Hi Folks, What has been the reaction to the "Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease Following Influenza Vaccination: A Claims-Based Cohort Study Using Propensity Score Matching" study that was published last month?
Sorry to ask such a banal question, but does anyone remember the term describing how most of us treat journalism as authoritative despite recognizing that news coverage of the subjects we know something about tends to be superficial at best and not right at worst? E.g., I know enough to recognize that the NYT coverage of law and finance is garbage, yet I still assume they know something about foreign policy or particle physics.
Does anyone know if there is a list of all the ASX and SSC that are stories? My son really enjoys Scotts fiction and I would like to send him more. He's read three idols, how deep the rabbit hole goes, and in the balance.
After a few weeks off, the calm is very much gone. Has been a very stressful time, but this whole year has been stressful so I'm not sure how much that matters. Decided to resume today.
The Sri Lankan government has collapsed in rather spectacular fashion. I am interested in a balanced analysis of the causes, or barring that, differing responsible opinions. I have not paid to read Schellenberger's take, but it seems he blames the organic farming mandates. I have seen another article blaming it on COVID-19 lockdowns. I would not be surprised if I could find opinions like "Organic farming would have worked, they just didn't do it right..."
For any ACX regulars who fancy the idea of being able to build friendships with fellow regulars beyond the confines of these hallowed comment threads: my partners and I have just released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
It amazes me how many people on this site and related places have this outright hostility towards genetic explanations for race differences, and cannot concieve of believing/caring about this expect aside from wanting to feel "superior" to other races or something. In reality, this is what happens:
"anti-racist": Black people have [lower income/lower wealth/lower school scores/higher incarceration ratios/less representation in elite jobs/etc.], this proves that systematic racism is oppressing black people and that white people have white privilege. We therefore need [policy that aims to fix this that is bad for white people]
anti-"anti-racist": No, actually if you look at this data, you'll see that these outcome disparities cannot be explained by [systematic racism/white privilege] and you believe they are based on an assumption that there are no genetic differences between races, which isn't reasonable given what we know about heritability.
"anti-racist": Wow, why do you care so much about this stuff? Are you some kind of white supremacist? Does it make you feel like less of a loser when you say that white people have higher IQ than black people?
Just saw this in the Guardian. I found Wengrow's comments interesting, but I felt that the article bordered on being a fluff piece (and I'm Wengrow supporter!). If you'll recall, the ACX review of _The Dawn of All and Everything_ generated lots of strongly-worded exchanges (the result of which I don't think changed anyone's opinion). At the risk of stirring the pot again, here you go.
I'm considering writing an alternative universe novel about the forth harry potter book, with one of the changes being that the main character is a girl. That made me wonder to what extent that alone would affect the status quo. What would be the biggest changes?
One particular thing I've wondered is whether the Dursleys would treat Primrose (the girl who lived) better or worse than Harry. Is it psychologically harder to be cruel to a girl than a boy? Does sexism play a role? Are the Dursleys ever shown to be sexist? Would they still make her sleep in a cupboard up to age 11?
'Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said Flynn brought diagrams [to Trump] to show a conspiracy theory involving Venezuela and communications via internet-connected thermostats. '
ACX Harrisburg PA local group, here. We are still advertising for new members... if you're interested in coming to an event, please contact acxharrisburg (at) gmail.com.
Who we are: local ACX meetup group with monthly meetings in central PA.
Who you are: a person reading this within driving distance of Harrisburg, Lancaster, or Carlisle, PA.
I am wondering if there's some term for...being pro-capitalist (in the sense that one isn't socialist or communist, and thinks it's at minimum the best worst economic system ever tried), and also being completely disgusted with one's workplace failing to follow basic economic theory. That sense of, if this is a for-profit company, why do they seem to hate making money so much? So many $20 bills left on the ground, and bigger denominations not infrequently. I'm familiar with some of the popular explanations for organizational dysfuction; what interests me more is how directly advocating process improvements and money-saving efficiencies to management tends to go nowhere, or even paradoxically make them double down on Worse Ways of Doing Everything, how dare you criticize.
This isn't an uncompetitive industry, and margins are really thin, so lack of robust competition can't be the answer. Heck, within the same mall there are two other national chains in our same business - the competition is literally nextdoor. It also isn't because we are flush with human capital - we're constantly under-staffed and frequently turn off both veterans and fresh faces. (It's pretty damning when new hires literally quit after a single day. Massive HR expense, no profit, only pain. Who is making these asinine hiring decisions? Why isn't this considered a huge knock-on cost for Worse Ways of Doing Everything?)
I guess I'm just frustrated. The easy cop-out is to pick up my sickle and sign up to Burn Down The System, Man. But that seems so strongly like a victim-mentality culture[1] response that I just can't. That last inch of self-esteem is too precious to give up, having been raised Honour and socialized into Dignity. An appropriately rationalist response would be to solve this with Entrepreneurship(tm), but I don't think "grocery" is a ripe market for Innovative Disruption or Plucky Start-Ups. (Other previous reformers have tried to climb the management ladder to effect change. They get the ideals beaten out of them. Every time. "I'm in a cult," my manager friend openly admits.)
If capitalism is still the best worst system despite copious amounts of literally setting fire to piles of fragile Value cause no one cares enough not to, then...it sure seems like there's way more Value to go around than I thought. Perhaps it's not actually valuable. What Are We Doing Here?, as Matt Yglesias would ask. Cause it's certainly not making money efficiently.
(Frankly, it's tempting to try and monetize the ineptitude by starting a Substack or something to chronicle my daily misadventures. But at-will employment is the law of the land in CA, and I'm already far too lax here with personal information. It'd be just begging to get doxxed and subsequently canned. Likely before attracting enough paid subscribers to be worthwhile, and then where would I find new material?)
Why do people concerned about AI risk seem (from what I've read) to dismiss Elon Musk's proposal to use Neuralink to enhance human capabilities so we'll be less cognitively-outclassed by our creations?
There are multiple stated purposes for a government inflicting punishments on individuals. I've often thought of these as non-exclusive (we can have many reasons for imposing a prison sentence on someone). However, I was reading a book recently that caused me to question the legitimacy of some justifications for punishment and promote the supremacy of others. I'd like to hear the perspective from the ACX community on these. Much of my perspective is coming from a US-centric perspective.
Deterrence - The biggest problem with this theory of punishment is that it's not rooted in the individual crime and the person who committed the crime. This can lead to significant injustice being carried out in the name of punishment. Take for example a shoplifter in a quiet town where nothing much happens versus a shoplifter in San Francisco. The same crime is committed, but the small town doesn't have much incentive to promote deterrence, since this kind of thing rarely happens. That shoplifter gets a sentence commensurate to the crime (perhaps a few hours of community service) and goes on their way. Meanwhile, a shoplifter in SF sees people around them not getting caught and shoplifts anyway. Maybe they get caught and are upset that they're getting punished for something nobody else is getting punished for. Under the principle of deterrence, perhaps they have a point - they weren't given 'notice' that this was wrong through the enforcement of criminal norms. Or perhaps a new DA comes to SF seeking to crack down on shoplifting. They institute stronger sentences on shoplifters, up to and including 5 years in prison. Because they want to maximize deterrence, the DA makes this a mandatory minimum sentence.
The new scheme works and SF shoplifting drops to an all-time low. Parents empty their toddler's pockets after leaving each shop, to ensure nothing is accidentally stolen from the store. Except that the new sentences will still be applied to some undeterred shoplifters (if not just people who were caught in the initial rollout of the sentencing changes, or who were unaware of the strict policy). Deterrence failed even with the policy. However, think of what the underlying crime actually was: the SF shoplifters engaged in the same activity as the small town thief, but got much harsher punishments for their actions.
What is the justification for the harsh punishment? Not that their crimes were particularly worse than the small town thief's crime, but that there might be knock-on effects from the imposition of a greater sentence that would prevent other people from committing offenses. "You're suffering so others don't have to."
Imagine you're the person who received 5 years hard time for something that - done in isolation - would only have warranted community service. You didn't commit the other offenses, and you have nothing to do with potential future offenders. How does the harsh punishment not appear monumentally unjust to you? Indeed, it seems you're being punished more for other people's crimes than for your own.
In a way, deterrence contains an element of collective punishment being heaped on an individual. Do you belong to a class of criminals we want to deter? Congratulations, you get to serve as an example to get flogged disproportionate to your crimes for the knock-on effect that will have in promoting the public peace. Why is your fate a public resource, not a direct result of your own actions? Certainly not out of some sense of "justice".
(If your punishment isn't disproportionate, and is exactly what we would do without deterrence, then what role is deterrence playing in the justification for punishment?)
Deterrence, taken seriously, suggests a direction for criminal justice we don't want to go down. After all, if we're willing to punish people disproportionate to their crime in the name of deterrence, why are we stipulating that the people who receive the unfair treatment have to have committed a crime? Might we just go on to profile people who are disproportionately likely to commit a crime and prevent them from doing so? In a sense, this is like Minority Report, except that we've already done the hard philosophical work of accepting (through the deterrence principle) that it's okay to punish someone for the public good, and not just for crimes committed. With big data, machine learning, and a lot of hand-waving by politicians who want to appear Tough On Crime, I'm sure we can achieve the dystopian future we're all ready to vote into office.
