The new biography of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller is very good! Made me wonder if theology can ever be avoided. Maybe all modern controversies simply rehash ancient religious debates.
You can't compliment Cass like that, Scott. I spend like ten hours a day telling him terrible things about himself and it's barely keeping him in check. Saying nice things about him is like feeding a mogwai after midnight - you are courting a full Gremlins 2 situation.
I suppose it's possible that the standard explanations (economy, isolation, etc) explain rural homicide, while protests and the knock-on effects on policing, explain urban homicide, but it would certainly be a strange coincidence if mostly unrelated causes increased murder by almost the same amount at the same time in urban and rural places. It would be nice if there were a graph showing the increase in rural homicide, so we could see if it's tightly connected to the same time period or more spread out. My link, as well as what I can read of the paywalled link, seem to indicate that it is more spread out (2 vignettes mention March and April of 2020, while the top paragraph of the full text mentions murders continuing until December).
According to WSJ, the spike in rural areas has been 80% of the spike in urban areas. Percentage wise, there are 62% as many blacks in rural as urban areas. If you see this effect as “police afraid to interfere with black people committing crime,” it’s not surprising you’d see a spike in rural areas too.
Having nearly finished my Masters, I'm wanting to plan out my PhD, and AI Alignment is an area (among others) that I'm thinking about transitioning into. I'd like to talk to someone doing Real Research in the area (who might potentially be a PhD supervisor). I don't have a lot of contacts at top tier universities yet, so I thought I'd ask here first before trying connections-of-connections.
I am having difficulty conceiving of a pro-choice argument from a utilitarian standpoint. Instead of doing something like QALY, I'll just use Average American Life Year (AALY). Each American has about 79 AALYs. We can imagine that the life of a would-be aborted human is less in terms of well being, but how much less? It's hard to imagine that unwanted babies lives are hardly worth living in most cases. Most people are glad to be alive, and I'm sure it's the same for people who are adopted or live in orphanages.
What is a reasonable discount factor? Imagine something extreme like 50%. That's still 39.5 AALYs. You could argue that would-be humans are a societal burden, but how much disutility are they causing? Perhaps in some extreme cases with disabled fetuses, they are particularly burdensome, but it is difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden.
How much disutility is the mother receiving? It's hard to imagine more than decades worth of non-existence. If you think I'm wrong, then give me some rough estimates of how much the average aborted American life is worth and how much disutility the mother experiences.
We can add more to the side of pro-life if we factor in that aborted humans will have children of their own with their own utility. We can reject fetal personhood while still considering the moral worth of future people - longtermists should be sympathetic to this.
Re: DSL, every time I stop by I'm surprised by how conservative it is. Does anyone know why? Is it a founder effect thing, or that actually everyone is super conservative and it mostly doesn't come out in these threads, or what? In the days that the SSC subreddit hosted the culture war thread its posters were fairly conservative leaning on average, but not to this extent, in my recollection; I haven't stopped by The Motte to see how it's doing these days.
Hi all. Reposting from last week's thread as I was a little later to that one than I am to this one.
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.
Already quite a few requests in there from ACX folk to match with! We'll begin 'concierge matching' some of our initial matching users in the coming weeks.
The weird thing about the homicide spike in the US is that it seems to be an effect of a general national "mood" of unrest. There was a feeling of distrust and craziness in the air. I realize this isn't at all scientific or even measurable, but I think this is the reason the Covid explanation seems so intuitive to many people. They felt the bad energy and attributed it to Covid.
Now we see this spike didn't happen in other countries and it seems likely that the worst effects of the national bad mood/distrust were due to BLM and protests, more than covid. This makes sense because we have citizens wary of police intervention and police nervous about intervening in the first place. I wouldn't expect this abstract national phenomenon to be limited to big urban areas where the protests took place. Everyone was watching the same news and having the same conversations online. The internet truly unites Americans across regions. So I'm not at all surprised that the spike happened everywhere. The question is: did it indeed happen everywhere or is there just a more random sample of where more murders took place?
What's The Deal With...hard seltzer? I am trying to understand the success of stuff like White Claw and just not grokking it. So many of those "flavoured bubbly malt beverages" just taste like...sadsack. It's definitely cheap, but there are even more efficient ways to get drunk; also feels like trading off taste and experience purely for dollar value is missing half the point of drinking. Lots of low-ABV% drinks that aren't quite that bottom-barrel, if it's a moderation thing. They also seem to buck the whole, yknow..."natural", "no artificial ingredients" trend that I thought was A Big Deal these days.
My first ever drink was Mike's Hard Lemonade at <several years past legal drinking age>...I grew up painfully aware of the perils of alcoholism, resolved to be sober forever myself, and then whoops fell off that wagon real fast after experiencing cheap crap beer. So like, I get that - no one starts off sipping Japanese whiskey, it's a phase thing. I am not confused when I see college kids loading up their shopping carts with White Claw. But it does confuse me when anyone not in that demographic/shopping for that demographic does. "Surely you know better?" I wanna ask...Even Coors or Heineken or $3 wines can plausibly be bought for cooking purposes rather than drinking. (Beer chili!)
This is almost certainly a stupid/selective-blindness question, but where's the ACX register of bans? I could have sworn there was a public ban register, but I can't find it now. Was it simply removed, and people are now just disappeared wordlessly? Or was it never brought over from SSC and this is a mnemonic interference pattern?
