While I do broadly agree, as an atheist myself, I also am pretty hesitant about this line of reasoning. What’s the difference here between truth from spiritual experience and from mathematics? Many mathematics papers claim to describe fundamental truths about reality. But some are written by cranks proving the irrationals are denumerable or whatever. To a lay person, those are indistinguishable from normal math papers except that the math establishment doesn’t endorse them. The establishment has a complicated procedure that it says can determine exactly which papers are the good ones, though if you look into it they mostly don’t really use that procedure and just apply more general heuristics and admit that there are often errors (but say they’re rarely substantial). Religions also might have rules and procedures that tell you when a spiritual experience does or does not reveal the truth, and they might even have to fudge the rules a bit so that only traditional experiences stay intact. But so does math! What’s the distinction? I think there is one, but it’s kind of nontrivial.
I think there are a few serious mistakes in this post – for one, Protestantism didn't do a disproportionate share of the grenade lobbing: early Christianity, including the apostles themselves, was highly engaged in refuting and denying all other gods and faiths, and the Catholic Church's stance on supernatural events has always essentially been "they don't exist, you stupid cow" with very minor exceptions for the intercession of saints etc. I don't think they even officially acknowledge any of the visions of the various visionary monks and nuns who started orders and so on as being divinely inspired.
With that in mind another more serious issue is that your whole arrangement is wrong, since it leaves out possible interpretation 3) All these experiences are illusory because the weird spastic twitching of your subconscious mind when inebriated by psychedelics or afflicted with migraines have absolutely nothing to do with God or religion, and do not represent authentic insight.
This interpretation of ecstatic phenomena is, I won't go so far as to say the official one, but *much closer* than either of your options to that of the major sects of Christianity, as far as I know.
What’s the difference between that option and option 1? Also, is it true that most Christians don’t believe that sometimes people can receive direct evidence of the existence of God through a spiritual experience? I just found a Pew poll that says 35% of all US Christians say that God speaks directly to them. Presumably the number for believing that some other people are spoken to is noticeably higher, and even higher if you include nonverbal divine experiences. Either way, the original question was whether this argument is a dead end, not whether it is ubiquitous.
(Interestingly, one percent of atheists also say they’ve been spoken to by God, so there’s the lizard man constant again.)
I'll reply to both of you here: the critical difference is the part of Machine Interface's option #1 which says "there are no gods at all". My point is that you *don't actually need to disavow any gods or religions to reject ecstatic insight as false*. This notion of psychedelic/hallucinatory/etc. experiences being somehow doorways to a deeper truth, more accurate view of reality or what have you is *specifically* a hippie/New Age idea. I suppose it's typical of such a Bay Aryan-inflected community to confuse 1960s San Fransisco with the entire history of the world, but they are, nevertheless, not isomorphic. Hippieism is a set of crank beliefs which briefly replaced Christianity among one actually quite small group of people who found the "having any rules or limitations at all" aspect of traditional religion stifling, it doesn't have any particular claim to being the null hypothesis or the starting point of philosophical investigation.
And TGB, there are *lots* of things that lay Christians believe that their clergy and actual principles both absolutely disavow. Tons of South American Christians venerate various straight up pagan shit, either with a sloppy coat of saint paint or just outright and unashamedly. The clergy do not endorse this one bit. Similarly (very similarly, actually) many Western Catholic women still see tarot readers or mediums. *Christianity* as a dogma, organization, what-have-you still considers these people hucksters and has done for literal millennia.
In other words, *most Christians* may well believe in spiritual experiences giving them direct evidence of God, nevertheless mainstream *Christianity* is highly skeptical of these claims at minimum.
It sounds like you agree with the original argument that spiritual experiences are an invalid justification for a religion and therefore a theological dead end, right? Whether there are gods or not is rather tangential to the discussion of whether this one particular argument shows that they exist.
I’m not sure why you think this is about hippies and drugs. It’s more about speaking in tongues and having prayers answered.
I’m far from an expert on Christianity, but I think you’re simply mistaken that no major Christian establishments think God communicates literally with ordinary people today. Pentecostals, for example, by my superficial understanding.
There's an extremely strong preference among the left/liberals/progs/whatever your preferred term is for mental blank-slatism, in spite of it being obviously untrue and increasingly untrue as the evidence mounts. This is strongly related to liberals/etc. having massive problems with accepting the heredity of intelligence in spite of accepting the heredity of strength, looks and even intangibles like "musical talent". I think it's basically because many of the policy preferences of liberals/etc. such as equality of outcome are tripped up pretty badly by mental traits being hereditary (and perhaps this will be seen as snide, but it also seems obvious to me that liberalism being heavily overrepresented among academics, many if not most quietly believe that being stupid makes you a lesser human being, therefore they don't want to admit the possibility of stupid being genetic). Also, in the case of sex specifically, any mental difference between the sexes is seen to massively disrupt the core claims of feminism (judge for yourself whether rightly or wrongly).
"many if not most quietly believe that being stupid makes you a lesser human being, therefore they don't want to admit the possibility of stupid being genetic"
I think this is it distilled.
I like thinking I'm smart; it makes me feel good about myself, and is a point where (I think) I'm superior to the average person. When I was an atheist who didn't believe in a God who created us all and commanded us to love each other as "made in his image"; and who rejected leftist dogma; it was very quick and easy to go from "I'm smarter than this person" to "I'm legitimately a better human being and it would be perfectly rational for me to advance my interests at the expense of lesser people, so long as it doesn't backfire."
These people want to hold onto one of the end products of religion "Love everyone equally" but reaaaaally don't want it to be a religious principle, so end up twisting themselves into ridiculous knots to get the outcome they wanted. (One can argue that religions themselves are equally ridiculous knots to get to their outcomes.)
Speaking about blank-slatism, the popular idea that universal love is the product of religion is completely backwards. If anything, religion parasitises on this part of human utility function getting credits by association.
Of course if you happened to experience universal love only in religious context, typical mind fallacy will make you assume that people who do it without religion are twisting themselves. As a person who felt universal love in both contexts, I have to say that without the intermediaries of religion it's actually a much more pure experience.
Assuming for the moment that your assertion that this predates religion is true; and that the fact that I certainly do not experience it without religion; that would lend itself more to an explanation of "Religion took a good experience X% of the population felt and made it available to x+y% of population." Which hardly sounds parasitic.
Religion is parasitic (bad), thus anything it does is parasitic (bad) even if we would describe it as good if a non-religious body did the exact same thing.
The problem is that an important reason why you didn't experience this feeling without religion is due to this feeling being commonly framed in our memetic space as a religious one in the first place. That's what I mean by religions being parasitic. We now have a huge cluster of completely valid ideas so tightly assosiated with religious bathwater that it takes actual cognitive effort to access them in secular context.
Ape, I was a full out atheist. Believe me, I thought about this issue a lot. And everytime I kept coming back to the conclusion that "A lot of these people are not only really bloody inferior, and do not deserve *any* of my time or help, but I would really honestly prefer if they died and no one wasted resources on them."
Why should we help the 50 year old drug addicted pedophile who runs around exposing himself, making people uncomfortable, and stealing stuff?
Because it's Good. Because it's awesome. Because it's the right thing to do. Because it would make you and everybody else happier and more fulfilled. Because you actually care about other people well-being and generalising this care to everybody feels much better than limiting it.
One can always retreat to is–ought problem and claim that nothing make them *should* anything. But religion wouldn't help here in anyway.
Three variations on the same circular argument followed by two repetitions of an unsupported assertion. At least Christians who call for universal love can fall back on the argument that it's the only way to avoid getting tortured by their all-powerful dictator. All their atheist imitators have are circular arguments and wishful thinking.
Why does acceptance of innate differences inherently undermine leftist arguments for equality of outcome?
Freddie De Boer, a regular commenter here, wrote a book arguing precisely the opposite: that it *legitimizes* massive redistribution to the less innately-gifted, by demolishing meritocratic arguments about the successful having earned their wealth through hard work and good choices.
It doesn't; if you have another strong basis for arguing for equality of outcome. "God told us all to love one another" works if you can accept religion.
Something something, inherent dignity & equality of human beings. (weak man) APPARENTLY works for a lot of lefties. But it just... contradicts observed facts on any objective level, so, to me, and to many, it seems like a religious principle without a religion.
It doesn't *inherently*, which is why I tried to be careful with hedging: "tripped up" rather than obliterated; "seen to disrupt"; "judge for yourself". That said, we can see that in practice, most self-identified liberals do not take these positions, and that Freddie is atypical – from what imperfect grasp of his beliefs I have, I gather he's a frank socialist and believes, as you say, in massive redistribution. As an observable fact, however, we don't see a lot of lefties/liberals saying e.g. "blacks are helplessly retarded as a group, therefore we're justified in giving them a large amount of free resources so that their debased mental condition doesn't affect their social position". This is a type of advocacy which would be seen as incredibly patronizing at the very best and more probably get the person all but stoned by an enraged mob.
Instead, it seems to me that most liberals take some form of the position that since everyone has the exact same starting capacities, hard work and application = merit, and since the ability to apply yourself is also mental and thus evenly distributed, we should see equality of outcome at least between broad groups; if this is not happening, it must therefore necessarily be due to some form of oppression or persecution deliberately fucking over the disadvantaged groups, thus if we can eradicate the oppression we will, *a priori*, achieve group-level parity of outcome *without* having to resort to redistribution. If one does not believe some version of this, those claims of e.g. white supremacy which point to differences in outcome as proof are completely nonsensical.
My belief is that this contorted logic is at least partially the product of an awareness on the left that Americans hate redistribution worse than they hate Nazis, so if they want to have a politically viable ideology to the left of Reagan they need some other principles that don't imply redistribution as a solution; then they kind of... try to quietly tack on some redistribution when nobody's looking.
EDIT: And Ian is correct about the justification problem. I skipped over that because he'd already covered it, but I endorse what he wrote.
I think your claim that this doesn't happen with non-mental diseases is wrong. Just recently while looking for info on heart diseases, I stumbled on a claim that they are underdiagnosed in women due to less explicit symptoms. There is also a general idea that women are often underdiagnosed due to specifically male symptoms being assumed to be "norm", men overrepresented in clinical trials and so on.
The whole narrative may have something to do with previous failures of the opposite approach. The fiasko with autism, for instance, when autistic women were just ignored because everybody assumed that it's a male thing. If anything, I think current failure mode is less bad.
cognitive creationism (I think) is the tendency for people to think that evolution only created sex differences from the neck down. It seems like if this is the perspective one takes, you might imagine disorders being evenly distributed across sexes.
By genetic selection, do you mean artificial methods coming down the tube, or just normal natural selection of who gets to successfully mate?
Either way, I'm not seeing either of those effects softening the demographic collapse.
If it's artificial Gataca style stuff that gives us ubermensch, only a small portion of society is going to go for it, upper-classers and upper middle classers.
If it's just natural selection, well, the people I meet with the most kids always tend to be either A. religious lower middle class (a declining portion of the population today.) or B. So lower class that they're already dependent on charity and taxpayer handouts. (This group does seem to be growing.)
Before reading your article; this sounds like the theory that religious conservatives will outbreed secular liberals; but in practice it seems like defections from that lifestyle counter out the higher reproduction rate.
Even if the genetic factor is very strong, I would assume that it's over represented in the religious conservative types, and we should already be seeing evidence of this.
He's right on the general "We're not going to go extinct" at some point, the population decline will stop, partially because we're down to just folks like this.
How soon that stop comes... well... To Be Determined, at least in part by the trajectory of the culture war.
>but in practice it seems like defections from that lifestyle counter out the higher reproduction rate.