Rehabilitation - This one seems less problematic than deterrence. After all, what's wrong with wanting to reduce recidivism? And I think that's a noble goal of government - to reduce the rate of crime. However, it walks a fine line between, "don't continue to do the thing we initially punished you for" and "go be a good person". Why wouldn't we want criminals to go be good people? I certainly think that would be great if they all got rehabilitated and went on to live good lives. But who gets to define "good"? The State, in the case of criminal justice/punishment.
Once the State gets to decide that people should be good - and more importantly, that it's the State's responsibility to ensure people are good - we have to ask again, why the State should wait for people to commit crimes before undertaking its appointed mission of making people "good" as it defines them? To the State, "good" citizens are easy to count, tax, and govern (cf. "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott). Good citizens don't smoke, get fat, lose their job, or get too involved in political organizations other than those already sanctioned as part of the status quo. Also, they die when they're supposed to, instead of living out into their 90's.
I'm not saying that the principles of deterrence and rehabilitation will necessarily lead to dystopian futures where the State rounds people up and mandates Approved behaviors. Instead, I'm trying to ask whether these justifications are workable in a rational framework for criminal punishment. Because if they're fundamentally wrong, we should probably stop using them, since they could lead to poor results, even if they're never taken to the limit.
(Also, maybe I'm wrong here? I'm kind of thinking out loud and interested in the ACX community's take on this. In principle, I like programs that seek to reduce recidivism by providing educational and job opportunities. Maybe I'm being too harsh on rehabilitation? Perhaps instead we should think of rehabilitation as an ancillary/non-coercive goal of criminal reform - something the State may advance but not require as part of a separate initiative from criminal punishment. Perhaps a similar case may be made for deterrence. The problem is that when we say, "We punish because we care!" it's necessarily a compulsory exercise. You don't get to choose whether you go to prison, the State does. That's not the same process as getting the chance to earn your GED in prison.)
I have a horrible thought about something: some of the people who were lynched in the U.S. were guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Statistically speaking, it's impossible that all of them were innocent.
I don't at all support lynching or any form of extrajudicial killing (outside of some extreme emergency situations), and I think the phenomenon of lynchings were a blight on America. At the same time, the notion of a memorial to the victims of all lynchings, regardless of their guilt, bothers me since such a thing inadvertently venerates the minority of murderers and rapists in those ranks who actually did do what their accusers claimed.
Hello Sam Altman ! I'm glad that you enjoyed my review.
Based on what I know, I think that those estimates are too high. But I'm sure that you have insider information about Helion.
Here's what I know about Helion's schedule: The 5th prototype, Venti, had a triple product of ~10^19 keV s / m^3, which is two orders of magnitude too small for D-T fusion. The current 6th prototype is Trenta is much larger. It has demonstrated temperatures of over 100 million Celsius, which is 4-5 times Venti. This is hot enough for D-T fusion, but still an order of magnitude too low for D-He3 fusion. I don't think that the best triple product for Trenta has been published. The 7th prototype, Polaris, should be completed in 2023, and the 8th prototype is Antares.
Your predictions sound like: 85% that Polaris will get Q>1 D-T fusion within 1-2 years of operation and 65% that Antares will be built by 2025 and will get Q>1 D-He3 fusion within 1-2 years of operation.
My predictions didn't give any individual project a greater than 70% chance of success. Even though high quality simulations that accurately model JET & other tokamaks tell us that ITER and SPARC should get Q~10. Plasmas have surprised us too many times to be that confident of individual experiments. There are some predictions that I could make with higher accuracy. For example, JET could get Q>1 if it tried (90%). I am this confident because JET has already demonstrated the triple product needed for Q>1, but using entirely deuterium plasmas instead of D-T plasmas. All they would have to do is repeat that shot with different fuel.
I am tempted to read your predictions as saying that Trenta has already demonstrated the densities and confinement times needed for D-T fusion, using pure deuterium plasmas, but hasn't published them. Otherwise, I think that 85% is too high.
The second prediction is more than 10 times harder than the first, measured using the triple product. The temperature needed for D-He3 fusion is almost an order of magnitude higher and the density * confinement time also needs to be several times larger. This is significantly different from regimes where the simulations have been tested.
I'm having a debate with someone about harmony in music, specifically in chords, and we're stuck on two separate problems.
The first is about measuring harmony mathematically. I went into the debate assuming this is easy, but that doesn't seem to be true. My understanding so far is (1) the frequency ratios from different notes in a chord are important, (2) simple ratios like 2:3 are consonant/harmonic whereas more complicated ratios are dissonant, however (3) it's unclear how to quantify it.
It seems to me that, at a minimum, a proper measure should (assuming it takes the ratio as an argument, e.g. 2/3), be applicable to arbitrary real values, be continuous, and measure the *distance* to various (all?) integer ratios. E.g., 288172993915332718882937/576345987830665437765875 should be highly consonant (since it's almost exactly 1/2) even though both integer values are big. But I haven't yet found a formula that does this.
Our other question is to what extent harmony is intrinsically pleasant versus culturally conditioned. (Answering the first question would help here; without that, it's unclear whether e.g. chords on the japanese insen system can be consonant.) On this point, it seems to me like the most relevant data would be from preferences of babies and/or animals. And preferably babies from different cultures, since otherwise they may be conditioned by e.g. hearing western music when they're still in the womb. Do we have good data on this?
I know that primarily, it dramatically reduces the risk of severe disease and death (waning over time).
Does it do this by shifting the entire distribution of disease severity, or by chopping off the high end of the distribution and leaving the rest about the same?
What's the Tory mandate going to be like going forwards? Obviously they officially have everything that they won in 2019 (minus the odd by-election) but the next government is going to be very different from the centerist Johnson ministry that the red wall voted for. Or are those seats enough of a lost cause that they're not worth worrying about?
I'm a math grad student in his final year, and I want go to "all out" in terms of working hours in order to get good results/publications. I was just toying with the idea of taking modafinil in order to accomplish that.
What is the recommended dosage for producing quality research (so alertness and sharpness are important). Could I pop a pill every other day, for instance?
I wrote this comment in the response to the comments for the 2020 Homicide Spike piece, but was a bit late to the party so I think it may have missed the prime time for discussion. I think it might be worth considering, however, so I'll repost it here to see what people think:
I want to make the argument that the media coverage of the murder itself is what led to the increased murder rates.
It is already well known that the wide-reporting of suicides leads to an increase in suicides (and, sadly, an increase in car and commercial aircraft crashes). It is similarly known that the reporting of murders leads to an increase in murders in the areas of reporting. This is most notably observed following, again sadly, school shootings, when numerous shootings occur in succession. So, I think the argument can be made that the massive media coverage of the murder of George Floyd led, in turn, to the murder of more black men.
This would track with the logic that in reporting suicides and murders you lead to copycat suicides and murders. Where ages are reported in articles discussing suicides, the increase in suicides occurs in those within that age group/range. It seems to follow, therefore, that massive reporting of the murder of a black man would lead to copycat events. This would seem to explain why deaths of other ethnicities do not see a staggering increase. Likewise, one imagines that coverage of the murder of George Floyd was more extreme in the United States hence why the increase is only observable there (albeit I would need to actually see if the coverage was greater in the US). I would add that this explanation would also cover why media outlets have discussed other reasons; to state this is the reason would make them, in some way, complicit.
Timings wise it would also make sense. The coverage and the protests would occur contemporaneously, each feeding off the other.
I appreciate that this thought is unsourced, and low-effort in that it may have been covered by other comments, or by ACT and I have just missed it. Regardless, any discussion based on this thought would be interesting.
is it to be taken seriously at all? rationalist communities have been silent on this matter as far as i can tell. is it a hoax? measurement errors? or something else bit too wacky for us to comfortably admit might be real?
So there's this anecdotal (maybe formally quantified through studies too?) thing about how for people with ADHD, stimulants sometimes produce the opposite, a calming effect.
I am wondering whether there's a similar thing going on with musical taste, albeit not related to ADHD, which I don't (think?) I have. Obviously quite subjective, but...I just do not have the capacity to listen to "chill beats". They don't calm me down, they...make me angry? Possibly a poorly-differentiated emotion. All I know is, they definitely do not leave me feeling chill...always some variety of upset, sometimes including literal upset-stomach nausea.
The beats which do calm me down are...often ones that other people find too stimulating, such as operatic metal. (Listening to Therion's "Beloved Antichrist" while typing this.) Even classical music, which is traditionally associated with calm and repose, is *aggressively* structured and executed...there's a lot of Effort behind it, no matter the actual tempo. That somehow feels necessary for audiophilia, though not sufficient. Good music makes my heart tremble. As Bruce Lee would say, "We're looking for *emotional content*". Not numb stultification.