It is a common observation that ideas tend to come when you are not thinking about them, but generally you need to prime your mind first by consciously working on the problem to solve.
Hypothesis 1: your subconscious mind is doing the heavy lifting and, when your conscious mind is relaxed, raises the solution to the level of consciousness.
Hypothesis 2: Like any other part of your body, you can use exercise, nutrition or pharmaceuticals to alter the performance of your subconscious.
So.... Does anyone have any experience on attempting to improve their subconscious idea generation? Either improving the quality or frequency of ideas, or reducing the length of time they take to appear after a conscious attack on a problem? If so, what steps did you take and were they effective?
My kid will turn five in early October, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to give him shots now (the ones for under 5) or wait and give him 5+ ones?
I think the 5+ ones have higher doses and so might be more affective, bit not sure about that.
As far as we can tell, he hasn't gotten COVID so far.
Does anyone else feel like the internet is better than ever in terms of good content? Yeah, social media sites are cesspools. But I find there’s still plenty of great content; I just have to do the work of finding it.
My opinion on homicide rates is that the primary factor determining them is mental illness and substance use/abuse. This is because murder is generally irrational, so I don't expect murderers to respond mechanistically to incentives.
It's no secret that the lockdown period has strained the mental health of most people, especially people who are more dependent on extended family and neighborhood socializing.
On the other hand, many "nerds"—introverts, people with higher education, those of us more interested in things and thoughts than social dynamics—have actually benefited from social distancing.
Could Ukraine plausibly hire mercenaries to help fight the war against Russia? (With Western financial backing, obviously). I think former American or European soldiers would probably be a bridge too far, but to my understanding many of the mercenaries these days are demobilized infantry from high-conflict countries- Colombia and other places in South America, parts of Africa, etc.
I doubt mercenaries would engage in high-casualty conflict on the front lines (what’s the point of a paycheck if you’re dead?), but could they plausibly help guard the rear, help with logistics, drive trucks, transport the wounded, patrol areas further from the hot zones, etc.- freeing up more native Ukrainian infantry? Former soldiers from say Colombia would come with combat experience- a quick boot camp to get them used to the Ukrainian system, maybe, and then deployment to guarding the western provinces. Could this possibly work at all?
Could someone explain to me how electric lines of force are related to the generation of light? I read a passage about this in an old encyclopedia, but don't understand it. This Youtube video seems to do a good job explaining what electric lines of force are.
I'm looking for a certain type of [offline] community/group/club, and so far my search (in NYC) has not been too successful. The attributes that matter to me:
1. Cross-disciplinary membership and discussion topics; Not skewed towards one particular industry or area (e.g. IT or entrepreneurship)
2. Deeper than surface level (what you can read in the mass media) discussions. Ideally for each topic discussed there would be an expert/professional in the room. A good indication of success here is the ability of the group to engage in "deep tech" discussions.
3. Stable core of participants and at least somewhat regular events (bi-weekly would be ideal frequency).
(4. Not an ethnic or expat-only group)
Some examples and non-examples:
- A specific topic- or interest-based community would violate (1). Also, in my experience, if the event is discoverable publicly (e.g. on Meetup), it gets overrun by hustlers.
- An activity group (sports, wine tasting, tabletop games) would violate (2) - there are rarely any deep discussions not centered on the activity currently performed
- LessWrong and satellites get very close, but they tend to be disproportionately attended by the IT crowd.
- University alumni clubs are an example of a community that satisfies all criteria. Unfortunately, they are not accessible to the outsiders
I would appreciate any leads! At this point in my search I'm fairly certain that the right way is to build such a community from scratch, but learning about the existing groups has been an amazing source of inspiration and best practices.
I think the "BLM protests" explanation for the homicide spike is part of the reason, but only part of the reason. I think there are a few factors that weren't explained in that post.
1) The original post assumes that the BLM protests/riots were the only thing going on at that time. However, that was also the end of the covid lockdowns, and generally seemed to be the signal we were "done" with the lockdown part of covid. For some reason, covid seemed to drive people crazy and made them more prone to sudden overwhelming rage. Call it "covid psychosis." (Not sure if this was only in the US or around the world; it seems to be more in the US). Anecdotally, many of the murders seem to be caused by sheer rage or revenge, not gang-related crimes or for any rational reason.
This would also explain the rural murder spike, since rural communities would most likely not change due to anger over police violence, but would be susceptible to post-lockdown rage.
2) Obviously there are many confounding variables in understanding crime rates (see "Freakonomics" for more on that). One clue that a variable might be more correlational than causal is if the trend starts too early. In this case, the murder spike starts right at the BLM protests; in fact, since the stats aren't exact, it might have even started before the protests. That suggests there might be another factor (for example, covid psychosis) causing the spike.
3) Police certainly pulled back in 2020, but I have not seen much written about the original reason they stopped enforcing laws that year--fear of covid. From what I remember around that time, police basically stopped doing anything around March 2020, so whatever missing enforcement there was started before the BLM protests.
The Impact Markets discussion reminds me that I'm curious about the effectiveness of prospective prizes. It seems to me that offering a prospective prize (prizes for past accomplishment is a whole nother thing) is a way of shuffling the costs off to the people who are competing for the prize, and also, that it might be hard to come up with a truly useful target., though it's probably easily for math than for anything else.
Has there been work done on the value of prizes to lead to further accomplishment? Have robot fighting competitions led to anything more than entertainment?