How are you measuring the practical defection rate? Because if it's "number of ex-religious-conservatives in my mostly-secular bubble", or anything like that, there's an obvious selection bias at work.
The Amish population is growing at ~3%/year. The Mormon population is growing at ~1%/year. The Israeli population, including secular Jews, is growing at ~2%/year. At the margins, obviously, there is a population that just barely qualifies as "religious conservative types", that by definition will reproduce at rates similar to secular liberal types and see substantial crossover with same. But if you go far enough into religious conservatism, you see fertile, expanding populations in spite of defection.
That's where you'll find the meek who shall inherit the Earth. OK, the Israelis aren't all that meek, but no surprise there.
What deeply frustrates me is that basically everyone who talks about this sees it as a *good* thing--they're happy about how their own side is going to outbreed their culture-war enemies. That's certainly the tone taken by the article linked above, with its bizarrely blithe reassurance that the nasty, Taliban-style thing we think of when we hear "patriarchy" isn't actually *true* patriarchy.
But while I dislike much of contemporary Western wokeness and am sympathetic to criticisms of our excessive atomistic individualism, by the standards of all other human cultures I'm still a flaming liberal egalitarian individualist.
I fundamentally think individual freedom--including, most significantly for the issue of fertility rates, the freedom of women to do things with their lives beyond constant pregnancy and childcare--is an *extremely good* thing.
The fact that societies in which half the human race is treated as little more than breeding stock (and I want to make clear that I *don't* think mainstream contemporary Western social conservatism falls into this category--but they're not the ones with downright explosive birthrates like those of the Amish, Quiverfull types, Hasidim, or Wahhabis) or ) really do seem destined to inherit the earth is an incredibly disturbing social trend that I wish more people thought about how to prevent.
It seems like a Molochian phenomenon: cultures that make the people in them worse off seem destined to outcompete other cultures that care more about individual happiness than about maximizing fertility.
The people in the Amish, Mormon, and Israeli cultures don't seem "worse off" by most standards. Note that they all have the opportunity to defect, even the women, and are still growing.
Probably the fact that Fetterman has policies that are popular among the blue base while his attack ads are relentlessly hammering the anvil of "Dr. Oz is a carpetbagger from NJ who wears 4-5 figure custom suits, owns a yacht, has three very expensive watches he'll wear at the same time to flex on people, and then tries to LARP as Joe Average from PA." It turns out "this guy's a phony, he's richer than you, he doesn't care about you, he'll wipe your problems off of his shoes before he gets in his limo to go party with all his rich friends" is a playbook that can cut both ways.
I never understood why use of a comb as an improvised fork got negative attention. (I'm assuming someone sanitized the comb first.) If she had been a soldier or a lumberjack eating in a remote area, it would be celebrated as ingenuity, wouldn't it?
From Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar:
> This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers travelling back and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.
That seems surprising to me. Are people saying this because of moved she has made? It’s much more plausible that some of the younger 2020 candidates who were newer on the national scene then will run again.
Is this really a popular take right now? He’s got memes and momentum, sure, but he does need to actually win the seat he’s running for. Most commentators worth their salt seem pretty hesitant to suggest anyone except Harris as a favorite (despite acknowledging she is a weak candidate who could easily be beat).
My dark horse pick, FWIW: Sherrod Brown. Ohio is gone for the Dems in 2024, he might as well aim for the big one.
Brown would be good. I don't think anyone is seriously betting on Fetterman but it's just more fun to say than *deep sigh of despair* 'probably Kamala'
Filter bubbles must be active, because I've never heard of him. One glance at his picture on wikipedia and I feel one hundred percent confident that he will never be President of the United States, though he does look qualified to host some kind of motorcycle repair reality show on the History Channel.
The Republican nomination belongs to whoever can correctly hit the right note of being Trumpy enough without being too Trumpy. Mike Pence is the only other candidate I can think of who might be able to split the difference correctly.
Kamala or (unless someone can find a way to prop up Biden and make him look lifelike) for the Dems; anything else would be a repudiation of the current administration and I can't see any major Democrat having the guts to do that. And that's before we even get into the whole race-and-sex thing.
Pence's problem is that the "trumpy" base _hate_ him for his post-election actions. I don't see a world in which he can win a primary with any other trumpy candidate.
I think that hating Mike Pence for agreeing to certify the election results is a pretty fringe position for anyone not currently wearing a buffalo's head as a hat.
You can think the validity of the election result is highly questionable while also acknowledging that Mike Pence had no other realistic option; the idea that he wouldn't was a crazy 4chan pipe dream.
Or to put it another way, anyone who hates Mike Pence for January 6 is in the "too Trumpy" category,
I mean, by that definition the republican base is in the too Trumpy category. The claim is no anti Trump candidate can win, which seems? true in an open field (possible Trump cant beat a particular single challenger, but has enough clout especially in state level local politics to take down any particularly annoying to him one)
Among the broader set of "people who identify as republican or usually vote for republicans", sure it's pretty fringe. But that's not the important section in a primary. Primaries magnify the voice of the fringe (for both parties, this is not a republican only issue). So yes, Pence would probably do about as well as a generic candidate among republican voters during a general. But I'm not sure he could make it there because the small minority that hates him is important enough during the primary to exclude him.
I could be wrong about this, but it doesn't even have to be that people care much about his specific actions. Just the fact that _Trump_ hates him and would denounce him and support someone else (assuming he wasn't running himself) would be enough.
It could be a 2012 primary again. Mitt Romney was perpetually in second in the polls, behind Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich or whoever. But they ended up splitting the vote and he won. It didn’t work in 2016 for Jeb! but it’s not out of the question that Pence could get lucky.
Yeah, pushing aside a black woman for some more charismatic white guy would probably be a hard thing for the Democrats to do, even with mostly friendly media trying not to comment on it too much.
This is a tough one. Basically I cant see Biden or Harris beating a non Trump republican. And I think if Trump announces early Biden will either announce he's running or not endorse Kamala (he doesn't like her) and it'll be a massive open field on both sides. I think Trump Biden is the most likely scenario (maybe 25% chance?), only thing I'm unusually confident in is Kamala won't be in the matchup. My guess would be Klobuchar? May be bias because I liked her (after Pete, but he's not electable and I get that)
At this point I'm not confident Biden or Harris could beat ANY Republican, Trump included. Biden's approval ratings are worse than Trump's, which is something I never thought I would see. Harris' approval ratings are worse.
It's amazing to see the Democratic field shaping up to be a rehash of 2020, even though most of the candidates were very old by historical standards even at that time.
I do agree that Trump/Biden is the most likely outcome at this point, which is frustrating and sad on many levels. I could see DeSantis as a viable Trump alternative, but I'm having trouble seeing any Democrat as viable other than Biden - and Biden only because he's the current president.
I thought Sanders, Warren, and Biden were the only old candidates in 2020. Buttigieg was notably younger than candidates in other years, and Harris, Yang, Klobuchar were about standard age.
Yes, there were younger candidates, but they never stood a chance. The top candidates were the three oldest, and the top candidates four years prior were also the oldest. It's remarkable that as many as eight years later, candidates who were known as notably old at the time are still even considered.
Klobuchar and DeSantis would at least seem like two appropriately-qualified people of a reasonable age for the job. I don't recall much of Klobuchar, other than that she kinda seemed sane and rational as these things go.
She didn't get enough coverage early on to know what she was like, and then the attack articles were all about how she was a terrible boss. I don't have much of an opinion on her, because I don't trust we got much of a complete view.
Both parties have some options that are reasonably qualified at reasonable ages. Given the last two cycles, I have very little confidence that we will see those candidates on the national ballet. I want to say that the Republicans have a better chance of getting a DeSantis than the Democrats have of getting a Klobuchar, but that's a gut feeling that has more to do with the events of 2016 than any update relevant to 2024.
There was a weird missing middle, with the top-placing candidates having been born in either the 1940s or 1980s. Klobuchar, Steyer, Patrick and Bennett were the only ones in the more conventional 50-65 age range, and I'd forgotten about 3/4 of them.
My theory at the time was that Hillary Clinton had spent the whole Obama administration carefully undermining any other prominent Democrat who could possibly be a threat to her in 2016, leaving a massive hole in the party. The only prominent Democrats left by 2016 were those who were either too old or too young to be considered a threat to Hillary's 2016 nomination.
Jenna and Barbara will be 43 by then, old enough for a JFK-style youthful push at the big chair. Is America ready for an all-female all-twin Bush/Bush ticket?
I went away and thought about this, and now I'm convinced that eight years of Jen/Barb followed by eight years of Barb/Jen (ideally in alternating terms) is what the country needs to get back on its feet. They could be the Republican FDR!
My mother and step-father are *convinced* it'll be Hillary. I keep telling them that whatever news they're watching/reading is flat out lying to them, but it doesn't do much good.
Maybe Booker? Assuming it's not Joe, the Dems need to move hard to shore up African-American support. Trump/Booker might be a fun race.
For the Reps, I've been stanning Tim Scott for a while, but I now think DeSantis has a non-Trump primary race sewed up. His anti-anti-covid stuff, the don't say gay bill and the Disney horse-whipping all play really well with the base.
Since you seem to root for the party that picks presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices using race as one of the most important considerations, I can see why you would assume the same about GOP. But you'd be wrong - Republicans don't elect their officials based on their race, they elect them because they like them. Unlike with Democrats, a Republican candidate's race is normally never even mentioned while he's running.
As to Tim Scott, South Carolina obviously likes him. Unless I'm missing something, everywhere else he doesn't have enough of a presence. He'd have to make a really good case for himself in order to win the primaries, and so far he doesn't seem to have started.
He's been in Iowa, he's been wooing donors. That kind of thing. Hard to raise your profile from the Senate the way DeSantis has done. Like I said, I think DeSantis is the non-Trump to beat at this point.
South Carolinians like him, and he has a national profile. As to whether or not they like him generally, that's what the primary process is for. My impression is that Republicans really like voting for people of color because they really hate being seen as the party of white people. I think they'd be excited to vote for a black president at least partly to tell everyone who calls them racist to go f themselves. But IANAR, so I may have that wrong.
You're not a Republican, so I think you have this wrong. If anyone on the Republican side still cares about being called racists and GOP a party of white people, they are a really tiny confused minority. You can only call people racists for no reason for so long until they all wish everyone who calls them racist to go f themselves.
I think you confuse Republicans liking candidates because they are likeable with liking them because of their race (which is really not a thing).
It's absolutely possible for a black or Latino Republican to get some mileage towards looking cool for the cool background story. Grew up in a slum, broke out, started a business, was an amazing success story because this country is the land of opportunity, now wants to do the right thing for other black kids? Cool, sounds like a good person for the job. Jamaican immigrant who grew up in extreme poverty, became a Marine, and is now living the American dream? Cool, we also believe in this country, and we really like to hear from other people who do (and also we really respect the Marines). Son of Cuban immigrants, anti-Communist, knows how things worked in Cuba, understands really well what he doesn't want to happen in this country? Cool, we need more people like that, would like to invite him to a bbq to talk more about this.
I don't know if you get the idea from these examples, but they are not about race. They are about people having a cool story and personality and sharing the Republican values.
So no, Republicans are not looking to please people calling them racist by showing to them something they would approve of - even if that was at all possible. It's worth noting that any time a black Republican gets elected somewhere, he or she gets subject to insults about just being a house slave following the master's orders (Tim Scott is one of the examples of this, see also e.g. https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/11/07/winsome-sears-and-the-rise-of-woke-racism/ for another of those cases). So, damned if you do, damned if you don't - even if Republicans cared, which they don't, why bother?