Is *proportionality* a thing in your legislature, especially with regard to state behaviour vis-a-vis the citizens?
Roughly it means that the state is allowed to restrict or interfere with basic rights, but only to the extend to which it is proportionate to the situation/threat or necessary to protect other important rights.
In Germany it played a big rule lately during Covid, when it resulted in quite a number of concrete Covid measures being cancelled by the courts (and probably even more being approved). To give another example, proportionality is also important in the use of force by the police, when they are allowed to use force, but only to the extend to which it is necessary in a given situation.
It's a huge thing in the relation of German state to citizens. (I'm not a legal expert, so I don't claim to be aware of the technicalities.) Two or three remarks that I read lately made me wonder: is this very common in other legal systems as well?
Re bans, I noticed that they are not "publicly" announced in the open threads anymore. Alas, given that often i mute threads, how can i know if I have some fraction of a ban?
How can I find guidance to help me study myself as a data point of one, to figure out what is a healthy diet for me, in order to be as healthy as possible? I am confused about what goals to set. High fat or low fat? Is saturated fat to be avoided?
Ofcourse, being disciplined about the goals is a different thing. I just want to atleast figure out the optimal goals to set, for how to eat.
Are there smart data-driven medical professionals who do this?
Just for the record: I took down the post I put up a few hours ago asking for suggestions about great countries my adventuresome daughter might move to. I found it startlingly unpleasant when a few people jumped on the very small political aspect of things and started sniding and snarking about her supposed leftiness. If you'd been talking about me, I'd have just argued, but something about knowing those comments concerned my daughter really got to me.
I did get some good suggestions before I pulled the plug though. New Zealand sounds good to me.
Oh, and Kerani, Melvin and pie_flavor? I think you are boors.
Hi Peter. Thank you for submitting an application for Clearer Thinking Regrants.
Visit the Clearer Thinking website here to learn more about our research, programs, and tools, which are designed to help you change your habits, make better decisions, and achieve your goals.
Here are the responses you gave in the application:
A brief name you can use to refer to my project is Global Warming Directory
My project aims to improve the world or the future by Collecting information about global warming in a structured and accessible way.
The group or population that will benefit from this project is The population of the Earth.
This project is important because it will lead to Better understanding of what we can do to reverse global warming.
The mechanism by which I expect my project will achieve these positive outcomes is as follows:
I have created a directory titled "How to Stop Global Warming (100 Ways to Cool Your Mother)". I have done this working by myself while living on Social Security. A larger organization could build on what I have done. Link: Rodes.pub/GlobalWarming.
In the future, a strong indicator I'll be able to look to in order to see if my project is succeeding is... The directory grows and becomes well publicized.
I am (or my team and I are) well-suited to implement this project because I have already done it.
If this project gets funded but DOESN'T achieve its desired outcomes, the MOST LIKELY reason that this would happen would be No one was interested.
If I suddenly had an extra $10,000 for my project, I (or we) would be most likely to spend it on Half for medical needs for me, and half for publicity for the directory..
This project is a single person project that is not a charity or company
So far, this project has begun to be implemented but has not yet gotten any funding
I just wanted to share this post that expands upon Scott's "moral costs of chicken vs beef" post by drawing upon the latest economic modelling (by Kevin Kuruc) of the "social cost" of animal suffering:
"While the animal welfare costs of the Standard American Diet are on the order of $100,000 per year, the climate costs are a mere $47. Combining these with Scott Alexander’s estimates of offsetting efficacy yields some interesting results..."
In the interest of starting a big political fight for some reason, what do people think of the so called "independent state legislature" theory, which is going to come up in the Supreme Court case Moore v Harper next term?
The two relevant parts of the Constitution:
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators."
and
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
The argument is that this means that other organs of a state government, e.g. governor, courts, etc, can't override the legislature in setting rules for federal elections. This comes up in a couple contexts:
- the rules around mail-in ballots, etc, which were often set/changed by governors or courts in the 2020 election and not state legislatures
- redistricting/gerrymandering, who in a state gets to decide
- picking of presidential electors, who gets to decide (and when)
Argument in favor is that the constitution says the state legislature gets to decide, not the state government overall or governor or whatever; the grant of power is to the legislature itself. Argument against is that state legislatures are creatures of state constitutions and so they have no ability to operate outside of the bounds of the relevant state constitution.
Personally I'm against it, my reasons:
- insofar as anyone cares about this sort of thing, precedent goes against it. Arizona sate legislature vs Arizona independent districting commission from 2015 upheld Arizona having an independent redistricting commission; and a case from 1916, Davis v Hildebrant which allowed a referendum in Ohio to veto the legislature's districting plan. The recent case was 5-4 and conservatives have gained more seats since then. But also, Roberts's dissent in 2015 drew a distinction between the old 1916 case (where a referendum merely vetoed the legislature) and the 2015 case (where the legislature was entirely taken out of it).
- If you start granting power to a legislature independently of the state constitution, it can lead in all sorts of weird directions. Like what if the state constitution has a supermajority requirement to pass any law (like the filibuster but more formalized)? Does that not apply to a vote on redistricting? What's the difference for this purpose between a constitutional provision saying "no gerrymandering" and one saying "supermajority requirement"? They're both constitutional restrictions on what the legislature can do.
- People talk about the federal government having enumerated powers - well those enumerated powers are specifically granted *to Congress*. Similarly everyone agrees the President can't take actions that violate the first amendment, but the first amendment says that "*Congress* shall make no law..." It just reflects an idea that government power derives from the legislature, and they aren't distinguishing between giving the power to the legislature and giving it to the state government generally (I'm not sure I agree with this idea, seems like a good question for a historian).
- often it's hard to disentangle the legislature's actions from the state government's actions more broadly. What if a state law says that the courts or governor can take actions that change what the state law says? Similarly, there are always going to be details of implementation left to other branches. Is a federal election in California invalid because the legislature didn't specifically list every church, high school gym, and sports arena in the state that has voting booths?
Couple other notes:
- For the two constitutional provisions I quoted, note the one on house elections, but not presidential elections, gives the federal government power to override state government rules.
- For liberals the big worry is presidential elections. A few big swing states, though evenly split population-wise, have Republican dominated/gerrymandered state legislatures. That said, even though it's considered a conservative idea, ending the doctrine could help liberals in some ways. More blue states than red have independent redistricting commissions, if the doctrine is put in place there will probably be more blue state gerrymandering.
- It does seem kind of smarmy for a state legislature to lose a ballot initiative that stops them gerrymandering and then sue to invalidate it in federal court, so they can continue to gerrymander. Aside from the constitutional question I'd hope they all get primaried.
- Also seems smarmy for people who are normally all about respect for state governments to start having federal courts override state court interpretations of state laws, which they normally never do.
- I think this idea has gained traction due to conservatives who wanted to reject trump's claims of a stolen election while throwing a bone towards it - so they settled on this "states didn't follow their own rules" formulation. Of course states *did* follow their own rules, unless you believe in the independent state legislature idea.
So I watched a video today where they argued that instead of trying to use the lower/middle/upper class trichotimy when discussing politics and studying things, we should instead use (and I'm using their phrasing which I'll immediately define so hold your horses) the working/capitalist dichotomy.
The working class here is meant literally: if you have to do serious physical or mental work to earn a living, you are part of the working class: laborers, service workers, and basically anything where you're helping to make money for someone else. The capitalist class represents people who earn their money off the work of others: so landlords, investors, and the owners of businesses that are large enough to run themselves. If you own a business, but it's small enough that you have to pitch in and/or do any of the work yourself, then you're also a part of the working class.
The argument is that l/m/u classes tend to be nebulously and arbitrarily defined depending on what someone is trying to do, with no standardized definition, and straight up asking people what class they belong to leads to people, with incomes anywhere from below the poverty line to over a million dollars, claiming to be middle class.
The w/c class dichotomy, on the other hand, has a definition independent of location, relative wages, home ownership, and standard of living, and classification is only dependent on the type of work (or lack thereof) necessary to obtain a person's income.
One application of this framework would be how to judge policy proposals. For instance, if you hear about a proposed budget or tax cut, you can try putting yourself in your boss's shoes, and seeing if they would be happy about it (if your boss is a small business owner, imagine Jeff Bezos or something). If they would, it's probably not going to be helpful for you, regardless of any claims or arguments that it'll help the middle class.
In my ongoing project of trying to pick up more hobbies and skills, I've decided to take up drawing. I bought a cheap Canson sketchbook to work through drawabox.com's exercises. Does anyone have experience with it or another art course they can recommend? Textbooks on the subject? I'm coming at this from a level of "drew a few graphs in college chemistry" as a level of prior artistic skill.
There used to be a thing called Literary Fiction. Around the turn of the millennium this non-genre genre seemed to have gotten over its heels turning out pretentious writerly tomes that were heavily criticized in essays like this one in the Atlantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Reader%27s_Manifesto
Two decades later, literary fiction in the USA is non-existent yet there hasn't been a tolling of the bells. It seems to have gradually transformed unnoticed into books that middle-aged, all-female book clubs read. In other words, it didn't die, but it smells funny.