Does anyone else wonder why people treat IQ scores like penis size? Every person on here I've seen refer to their own intelligence has never put themselves below the 90th percentile for IQ, which means either most of this community is in the top 10% for IQ, most people are lying about their IQ scores, or that most people do not have an accurate gauge of their own IQ and inflate it ("smarter than average" effect).
Whilst I have no doubt there are very smart people in this community, it seems highly improbable to me that everyone who's happened to comment is in the top 10% for IQ. So the question is, why are many people in this community so insecure about their smarts?
Unsurprisingly, basically there's a lot of "man for the categories" in the comments where people insist that there's an objective, cut-and-dry way to define genre boundaries while the actual results show that that's largely not the case.
We've got the far right talking about a Jewish conspiracy to "replace" the "white race" with brown people, the median right-winger flying a "Fuck Biden and Fuck You for Voting for Him" flag on his pickup truck, the median young left-winger talking about how we're all going to die of climate change due to climate activists' laughably overstated histrionics*, and the far left talking about guillotining or firing squad-ing all rich people and landlords.
Certainly not a country singing kumbaya.
* if you live on the Ganges in Dhaka, sure, your odds of dying from climate catastrophes are high enough to worry. But no, upper-middle class child living in the suburbs of a major American city, you are not going to perish because the global mean temperature rises another 2 deg C. We should absolutely try to mitigate climate change because millions of people dying is bad, but the overreaction only breeds complacency.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
Meanwhile, here is a rather good interview with Chomsky (as well as a load of other discussions) about Large Language Models and what they can tell us about intelligence.
A decade ago it was an active debate, nowadays I rarely hear about it any more. I don't think there has been enough additional data collected in the last ten years to convince skeptics they were wrong; if anything the evidence seems to be accumulating on the "no big deal" side as various predictions of doom have failed to bear out.
Has anyone hear read the "48 Laws of Power"? Reading it has made me realize that I was missing a lot of insight into how people really are, that may be obvious to most other folks.
I recently had some thoughts about a possible connection between cognitive dissonance and autism. I'm posting here in the hope that someone more knowledgeable on the subject will give it a quick read and tell me "That's not how it works" or "You might actually be on the right track." I'm a layperson (as my notes to self clearly show) and can't really justify spending time studying psychology to find out if my arguments are fundamentally flawed.
On a recent post, there was some discussion about how present-day Socialist parties in Europe have historically socialist roots but in countries such as France where those parties have been popular the ideology has been Socially Democratic for a long time now. The name Socialist persists but it's just a brand name at this point, much like the NBA team The Lakers is a brand name that no longer has anything to do with The Land of 1000 Lakes.
My question here is about Germany's Christian-Democrats (CDU). I can't tell from reading Wikipedia to what extent they still consider themselves to be a Christian party. I've long assumed that, like the Socialist Party in France, it's just a brand name that nobody wants to change, but maybe my assumptions are wrong.
So, for those who know: Is the CDU still considered to be a Christian party?
Substack has started adding paragraphs to their RSS feeds in the format of "XYZ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber." The paragraphs aren't differentiated by being block quotes or italics or anything, so I end up breaking my reading flow as I fail to notice them until I'm already halfway across. I find it more than a bit annoying because I'm already a paid subscriber (not that SS can tell from the RSS feed).
Has anyone else seen this? If so, have you found any workarounds?
I'm confused by this line from point (3) of this post:
> the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today,
It's my understanding that the corporatization of the web is part of Web 2.0. Interactive sites used to be niche / community driven, and corporate-owned sites were read-only. Then Web 2.0 came, and large corporations began making mass-market websites that collected and published user-created content.
I also can't find any reference to BBS that isn't a recent blockchain / Web 3.0 thing.
How hard is it to assassinate high-ranking politicians? (a great question to post in a public discussion!)
I was thinking about the war in Ukraine and how a death of this or that individual could affect its outcome. Obviously, the Russians tried to kill Zelensky at the beginning of the invasion and failed. After a few more attempts, they gave up. Would say CIA do "better" or is it really that difficult?
I also noticed that at the beginning of the war, Zelensky regularly posted videos from his office (which you can probably find even on google maps) and while the "precision strikes" Russia boasts about are probably far from that precise, I guess that if you fired 10 kalibr rockets aimed at Zelensky's office at the time he is likely going to be recording those videos, there is a good chance one of them hits. So either the rockets are even less precise than I thought or the Russians decided at some point that killing Zelensky was no longer going to bring them any major advantage in the conflict (in fact, it could galvanize both the Western support and Ukraine resistance even further). Do you agree with that?
This also lead me to think about whether killing Putin would help. I guess that his assassination would be much harder to pull off and the risk in case of a failure and discovery (realistically, it would probably have be an attempt by the US or with a lot of US operational support) could spell a disaster for international politics (it would probably be even more dangerous than sending NATO navies to clear out the Black Sea of Russian presence...). So I guess those are good reasons not to attempt the assassination at all. But if you could guarantee success and a degree of deniability (which might be impossible), would it help? I guess it would paralyze the Russian state for a while which would help in the short therm, but it could lead to even more aggression and perhaps even an (open) mobilization in Russia. I guess that you'd have to kill the entire Russian high command which is probably impossible.