When I first read about this, perhaps in 2015, I checked if there were any contrary studies that found no association. I couldn't find any.
So approached it through expected utility: even a small chance of a huge negative outcome, dementia, outweighed the likely modest benefits of taking a certain anticholinergic as an antihistamine. Thus I stopped taking it. (I can't remember which one it was. These Greco-Aztec medicine names can be hard to keep straight.)
I'm interested to hear from others who know more about dementia, statistics, or both.
This motivated me to stop taking diphenhydramine for sleep. But, I actually don't think that was rational. It's likely only to affect people who take these drugs every day. So—if you are taking anticholinergics every day, I assume you have pretty serious medical problems, and I would be looking at whether a good alternative exists.
For what it is worth, the UK has deprecated use of medicines containing diphenhydramine. Occasional use in younger people might not be the problem but the misuse potential in elderly is just too high. There are better antihistamines for allergies and better medicines for sleep anyway.
What alternative can you recommend for sleep? I found anti-histamines to be a good choice so far as they don't have a strong hang-over effect, dont build tolerance too much and don't have a lot of side effects.
It definitely does -- the concept originated AFAIR in the context of different flu strains, based on the observation that your immune response to future exposure to the *first* strain that you caught (in your life) is significantly more effective than to different but similar versions.
This led to the idea of a "pan-flu" vaccine that you can take *before you ever get the flu*, which would theoretically be much better than the current seasonal strain based approach. This has not yet borne fruit, and is probably harder than it sounds.
The beef specific to the mRNA covid vaccines is that since they are tightly focussed on a specific subunit of the virus, a mutation in that area could not only render the vaccine ineffective against the new strain, but also hinder one's immune system from developing antibodies (and thus future immunity) to the mutated version.
Omicron has pretty much proven the first part of that to be true; however so far it seems like people are *probably* developing reasonable long-term immunity post-infection, even if they were previously vaccinated. (It's slightly early to say at this point, as to know for sure one would need to compare outcomes between vaxxed/unvaxxed convalescents over the longer term, say a year or so -- and even if anyone were interested in doing this study, Omicron has not been prevalent for long enough yet)
Immunologically it was and remains (since the possible effect of future mutations can't be known) a perfectly valid reason to be concerned about the long-term impact of taking the vaccine particularly for low-risk/young people -- sadly it was swept aside by the flood of articles along the lines of "no vaccine evah in the history of vaccines has had side effects that didn't manifest within a month or two of administration".
Is this likely to be worse if you take multiple boosters? Since I get a flu shot every year (they change the strains over time, but I think often reuse the same strain a couple or three years in a row), it doesn't intuitively seem like this should be worse.
We're fortunate that so far, the vaccines' versions of the original spike protein are enough to trigger an effective T cell response. If that ever stops happening, then we'll lose the major benefit of the vaccines so far, which is that even though you can still catch covid, you're much less likely to end up in the hospital or the morgue because your body can clear the infection efficiently.
I don't think so, no -- there's supposed to be other potential issues around immune fatigue (something like your body just giving up deciding to live with the "new normal" when continuously juiced with the same immune agitator) but I haven't really looked into that.
For OAS the only thing that matters (AFAIK, IANAI) is the first strain you were presented with and how different it is from the current one. Importantly more boosters won't really *help* with this, though.
Omicron boosters helped against the old strains, but not the Omicron ones, when they looked at antibody responses and compared them with boosting with the original vaccine.
One of the guys from the FDA advisory panel also raised that as a concern, saying that these Omicron boosters proposed for the fall didn’t seem compellingly better than the original ones used as a boost (maybe 2x antibody levels, unclear if that’s clinically relevant, and only against the early Omicron strain not the current BA4/5 ones). Better not to take additional imprinting risks with new vaccines when the old ones seem almost (just?) as good. Summary of the 45 minute interview below, with links to TWIV where you can watch it yourself.
Don't post "first". Don't make big cultural war/political flame wars. Try to be an earnest and fair interlocutor and not resort to ad hominem. Try and understand what someone is saying, rather than just replying to what you wished they had said, or what you assume people like them say.
Basically treat the people here like you would people at a cocktail party instead of anonymous internet punching bags? That is my understanding.
It's a way of saying "I'm the first one to comment on this new post!", like jokingly congratulating yourself on that. It's an old Internet meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/first
Even Neil Armstrong, descending from the Apollo 11 capsule, was tempted to say "First!". But he didn't give in to temptation, he said something meaningful and memorable instead.
ACX posters should not give in to temptation either, even if they are prominent and popular scientists; Scott *will* ban them.
If ignorance were always a defensible justification, forum threads everywhere would become an tug of war between veterans who know all the rules and want to get further in the topics that interest them, and an endless parade of newbies who come in and break every rule until someone "potty trains" them.
If ignorance were *never* a justification, forum threads would be a no-man's land where the veterans are sherpas who alone know the way through the minefield, dodging shrapnel thrown up by the newbies continually getting themselves blown up. The vets gradually get lonely, but the newbies soon become too fearful to make themselves visible.
One of the arts to forums is bridging that divide between the extremes. (Sometimes I wonder if "ACX Junior Varsity" would be worthwhile.)
Yup, the things mentioned in 3. above would seem to be a straightforward case of being egregiously neither kind nor necessary. "I can't believe you don't understand this basic fact" isn't great phrasing at the best of times†, but at the very least it ought to precede actually answering the question.
Unfortunately, the answer is unambiguously *yes*... at least, for certain definitions of "good reason". When voluntary engagement is the name of the game, there are any number of reasons why it is instrumentally useful to be provocative.
Speaking for myself, I've spent time in multiple places on the internet where a milquetoast response will be ignored when an inflammatory one at least gets *some* engagement - when I find myself deliberately dialing up the snark beyond my own prodigious baseline, it's usually a sign that it's time to move on to greener pastures.
In terms of "superfluously rude"... it's a decent way to assemble an angry mob, and it's a good threat display. These are usually not good ideas, but there are exceptions.
I can't think of even a single instance where *initiating* unkindness (aka meanness) on a forum was productive.
Being mean *in response to* initiated meanness, OTOH, is probably better than the alternative, for the same reason that the TIT-FOR-TAT strategy works, and for the general reason that makes feedback work. I mean, if you touched a hot stove and the stove didn't inflict immediate pain on you, you'd likely keep your hand there until the third degree burns kick in and cost you actual functionality. Mean responses can work like that mean stove.
This is assuming, of course, that meanness deters you from something you genuinely ought not be doing. If I'm being mean to you because you're clogging every forum up with "First!", that might be worth the pain. But if I'm mean to you because you once said you can understand why someone would vote for Trump, it's less clear whether it's worth it.
Then again, meanness on a forum isn't going to achieve much either, in my experience. Meanness is naturally dampened to just pixels on a monitor. Words might mean things, but the reader doesn't have to take the writer seriously, so if you launch a scathing response to a troll on the internet, all the troll has to do is say "lol" and continue, and the only positive value the writer might get is some entertainment for her confederates. Which, granted, might be enough - provided the writer is truly entertaining.
Because of all this, I default to being kind unless someone else started being mean. And even then, it only works if they really believe they ought not be mean. If they think it's okay - including people who think that's the only way to get a response - I typically just ignore them.
>Then again, meanness on a forum isn't going to achieve much either, in my experience.
In general, no, but if you're a mod or can assemble a large-enough angry mob to coerce the mods it's a bit different.
(Yes, user revolt forcing staff concession is rare, but it does happen. The Fram incident on English Wikipedia, the Superprotect incident on German Wikipedia and the Athene incident on SpaceBattles are the biggest cases I know; I've also personally led such a mob on a much smaller board.)
If you have a large enough mob, yes, you can drive someone off. But that's just it; *anyone* with a large enough mob can be mean until the opposition leaves - even if that mob is wrong. That's good news for anyone in that mob, but is it good news overall?
If a bad mob drives off people with a good idea, either the good people are gone forever and that idea is unlikely to ever spring up again, or the good people hide, lick their wounds, and slowly reassemble until they can coordinate meanness on their own. Then they return and it's worse than if the bad mob had never driven them off.
If a mob is *good*, then maybe it's okay. So meanness being good depends a lot on whether the coordinated meanness is good or bad. How does one tell? It's independent of the ability to coordinate.
I'm not sure about this exact rule (involving answering questions specifically), but Scott has often expressed his dislike of contentless criticism. He usually doesn't seem to ban people for it though, unless it also contains a dig or is otherwise unkind.
I asked this on OT234 but I think I was too late, so here it is :
Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My gut tells me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I was wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively. What are the variables than influence policy choice and what is their relative importance ?
I don't know any, but I am sure there are some. My guess would be some big elements would be: popularity, cost, popularity among large political donors, popularity among "political intelligentsia", whether it helps one or both major parties.
Yes, I agree with your guesses. I'd love it if it could be confirmed by a study. Also to see the relative importances. But I couldn't find any so far, it's weird because it seems like a pretty important thing to study.
I think large parts of public choice theory address this. E.g., policies that support a small, concentrated interest group at the expense of a larger, more diffuse class tends, ex ante, to be likelier to be adopted. Sorry, this doesn’t address your request for an individual study.
Specifically look at the work of Mancur Olsen, who was very concerned with places where vocal interested minorities could override majorities by just knowing about the issue and caring more. (If I take a dollar from everyone and then split half what I collected among 1000 people, hardly any voters care because it's just a dollar, but those thousand people will fight tooth and nail to keep my program going.)
Yes, but the work in public choice I am aware of is largely theoretical (Buchanan and co). The reason I asked the question is precisely to get an empirical assessment of public choice predictions. I was wondering if the more recent work in public choice included empirical studies. I just found this for example, in which the author creates several PCT based predictions and tests them :
He finds little support for PCT. But I remember reading somewhere that initial PCT models failed empirical tests but were then updated and then could account for many more stylized facts. I would be nice if we could find a study empirically assessing the latest PCT models.
This study was fairly famous in 2014, which basically said economic elites and business interests have substantially more impact than total public opinion. However, it seems there's reason to believe that study's conclusions were flawed and/or overstated:
IMO, oligarchic domination of politics by the rich is somewhat overrated (at least among liberals in my bubble) as a source of the US's perceived problems, compared to factors like voters being status-quo-biased or genuinely trusting business over other interest groups.
Thanks a lot ! That's the stuff I was looking for. Combined R2 of average voter opinion + rich voters opinions + interest group alignment is 0.074, that's surprisingly low ! Less than 10% of the variance in policy outcome is explained by public opinion and interest groups. I wonder what the other explanatory variables might be, politicians ideology ? Probably not because change in governing party doesn't seem to have a large impact of the agenda (Routledge handbook of public policy p.168). Perhaps then policy outcome is determined in large part by budget constraint, that could explain why it doesn't correlate very well with the governing party, public opinion (rich + poor) or special interests. In other words politicians, on any given issue, just choose the policy then can afford which would explain the findings above.
Sadly, it seems the dta file extension is only available with paid versions of excel, and my open office version will not suffice. Unless I've totally misinterpreted how to open that file.
For obscure stuff, some have argued that the values of high SES individuals are much better predictors than average representations. I'm not sure how accurate that is as I didn't dig into the methodology of the study so I apologize if I'm passing along misinformation. Of course, there are a few wedge issues like gun rights, abortion, etc. which may not follow that trend.
Obviously, lobbying is an issue but it's hard to disentangle influence from wanting to back a winning horse. Of course, if I understand your question you're not really trying to disentangle those things.
Considering that policies can be modified significantly and aren't really discrete, I suppose one starting question would be; how do you define a policy.