I had an experience last week of being very high on marijuana via a 50mg edible. I had some questions and thoughts coming out of the experience and thought this might be the best place to get answers and feedback. The questions I want answered are mostly that I want to verify that some of my high thoughts were stupid so I can stop thinking about them. If you want to shoot down three dumb math thoughts and ignore the marijuana high journey skip to the __ line.
To answer some potential questions before they come up:
1. Why? I was offered it, and usually I don't notice the effects of marijuana. I'd taken half of a 50mg edible only a month or two earlier and don't remember noticing much of an effect.
2. Was it enjoyable? No, and I doubt I'd do it again. Maybe if I have a day to waste. But I would have preferred being more present and aware for that day.
3. Circumstances? On the 4th of july, with my parents, wife, and kid. Tried to nap through the majority of the high, cuz it was taking forever.
My observations about my mental state:
1. My conscious mind seemed to no longer be in the driver's seat of my physical actions. I was viewing the things I was doing, but I did not feel like I was controlling those things. I would say or do things, and then think "oh that was an interesting thing to say/do".
2. I was having delusions. Mostly I was just hearing sounds that were not there, once I started realizing that these were delusions they often went away. A few times when I was very high I was imagining that scenarios I had played out in my head were real. If anyone here thinks of how a conversation might go in their head before having the conversation ... just imagine not being able to distinguish those thoughts from reality. Or how you feel when you wake up in the morning sometimes and can't tell if a dream was real or an actual memory.
3. My perception of the passage of time was very messed up. I was noticing this constantly, because time seemed to be going at a crawl. I would often notice that it felt like 30 minutes or an hour had passed, when it had instead only been a minute.
4. My situational/spatial awareness was shit. I think this might have been related to the passage of time. If you are sitting in a room for an hour staring in only one direction you might forget what the room behind you looks like. Turning around and letting your mind update the picture will solve the problem. I was constantly losing my spatial awareness and body awareness. Unless I was actively moving around or walking I seemed to have no spatial awareness. Or maybe its like spatial awareness is normally stored in ram for a while, and my mind just kept dumping whatever was in there.
5. My ability to play spider solitaire was significantly worse. I like playing spider solitaire to kill ~10 minutes. I've noticed it tends to correlate with my mental abilities, so its a poor man's IQ test. If I'm being very productive at work and step away to use the bathroom or cook some food, I can finish a game in 5-8 minutes. If I'm drunk, very tired, or heavily distracted I'll finish a game in like 8-12 minutes. When I was high I *thought* I was playing really well, but it took me 20 minutes to finish a game.
6. I spent a lot of time in my head. My main point of dread and dislike of the whole experience is that it took so damn long. I slept through the majority of my high, but it still felt like it took days rather than a few hours of my time. I have some more horror of "locked in syndrome" after the experience. Just stuck with my thoughts for what felt like hours at a time, and I'd look a clock and only a few minutes have passed. Having so much time to spend in my head meant I went over some wacky ideas and theories.
7. I was constantly feeling an "enlightenment high". Some of you may have had it while reading Scott's articles, or finally figuring out how to program something, or completing a tough sudoku puzzle. Its that sense of "Ahh! Yes! I finally get it!". I was feeling this about all my ideas. Even when I realized *while still high* that some of these ideas were dumb.
_______________________
Anyways, three of the ideas I had while high are sorta math related. And I'm not well versed enough in math to know if these ideas are dumb, or even know the terms I would need to use on a search engine to find them. There are some shared concepts between all of the ideas, so I'll try and describe those first. I might not have the right math terminology.
Dimensions and infinity. The basic whole number system we use is a one dimensional number system. It describes a line. A two dimensional number system describes a plane. A three dimension number system describes a space. We don't really have common terms for the higher dimensional number systems (maybe time and space for 4d?).
Base increment. In a 1d (one dimensional) number system the base increment is pretty simple, its just "1". In a 2d number system I think the base increment has to be (1, 1), and in a 3d system it would be (1, 1, 1).
I'll start with the more absurd one:
1. An infinite rebound. I have trouble fully remembering the steps I took to get to the conclusion. There might not have been any steps. The idea was that there is some finite maximum to infinities that describe infinities. Even writing this makes my face turn red. Only talk about it if its *not* stupid. I've already mostly dismissed it.
The other two are kinda related
2. Pairs of primes are a property of the base increment. So in the single dimension we have a bunch of mathematicians working around prime numbers (reading news stories about this is what got my mind spinning in this whole direction). My thought was that if there is a rule for pairs of primes in the 1d then those rules would apply to pairs of primes in the 2d, 3d, etc.
3. The infinite dimension is entirely prime numbers. So as you go up in number dimensions the proportion of prime numbers increases. I realize this kind of breaks with the idea I had above. Which makes it harder for me to know if they are both stupid or if one secretly makes some sense.
I can try to elaborate more if anyone has questions. But mostly I'm looking for an obvious "this is wrong" or "this has been thought of before, here is what it is called".
I just finished reading Albion's Seed (after reading Scott's review a few years ago). Judging from Wikipedia the follow-on books never materialized (but perhaps they were done by other authors), the second was supposed to be similar, but how the African Slave Trade brought folkways. Is there a (hopefully great) single book covering that?
Just something I have noticed online: posters with overtly female nicks tend to be trans women rather than cis women. I have not noticed the converse though. This is anecdotal, but sort of makes sense, being open about one's gender is something that cis women learned early to be cautious about.
Can you recommend any clinical psych topics that are in need of a good literature review, or heuristics for how to identify one? I'm an undergraduate psychology student looking for a topic for my capstone project.
Population-wise, I'm interested in gifted children, learning disabilities, twice-exceptional students, and for adults I'm interested in the psychology of technical professionals. Condition-wise I'm interested in anxiety disorders (especially eating disorders and OCD), and dissociative disorders. Treatment-wise I'm interested in IFS, Coherence Therapy, and CBT/DBT/related stuff.
(I'm in a 2-year degree-completion BA program for adult students; I started out in the humanities at a different school a while ago, so I've only had about a year and a half of psych coursework and pretty limited faculty guidance or time to think about what I'm doing. I could do observational research instead of a review paper, but again I don't have ton of institutional support and so I fear that the study might not turn out very worthwhile. I feel more optimistic that a review paper could make a real contribution, if I pick something worthwhile to dig into)
Is there anything you'd like to know more about that you think I could feasibly sort out in 6 months of work?
Why are so many of the great thinkers and artists morally and/or politically compromised? Who is a great thinker or artist who also led a life that you consider morally exemplary, or else just neutral, boring?
I have a friend with a non profit in Colombia which I find very cool, albeit not as high impact enough for EA (At least I think so).
Any tips on how to reach a western audience effectively? I was thinking reaching https://zeroco2.eco/en/ and other climate impact charity aggregators with letters, but I was thinking maybe the ACX crowd has other novel ideas.
Why has the domination of "nerd" culture in pop entertainment (comic book movies, fantasy, sci-fi) not ended the culture of grievance within the community of self-identified nerds? Is it a "be careful what you wish for" thing?
Brits: can you explain what happened with Boris Johnson last week?
I know he resigned because someone in his government committed sexual harassment. But in the States that would barely make front page news - our presidents sometimes commit sexual harassment *personally* without getting forced out, plus I get the impression that Johnson had made it through many scandals much worse than that before. Is Britain just much tougher on harassment than we are? Or was there some deeper reason that this case caused so many previously-loyal ministers to resign and eventually brought down the government?
Hi Folks, What has been the reaction to the "Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease Following Influenza Vaccination: A Claims-Based Cohort Study Using Propensity Score Matching" study that was published last month?
https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad220361
Sorry to ask such a banal question, but does anyone remember the term describing how most of us treat journalism as authoritative despite recognizing that news coverage of the subjects we know something about tends to be superficial at best and not right at worst? E.g., I know enough to recognize that the NYT coverage of law and finance is garbage, yet I still assume they know something about foreign policy or particle physics.
Does anyone know if there is a list of all the ASX and SSC that are stories? My son really enjoys Scotts fiction and I would like to send him more. He's read three idols, how deep the rabbit hole goes, and in the balance.
I tried to sign up, but I never got a submit button even after I had filled out my email etc. I am doing it on the phone so maybe that’s my problem.
Lavender update:
After a few weeks off, the calm is very much gone. Has been a very stressful time, but this whole year has been stressful so I'm not sure how much that matters. Decided to resume today.
The Sri Lankan government has collapsed in rather spectacular fashion. I am interested in a balanced analysis of the causes, or barring that, differing responsible opinions. I have not paid to read Schellenberger's take, but it seems he blames the organic farming mandates. I have seen another article blaming it on COVID-19 lockdowns. I would not be surprised if I could find opinions like "Organic farming would have worked, they just didn't do it right..."