Then I thought about Lukashenko. He is extremely unpopular in Belarus and if he died, Belarus would have a revolution after which they would likely switch sides and openly support Ukraine in the conflict. Russia would be too busy to intervene and if the attempt did not succeed, the fallout would be much more limited. The army of Belarus is insignificant and unlikely to actually want to fight Ukrainians except for a few regime loyalists. At the same time, they keep a part of the Ukrainian military in check and they provide their territory and infrastructure to the Russians. They also have a sizeable stock of soviet-era artillery and tanks and if they flipped sides, gave/leased half of their military equipment to Ukraine and denied Russians in their territory this would be a significant blow to Putin (also the Russian economy would take a hit)...so it actually seems like quite a good idea to kill him (perhaps even through a local agent given how much people there actually hate Lukashenko) and I wonder if it could take place.
The "nudge" hypothesis for behavior modification has gotten a lot of attention for a long time. It would be interesting, but not shocking, if the statistics didn't back it up.
Regarding point 3, I've been reading and watching a lot on Web 0.1 and it's collection of decentralized dialup BBS's and their effects shaping modern social media. There is a book called The Modem World that discusses this specific topic or 300 hours of raw interviews that were recording 20 years ago detailing just about every aspect imaginable on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary)
It looks brilliant, but one thing that undercuts the realism is the fact that you shoot down several Japanese planes in the space of a few minutes. Even in a major air-to-air engagement like this, most fighter pilots would score no kills, the minority that did would only get one kill, and a pilot who scored two kills would have reason to brag among other pilots for the rest of his life.
This makes me wonder: I know there are fighter plane games that closely reproduce real-world physics and the performance characteristics of the real planes, so when mass air battles are held in those games, meant to simulate actual engagements like the Battle of Midway or one day during the Battle of Britain, do the loss/kill ratios ever approach what they actually were in real life? Or are the results always unrealistic, as they are in the clip?
In the bacteria/archaea that use CRISPR-Cas-9, when making an mRNA transcript of a stored piece of viral DNA, how is it determined which DNA strand to make an RNA transcript from?
I know that in standard mRNA transcription, there are often specific sequences on a strand that indicate where transcription should start. But the sequences surrounding the stored viral DNA are palindromic, so it seems like if there is such an indicator/promoter sequence, it should be on both strands.
Does it not matter which strand you copy, since in the end you are comparing it to incoming viral DNA using the Cas-9 protein, and which strand you copy doesn’t affect whether you recognize the incoming viral DNA?
I am not very familiar with methods for measuring serotonin in people, so I'm uncertain what to make of the results. My main takeaway as an outsider is that this doesn't shift my beliefs very much, but does highlight ongoing issues in the field. Does anyone here have a more informed opinion on this or other aspects of the review?
Looked up hedonium shockwave after you mentioned it in an earlier post. Entire galaxy having an orgasm. Pretty hard not to choose that! Question is, what sound would the galaxy make.
Why isn't popcorn ever a side dish with a meal? Seems that it would be about the nutritional equivalent of fries or chips. Is it a space or timing issue in the kitchen? Would nobody want it?
I was amazed at how many people on here rushed to the defense of BLM on the post about the Ferguson effect, when time and time again it is shown that BLM is a black nationalist movement that does not care about principled objection to police brutality and instead just react in a tribalistic way against any instance of their ingroup being hurt by the outgroup.
Case in point, the shooting of Andrew Sunberg by police following a six-hour standoff after Sunberg shot a neighbor he had been stalking has lead to angry BLM protests. And of course, along with that, the MSM disinformation machine has gone into overdrive looking for excuses to justify this black rage, portraying Sunberg as a veritable angel who did nothing wrong. And of course, the narrative of choice *every single time* there has been a high profile instance of black violence is that the offender was "mentally ill"/having a "mental health crisis". Maybe its true sometimes, maybe its not. But 1) This literally NEVER applies to white men/offenders deemed BAD by the media and 2) If police can't shoot somebody LITERALLY TRYING TO MURDER OTHER PEOPLE, mental health crisis or not, it's open and shut case that BLM isn't a movement against police brutality.
The new biography of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller is very good! Made me wonder if theology can ever be avoided. Maybe all modern controversies simply rehash ancient religious debates.
You can't compliment Cass like that, Scott. I spend like ten hours a day telling him terrible things about himself and it's barely keeping him in check. Saying nice things about him is like feeding a mogwai after midnight - you are courting a full Gremlins 2 situation.
The WSJ article is paywalled, but there are some more specifics here: https://www.wsj.com/story/murder-rates-soar-in-rural-america-bb431022
I suppose it's possible that the standard explanations (economy, isolation, etc) explain rural homicide, while protests and the knock-on effects on policing, explain urban homicide, but it would certainly be a strange coincidence if mostly unrelated causes increased murder by almost the same amount at the same time in urban and rural places. It would be nice if there were a graph showing the increase in rural homicide, so we could see if it's tightly connected to the same time period or more spread out. My link, as well as what I can read of the paywalled link, seem to indicate that it is more spread out (2 vignettes mention March and April of 2020, while the top paragraph of the full text mentions murders continuing until December).
4: Hm, I think Spencer's grants round is still open until July 22nd? https://programs.clearerthinking.org/FTX_regranting_2022_application.html
Black people make up about 8 percent of rural population, compared to 13 percent of the urban population.
https://ruralhome.org/wp-content/uploads/storage/research_notes/rrn-race-and-ethnicity-web.pdf
According to WSJ, the spike in rural areas has been 80% of the spike in urban areas. Percentage wise, there are 62% as many blacks in rural as urban areas. If you see this effect as “police afraid to interfere with black people committing crime,” it’s not surprising you’d see a spike in rural areas too.