Public Choice Theory seems to be a field tailored to addressing your question, in any case. It's interesting but I'm not deeply familiar with it.
A good part of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying" is about this. One big takeaway is that sustained popular support trumps all in the long run, but this is very hard to maintain. In practice, a concerted effort by a dedicated interest group is disproportionately able to maintain status quo.
So, if I recall well, the big three would be popular support, lack of polarization, and no opposing lobby.
The way I'd think of this is that it's less about a specific study and more like "the entire field of political science." There are entire textbooks written on this; I'd suggest emailing a professor of political science at your local university to ask questions about this.
These are interesting questions - I'm not entirely sure what you mean by them, though. I'm in education and have a fairly narrow definition of the word "assess" so I assume in the first question you mean something like, "how do I determine how much and how well I've learned the amorphous things I feel I've learned from being online?"
Working backwards is hard here, but you could start by trying to figure out *what you feel you've learned.* Trivia from Wikipedia rabbit holes? Philosophical concepts? New ways of thinking? Once you have some of these that you feel confident in, you'd want to determine the best way to assess your abilities. Play wikipedia trivia! Check to see if the philosophy stuff you feel you know has names and try to redescribe them to someone you know is more knowledgeable and get feedback from them! Tackle a new problem in a similar genre and try to approach it methodically with a new method you feel you've learned, and see how it goes!
Trying to assess yourself here would be a learning experience in and of itself and probably help you solidify the things you've learned.
I don't have a good guess at what you mean by your second question - learning that happens through AI by who? What type of AI? What type of learning?
Sorry if I'm really off-base with what you wanted!
Well, I'll take the role of Sagredo in this conversation.
What do you mean by "assess"? Are you asking for our subjective views of what we've learned using the Internet? Or are you asking for a mechanism that we could use to quantify our structured and/or unstructured learning using the Internet?
And why did you select the past four years as the timeframe for your question? I'm curious if you're trying to tie this assessment of our assessments to a particular societal, political, or economic trend, or cycle.
As for AI, I don't expect AI will be helpful to my personal learning ambitions during the timeframe of my remaining lifetime (probably another decade, but hopefully *not* two decades). My current personal learning goals are probably too diverse and too detailed for the current generation of GPT AI's to handle—and I suspect they won't be for many years to come. For instance, is there an AI that can tutor me pros and cons of the logistic vs the exponential models of biodiversity hotspots over earth's history? I am very interested in that question at the moment. Also, I've been translating Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry as a hobby. I need an AI that searches through Chinese and Japanese scholarly literature when I need to understand an obscure literary reference and, for the Japanese, one that will translate the Japanese sources for me (the Japanese have a vast accumulation of commentaries on Chinese literature, but it's inaccessible to me because I don't have any facility with Japanese). Also, I've taken a recent interest in Merkavah and Kabbalistic mysticism. Can AI help me? Anyway, other than catching up on 30 years of new developments virology and immunology (to better understand SARS2) that's how I've been spending my time on the Internet for the past couple of years. That and downloading and viewing naughty Galitsin videos.
Then I let Cunningham's law do the rest. ("The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.")
Are animals from today 'more evolved' than similar animals from, say, 100 million years ago?
I had the impression that sharks have been around a while. If we put a shark from today in the ocean 100 million years ago, would it be some amazing badass who'd quickly dominate?
Or is it more like, once a niche gets saturated, animals start adapting to smaller and smaller changes in the niche, so our shark today would probably die out quick because the ocean was different 100 million years ago in ways that the sharks back then were more fit for.
Yes and no. So overtime the fitness landscape is constantly changing, and sometimes highly derived (longer chain of large evolutionary changes) creatures die out, while more basic ones live. So there is a lot of "backwards" and "forwards", but everything is always making small optimizations. So even something that is "essentially the same" as it was 400 million years ago, probably isn't literally the same unless it is very simple. It is more a cloud of constant vibration around a fitness environment.
Some things like for instance jaws seemed to be big "advancements" that radically changed the entire ecology and possibilities for what creatures might do and what strategies they could pursue. So there is some decent argument for seeing say "jaws" as more "advanced." Jawed creatures can pursue and evolve a lot of the strategies no jawed creatures could, plus others. Certain paths don't seem to have a lot of downsides, so you might consider those more "advanced".
A great example of this is fish. People think of fish as rather primitive creatures that have been around since the Devonian and led to the evolution of tetrapods, eventually leading to mammals and us. But the majority of fish species living today (the teleosts) are highly evolved organisms that are nothing like the jawless fish of the Devonian or even like the "primitive" fish of the Mesozoic. The teleosts have developed a mobile premaxilla that enables them to shoot their mouth forward and suck in their prey. There is a second set of jaws, called the pharyngeal jaws, which evolved from gill arches, which can grasp and in some species grind up the prey that was sucked into the mouth (the pharyngeal jaws were the inspiration for the jaws of the xenomorph in the Alien movie).This is a highly evolved feeding mechanism adapted for water that millions of years to evolve. So it's not like fish stayed the same while tetrapods continued to evolve towards reptiles and mammals.
I don't think animals today would necessarily fare better millions of years ago because, as you say, niches were different. That said, there are invasive species even today. Are rabbits more evolved than... whatever was in Australia before because they've outcompeted them? Arguably I suppose. I would guess that same would happen if you transferred species between time as if you transferred them between continents. Some would do better, some worse, some about the same.
The fact that sharks haven't changed much in millions of years though seems like evidence that their niche hasn't changed much in that time either.
As a caveat, we don't really know that sharks haven't changed for millions of years, because all we have are fossils. For all we know, the sensory, locomotive, and mental capabilities of sharks have drastically improved, and their behavior could be unrecognizable from what it was millions of years ago.
>Are rabbits more evolved than... whatever was in Australia before because they've outcompeted them? Arguably I suppose.
What was there before = marsupials (of various sorts). And yes, eutherians outcompete marsupials in essentially all cases. That's why the "Tasmanian tiger" became extinct on the Australian mainland; feral dogs were introduced and outcompeted them. Likewise, a lot of South American marsupials went extinct when the Isthmus of Panama formed and let eutherians in.
OTOH, it's worth remembering that the opossum traveled up to Virginia. And humans paid a large part in the extinction of the "Tasmanian tiger". As for rabbits...they moved to an area where there wasn't a native predator adapted to eat them. This is a big reason why lots of "invasive species" are successful.
Yes, it is debatable whether the dingos directly led to the extinction of the thylacine through competition, since the thylacine was more of an ambush predator than a pursuit predator like the dingo. Human arrival and land use patterns probably had more to do with it, though no doubt both contributed to its demise. Humans are particularly bad for predators for three reasons: 1) humans view predators as competitors and outright kill them, 2) humans compete with predators for the same prey but are able to shift to other sources of food if prey becomes scarce, while many the predators can't, and 3) humans can form large packs to drive predators away from their kills to steal them.
There are quite a few marsupial species thriving in South America (about 120 species). The Great American Interchange did not lead to the extinction of the sparassodonts (metatherian predators), as these were already extinct by then for reasons that are not settled. However, it is true that metatherians were outcompeted by eutherians in Laurasia and went extinct there, after being the dominant mammals in the Cretaceous and decimated in the K-Pg extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.
The neutral theory of evolution says that the bigger population, the finer the adaptations that can exist. So that's a reason to expect Australian organisms to be objectively superior to island organisms and objective inferior to big continent organisms. I'm not sure it's the correct explanation, though.
Intuitively, there is a certain point at which you can say that organisms that came previously are 'less evolved' than the ones that came after. Prokaryotes vs eukaryotes, anaerobic vs aerobic metabolizers, vertebrates vs invertebrates, and so on.
Sharks are obviously 'more evolved' than anaerobic bacteria, because they have eyes, teeth, a nervous system, etc. But the shark has its niche in predating on organisms much larger than that, so obviously when you put it in an environment with only anaerobic bacteria it won't survive.
However, in any environment where the shark can find prey reasonably similar to what it normally eats, it's going to be better at doing that than similar predators that didn't evolve eyes, teeth, motorics, or electroreception as well as the shark has. So, I'm pretty sure the shark would outcompete Anomalocaris even if it didn't evolve in exactly the same niche.
I don't think 'adapting to smaller and smaller changes in the niche' is as important as it seems, because the flip side of that is that it makes the organism less adaptable to changes. If you hyperspecialize in eating just eucalyptus leaves, and a fungal plague wipes out all the eucalyptus trees, then all that evolution you went through was for nothing.
As a general rule with animals, at small scales arthropods are The Best while at large scales vertebrates are The Best. Those two groups are *miles* ahead of everything else, but between them it's more a matter of tradeoffs and niches than "one is better".
Interestingly, dinosaur fiction seems to be convinced of the reverse: you get things like characters saying "T. rex was forged by millions of years of evolution to be the ultimate predator," presumably in contrast to modern animals, who have those same years of evolution, plus 65 million more. I guess the implication is that the K-T extinction event "reset" evolution? The sentiment never made much sense to me.
Yeah that type of narrative is exact the sort of thing most biologists tend to hate. but the ones who are willing to say stuff like that are the ones who get asked to be on shows!
I mean, certainly the "large land animal" niche had to be rebuilt from scratch after K-T (because anything in that niche got wiped out; big things need lots of food to sustain a breeding population, and there was no food). And it should also be remembered that we just had another extinction of large land animals (Pleistocene extinction a.k.a. the March of Man), so the remnant modern megafauna is legitimately less impressive than usual (Africa somewhat excepted).
I remember that a long, long time ago, we used to play a computer game of the combat type with friends (the original Starcraft, if anyone is interested). The first thing we did was to try and send in troops right away, before the enemy was prepared. Obviously, everyone got wise to that pretty quickly, and set up defenses first thing. So people stopped rushing and adopted a second-order strategy to evade those defenses. This evolved further and further; at some point, the strategy of choice was huge and expensive late-game flying destroyers. And then, when I had this strategy working almost on autopilot, and was just laying the foundation for my long-term success in a new game, I remember my shock when I got rushed and annihilated within the first minute.
I guess you could say that latest strategy was *more* evolved than the first one, just because it did evolve for a long time. However, it's harder to claim it's *better* evolved since it was exactly the same strategy as the first one, just arrived at via a long detour.
I can't answer the original question, because I know little about zoology. However, in keeping with my game analogy, I guess that you'd get the best results if you put an organism a *short* while back in time, so that it is one step ahead. As an illustration, consider moving a shark not 100 million years back in time, but 1 billion years. The shark would be much more evolved than anything else around - but since that anything else would be the simplest of multicellular organisms, the shark would perish while the other organisms would prosper and live long.
There's a term StarCraft players use for the phenomenon you describe: the metagame. We talk about the evolution of the metagame over time, as people figure out new strategies and the developers adjust stats to balance the game.
I find it really interesting when there's a known optimal strategy that dominates even specific counters, but human limitations prevent its execution ("In the year 20XX"). You get a mix of the normal cyclic metagame interjected with attempts to capture a shadow of perfect play, but which aspect each top player focuses on leads to some delightfully unstable dynamics.
This is pretty clearly a rock-paper-scissors sort of situation, but the implication in Jurassic Park et. al. is that the dinosaurs are objectively better life-forms than modern animals. E.g., T. rex beats, say, tigers, both now and in the Cretaceous Period.
I vaguely remember one of the Jurassic Park novels where, despite the heroes' best efforts, some of the dinosaurs make it to the mainland. Where they promptly die because they're less evolved and can't compete with modern wildlife.