For any ACX regulars who fancy the idea of being able to build friendships with fellow regulars beyond the confines of these hallowed comment threads: my partners and I have just released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
You can check it out here https://www.imsurf.in/
We'll begin 'concierge matching' some of our initial matching users in the coming days and weeks!
It amazes me how many people on this site and related places have this outright hostility towards genetic explanations for race differences, and cannot concieve of believing/caring about this expect aside from wanting to feel "superior" to other races or something. In reality, this is what happens:
"anti-racist": Black people have [lower income/lower wealth/lower school scores/higher incarceration ratios/less representation in elite jobs/etc.], this proves that systematic racism is oppressing black people and that white people have white privilege. We therefore need [policy that aims to fix this that is bad for white people]
anti-"anti-racist": No, actually if you look at this data, you'll see that these outcome disparities cannot be explained by [systematic racism/white privilege] and you believe they are based on an assumption that there are no genetic differences between races, which isn't reasonable given what we know about heritability.
"anti-racist": Wow, why do you care so much about this stuff? Are you some kind of white supremacist? Does it make you feel like less of a loser when you say that white people have higher IQ than black people?
and so on
Just saw this in the Guardian. I found Wengrow's comments interesting, but I felt that the article bordered on being a fluff piece (and I'm Wengrow supporter!). If you'll recall, the ACX review of _The Dawn of All and Everything_ generated lots of strongly-worded exchanges (the result of which I don't think changed anyone's opinion). At the risk of stirring the pot again, here you go.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/12/david-wengrow-graeber-dawn-of-history-interview?CMP=share_btn_tw
I'm considering writing an alternative universe novel about the forth harry potter book, with one of the changes being that the main character is a girl. That made me wonder to what extent that alone would affect the status quo. What would be the biggest changes?
One particular thing I've wondered is whether the Dursleys would treat Primrose (the girl who lived) better or worse than Harry. Is it psychologically harder to be cruel to a girl than a boy? Does sexism play a role? Are the Dursleys ever shown to be sexist? Would they still make her sleep in a cupboard up to age 11?
What is this referring to?
'Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said Flynn brought diagrams [to Trump] to show a conspiracy theory involving Venezuela and communications via internet-connected thermostats. '
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109999639/jan-6-hearing-livestream-how-to-watch-live-updates
I wrote a thing about predictions and why prediction markets might be super important. Would love some feed back.
https://workthejab.substack.com/p/everything-is-predictions?sd=pf
Thanks for everything you do Scott.
ACX Harrisburg PA local group, here. We are still advertising for new members... if you're interested in coming to an event, please contact acxharrisburg (at) gmail.com.
Who we are: local ACX meetup group with monthly meetings in central PA.
Who you are: a person reading this within driving distance of Harrisburg, Lancaster, or Carlisle, PA.
Hope to see you soon!
I am wondering if there's some term for...being pro-capitalist (in the sense that one isn't socialist or communist, and thinks it's at minimum the best worst economic system ever tried), and also being completely disgusted with one's workplace failing to follow basic economic theory. That sense of, if this is a for-profit company, why do they seem to hate making money so much? So many $20 bills left on the ground, and bigger denominations not infrequently. I'm familiar with some of the popular explanations for organizational dysfuction; what interests me more is how directly advocating process improvements and money-saving efficiencies to management tends to go nowhere, or even paradoxically make them double down on Worse Ways of Doing Everything, how dare you criticize.
This isn't an uncompetitive industry, and margins are really thin, so lack of robust competition can't be the answer. Heck, within the same mall there are two other national chains in our same business - the competition is literally nextdoor. It also isn't because we are flush with human capital - we're constantly under-staffed and frequently turn off both veterans and fresh faces. (It's pretty damning when new hires literally quit after a single day. Massive HR expense, no profit, only pain. Who is making these asinine hiring decisions? Why isn't this considered a huge knock-on cost for Worse Ways of Doing Everything?)
I guess I'm just frustrated. The easy cop-out is to pick up my sickle and sign up to Burn Down The System, Man. But that seems so strongly like a victim-mentality culture[1] response that I just can't. That last inch of self-esteem is too precious to give up, having been raised Honour and socialized into Dignity. An appropriately rationalist response would be to solve this with Entrepreneurship(tm), but I don't think "grocery" is a ripe market for Innovative Disruption or Plucky Start-Ups. (Other previous reformers have tried to climb the management ladder to effect change. They get the ideals beaten out of them. Every time. "I'm in a cult," my manager friend openly admits.)
If capitalism is still the best worst system despite copious amounts of literally setting fire to piles of fragile Value cause no one cares enough not to, then...it sure seems like there's way more Value to go around than I thought. Perhaps it's not actually valuable. What Are We Doing Here?, as Matt Yglesias would ask. Cause it's certainly not making money efficiently.
(Frankly, it's tempting to try and monetize the ineptitude by starting a Substack or something to chronicle my daily misadventures. But at-will employment is the law of the land in CA, and I'm already far too lax here with personal information. It'd be just begging to get doxxed and subsequently canned. Likely before attracting enough paid subscribers to be worthwhile, and then where would I find new material?)
[1] https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-tour-through-three-centuries-of-american-political-culture/
Manifold is hosting a prediction markets meetup in SF this wednesday (7/12) at 7pm. Details in the description of this market: https://manifold.markets/Sinclair/how-many-people-will-show-up-to-wag
You may rsvp by leaving a comment on the market or emailing me at abc (dot) sinclair (at) gmail
Why do people concerned about AI risk seem (from what I've read) to dismiss Elon Musk's proposal to use Neuralink to enhance human capabilities so we'll be less cognitively-outclassed by our creations?
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Purposes of Justice:
There are multiple stated purposes for a government inflicting punishments on individuals. I've often thought of these as non-exclusive (we can have many reasons for imposing a prison sentence on someone). However, I was reading a book recently that caused me to question the legitimacy of some justifications for punishment and promote the supremacy of others. I'd like to hear the perspective from the ACX community on these. Much of my perspective is coming from a US-centric perspective.
Deterrence - The biggest problem with this theory of punishment is that it's not rooted in the individual crime and the person who committed the crime. This can lead to significant injustice being carried out in the name of punishment. Take for example a shoplifter in a quiet town where nothing much happens versus a shoplifter in San Francisco. The same crime is committed, but the small town doesn't have much incentive to promote deterrence, since this kind of thing rarely happens. That shoplifter gets a sentence commensurate to the crime (perhaps a few hours of community service) and goes on their way. Meanwhile, a shoplifter in SF sees people around them not getting caught and shoplifts anyway. Maybe they get caught and are upset that they're getting punished for something nobody else is getting punished for. Under the principle of deterrence, perhaps they have a point - they weren't given 'notice' that this was wrong through the enforcement of criminal norms. Or perhaps a new DA comes to SF seeking to crack down on shoplifting. They institute stronger sentences on shoplifters, up to and including 5 years in prison. Because they want to maximize deterrence, the DA makes this a mandatory minimum sentence.
The new scheme works and SF shoplifting drops to an all-time low. Parents empty their toddler's pockets after leaving each shop, to ensure nothing is accidentally stolen from the store. Except that the new sentences will still be applied to some undeterred shoplifters (if not just people who were caught in the initial rollout of the sentencing changes, or who were unaware of the strict policy). Deterrence failed even with the policy. However, think of what the underlying crime actually was: the SF shoplifters engaged in the same activity as the small town thief, but got much harsher punishments for their actions.
What is the justification for the harsh punishment? Not that their crimes were particularly worse than the small town thief's crime, but that there might be knock-on effects from the imposition of a greater sentence that would prevent other people from committing offenses. "You're suffering so others don't have to."
Imagine you're the person who received 5 years hard time for something that - done in isolation - would only have warranted community service. You didn't commit the other offenses, and you have nothing to do with potential future offenders. How does the harsh punishment not appear monumentally unjust to you? Indeed, it seems you're being punished more for other people's crimes than for your own.
In a way, deterrence contains an element of collective punishment being heaped on an individual. Do you belong to a class of criminals we want to deter? Congratulations, you get to serve as an example to get flogged disproportionate to your crimes for the knock-on effect that will have in promoting the public peace. Why is your fate a public resource, not a direct result of your own actions? Certainly not out of some sense of "justice".
(If your punishment isn't disproportionate, and is exactly what we would do without deterrence, then what role is deterrence playing in the justification for punishment?)
Deterrence, taken seriously, suggests a direction for criminal justice we don't want to go down. After all, if we're willing to punish people disproportionate to their crime in the name of deterrence, why are we stipulating that the people who receive the unfair treatment have to have committed a crime? Might we just go on to profile people who are disproportionately likely to commit a crime and prevent them from doing so? In a sense, this is like Minority Report, except that we've already done the hard philosophical work of accepting (through the deterrence principle) that it's okay to punish someone for the public good, and not just for crimes committed. With big data, machine learning, and a lot of hand-waving by politicians who want to appear Tough On Crime, I'm sure we can achieve the dystopian future we're all ready to vote into office.