Having nearly finished my Masters, I'm wanting to plan out my PhD, and AI Alignment is an area (among others) that I'm thinking about transitioning into. I'd like to talk to someone doing Real Research in the area (who might potentially be a PhD supervisor). I don't have a lot of contacts at top tier universities yet, so I thought I'd ask here first before trying connections-of-connections.
Scott, any chance you could write an article about therapeutic uses of hypnosis?
I am having difficulty conceiving of a pro-choice argument from a utilitarian standpoint. Instead of doing something like QALY, I'll just use Average American Life Year (AALY). Each American has about 79 AALYs. We can imagine that the life of a would-be aborted human is less in terms of well being, but how much less? It's hard to imagine that unwanted babies lives are hardly worth living in most cases. Most people are glad to be alive, and I'm sure it's the same for people who are adopted or live in orphanages.
What is a reasonable discount factor? Imagine something extreme like 50%. That's still 39.5 AALYs. You could argue that would-be humans are a societal burden, but how much disutility are they causing? Perhaps in some extreme cases with disabled fetuses, they are particularly burdensome, but it is difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden.
How much disutility is the mother receiving? It's hard to imagine more than decades worth of non-existence. If you think I'm wrong, then give me some rough estimates of how much the average aborted American life is worth and how much disutility the mother experiences.
We can add more to the side of pro-life if we factor in that aborted humans will have children of their own with their own utility. We can reject fetal personhood while still considering the moral worth of future people - longtermists should be sympathetic to this.
Gun sales increased in both rural and urban areas, increasing homicide
Re: DSL, every time I stop by I'm surprised by how conservative it is. Does anyone know why? Is it a founder effect thing, or that actually everyone is super conservative and it mostly doesn't come out in these threads, or what? In the days that the SSC subreddit hosted the culture war thread its posters were fairly conservative leaning on average, but not to this extent, in my recollection; I haven't stopped by The Motte to see how it's doing these days.
(Just to pick an example at random, the thread for the Dobbs SCOTUS decision: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6939.msg269063.html )
Hi all. Reposting from last week's thread as I was a little later to that one than I am to this one.
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/
Already quite a few requests in there from ACX folk to match with! We'll begin 'concierge matching' some of our initial matching users in the coming weeks.
The weird thing about the homicide spike in the US is that it seems to be an effect of a general national "mood" of unrest. There was a feeling of distrust and craziness in the air. I realize this isn't at all scientific or even measurable, but I think this is the reason the Covid explanation seems so intuitive to many people. They felt the bad energy and attributed it to Covid.
Now we see this spike didn't happen in other countries and it seems likely that the worst effects of the national bad mood/distrust were due to BLM and protests, more than covid. This makes sense because we have citizens wary of police intervention and police nervous about intervening in the first place. I wouldn't expect this abstract national phenomenon to be limited to big urban areas where the protests took place. Everyone was watching the same news and having the same conversations online. The internet truly unites Americans across regions. So I'm not at all surprised that the spike happened everywhere. The question is: did it indeed happen everywhere or is there just a more random sample of where more murders took place?
What's The Deal With...hard seltzer? I am trying to understand the success of stuff like White Claw and just not grokking it. So many of those "flavoured bubbly malt beverages" just taste like...sadsack. It's definitely cheap, but there are even more efficient ways to get drunk; also feels like trading off taste and experience purely for dollar value is missing half the point of drinking. Lots of low-ABV% drinks that aren't quite that bottom-barrel, if it's a moderation thing. They also seem to buck the whole, yknow..."natural", "no artificial ingredients" trend that I thought was A Big Deal these days.
My first ever drink was Mike's Hard Lemonade at <several years past legal drinking age>...I grew up painfully aware of the perils of alcoholism, resolved to be sober forever myself, and then whoops fell off that wagon real fast after experiencing cheap crap beer. So like, I get that - no one starts off sipping Japanese whiskey, it's a phase thing. I am not confused when I see college kids loading up their shopping carts with White Claw. But it does confuse me when anyone not in that demographic/shopping for that demographic does. "Surely you know better?" I wanna ask...Even Coors or Heineken or $3 wines can plausibly be bought for cooking purposes rather than drinking. (Beer chili!)
Thread 233 is full of thanks :p .. Thank you
This is almost certainly a stupid/selective-blindness question, but where's the ACX register of bans? I could have sworn there was a public ban register, but I can't find it now. Was it simply removed, and people are now just disappeared wordlessly? Or was it never brought over from SSC and this is a mnemonic interference pattern?
It is a common observation that ideas tend to come when you are not thinking about them, but generally you need to prime your mind first by consciously working on the problem to solve.
Hypothesis 1: your subconscious mind is doing the heavy lifting and, when your conscious mind is relaxed, raises the solution to the level of consciousness.
Hypothesis 2: Like any other part of your body, you can use exercise, nutrition or pharmaceuticals to alter the performance of your subconscious.
So.... Does anyone have any experience on attempting to improve their subconscious idea generation? Either improving the quality or frequency of ideas, or reducing the length of time they take to appear after a conscious attack on a problem? If so, what steps did you take and were they effective?
Hi, a question about COVID vaccine.
My kid will turn five in early October, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to give him shots now (the ones for under 5) or wait and give him 5+ ones?
I think the 5+ ones have higher doses and so might be more affective, bit not sure about that.