I think you have rediscovered a pretty well known starcraft dynamic; in a nutshell, with
all else equal:
conservative play beats rush
expand/tech beats conservative play
rush beats expand/tech
when both players are familiar with this dynamic, much of the game becomes trying to identify what strategy your opponent is pursuing, while preventing your opponent from discovering what strategy you are pursuing
It's standard with deckbuilding card games (in the Magic the Gathering genre) too.
You have aggro, mid-range and control decks. Aggro is about nuking the opponent from the start, mid-range is about reacting flexibly, gaining board control and winning, control is about shutting down the enemy until you can invoke an unchallengeable presence.
I would steelman it as "the evolution counter resets when the animal changes substantially".
I don't have a definition of what counts as "substantially", but the idea is the difference between optimizing within a certain local maximum (for millions of years) and moving towards a different local maximum (the reset).
But perhaps this doesn't make sense either. The fitness landscape can be a fractal, so there may be no substantial difference between "the same" and "different" local maximum. Also, there is no reason to be impressed by spending millions of years in the same local maximum; maybe the entire local maximum just sucks.
One charitable interpretation of the hypothetical attitude you mention would be as a statment about path-dependence. That is : there is only 1 dinosaurs (I realize there a multitude of ways this sounds wildly wrong, ignore them). The bag of tricks and strategies that Evolution hammered into dinosaurs is unique and peculiar. When they were wiped out, that bag was gone forever. Modern animals are not "better", they are different, they aren't "further" along the same path as the dinosaurs, they are along another path entirely, a path that you know and can defend against (by virtue of being counter-evolved against it). So the movie character's attitude is a perfectly valid concern, dinosaurs have a unique bag of tricks and strategies that died with them, and reviving them revives this bag of tricks and strategies against organisms that spent the last 65 million years *not* adapting against it.
Consider another situation vaguely similar, cultural evolution. When we say that, e.g, the Greeks had hundreds of year to craft amazing stories and mythologies, this can't be countered by the fact that, say, Egypt or China had more time because they are older. Egypt or China crafted different bags of culture entirely. There is only 1 Ancient Greece, and the bag of culture it crafted was unique and, if lost, irretrievable. The space of all possible culture, like the space of all possible organism, is impossibly vast; you can't recover, let alone improve upon (this implies recovery: improving upon something means starting with it and iterating) dinosaurs or ancient greek culture, no matter how many millions or even billions of years you spend.
But after the KT event, the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere dropped 30%. In the modern atmosphere larger dinosaurs wouldn't be large, they'd have to adapt to the current atmosphere
Only short-term -- air is actually much more oxygen-rich *now* than it was in the Mesozoic. In fact, a big part of the success of dinosaurs was being better at extracting oxygen from poor air with their extensive air sacs, which then were put to good use by their descendents the birds.
The point still stands, though: there is no such thing as inherently "more evolved", fitness is entirely relative to the environment, and dinosaurs specialized to suit conditions that no longer exist.
Dinosaurs were (largely) daytime creatures while the mammals of that era were nighttime creatures. As a result, mammal ancestors had less reliance on vision, and less investment in things like sharp edge detection and color discrimination, that dinosaurs had. In the past few tens of millions of years, with most of the dinosaurs gone, many mammals evolved back into these daytime niches. But our vision just isn’t as acute along any of these lines as those of the dinosaur descendants that remained diurnal (notably hawks and eagles, but probably many birds).
But it’s also likely that modern diurnal mammals have sensory combinations and capabilities that dinosaurs never had. Wolves and tigers don’t see as well as a tyrannosaur, but they may have a better combination of sight, hearing, and smell.
In the specific case of the T. rex, there's a good argument to be made that its dominance surpasses that of any other non-human predator that has evolved since except. T. rex is thought to have been so effective at large prey that it prevented any other large predators from being able to evolve that could compete with it -- the next largest predators known from North America during the time the T. rex lived were only around 1/20th of its size. No known predator from after the Mesozoic has been able to replicate this feat.
There are many facets to this topic. Here are some considerations:
1. Even if the outward appearance of an animal doesn't change, there might be a lot of stuff happening at the molecular level that we can't tell from fossils. Scorpions are a good example of this. They haven't changed since they crawled out of Silurian seas, but their venom has been evolving all along to answer innovations made by the vertebrate nervous and circulatory systems.
2. There have been some global "species X-risk" events. All modern species have adaptations against these, because if they hadn't, they'd have died out. Modern shellfish have anti-drilling adaptations, for example, because specialized drillers and crushers evolved during the Mesozoic and promptly ate everything that couldn't adapt. So yes, modern animals are more adapted because they have inbuilt counters to some major evolutionary innovations.
3. Speaking of which, there are examples where one animal group is widespread, and another comes along and displaces it because it's just better at that particular niche. Brachiopods used to be all over the place back in the Paleozoic, but once bivalves evolved, they got sent to the shadow realm (i.e. the deep sea) alongside stuff like forams and sea lilies. Marsupials in Australia used to have it good until we came along. Seed ferns had global dominion before angiosperms appeared. So there ARE cases where a species (or other clade) is just better than the other.
4. That said, there are also some "easy" niches that seem to be filled by pretty much whoever gets there first. Think the giant filter feeder niche, I don't know who would come on top in a battle royale between whales vs. whale sharks vs. giant belemnites vs. Aegirocassis vs. Leedsichthys vs. Vortex. Or coral reefs vs. sponge reefs vs. snail reefs vs. clam reefs vs. brachiopod reefs (okay, fine, the brachiopods aren't living through that one).
(and 0. As always, it's good to keep in mind that evolution has no memory and only cares about the current situation. An Archean era cyanobacterium is still "more evolved" than us air-breathing losers on its home turf.)
My ballpark guess is 75% your modern shark adapts to the Cretaceous but doesn't cause a revolution, 20% it dies out because local environmental factors are different enough, 5% it conquers the world (or at least displaces a lot of other sharks).
To me, it seems, embedded in this question is the idea that evolution has an aim or is "progressive." But there is no aim or goal.
It's not simply survival of the "fit", it's also survival of the lucky. There is no objective improvement, nor predisposition to progress. It could well be that mass extinction events are the primary drivers of change, aka evolution.
Society tells itself it has everything under control, then nature or another uncontrollable force introduces chaos. All while we land an aircraft on an asteroid, take soil samples, and bring them back to earth, or launch a telescope that reveals previously unseen worlds.
Not even that, because the meta level also changes. Sometimes the nature changes relatively quickly and the less flexible species go extinct. Other times the nature stays the same for millions of years, and the species with more potential flexibility keep paying a higher price (bigger genome, longer pregnancy, need more food, etc.) for the features they never use, which reduces their fitness in the meanwhile.
That assumption doesn't have to be embedded in the question. Under some circumstances, evolution resembles an arms race. On an island filled with cheetahs and gazelles, you'll probably see both species becoming gradually faster from generation to generation, and a cheetah transported thousands of years into the past will outclass its competitors.
But evolution is more complicated than just arms races. A modern cheetah sent back a million years (say) will probably be able to outcompete the fast-running savannah proto-cheetahs that filled the cheetah's ecological niche back then... but if we keep going further back then that niche will no longer exist. The savannah animals of today will do very poorly in the Mesozoic, before there was grass.
This stuff is complicated and (as you noted with the “probably”) is not predictable. For example the speed has metabolic costs and a predator needs to be only just able to catch its usual prey. A super fast predator that needs 2X as much food as a just-fast-enough predator that conserves energy for outbreeding the new guy may be a loser in the long game. Cool to think about.
Cheetahs are weird. Most pursuit predators are a little slower on average than their favorite prey, because they only need to be fast enough to catch the slowest individuals. But cheetahs are way faster than anything they hunt. I don't know what's going on there.
Exactly. Far too often, people speak of evolution as if it were an intelligent design (i.e. God). Evolution only appears to have aimed at a destination when we look at the path taken and anthromorphise an intelligent design upon that path.
Evolution is instead a crowd of organisms with each individual exploring a different evolutionary path. The organisms discovering a slightly better path advance evolution only with a slightly higher reproduction result.
One of the things that has changed over the last 100 million years is which pathogens and parasites are common. I am not a biologist, but I wouldn't expect a shark today to be particularly well adapted to pathogens and parasites that haven't existed for millions of years.
Yes, the Red Queen Hypothesis says that most evolution is about very specific arms races against parasites. It's usually suggested that it goes both ways: the sharks of today have probably lost their defenses against the sharks of the past, but the parasites of the past probably had very specialized offenses that might not be so relevant.
We don't know if dinosaurs had faster neurons than us like today's birds. If they did they might have been as smart as today's small monkeys, throwing rocks and using tree branches to poke into anthills. Imagine T-Rex throwing rocks and branches to bring down prey.
Just chucking a rock or a stick doesn't take fine manipulation. And predators don't pick on someone their own size every time they want lunch- a T Rex that knocked down small prey would out-eat a T Rex that went after big prey that could fight back effectively.
The very premise of the question sort of assumes a goal. So in that sense, no. No species is more evolved than any other because there is no "end goal" towards which a species can be closer or further. Now, one can argue that certain species are better or worse suited for the niche in which they find themselves, but that makes comparison across time impossible since at the scales you are asking about, so much is different than comparing doesn't make sense. And it is _highly_ unlikely that modern species are better adapted for ancient niches than the species that lived in those niches (and vice versa).
And even when comparing modern species to each other, mostly similar species often differentiate and split niches up in very fine grained and hard to obsere ways. There are over 60 species of Rockfish (all in the same genus; Sebastes) from Alaska to Baja. Many of them live in the exact same habitats and eat very similar things, and yet they coexist (and have for quite some time). Presumably, they are exploiting very narrow adjacent niches that we have not yet figured out what the differences are.
Additionally, many of the adaptations that occur are sort of a Red Queen's Race where two species are both changing but in ways that more or less offset. Immune system adaptations can be an example of this. Theyy change very rapidly in response to novel diseases, but they aren't necessary "better" in any general sense (although there are more and less sophisticated immune systems).
Basically, the question is impossible to really answer and almost doesn't even make sense. While there are particular tasks or goals that one species may be better at than another, that is not the same thing as "more evolved".
Evolution does not only make organisms better adapted to their environment. Sexual selection can make them less adapted too. An animal sent millions of years back in time could be a hyper-sexualized creature that can't get enough food in competition with less sexualized specimens.
Here's an interesting study that suggests something like that:
Teeth come immediately to mind! Mammalian dentition has evolved in a variety of specialized directions that allow Mammalia to exploit food sources more efficiently and it has allowed them to diversify into all sorts of different ecological niches. The Synapsids and then the Dinosauria didn't have the diversity of dentition that modern mammals do. And since mammalian dentition has allowed mammals to better exploit their environments, the plants eaten by mammals have evolved in response to the increasing efficiency of mammalian teeth probably creating a diversifying feedback loop. (Excuse my inexact terms, it's late and I'm writing quickly.)
I don't think 'more evolved' is actually a meaningful concept. (See e.g. https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/833) If by that you mean "more complex" (like the commenter below re: sharks vs bacteria), just say "more complex".
Yes, there are measures of "complexity", but I don't we can really say evolution (change) even has any goal/aim/direction toward "more complex", since both less complex and more complex continue to co-exist.
What does "more evolved" mean? Does it mean "a longer chain of evolutionary changes" or does it mean "more able to compete in their environment"? I imagine you are probably referring to the latter, but on the off chance you mean the former - I would expect there to be longer chains of evolutionary changes today than 100 million years ago, based purely on time, but would be interested in further views on this.