Rehabilitation - This one seems less problematic than deterrence. After all, what's wrong with wanting to reduce recidivism? And I think that's a noble goal of government - to reduce the rate of crime. However, it walks a fine line between, "don't continue to do the thing we initially punished you for" and "go be a good person". Why wouldn't we want criminals to go be good people? I certainly think that would be great if they all got rehabilitated and went on to live good lives. But who gets to define "good"? The State, in the case of criminal justice/punishment.
Once the State gets to decide that people should be good - and more importantly, that it's the State's responsibility to ensure people are good - we have to ask again, why the State should wait for people to commit crimes before undertaking its appointed mission of making people "good" as it defines them? To the State, "good" citizens are easy to count, tax, and govern (cf. "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott). Good citizens don't smoke, get fat, lose their job, or get too involved in political organizations other than those already sanctioned as part of the status quo. Also, they die when they're supposed to, instead of living out into their 90's.
I'm not saying that the principles of deterrence and rehabilitation will necessarily lead to dystopian futures where the State rounds people up and mandates Approved behaviors. Instead, I'm trying to ask whether these justifications are workable in a rational framework for criminal punishment. Because if they're fundamentally wrong, we should probably stop using them, since they could lead to poor results, even if they're never taken to the limit.
(Also, maybe I'm wrong here? I'm kind of thinking out loud and interested in the ACX community's take on this. In principle, I like programs that seek to reduce recidivism by providing educational and job opportunities. Maybe I'm being too harsh on rehabilitation? Perhaps instead we should think of rehabilitation as an ancillary/non-coercive goal of criminal reform - something the State may advance but not require as part of a separate initiative from criminal punishment. Perhaps a similar case may be made for deterrence. The problem is that when we say, "We punish because we care!" it's necessarily a compulsory exercise. You don't get to choose whether you go to prison, the State does. That's not the same process as getting the chance to earn your GED in prison.)
I have a horrible thought about something: some of the people who were lynched in the U.S. were guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Statistically speaking, it's impossible that all of them were innocent.
I don't at all support lynching or any form of extrajudicial killing (outside of some extreme emergency situations), and I think the phenomenon of lynchings were a blight on America. At the same time, the notion of a memorial to the victims of all lynchings, regardless of their guilt, bothers me since such a thing inadvertently venerates the minority of murderers and rapists in those ranks who actually did do what their accusers claimed.
https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial
Hello Sam Altman ! I'm glad that you enjoyed my review.
Based on what I know, I think that those estimates are too high. But I'm sure that you have insider information about Helion.
Here's what I know about Helion's schedule: The 5th prototype, Venti, had a triple product of ~10^19 keV s / m^3, which is two orders of magnitude too small for D-T fusion. The current 6th prototype is Trenta is much larger. It has demonstrated temperatures of over 100 million Celsius, which is 4-5 times Venti. This is hot enough for D-T fusion, but still an order of magnitude too low for D-He3 fusion. I don't think that the best triple product for Trenta has been published. The 7th prototype, Polaris, should be completed in 2023, and the 8th prototype is Antares.
Your predictions sound like: 85% that Polaris will get Q>1 D-T fusion within 1-2 years of operation and 65% that Antares will be built by 2025 and will get Q>1 D-He3 fusion within 1-2 years of operation.
My predictions didn't give any individual project a greater than 70% chance of success. Even though high quality simulations that accurately model JET & other tokamaks tell us that ITER and SPARC should get Q~10. Plasmas have surprised us too many times to be that confident of individual experiments. There are some predictions that I could make with higher accuracy. For example, JET could get Q>1 if it tried (90%). I am this confident because JET has already demonstrated the triple product needed for Q>1, but using entirely deuterium plasmas instead of D-T plasmas. All they would have to do is repeat that shot with different fuel.
I am tempted to read your predictions as saying that Trenta has already demonstrated the densities and confinement times needed for D-T fusion, using pure deuterium plasmas, but hasn't published them. Otherwise, I think that 85% is too high.
The second prediction is more than 10 times harder than the first, measured using the triple product. The temperature needed for D-He3 fusion is almost an order of magnitude higher and the density * confinement time also needs to be several times larger. This is significantly different from regimes where the simulations have been tested.
I'm having a debate with someone about harmony in music, specifically in chords, and we're stuck on two separate problems.
The first is about measuring harmony mathematically. I went into the debate assuming this is easy, but that doesn't seem to be true. My understanding so far is (1) the frequency ratios from different notes in a chord are important, (2) simple ratios like 2:3 are consonant/harmonic whereas more complicated ratios are dissonant, however (3) it's unclear how to quantify it.
It seems to me that, at a minimum, a proper measure should (assuming it takes the ratio as an argument, e.g. 2/3), be applicable to arbitrary real values, be continuous, and measure the *distance* to various (all?) integer ratios. E.g., 288172993915332718882937/576345987830665437765875 should be highly consonant (since it's almost exactly 1/2) even though both integer values are big. But I haven't yet found a formula that does this.
Our other question is to what extent harmony is intrinsically pleasant versus culturally conditioned. (Answering the first question would help here; without that, it's unclear whether e.g. chords on the japanese insen system can be consonant.) On this point, it seems to me like the most relevant data would be from preferences of babies and/or animals. And preferably babies from different cultures, since otherwise they may be conditioned by e.g. hearing western music when they're still in the womb. Do we have good data on this?
I have a question about covid vaccine efficacy.
I know that primarily, it dramatically reduces the risk of severe disease and death (waning over time).
Does it do this by shifting the entire distribution of disease severity, or by chopping off the high end of the distribution and leaving the rest about the same?
What's the Tory mandate going to be like going forwards? Obviously they officially have everything that they won in 2019 (minus the odd by-election) but the next government is going to be very different from the centerist Johnson ministry that the red wall voted for. Or are those seats enough of a lost cause that they're not worth worrying about?
Recommended dose of modafinil?
I'm a math grad student in his final year, and I want go to "all out" in terms of working hours in order to get good results/publications. I was just toying with the idea of taking modafinil in order to accomplish that.
What is the recommended dosage for producing quality research (so alertness and sharpness are important). Could I pop a pill every other day, for instance?
Substack as of today suggests me a list of eight newsletters 'recommended by Scott Alexander'.
At least I guess it's from substack, not Scott.
I wrote this comment in the response to the comments for the 2020 Homicide Spike piece, but was a bit late to the party so I think it may have missed the prime time for discussion. I think it might be worth considering, however, so I'll repost it here to see what people think:
I want to make the argument that the media coverage of the murder itself is what led to the increased murder rates.
It is already well known that the wide-reporting of suicides leads to an increase in suicides (and, sadly, an increase in car and commercial aircraft crashes). It is similarly known that the reporting of murders leads to an increase in murders in the areas of reporting. This is most notably observed following, again sadly, school shootings, when numerous shootings occur in succession. So, I think the argument can be made that the massive media coverage of the murder of George Floyd led, in turn, to the murder of more black men.
This would track with the logic that in reporting suicides and murders you lead to copycat suicides and murders. Where ages are reported in articles discussing suicides, the increase in suicides occurs in those within that age group/range. It seems to follow, therefore, that massive reporting of the murder of a black man would lead to copycat events. This would seem to explain why deaths of other ethnicities do not see a staggering increase. Likewise, one imagines that coverage of the murder of George Floyd was more extreme in the United States hence why the increase is only observable there (albeit I would need to actually see if the coverage was greater in the US). I would add that this explanation would also cover why media outlets have discussed other reasons; to state this is the reason would make them, in some way, complicit.
Timings wise it would also make sense. The coverage and the protests would occur contemporaneously, each feeding off the other.
I appreciate that this thought is unsourced, and low-effort in that it may have been covered by other comments, or by ACT and I have just missed it. Regardless, any discussion based on this thought would be interesting.
"Anchovies are reportedly raining from the sky across San Francisco" https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/raining-fish-in-san-francisco-17272717.php
An omen.
I don’t know what to make of the UAP/UFO stuff the US gov’s been talking about recently.
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/nasa-uap-investigation-unidentified-aerial-phenomena
is it to be taken seriously at all? rationalist communities have been silent on this matter as far as i can tell. is it a hoax? measurement errors? or something else bit too wacky for us to comfortably admit might be real?
What are some good books (or blogs) to read if I want to learn everything about rhetoric?
So there's this anecdotal (maybe formally quantified through studies too?) thing about how for people with ADHD, stimulants sometimes produce the opposite, a calming effect.
I am wondering whether there's a similar thing going on with musical taste, albeit not related to ADHD, which I don't (think?) I have. Obviously quite subjective, but...I just do not have the capacity to listen to "chill beats". They don't calm me down, they...make me angry? Possibly a poorly-differentiated emotion. All I know is, they definitely do not leave me feeling chill...always some variety of upset, sometimes including literal upset-stomach nausea.
The beats which do calm me down are...often ones that other people find too stimulating, such as operatic metal. (Listening to Therion's "Beloved Antichrist" while typing this.) Even classical music, which is traditionally associated with calm and repose, is *aggressively* structured and executed...there's a lot of Effort behind it, no matter the actual tempo. That somehow feels necessary for audiophilia, though not sufficient. Good music makes my heart tremble. As Bruce Lee would say, "We're looking for *emotional content*". Not numb stultification.