As far as we can tell, he hasn't gotten COVID so far.
Does anyone else feel like the internet is better than ever in terms of good content? Yeah, social media sites are cesspools. But I find there’s still plenty of great content; I just have to do the work of finding it.
My opinion on homicide rates is that the primary factor determining them is mental illness and substance use/abuse. This is because murder is generally irrational, so I don't expect murderers to respond mechanistically to incentives.
It's no secret that the lockdown period has strained the mental health of most people, especially people who are more dependent on extended family and neighborhood socializing.
On the other hand, many "nerds"—introverts, people with higher education, those of us more interested in things and thoughts than social dynamics—have actually benefited from social distancing.
Could Ukraine plausibly hire mercenaries to help fight the war against Russia? (With Western financial backing, obviously). I think former American or European soldiers would probably be a bridge too far, but to my understanding many of the mercenaries these days are demobilized infantry from high-conflict countries- Colombia and other places in South America, parts of Africa, etc.
I doubt mercenaries would engage in high-casualty conflict on the front lines (what’s the point of a paycheck if you’re dead?), but could they plausibly help guard the rear, help with logistics, drive trucks, transport the wounded, patrol areas further from the hot zones, etc.- freeing up more native Ukrainian infantry? Former soldiers from say Colombia would come with combat experience- a quick boot camp to get them used to the Ukrainian system, maybe, and then deployment to guarding the western provinces. Could this possibly work at all?
Could someone explain to me how electric lines of force are related to the generation of light? I read a passage about this in an old encyclopedia, but don't understand it. This Youtube video seems to do a good job explaining what electric lines of force are.
https://youtu.be/mtkzGd1p0Gw
Will the full review ranking be posted? This may influence what I'll do with my review.
I'm looking for a certain type of [offline] community/group/club, and so far my search (in NYC) has not been too successful. The attributes that matter to me:
1. Cross-disciplinary membership and discussion topics; Not skewed towards one particular industry or area (e.g. IT or entrepreneurship)
2. Deeper than surface level (what you can read in the mass media) discussions. Ideally for each topic discussed there would be an expert/professional in the room. A good indication of success here is the ability of the group to engage in "deep tech" discussions.
3. Stable core of participants and at least somewhat regular events (bi-weekly would be ideal frequency).
(4. Not an ethnic or expat-only group)
Some examples and non-examples:
- A specific topic- or interest-based community would violate (1). Also, in my experience, if the event is discoverable publicly (e.g. on Meetup), it gets overrun by hustlers.
- An activity group (sports, wine tasting, tabletop games) would violate (2) - there are rarely any deep discussions not centered on the activity currently performed
- LessWrong and satellites get very close, but they tend to be disproportionately attended by the IT crowd.
- University alumni clubs are an example of a community that satisfies all criteria. Unfortunately, they are not accessible to the outsiders
I would appreciate any leads! At this point in my search I'm fairly certain that the right way is to build such a community from scratch, but learning about the existing groups has been an amazing source of inspiration and best practices.
I'm a programmer that's gotten into management in the last year, and I am finding it difficult. Does anyone have any resources that would be helpful?
I think the "BLM protests" explanation for the homicide spike is part of the reason, but only part of the reason. I think there are a few factors that weren't explained in that post.
1) The original post assumes that the BLM protests/riots were the only thing going on at that time. However, that was also the end of the covid lockdowns, and generally seemed to be the signal we were "done" with the lockdown part of covid. For some reason, covid seemed to drive people crazy and made them more prone to sudden overwhelming rage. Call it "covid psychosis." (Not sure if this was only in the US or around the world; it seems to be more in the US). Anecdotally, many of the murders seem to be caused by sheer rage or revenge, not gang-related crimes or for any rational reason.
This would also explain the rural murder spike, since rural communities would most likely not change due to anger over police violence, but would be susceptible to post-lockdown rage.
2) Obviously there are many confounding variables in understanding crime rates (see "Freakonomics" for more on that). One clue that a variable might be more correlational than causal is if the trend starts too early. In this case, the murder spike starts right at the BLM protests; in fact, since the stats aren't exact, it might have even started before the protests. That suggests there might be another factor (for example, covid psychosis) causing the spike.
3) Police certainly pulled back in 2020, but I have not seen much written about the original reason they stopped enforcing laws that year--fear of covid. From what I remember around that time, police basically stopped doing anything around March 2020, so whatever missing enforcement there was started before the BLM protests.
The Impact Markets discussion reminds me that I'm curious about the effectiveness of prospective prizes. It seems to me that offering a prospective prize (prizes for past accomplishment is a whole nother thing) is a way of shuffling the costs off to the people who are competing for the prize, and also, that it might be hard to come up with a truly useful target., though it's probably easily for math than for anything else.
Has there been work done on the value of prizes to lead to further accomplishment? Have robot fighting competitions led to anything more than entertainment?
Does anyone else wonder why people treat IQ scores like penis size? Every person on here I've seen refer to their own intelligence has never put themselves below the 90th percentile for IQ, which means either most of this community is in the top 10% for IQ, most people are lying about their IQ scores, or that most people do not have an accurate gauge of their own IQ and inflate it ("smarter than average" effect).
Whilst I have no doubt there are very smart people in this community, it seems highly improbable to me that everyone who's happened to comment is in the top 10% for IQ. So the question is, why are many people in this community so insecure about their smarts?
> I’ve been reading a lot recently on the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today
Web 2.0 *is* the 'corporate web of today'.