As I understand it, 100 million years ago the XY sex chromosome system was virtually nonexistent, the ZW sex chromosome system was the dominating one in the ecosystem. (I'm not doing a "headcount of X0 insects" here, just looking at which organisms are the dominant ones). XY's path to ascenscion was quite difficult, but it seemed to gain momentum in the aftermath of the meteorite 65M years ago, and the XY's became the ecosystem's dominant organisms after that period -- ultimately culminating in the uber-predator, Homo Sapiens. (virtually all mammals are XY, whereas the platypus seems to be a relic of the complex transition from the ZW to the XY system)
Evolution is an ongoing process, and therefore asking "were organisms more evolved 100M years ago?" is a bit akin to asking "was I older 20 years ago?". Evolution always adapts to the environment, but the reason I mention the ZW -> XY switchover is that it represents a small watershed in *evolution's speed of adaptation*. The XY system sacrifices overall population size for greater speed of evolution, and that tradeoff has been extremely successful.
The ZW organisms will often balance out in a high female-to-male ratio (e.g. an order of magnitude more chickens than roosters), while XY organisms are "forcibly" balancing out at an equal ratio. Genetic studies suggest that in humans, about 80% of women and 40% of men have reproduced. The disparity is lesser since the advent of single-partner marriage cultures, it was likely higher before that, and is higher in most other XY organisms.
Therefore with XY there is significant genetic filtering at work, in terms of males that will not be chosen for reproduction. In contrast, in a high female-to-male ratio ZW arrangement, almost all males and females get to reproduce - but less genetic filtering happens as result. (both XY and ZW are subjected to "filtering by environmental selection", of course, but XY is more strongly subjected to "filtering by partner selection" than ZW is, overall - with consequent impacts on the speed of evolution)
This is a layman retelling, but the end-result is quite visible. Sharks didn't change all that much in the last 100M years, while mammals went from rodent-like creatures to horses, lions, giraffes, bats, whales and humans. Which are more "evolved", in terms of their genomes having further changed in ways to exploit the environment and niches?
Interesting! Do you have any links or books that you'd recommend on ZW vs XY sex ratio theories? There does seem to be a pattern (but the devil is in the details). ;-)
Considering that monotremes use an XY system (albeit with a different arrangement from placental mammals), that suggests the XY/ZW split happened after the Dinosauria branched off from the Synapsids—but probably before monotremes and Therians diverged in the mid-Jurassic (say ~170 mya). And considering that <checking Wikipedia hurriedly> some reptiles seem to have also convergently evolved an XY sex-determination system—I'm not sure if it offers any selective advantage over the ZW system. Anyway, I'd like to read up on those sex ratio theories if you can point me to the literature. Thanks!
I had read it in a book almost a decade ago, I can't recall now which one, sorry. But as I recall, the main issue has seemed to be the fixation of alleles that would lead to sex ratio disparity in the offspring - and how differently that works out in XY vs. ZW.
It would be advantageous for any organism (whether male or female) to produce more female than male offspring, in terms of total descendants down the line. Of the organisms surviving to maturity, nearly all the females will reproduce while only some of the males will do the reproducing. Having 8 female and 2 male offspring may thus be a less risky way of passing genes to the subsequent generations, than 5 female and 5 male offspring.
The problem with XY being, it is the paternal gametes which determine the sex. Any mutation that would lead to a male producing more female than male offspring, would simultaneously and by that same method, be effacing itself from the gene pool. This is practically ensuring an equal-ratio deadlock.
It is the opposite case with ZW, where the maternal gametes determine the sex. In that setup, females *can* collect mutations which ensure that they produce more female than male offspring. They will *not* "auto-erase themselves from the gene pool" by doing that, at least not up until exceeding the ratio that follows from the female vs. the male chances of reproducing. (i.e. if it comes to female A producing 100% female offspring and female B producing 75% female, the B genome will soon get the upper hand again even in a setup where a mature female's chances of reproducing are quite higher than a male's chances)
XY's "equal-ratio deadlock" is thus producing a higher total number of organisms that won't reproduce in turn [male, mostly]. But that also implies a higher degree of genetic filtering over time than the one found in species with a higher ratio of females, and in which a lesser proportion of organisms that survived to maturity do /not/ get to reproduce.
As I understand, the switch from ZW to XY has happened before the switch from oviparian to viviparian/mammal. That switch-to-mammal was in itself perhaps even more complex than the ZW->XY switch; but the XY's "faster evolution" might have ensured that it's the XY's who got to become mammals. As you noted, some branches of reptiles also "paralelly discovered" the ZW->XY switch, without making it quite as far as becoming mammal, and no ZW has ever made it into a mammal. The platypus seems to be a relic from that transition period, with a strange hybrid sex determination system depending on a multitude of chromosomes.
If males and females are born in equal numbers, then the average male and average female will have same fertility rate; if only a small number of males mate, that doesn't change the average, it only changes the variance.
On the other hand, if one sex outnumbers the other, the strong strategy is to produce the rarer sex; a member of a rarer sex has a better shot at finding a mate (or multiple mates, if it's males that are rare).
I said "risk" but a better word might be "quantization".
Say that in a species' circumstances, 80% of mature females and 20% of mature males will get to reproduce. An organism which produces 5F + 5M that reach maturity, can supposedly count on 4F producing further offspring and 1M producing 4x offspring -- making it a wash from a F/M perspective.
That is simplified - there might be small deviations, like 1M producing 3.5x offspring, 1M producing 0.5x, and 3M producing 0 - but the effect remains that only the "winning" M's reproduce [a lot], whereas almost all F's reproduce.
Why is quantization tricky here. For most periods of ecosystem equilibrium, the organism will *not* have 10 offspring reaching maturity. In the competition for resources in an ecosystem saturated with that species, an organism that did reproduce can mostly count on one to three survivors to maturity. Having 1F + 1M, there's significant odds that the organism did not produce a "winning M", which is a significant cut in the total number of descendants compared to having 2F. That 1M wouldn't have produced "20% of the descendants" but 0.
In addition to quantization loss, if the "overall stats" of a species is that 80% F and 20% M reproduce, it doesn't mean that the "elasticity" is the same across all individual organisms. A genotype with some slight defects might experience the chances of F reproduction decrease from 80% to 75%, while its chances of M "being the winner" decrease from 20% to 10%. It's asymmetrical in that way. Alleles that favor a higher chance of F offspring, can attain a better fixation through the iterations of this process. (this asymmetry is at the same time the reason why the *evolution* of such a species would proceed at a slower pace)
Lastly, note that XY organisms cannot "by nature" attain a fixation of a significantly higher chance of female offspring, but they *could* attain fixation of a significantly higher chance of male offspring. And yet, to my knowledge, that has happened never. The opposite scenario with ZW organisms, does happen.
Do you know the mechanism by which the ZW system produces unequal sex ratios? I'd expect it to produce equal ratios for much the same reason as the XY system: a ZZ male always produces Z sperm, while a ZW female would produce 50% Z eggs and 50% W eggs unless there's an extra step to cull one or the other.
Chickens are probably a bad example. My understanding is that the primary sex ratio for barnyard chickens is about 50/50, but humans cull most of the rooster chicks shortly after hatching because roosters are less economically useful than hens. Only hens lay eggs, and in the most popular meat breeds, hens grow faster and yield higher-quality meat than roosters, so roosters are only kept for breeding, to defend the hens from small predators, and to fill a social role in the flock. Pre-20th-century, surplus roosters were usually caponized (surgically castrated) and raised for meat. And among the Red Junglefowl wild cousins of domestic chickens, adult roosters fight one another for territory and access to hens, similarly to many mammalian species with polygamous habits.
Valid point. Turns out I was wrong about chickens, they are a bad example, since the culling of roosters is actually done by farmers. (if they let the natural sex ratios develop to maturity, all those roosters spend most of their time fighting for dominance, which is not anyhow useful to farmers even if it is useful to evolution)
Sex ratio disruptors can be "external", such as the said farmers, or such as e.g. a Wolbachia infection, a parasite transmissible to offspring which decimates specifically the males. The F:M ratio of the affected butterfly species turns out like 100:1, which actually puts the species at risk of extinction in the longer term. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0304068101
The "Fischer equilibrium" postulates that there cannot be an "internal" sex ratio disruptor which could achieve fixation in the long term. But that principle is at best valid for "unconditional" sex ratio disruptors (I mean when an organism would *unconditionally* suppress a given fraction of male gametes after meiosis). In contrast, *conditional* sex ratio disruptors would not be ruled out by Fischer's postulates.
Here's an interesting paper which mentions some conditional disruptors that were observed, with references: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/36534 . In short, a female in really good condition is "evolutionarily incentivized" to produce more sons, because if those sons end up winners, the "returns" will be really large. Conversely, a female in a not-so-good condition is "incentivized" to produce more daughters, since the sons are less likely to be "winners" whereas the daughters will likely reproduce nonetheless.
The said paper does not offer the exact genetic mechanisms, but clarifies that this has been empirically observed. The paper is in fact guidance for Conservation Biology, and explains how this natural mechanism can be leveraged by conservationists to attain a non-balanced sex ratio which suits their purposes. The main thing is, such a *conditional* sex ratio disruptor *can* bypass Fischer's postulates.
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Supplementary feeding of the few remaining individuals of that species may have led to male-biased sex ratios because females in good conditions turned out to be more likely to have sons than daughters (Tella 2001, Clout et al. 2002). At one point in time, about 70% of all recorded offspring of this species were sons. Robertson et al. (2006) found that the male bias was significantly reduced when female condition was altered. Lenz et al. (2007) used this line of thought to work out the likely genetic and demographic consequences of analogous management actions in an existing captive breeding program for a Spanish population of the lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni), another polygynous bird that shows a correlation between family sex ratio and female condition: more daughters are born by mothers of average conditions, while more sons are born by mothers of good condition (Aparicio and Cordero 2001). The authors found that a sex-ratio management within the range that seems possible would significantly increase the efficiency of an existing captive breeding program.
I'd say that XY vs ZW *does* matter. This is a strategy that can only work for females, and that presumes the female can control the sex ratio. This is the case with ZW, not with XY. All the references in that cited passage were to birds, i.e. ZW.
To recap the strategy of the *conditional* sex ratio disruptor. /Conditional to/ being in above-average condition, the female organism will suppress female gametes (skewing to more sons), and /conditional to/ being in average condition or below, the female organism will suppress male gametes.
I don't know the details of the mechanism, but this looks very possible for a ZW female organism to do. (A female organism of the XY system cannot have much influence on the sex of the fertilizing gamete - that ratio is up to the male organism)
The principles of Fischer's equilibrium will prohibit the "fixation" of any genetic trait that would *unconditionally* disrupt sex ratios -- i.e. a trait for *always* producing 2x more male, or always 3x more female -- but those principles cannot stop the fixation of such *conditional* traits which are clearly beneficial for maximizing the count of descendants in the given circumstances. Such a species might even out at a 1:1 F:M ratio *overall*, but its higher-tier females will skew to more sons (given the high odds that *their* sons will be the winners), and the lower-tier females skew to more daughters. Basically, females are "betting on different tickets"; those tickets likely to yield the highest return (in grandchildren & beyond) *for them*.
This conditional strategy can work only for females. For males, the "conditional to being average or below average" part translates to "will not reproduce anyway" from the outset. Any sex ratio disruption enacted by *winning* males in XY systems, would not (effectively) be conditional, and will thus be wiped out by Fischer's equilibrium principles.
This seems to make XY systems "deadlocked" to 1:1 ratios across all parents, while ZW systems can let individual females skew the sex ratio of their offspring to the one that's most beneficial in their circumstances.
The threshold for females should not be simply average. The threshold for males should obviously not be average, but that doesn't mean it can't exist. And XX females can select on sex of sperm because X sperm and Y sperm are easily distinguished. For example, Y sperm move fast and die young.