I've yet to find anyone else with remotely similar musical (dis)preferences; even those that also like high-energy music can at least conceive of chilling to chill beats. I don't have that "musical empathy", at all. Is this just a weird case of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ ?
Is *proportionality* a thing in your legislature, especially with regard to state behaviour vis-a-vis the citizens?
Roughly it means that the state is allowed to restrict or interfere with basic rights, but only to the extend to which it is proportionate to the situation/threat or necessary to protect other important rights.
In Germany it played a big rule lately during Covid, when it resulted in quite a number of concrete Covid measures being cancelled by the courts (and probably even more being approved). To give another example, proportionality is also important in the use of force by the police, when they are allowed to use force, but only to the extend to which it is necessary in a given situation.
For some German source, see here: https://www.juraindividuell.de/pruefungsschemata/der-verhaeltnismaessigkeitsgrundsatz/ . I don't know if *proportionality* is the technically correct translation ('Verhältnismäßigkeit').
It's a huge thing in the relation of German state to citizens. (I'm not a legal expert, so I don't claim to be aware of the technicalities.) Two or three remarks that I read lately made me wonder: is this very common in other legal systems as well?
Re bans, I noticed that they are not "publicly" announced in the open threads anymore. Alas, given that often i mute threads, how can i know if I have some fraction of a ban?
Maybe my reflection on being a small fish investor would be interesting for someone?
https://eightyfour.substack.com/p/want-to-invest-in-stocks
If you're near Seattle, there's going to be a summer ACX/LW meetup on Wednesday, Aug 3rd:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-seattle-summer-meetup
https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
How can I find guidance to help me study myself as a data point of one, to figure out what is a healthy diet for me, in order to be as healthy as possible? I am confused about what goals to set. High fat or low fat? Is saturated fat to be avoided?
Ofcourse, being disciplined about the goals is a different thing. I just want to atleast figure out the optimal goals to set, for how to eat.
Are there smart data-driven medical professionals who do this?
Thanks!
Just for the record: I took down the post I put up a few hours ago asking for suggestions about great countries my adventuresome daughter might move to. I found it startlingly unpleasant when a few people jumped on the very small political aspect of things and started sniding and snarking about her supposed leftiness. If you'd been talking about me, I'd have just argued, but something about knowing those comments concerned my daughter really got to me.
I did get some good suggestions before I pulled the plug though. New Zealand sounds good to me.
Oh, and Kerani, Melvin and pie_flavor? I think you are boors.
I applied
Hi Peter. Thank you for submitting an application for Clearer Thinking Regrants.
Visit the Clearer Thinking website here to learn more about our research, programs, and tools, which are designed to help you change your habits, make better decisions, and achieve your goals.
Here are the responses you gave in the application:
A brief name you can use to refer to my project is Global Warming Directory
My project aims to improve the world or the future by Collecting information about global warming in a structured and accessible way.
The group or population that will benefit from this project is The population of the Earth.
This project is important because it will lead to Better understanding of what we can do to reverse global warming.
The mechanism by which I expect my project will achieve these positive outcomes is as follows:
I have created a directory titled "How to Stop Global Warming (100 Ways to Cool Your Mother)". I have done this working by myself while living on Social Security. A larger organization could build on what I have done. Link: Rodes.pub/GlobalWarming.
In the future, a strong indicator I'll be able to look to in order to see if my project is succeeding is... The directory grows and becomes well publicized.
I am (or my team and I are) well-suited to implement this project because I have already done it.
If this project gets funded but DOESN'T achieve its desired outcomes, the MOST LIKELY reason that this would happen would be No one was interested.
If I suddenly had an extra $10,000 for my project, I (or we) would be most likely to spend it on Half for medical needs for me, and half for publicity for the directory..
This project is a single person project that is not a charity or company
So far, this project has begun to be implemented but has not yet gotten any funding
I just wanted to share this post that expands upon Scott's "moral costs of chicken vs beef" post by drawing upon the latest economic modelling (by Kevin Kuruc) of the "social cost" of animal suffering:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/meat-externalities
"While the animal welfare costs of the Standard American Diet are on the order of $100,000 per year, the climate costs are a mere $47. Combining these with Scott Alexander’s estimates of offsetting efficacy yields some interesting results..."
In the interest of starting a big political fight for some reason, what do people think of the so called "independent state legislature" theory, which is going to come up in the Supreme Court case Moore v Harper next term?
The two relevant parts of the Constitution:
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators."
and
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
The argument is that this means that other organs of a state government, e.g. governor, courts, etc, can't override the legislature in setting rules for federal elections. This comes up in a couple contexts:
- the rules around mail-in ballots, etc, which were often set/changed by governors or courts in the 2020 election and not state legislatures
- redistricting/gerrymandering, who in a state gets to decide
- picking of presidential electors, who gets to decide (and when)
Argument in favor is that the constitution says the state legislature gets to decide, not the state government overall or governor or whatever; the grant of power is to the legislature itself. Argument against is that state legislatures are creatures of state constitutions and so they have no ability to operate outside of the bounds of the relevant state constitution.
Personally I'm against it, my reasons:
- insofar as anyone cares about this sort of thing, precedent goes against it. Arizona sate legislature vs Arizona independent districting commission from 2015 upheld Arizona having an independent redistricting commission; and a case from 1916, Davis v Hildebrant which allowed a referendum in Ohio to veto the legislature's districting plan. The recent case was 5-4 and conservatives have gained more seats since then. But also, Roberts's dissent in 2015 drew a distinction between the old 1916 case (where a referendum merely vetoed the legislature) and the 2015 case (where the legislature was entirely taken out of it).
- If you start granting power to a legislature independently of the state constitution, it can lead in all sorts of weird directions. Like what if the state constitution has a supermajority requirement to pass any law (like the filibuster but more formalized)? Does that not apply to a vote on redistricting? What's the difference for this purpose between a constitutional provision saying "no gerrymandering" and one saying "supermajority requirement"? They're both constitutional restrictions on what the legislature can do.
- People talk about the federal government having enumerated powers - well those enumerated powers are specifically granted *to Congress*. Similarly everyone agrees the President can't take actions that violate the first amendment, but the first amendment says that "*Congress* shall make no law..." It just reflects an idea that government power derives from the legislature, and they aren't distinguishing between giving the power to the legislature and giving it to the state government generally (I'm not sure I agree with this idea, seems like a good question for a historian).
- often it's hard to disentangle the legislature's actions from the state government's actions more broadly. What if a state law says that the courts or governor can take actions that change what the state law says? Similarly, there are always going to be details of implementation left to other branches. Is a federal election in California invalid because the legislature didn't specifically list every church, high school gym, and sports arena in the state that has voting booths?
Couple other notes:
- For the two constitutional provisions I quoted, note the one on house elections, but not presidential elections, gives the federal government power to override state government rules.
- For liberals the big worry is presidential elections. A few big swing states, though evenly split population-wise, have Republican dominated/gerrymandered state legislatures. That said, even though it's considered a conservative idea, ending the doctrine could help liberals in some ways. More blue states than red have independent redistricting commissions, if the doctrine is put in place there will probably be more blue state gerrymandering.
- It does seem kind of smarmy for a state legislature to lose a ballot initiative that stops them gerrymandering and then sue to invalidate it in federal court, so they can continue to gerrymander. Aside from the constitutional question I'd hope they all get primaried.
- Also seems smarmy for people who are normally all about respect for state governments to start having federal courts override state court interpretations of state laws, which they normally never do.
- I think this idea has gained traction due to conservatives who wanted to reject trump's claims of a stolen election while throwing a bone towards it - so they settled on this "states didn't follow their own rules" formulation. Of course states *did* follow their own rules, unless you believe in the independent state legislature idea.
So I watched a video today where they argued that instead of trying to use the lower/middle/upper class trichotimy when discussing politics and studying things, we should instead use (and I'm using their phrasing which I'll immediately define so hold your horses) the working/capitalist dichotomy.
The working class here is meant literally: if you have to do serious physical or mental work to earn a living, you are part of the working class: laborers, service workers, and basically anything where you're helping to make money for someone else. The capitalist class represents people who earn their money off the work of others: so landlords, investors, and the owners of businesses that are large enough to run themselves. If you own a business, but it's small enough that you have to pitch in and/or do any of the work yourself, then you're also a part of the working class.
The argument is that l/m/u classes tend to be nebulously and arbitrarily defined depending on what someone is trying to do, with no standardized definition, and straight up asking people what class they belong to leads to people, with incomes anywhere from below the poverty line to over a million dollars, claiming to be middle class.
The w/c class dichotomy, on the other hand, has a definition independent of location, relative wages, home ownership, and standard of living, and classification is only dependent on the type of work (or lack thereof) necessary to obtain a person's income.