As far as I can tell, the entire narrative of Web 2.0 is based on pretending that forums and BBSs didn't exist.
(And true BBSs actually predate the web altogether and should maybe be called Web 0.0 or Web -1.0 or something)
I imagine this is niche appeal, but if you ever wanted a case-study in "Categories are Made for Man, not Man for the Categories": r/anime trying to determine what counts as a "harem anime". https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/w1xe0o/what_even_counts_as_a_harem_i_asked_ranime_about/ (There was a previous one by the same poster on "isekai anime")
Unsurprisingly, basically there's a lot of "man for the categories" in the comments where people insist that there's an objective, cut-and-dry way to define genre boundaries while the actual results show that that's largely not the case.
I'll second that "mood" is a good explanation.
We've got the far right talking about a Jewish conspiracy to "replace" the "white race" with brown people, the median right-winger flying a "Fuck Biden and Fuck You for Voting for Him" flag on his pickup truck, the median young left-winger talking about how we're all going to die of climate change due to climate activists' laughably overstated histrionics*, and the far left talking about guillotining or firing squad-ing all rich people and landlords.
Certainly not a country singing kumbaya.
* if you live on the Ganges in Dhaka, sure, your odds of dying from climate catastrophes are high enough to worry. But no, upper-middle class child living in the suburbs of a major American city, you are not going to perish because the global mean temperature rises another 2 deg C. We should absolutely try to mitigate climate change because millions of people dying is bad, but the overreaction only breeds complacency.
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/
https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/286780806/
I didn't previously have good reasons for choosing one brand of alcohol over another, but now I do: https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/b612-foundation-announces-2-3-million-in-leadership-gifts-806880675.html
Drink Tito's Vodka, the only X-risk-prevention-aligned product on your bartenders shelf.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
https://withdata.io/election/media/
Meanwhile, here is a rather good interview with Chomsky (as well as a load of other discussions) about Large Language Models and what they can tell us about intelligence.
https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q
TLDW: Zero. They are good engineering projects, and have some useful properties, but they tell us nothing about the science of intelligence.
Whatever happened to climate change skepticism?
A decade ago it was an active debate, nowadays I rarely hear about it any more. I don't think there has been enough additional data collected in the last ten years to convince skeptics they were wrong; if anything the evidence seems to be accumulating on the "no big deal" side as various predictions of doom have failed to bear out.
Has anyone hear read the "48 Laws of Power"? Reading it has made me realize that I was missing a lot of insight into how people really are, that may be obvious to most other folks.
What fraction of people who describe themselves as "YIMBY" actually own back yards?
I recently had some thoughts about a possible connection between cognitive dissonance and autism. I'm posting here in the hope that someone more knowledgeable on the subject will give it a quick read and tell me "That's not how it works" or "You might actually be on the right track." I'm a layperson (as my notes to self clearly show) and can't really justify spending time studying psychology to find out if my arguments are fundamentally flawed.
It's less than 1000 words: https://gist.github.com/dianefyte/52bafe26020183ff996efc56c06729b2
On a recent post, there was some discussion about how present-day Socialist parties in Europe have historically socialist roots but in countries such as France where those parties have been popular the ideology has been Socially Democratic for a long time now. The name Socialist persists but it's just a brand name at this point, much like the NBA team The Lakers is a brand name that no longer has anything to do with The Land of 1000 Lakes.
My question here is about Germany's Christian-Democrats (CDU). I can't tell from reading Wikipedia to what extent they still consider themselves to be a Christian party. I've long assumed that, like the Socialist Party in France, it's just a brand name that nobody wants to change, but maybe my assumptions are wrong.
So, for those who know: Is the CDU still considered to be a Christian party?
Substack has started adding paragraphs to their RSS feeds in the format of "XYZ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber." The paragraphs aren't differentiated by being block quotes or italics or anything, so I end up breaking my reading flow as I fail to notice them until I'm already halfway across. I find it more than a bit annoying because I'm already a paid subscriber (not that SS can tell from the RSS feed).
Has anyone else seen this? If so, have you found any workarounds?
I was sick for a good bit of yesterday-- my symptoms were minor-- a little vomiting and some painful gas which went on for a while.
What was amazing was how knocked out I was-- I didn't have a lot of attention available and less initiative.
Now I'm wondering how much of people's capacity is lost as a result of low-grade digestive problems, not to mention worse problems.
I'm confused by this line from point (3) of this post:
> the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today,
It's my understanding that the corporatization of the web is part of Web 2.0. Interactive sites used to be niche / community driven, and corporate-owned sites were read-only. Then Web 2.0 came, and large corporations began making mass-market websites that collected and published user-created content.
I also can't find any reference to BBS that isn't a recent blockchain / Web 3.0 thing.
Can anyone explain what I'm missing?
How hard is it to assassinate high-ranking politicians? (a great question to post in a public discussion!)
I was thinking about the war in Ukraine and how a death of this or that individual could affect its outcome. Obviously, the Russians tried to kill Zelensky at the beginning of the invasion and failed. After a few more attempts, they gave up. Would say CIA do "better" or is it really that difficult?
I also noticed that at the beginning of the war, Zelensky regularly posted videos from his office (which you can probably find even on google maps) and while the "precision strikes" Russia boasts about are probably far from that precise, I guess that if you fired 10 kalibr rockets aimed at Zelensky's office at the time he is likely going to be recording those videos, there is a good chance one of them hits. So either the rockets are even less precise than I thought or the Russians decided at some point that killing Zelensky was no longer going to bring them any major advantage in the conflict (in fact, it could galvanize both the Western support and Ukraine resistance even further). Do you agree with that?