There's (somewhat contentious) evidence that adaptive evolution happens quite quickly, and then there's a "drunkard's walk" kind of variation around that optimum. So if you put a bunch of modern sharks in the same environment as a bunch of ancient sharks, which would dominate would depend mainly on how closely the environment was to the one the particular groups of sharks were adapted form.
Most of the experiments confirming this have been done on bacteria, but there's some mildly confirmatory studies on the beaks of Galapagos finches. (I read it in print, and I didn't keep a copy, but you can probably find it if you search. It had to do with rapid evolutionary response to a drought.)
There are several different versions of "punctuated equilibrium". Some are widely accepted. Others are widely rejected. And there's a large clump in the middle.
I think most professionals feel that Gould went far beyond plausibility in "Wonderful Life", but much of the time he was quite plausible. And there's additional supporting evidence.
It's my impression that the general idea of punctuated equilibrium is widely accepted. How widely applicable it is, and how extreme the punctuation can be, are contentious.
(OTOH, I'm not a biologist, much less a specialist in that area.)
One of the big changes about 100 million years ago was the development of flowering plants, as well as a parallel set of developments in insects (including the true social insects like some termites, ants, and bees). The flowering plants and the social insects were obviously hugely successful over evolutionary time. But a modern one needs a whole ecosystem as it’s support (grasses won’t win if there aren’t grazers, and bright flowers won’t win unless there are insects attracted to them).
What are people's thoughts on how much retrenchment there is going to be in the housing market?
My wild guess has been 20-30%, from whatever is the peak in next year, to whatever is the low. A decent number of my social circle look to me for guidance and this is what I have been guessing. Does that seem reasonable to people? homes seem overpriced right now, but I am also not sure the structural things driving them up are going away.
I would agree with your 20-30% prediction but I think that monetary policy will be loosened again before it goes that low -- not to "save" the RE market but to lower the debt to gdp ratio.
I think it's gonna vary greatly from one submarket to another. E.g. in Sweden, it's been normal to have a 1% 50-year mortgage, giving a total cashflow of around 3% per year, whereas in Malta you'd typically have a 2.7% 30-year mortgage, giving a total of 6% per year, so an interest-rate hike is gonna hit twice as hard in Sweden as in Malta. Add to that that 81% of Swedish home owners have a mortgage, whereas only 27% of Maltese ones do. Just those two factors should give a difference of 6x in impact.
In London at least I don’t think they’ll crash - inflation may erode them a bit. While houses are over priced, everything else is cheap so people will continue to pump all their spare cash into housing. It is a supply of mortgages driven market. And even when mortgages cost more, people are reluctant to sell below what they last paid, so it will more freeze things.
Without other large market interventions (rental rights, stopping second or foreign home ownership, Georgism etc) I can’t see a crash happening. Without riots by young people about this, and political change.
(I expected larger crashes with the financial crisis and the pandemic and there weren’t so partly I’m learning by example)
There are few if any places with an excess of homes right now (other than markets like the rural Midwest that have been shrinking for decades). The work from home revolution has also caused a lasting increase in demand for housing space per household (which had already been slowly increasing for decades). It seems very plausible that there will be some kind of correction, but these structural factors will keep prices on a generally upward trajectory until there is a supply side fix.
20%-30% of housing equity or housing assets? The two get conflated a lot but the former is a levered return on the latter. If housing equity is down 20% and typically (in the US) mortgages are 80% LTV (loan to value) then the asset is down 4%. The same is true of volatility. If house equity has a volatility somewhat lower than equities (say 10%-15% per year) then housing asset volatilities are 2%-3%.
But if you believe in efficient markets, then the housing market should already have taken future interest rate and recession probabilities into account. Any particular house is not likely to look like an efficient market, but the housing market in aggregate should. There have been articles talking about how listed property prices are already being marked down. (https://www.redfin.com/news/price-drops-increase-may-2022/).
So I personally would not bet on prices dropping more unless the economy turns out to be worse. People in the aggregate are smarter than I am individually. And have deeper pockets.
Meh I don't have a lot of faith in the "efficient market hypothesis" for things like this, perhaps unless you go very long term. It was clear housing prices were badly overvalued in like 2003 in the US and yet they continued to rise for another 4 years before the shit hit the fan. I just don't think humans, even large numbers of them, or large institutions, are actually good at pricing in future changes, particularly if they are at all contingent.
You didn’t answer equity or assets, so I assume you mean equity. So housing assets down 4%-6% in a year. I think your band is too narrow (for 95% confidence) and too negative. But it will also be very dependent on what country and city you are in. (Not everyone on this blog is in the US.)
There are degrees of efficiency. The housing market has a lot of transaction costs and imperfect information so it is easy for an individual house to be priced inefficiently. With that said, if you knew, or it was known generally, that the house equity was going to fall 20%-30%, then prices would drop rapidly today on their way there.
My own view is assets will be somewhere between down 1% to up 1% in the next year (house equity will be down 5% to up 5%) where I am locally. Note that this implies I think that housing won’t earn its risk adjusted return so if I didn’t own a house, I wouldn’t buy one.
"With that said, if you knew, or it was known generally, that the house equity was going to fall 20%-30%, then prices would drop rapidly today on their way there."
Well maybe, depends on how many deluded/irrational buyers there are out there. We might all know that this painting is a piece of worthless garbage, but if 20 idiots want to trade it back and forth at $50 million +/- a couple %, then the price can easily stay that high.
I do agree that if there were widespread understanding there would for sure be such retrenchment, starting immediately.
IN my market which was not very overheated, but a bit hot housing prices have already fallen~5-10% over the past moth or two.
I think of places like Raleigh/Durham where housing is like 70% more expensive than it was 3 years ago. I would expect large retrenchment there, but I am totally open to the possibility I am wrong.
Only in some markets will there be a significant reduction in prices. Many markets may see prices stagnate. The structural issue is lack of supply and rising rates will only exacerbate that as builders won't build as much (to say nothing of zoning and regulatory issues). Unlikely 2008, lending standards have remained pretty high so you don't have lots of low quality mortgages out there with balloon payments or 0/negative equity.
I recently bought a house and in the process talked with realtors in three different markets (an easy coast primary, a mid west tertiary, and an east coast below tertiary). In all of them there were still high income people looking for houses and many willing to pay cash.
My simplistic view is that the past two years have seen high earners buying houses and driving up prices. Unlikely 2008, we haven't seen poor people going well beyond their means to buy houses. So there aren't many people who will be ruined by interest rates rising therefor they are unlikely to have to sell there homes which would increase supply.
I'd bear in mind that the current wave of inflation means that real housing prices are increasing by about 9 percentage points less than nominal housing prices, so some retrenchment is happening automatically and invisibly already.
The big structural things I see are:
1. Wealth effect from the big run-up in stock prices over the past few years. People with successful upper-middle-class careers and decent financial habits suddenly have a lot more assets (especially those who get paid partially in stock) available to spend on housing.
2. The proliferation of working from home during the plague years. If you're spending more time at home and you're doing more stuff that calls for dedicated home office space, then it makes sense to spend more of your income on housing.
WFH has also redistributed housing demand, as people freed from daily commutes have moved further from work. To pick one pair of datapoints, I moved from Sunnyvale (suburban Bay Area, a little but up the peninsula from San Jose) to Gilroy (exurb about an hour's drive south of downtown San Jose) a couple years before Covid hit. I just checked Redfin, and their current estimate for my old house is 21% higher than what I sold it for (almost all due to inflation) while my new house is estimated at 82% higher.
I’m looking for a recommendation for a very intro level monetary policy book. Also a history of money. I’m particularly interested why we went from a gold standard to what ever the standard is now. If the the book is available through audible that would be an added plus thanks!
They are "nothingbucks" no more than glittery piece of metal is worthless as long as central bank limits the supply of them and the government will accept them for payment of taxes and people trust either of them. I think it makes sense to view the fiat money as "backed" by their scarcity compared size to the economical value taxable by the government and the government's debts.
Like, any metal or land-based currency could also become much less valuable if everyone decides that gold, silver or land has much less value. (Land value notoriously can fluctuate. Maybe Musk finds an asteroid made of precious metals.)
I think even if you don't recognize the legitimacy of the government on an ideological level, fiat money still makes sense as "don't get thrown in jail by government thugs for tax evasion" coupons. The government issues the coupons, and demands that everyone hand over a certain number every year to not get arrested, your property seized, etc, with the amount based on tax law and the amount and type of economic activity the person or corporation engages in.
So under those circumstances it seems perfectly sensible for people to be willing to trade you valuable goods in exchange for those coupons.
Government exists to allow coordination and pooling of effort for common goals, in large groups of people. When done right, this gives the governed group (ie country) exponentially greater capability to survive, expand, gather resources, manipulate the physical world, increase knowledge, defend itself and many other desirable ends. This is why I think that (functional) government is legitimate.
Those "nothingbucks" are in fact a common contract between all users of that currency, to accept it as payment for things. This contract is enforced by the government, and is a good way to improve coordination.
I shouldn't be so disdainful of an agreement between a country's worth of individuals, backed up by their pooled, concentrated ability to apply physical force. Even a small country.
>I will never work and pay taxes again under any government
I assume you mean you intend to survive by what are, essentially, state handouts. That this is possible is proof that the people around you (ie your government) would rather provide its members with a minimal level of subsistence, than deal with the consequences of their sinking beneath it. The problem is that they might some day change their mind and stop supporting you. Not sure why you think that this will never happen, but that's your business, not mine.
>paying taxes in nothingbucks is mandated nonconsensually by government
Except that it isn't, if you aren't earning any, in any countries I'm aware of. Admittedly I have very limited knowledge about tax regulations.
Anyway, probably the term "contract" wasn't well chosen. Should have rather said "working arrangement" or some such. Either way, it's consensual, in that the arrangement can be revoked or altered, by (some form of) common agreement.
If you think that it's unethical towards yourself, that it's the majority imposing their will on you, you're right. But the system does work, on the average, rather well.
>But I didn't say that I think that this will never happen.
True, and I'm not criticizing your choices. Just pointing out a possible mode of failure, and why I wouldn't make that choice myself. Commenting gratuitously, as it were.
>Except that an actual contract is consensual and paying taxes in nothingbucks is mandated nonconsensually by government.
No, paying taxes is consensual in exactly the same way that a contract is. If I want you to contract to do something for me, you can choose to opt out, but you then have to forego whatever benefits I'm offering you, otherwise you leave yourself open to legal punishment. Likewise, if the government wants you to pay taxes, you can opt out, but then you have to forego whatever benefits the government is offering you, otherwise you leave yourself open to legal punishment.
The two situations are practically different in that some of the services a government offers, like defence against foreign attacks, are things that are offered indiscriminately to all those in a particular territory rather than to specific people. For this reason, opting out might require avoiding living in a particular area, which is not usually the case with a private contract. I see no reason why this difference should have any moral relevance, though.
> personally want nothing to do with - can't imagine - I also don't believe
So, we are now aware of your intuitions. What about people in the audience who do not share your intuitions?
For example, you mentioned housing property. I wouldn't find value of land/housing very much more trustworthy than government fiat. Value of housing property depends on economic outlook in general, not unlike fiat money. There is a possibility that VR becomes a genuinely big thing. If you can have hyperrealistic virtual experience with anyone, anywhere, maybe the physical distance is finally reduced to nothing and much fewer people have a pressing need to live in the cities. And value of housing property in cities comes from people finding it valuable to live where all the other people are.
Nevertheless, even if the Metaverse kicks off, I am quite certain that transactions in Metaverse and equipment to access it will be subject to VAT by some form of government.