One application of this framework would be how to judge policy proposals. For instance, if you hear about a proposed budget or tax cut, you can try putting yourself in your boss's shoes, and seeing if they would be happy about it (if your boss is a small business owner, imagine Jeff Bezos or something). If they would, it's probably not going to be helpful for you, regardless of any claims or arguments that it'll help the middle class.
Thoughts?
What new science fiction have you read that’s blown your mind?
In my ongoing project of trying to pick up more hobbies and skills, I've decided to take up drawing. I bought a cheap Canson sketchbook to work through drawabox.com's exercises. Does anyone have experience with it or another art course they can recommend? Textbooks on the subject? I'm coming at this from a level of "drew a few graphs in college chemistry" as a level of prior artistic skill.
There used to be a thing called Literary Fiction. Around the turn of the millennium this non-genre genre seemed to have gotten over its heels turning out pretentious writerly tomes that were heavily criticized in essays like this one in the Atlantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Reader%27s_Manifesto
Two decades later, literary fiction in the USA is non-existent yet there hasn't been a tolling of the bells. It seems to have gradually transformed unnoticed into books that middle-aged, all-female book clubs read. In other words, it didn't die, but it smells funny.
Or am I entirely off base here?
I had an experience last week of being very high on marijuana via a 50mg edible. I had some questions and thoughts coming out of the experience and thought this might be the best place to get answers and feedback. The questions I want answered are mostly that I want to verify that some of my high thoughts were stupid so I can stop thinking about them. If you want to shoot down three dumb math thoughts and ignore the marijuana high journey skip to the __ line.
To answer some potential questions before they come up:
1. Why? I was offered it, and usually I don't notice the effects of marijuana. I'd taken half of a 50mg edible only a month or two earlier and don't remember noticing much of an effect.
2. Was it enjoyable? No, and I doubt I'd do it again. Maybe if I have a day to waste. But I would have preferred being more present and aware for that day.
3. Circumstances? On the 4th of july, with my parents, wife, and kid. Tried to nap through the majority of the high, cuz it was taking forever.
My observations about my mental state:
1. My conscious mind seemed to no longer be in the driver's seat of my physical actions. I was viewing the things I was doing, but I did not feel like I was controlling those things. I would say or do things, and then think "oh that was an interesting thing to say/do".
2. I was having delusions. Mostly I was just hearing sounds that were not there, once I started realizing that these were delusions they often went away. A few times when I was very high I was imagining that scenarios I had played out in my head were real. If anyone here thinks of how a conversation might go in their head before having the conversation ... just imagine not being able to distinguish those thoughts from reality. Or how you feel when you wake up in the morning sometimes and can't tell if a dream was real or an actual memory.
3. My perception of the passage of time was very messed up. I was noticing this constantly, because time seemed to be going at a crawl. I would often notice that it felt like 30 minutes or an hour had passed, when it had instead only been a minute.
4. My situational/spatial awareness was shit. I think this might have been related to the passage of time. If you are sitting in a room for an hour staring in only one direction you might forget what the room behind you looks like. Turning around and letting your mind update the picture will solve the problem. I was constantly losing my spatial awareness and body awareness. Unless I was actively moving around or walking I seemed to have no spatial awareness. Or maybe its like spatial awareness is normally stored in ram for a while, and my mind just kept dumping whatever was in there.
5. My ability to play spider solitaire was significantly worse. I like playing spider solitaire to kill ~10 minutes. I've noticed it tends to correlate with my mental abilities, so its a poor man's IQ test. If I'm being very productive at work and step away to use the bathroom or cook some food, I can finish a game in 5-8 minutes. If I'm drunk, very tired, or heavily distracted I'll finish a game in like 8-12 minutes. When I was high I *thought* I was playing really well, but it took me 20 minutes to finish a game.
6. I spent a lot of time in my head. My main point of dread and dislike of the whole experience is that it took so damn long. I slept through the majority of my high, but it still felt like it took days rather than a few hours of my time. I have some more horror of "locked in syndrome" after the experience. Just stuck with my thoughts for what felt like hours at a time, and I'd look a clock and only a few minutes have passed. Having so much time to spend in my head meant I went over some wacky ideas and theories.
7. I was constantly feeling an "enlightenment high". Some of you may have had it while reading Scott's articles, or finally figuring out how to program something, or completing a tough sudoku puzzle. Its that sense of "Ahh! Yes! I finally get it!". I was feeling this about all my ideas. Even when I realized *while still high* that some of these ideas were dumb.
_______________________
Anyways, three of the ideas I had while high are sorta math related. And I'm not well versed enough in math to know if these ideas are dumb, or even know the terms I would need to use on a search engine to find them. There are some shared concepts between all of the ideas, so I'll try and describe those first. I might not have the right math terminology.
Dimensions and infinity. The basic whole number system we use is a one dimensional number system. It describes a line. A two dimensional number system describes a plane. A three dimension number system describes a space. We don't really have common terms for the higher dimensional number systems (maybe time and space for 4d?).
Base increment. In a 1d (one dimensional) number system the base increment is pretty simple, its just "1". In a 2d number system I think the base increment has to be (1, 1), and in a 3d system it would be (1, 1, 1).
I'll start with the more absurd one:
1. An infinite rebound. I have trouble fully remembering the steps I took to get to the conclusion. There might not have been any steps. The idea was that there is some finite maximum to infinities that describe infinities. Even writing this makes my face turn red. Only talk about it if its *not* stupid. I've already mostly dismissed it.
The other two are kinda related
2. Pairs of primes are a property of the base increment. So in the single dimension we have a bunch of mathematicians working around prime numbers (reading news stories about this is what got my mind spinning in this whole direction). My thought was that if there is a rule for pairs of primes in the 1d then those rules would apply to pairs of primes in the 2d, 3d, etc.
3. The infinite dimension is entirely prime numbers. So as you go up in number dimensions the proportion of prime numbers increases. I realize this kind of breaks with the idea I had above. Which makes it harder for me to know if they are both stupid or if one secretly makes some sense.
I can try to elaborate more if anyone has questions. But mostly I'm looking for an obvious "this is wrong" or "this has been thought of before, here is what it is called".
Scott, I noticed you stop posting the reminder about the thread number and politics - was this intentional?
Not saying Altman's numbers are wrong but they do seem very much in conflict with just about market price and prediction market out there.
I just finished reading Albion's Seed (after reading Scott's review a few years ago). Judging from Wikipedia the follow-on books never materialized (but perhaps they were done by other authors), the second was supposed to be similar, but how the African Slave Trade brought folkways. Is there a (hopefully great) single book covering that?
Just something I have noticed online: posters with overtly female nicks tend to be trans women rather than cis women. I have not noticed the converse though. This is anecdotal, but sort of makes sense, being open about one's gender is something that cis women learned early to be cautious about.
Best Dire Straits song?
Scott (or anyone, really),
Can you recommend any clinical psych topics that are in need of a good literature review, or heuristics for how to identify one? I'm an undergraduate psychology student looking for a topic for my capstone project.
Population-wise, I'm interested in gifted children, learning disabilities, twice-exceptional students, and for adults I'm interested in the psychology of technical professionals. Condition-wise I'm interested in anxiety disorders (especially eating disorders and OCD), and dissociative disorders. Treatment-wise I'm interested in IFS, Coherence Therapy, and CBT/DBT/related stuff.
(I'm in a 2-year degree-completion BA program for adult students; I started out in the humanities at a different school a while ago, so I've only had about a year and a half of psych coursework and pretty limited faculty guidance or time to think about what I'm doing. I could do observational research instead of a review paper, but again I don't have ton of institutional support and so I fear that the study might not turn out very worthwhile. I feel more optimistic that a review paper could make a real contribution, if I pick something worthwhile to dig into)
Is there anything you'd like to know more about that you think I could feasibly sort out in 6 months of work?
Which prospective Tory leadership candidate would be the best?
Why is the background of this website now blue?
Why are so many of the great thinkers and artists morally and/or politically compromised? Who is a great thinker or artist who also led a life that you consider morally exemplary, or else just neutral, boring?
Relevant manifold market prediction:
https://manifold.markets/JamesGiammona/will-helions-polaris-fusion-reactor
I have a friend with a non profit in Colombia which I find very cool, albeit not as high impact enough for EA (At least I think so).
Any tips on how to reach a western audience effectively? I was thinking reaching https://zeroco2.eco/en/ and other climate impact charity aggregators with letters, but I was thinking maybe the ACX crowd has other novel ideas.
Why has the domination of "nerd" culture in pop entertainment (comic book movies, fantasy, sci-fi) not ended the culture of grievance within the community of self-identified nerds? Is it a "be careful what you wish for" thing?
Brits: can you explain what happened with Boris Johnson last week?
I know he resigned because someone in his government committed sexual harassment. But in the States that would barely make front page news - our presidents sometimes commit sexual harassment *personally* without getting forced out, plus I get the impression that Johnson had made it through many scandals much worse than that before. Is Britain just much tougher on harassment than we are? Or was there some deeper reason that this case caused so many previously-loyal ministers to resign and eventually brought down the government?