This also lead me to think about whether killing Putin would help. I guess that his assassination would be much harder to pull off and the risk in case of a failure and discovery (realistically, it would probably have be an attempt by the US or with a lot of US operational support) could spell a disaster for international politics (it would probably be even more dangerous than sending NATO navies to clear out the Black Sea of Russian presence...). So I guess those are good reasons not to attempt the assassination at all. But if you could guarantee success and a degree of deniability (which might be impossible), would it help? I guess it would paralyze the Russian state for a while which would help in the short therm, but it could lead to even more aggression and perhaps even an (open) mobilization in Russia. I guess that you'd have to kill the entire Russian high command which is probably impossible.
Then I thought about Lukashenko. He is extremely unpopular in Belarus and if he died, Belarus would have a revolution after which they would likely switch sides and openly support Ukraine in the conflict. Russia would be too busy to intervene and if the attempt did not succeed, the fallout would be much more limited. The army of Belarus is insignificant and unlikely to actually want to fight Ukrainians except for a few regime loyalists. At the same time, they keep a part of the Ukrainian military in check and they provide their territory and infrastructure to the Russians. They also have a sizeable stock of soviet-era artillery and tanks and if they flipped sides, gave/leased half of their military equipment to Ukraine and denied Russians in their territory this would be a significant blow to Putin (also the Russian economy would take a hit)...so it actually seems like quite a good idea to kill him (perhaps even through a local agent given how much people there actually hate Lukashenko) and I wonder if it could take place.
Does Scott, or anyone else with better statistics knowledge than I, have any thoughts on this article:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2200300119
The "nudge" hypothesis for behavior modification has gotten a lot of attention for a long time. It would be interesting, but not shocking, if the statistics didn't back it up.
Regarding point 3, I've been reading and watching a lot on Web 0.1 and it's collection of decentralized dialup BBS's and their effects shaping modern social media. There is a book called The Modem World that discusses this specific topic or 300 hours of raw interviews that were recording 20 years ago detailing just about every aspect imaginable on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary)
I just found this clip of a video game about the Battle of Midway.
https://youtu.be/m02izKBoL1g
It looks brilliant, but one thing that undercuts the realism is the fact that you shoot down several Japanese planes in the space of a few minutes. Even in a major air-to-air engagement like this, most fighter pilots would score no kills, the minority that did would only get one kill, and a pilot who scored two kills would have reason to brag among other pilots for the rest of his life.
This makes me wonder: I know there are fighter plane games that closely reproduce real-world physics and the performance characteristics of the real planes, so when mass air battles are held in those games, meant to simulate actual engagements like the Battle of Midway or one day during the Battle of Britain, do the loss/kill ratios ever approach what they actually were in real life? Or are the results always unrealistic, as they are in the clip?
A question on CRISPR-Cas9:
In the bacteria/archaea that use CRISPR-Cas-9, when making an mRNA transcript of a stored piece of viral DNA, how is it determined which DNA strand to make an RNA transcript from?
I know that in standard mRNA transcription, there are often specific sequences on a strand that indicate where transcription should start. But the sequences surrounding the stored viral DNA are palindromic, so it seems like if there is such an indicator/promoter sequence, it should be on both strands.
Does it not matter which strand you copy, since in the end you are comparing it to incoming viral DNA using the Cas-9 protein, and which strand you copy doesn’t affect whether you recognize the incoming viral DNA?
New "umbrella" review out re: the relationship between depression and serotonin: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 (open access).
I am not very familiar with methods for measuring serotonin in people, so I'm uncertain what to make of the results. My main takeaway as an outsider is that this doesn't shift my beliefs very much, but does highlight ongoing issues in the field. Does anyone here have a more informed opinion on this or other aspects of the review?
First came across this on r/nootropics (removed, initially on r/science https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w3jalq/the_main_areas_of_serotonin_research_provide_no/)
Looked up hedonium shockwave after you mentioned it in an earlier post. Entire galaxy having an orgasm. Pretty hard not to choose that! Question is, what sound would the galaxy make.
Why isn't popcorn ever a side dish with a meal? Seems that it would be about the nutritional equivalent of fries or chips. Is it a space or timing issue in the kitchen? Would nobody want it?
I was amazed at how many people on here rushed to the defense of BLM on the post about the Ferguson effect, when time and time again it is shown that BLM is a black nationalist movement that does not care about principled objection to police brutality and instead just react in a tribalistic way against any instance of their ingroup being hurt by the outgroup.
Case in point, the shooting of Andrew Sunberg by police following a six-hour standoff after Sunberg shot a neighbor he had been stalking has lead to angry BLM protests. And of course, along with that, the MSM disinformation machine has gone into overdrive looking for excuses to justify this black rage, portraying Sunberg as a veritable angel who did nothing wrong. And of course, the narrative of choice *every single time* there has been a high profile instance of black violence is that the offender was "mentally ill"/having a "mental health crisis". Maybe its true sometimes, maybe its not. But 1) This literally NEVER applies to white men/offenders deemed BAD by the media and 2) If police can't shoot somebody LITERALLY TRYING TO MURDER OTHER PEOPLE, mental health crisis or not, it's open and shut case that BLM isn't a movement against police brutality.