I mean, if we're asking "why have money at all", the answer is "because it lets you run an economy with a lot less deadweight loss".
Barter economies have a lot of economic activity that can't happen (outside a tight-knit commune) because person A produces X and demands Y, person B produces Y and demands Z, and person C produces Z and demands X. For goods you can *somewhat* compensate via chain-of-deals, but this requires everyone to know the relative value of all things at all times (overhead loss via time wasted), tends to require a lot more moving of items (overhead loss via transport costs), and doesn't work for services.
Money cuts through this - it's easily transported, and people only need to know the price of things they produce or consume in money.
The problem with property title (at least if you mean real estate) is that different blocks of land aren't fungible; I don't know how much your house is worth compared to other houses, and it is expensive for me to discover this.
In theory, I suppose you could have some large communal lot of which people owned shares, and then use the shares as money, but then you're right back to "we promise we won't print more shares" (Revolutionary France basically did this with the assignats).
Trouble with energy is that it's expensive to store and retrieve, making it tricky to use it as a sound currency. Also, not everywhere is necessarily plugged into the grid.
I'm not sure that everyone needs to know the relative value of all the things all the time for a barter network to function. My guess is that people need to know relative values a few steps from themselves, but not for the whole net. Thoughts?
For a history of money I'd go with Jacob Goldstein "Money: The True Story of a Made up Thing". He's a good communicator and doesn't come with the same baggage as the other title I've read on the topic (Debt by David Graeber).
We needed more money than there was gold to back it I think is the basic answer. We wanted to use shrinking and growing the monetary supply as an economic tool, and that is much easier if its value doesn't need to be directly tied to gold.
Unless a cent was backed by less than a single gold atom, then I don’t see how this is supposed to work as an explanation. Mind filling in that argument a bit?
but if there's "not enough money" that just makes each individual dollar bill more valuable... the only time you run into problems is, as Adam V states, if the smallest possible denomination of money doesn't match up with the smallest possible denomination of gold, at which point we'd have to like, start using halfpennies or whatever
Say we want 10,000 monies. And we want 10 monies to be worth 1 gold. So we need 1,000 gold to "back up" our monies.
There are 10 other identical countries, and combined there is 15,000 gold in the world. So countries hold 2/3rds of the gold to back up their monies.
Now economic conditions change and he countries want there to be 20,000 monies.
But we are unable to get another 1,000 gold because other countries are doing the same thing, and there is not enough gold for all countries to hold 2,000 monies to back up their gold.
Yes we could all devalue our monies, but if we anticipate needing to increase the supply of monies again in the future, and we worry that constant devaluing is going to reduce people's trust in the value of monies.
It might be thought as more beneficial to just rip off the bandage and let the value of monies float in relation to the price of gold instead of maintaining the fiction that a fixed amount of monies are in theory exchangeable for a fixed amount of gold.
Let's imagine you are a king with a pile of gold. You need the gold to pay for the army which secures your throne. You also need gold for a bunch of other government stuff, but as long as you keep your army you can get more gold raising more taxes or invading other kingdoms.
Now, the quantity of gold may be very large, but it's finite. There's only so much gold you can capture until it's either not enough for all the things you want to do or maybe there is but it's controlled by other kings with large armies you won't necessarily be able to defeat. If you want to grow past that point, and you do because the alternative is to be conquered yourself, you need some mechanism to increase the gold supply.
Since your regular alchemists failed again and again to physically turn lead into gold, you call your super-alchemists (aka: economists) and they suggest you look for other valuable stuff your soldiers would accept for payment instead of gold, such as silver or lead or salt, and you find out that instead of 1 gold they agree to accept 10 salt. Then you realise that when you make a symbolic abstraction like that, stuff becomes virtually interchangable. The same way you valued gold as some amount of soldiers you could hire with it, and your soldiers saw gold as some amount of food or cute outfits they could buy, people can see anything as "some amount of gold they can buy". Then as A = B and B = C implies C = A, you can skip the gold, and if you want you can have pieces of infinitely printable "king-paper" represent money.
For the scheme to work it must cut boths ways. For example if you raise taxes, people must be able to pay you in king-paper, or it won't be considered real money. You are a very smart and powerful king with a big army, so there is an incentive for people to want to have a reserve of king-paper to pay you with, and now there is a king-paper economy as people scramble to get enough king-paper.
However, if you have to much king-paper lying around, people won't have to work as hard to get the amount they need and it will become less valuable and you'll have inflation. At the same time, if you start losing wars or ruling poorly in general, people won't think you're such a smart and powerful king with such a mighty army and won't feel as pressed to pay your taxes, and you'll have a similar effect.
I enjoyed What has the Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard. It's concise, easy to read and understand for a non-economist, and spans a really long time frame of monetary history.
Heh. Missed that. I'll offer as an excuse that I had to get up early yesterday for a flight, so I was exhausted. My other excuse is that I suck at spelling.
Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" is a pretty good history of money. Or at least, I assume it is. I read it about five years ago and can't remember a word it said, but I enjoyed it at the time.
It's quite good, yeah. A nice pairing with the Graeber Debt book as well, since they have roughly opposite biases. (Ferguson is a bit more careful than Graeber with his sources, though)
I’m not his biggest fan, but The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is a pretty decent primer on the evolution of economic history and the development of most major financial institutions and arrangements. Might be up your alley
Nobody mentioned "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous. It's written from a pro-Bitcoin, Austrian-school point of view. The Austrian school of economics is quite fringe, but popular within Libertarian and NRx circles.
The book is interesting in terms of its account of economic policy up to the Great Depression, though I don't know how much of what it says is true. Later, it says
> it was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.
and the book doesn't get any better from there. It also tries to discredit Keynes by accusing him of being a paedophile.
Also, Ammous is a rabid Covid denier who says we shouldn't eat anything but meat.
And he is definitely no friend of Israel. I got interested in his Austrian School economics course but the Israel thing turned me off. Still I like Allen Farrington's writing ("Bitcoin us Venice" and many posts) though everyone I talk to about bitcoin tells me it stinks.
Hey, that's my question exactly! I don't have a clear picture of money in my head, but I got a couple of useful pieces from various sources.
* [core econ](https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents.html) -- that's the general intro to economics, very little is dedicated to money per se, but it taught me the relationship between unemployment and inflation (specific ideas: 1. some amount of inflation is good because it makes it easier to "cut" wages when the situation calls for it 2. with low unemployment wages go up, which causes the price to go up, which is one reason for inflation). It also taught me what the heck the business cycle is.
* [modern monetary theory](https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Money-Theory-Macroeconomics-Sovereign/dp/1137539909) -- heterodox economics book with rather obnoxious writing style, but it did clear up some things for me which were glossed over in other sources. Specifically, how the money actually originate. Specific ideas I've learned from it is interdependence of monetary and fiscal policies: state budget is not like a family budget, logically, the state just burns whatever revenue is gets (from, eg, taxes), and just prints the money whenever it needs to spend. There's no physical "conservation of money" law which would require the money emitter state's budget to be balanced. The second idea I've learned is that of the trilemma of "pick any three of a) independent monetary policy 2) stable exchange rate 3) free flow of capital across the borders"
With that, my layman explanation for the gold standard thing. The core explanation is the trilemma mentioned above. Basically, the following three things are desirable:
* Active monitory policy: as a state, you'd like the ability to control, to some extend, the value of money. You'd like to print, or burn, money when it is convenient. Two specific cases you'd want this in is for counter-cyclical stabilization (if there's a recession and no one spends, you want to use lose monetary policy to promote spending), and for competitiveness on global markets (if you are a developing country, you want your currency to be cheap, so that its profitable for other countries to import the goods your produce)
* Stable exchange rate: knowing, for sure, that x dollars is the same as y pounds helps with long-term planing
* Free movement of capital across the borders, so that you can make money in one country and then invest in another one.
If you allow free capital movement and fix the exchange rate, you can't just print money. If you allow active monetary policy and stable exchange rate, you need to restrict capital movement to prevent arbitrage. If you allow active monetary policy and unrestricted capital movement, than relative price of two moneys would vary!
Gold standard is one particular way to set a stable exchange rate. So, gold standard has to go if we want free capital movement and active monetary policy. In the XX century, this happened twice.
At the start of the century, major economies were on independent gold standards. But then WWI and great depression happened, and they motivated governments to establish active monetary policy, so gold standard was abandoned.
After WWII, we got Bretton Woods, which re-installed gold-standard for dollar, and, indirectly, for other currencies (by virtue of mostly fixed exchanged rates with dollar). Up until 1970, this worked well, but then we got a big, raising inflation. To combat inflation you can use monetary policy, but to have monetary policy the gold standard has to go.
Empathically, I am very much not an economist, so the above can be terribly off the mark! As I've said in the beginning, I myself am looking for a source which describes how global financial system works and the current limits of our understanding of it.
"The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression" by Scott Sumner sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Full disclosure: I haven't read the book itself, but have read his econoblogging for over a decade.
>I’m particularly interested why we went from a gold standard to what ever the standard is now.
The short version is that most of the big, rich countries went broke in the Interwar years, between war debts, veterans' pensions, the depression, dysfunctional domestic politics, and the mess around German war reparations. Devaluing currencies and suspending gold payments was the most politically feasible way of defaulting on national debts and promises to veterans at the time, especially once the first few countries had set the trend.
Post-WW2, everyone got together and "restored" a sort of make-believe gold standard. Most countries promised to redeem their currencies to all comers in a fixed ratio to US dollar and the US promised to redeem dollars for gold at a fixed ratio (but only to central banks of countries with dollar-backed currency). This worked pretty well in the 50s, limped along during the 60s, and collapsed completed in the early 70s. The core problem was that everyone had inflationary monetary policies, causing periodic fiscal crises in countries with more inflation than the US (where they had to either suddenly devalue their currencies against dollars or somehow scrape together enough dollars to cover redemptions) and causing US gold reserves to dwindle as the easiest way to get more dollars in a hurry was to cash in what dollars you had for gold at $35 dollars an ounce, then sell gold on the open market ($97 dollars an ounce in 1973 when the US officially suspended redemptions of dollars for gold). Before suspending redemptions, the US had tried import and international investment restrictions (to make it harder for dollars to leave the country and get into the hands of foreign central banks), joint efforts with other countries to manipulate the international market price of gold, and badgering other countries into limiting their redemptions of dollars for gold.
I think a troll will usually respond to what the stereotypical person with your beliefs would have said, whereas a good faith person responds to what you actually say
A sufficiently good troll will be indistinguishable from a sufficiently mind-killed True Believer, for whatever value of "sufficiently" you wish to use. Also, there's a form of not-very-serious exploratory argumentation I've sometimes engaged in where even I'm not sure whether or not I'm trolling. So as a discreet variable: no, but as a continuous one: also no in terms of being correct in your diagnosis, but maybe you can do well enough to manage for purposes of ethics et al.
As to the second question, human trolls have to be dealt with by humans, while bots have to be dealt with by AI. This makes human trolls a thornier issue, but not necessarily a greater problem, if only because labeling trolls a "problem" isn't so straightforward (with Michael Malice and company screaming from the sidelines). I can offer only my opinion that I prefer trolls to bots, but YMMV.
I think your first point is good enough that it makes me think trolls are the bigger problem. Since figuring out who is a bot and who is a human is at least theoretically possible (for now) but figuring out who is a troll....
Funny you ask, I actually just wrote a post a few hours ago where I propose a system for signalling good faith on Twitter, and that solution, if it worked, would work for bots too.
For purposes of law, it is trivial, as there already exists plenty of law that relies on intent. In practice, I believe that it is impossible to tell the difference between a troll and a person with exotic opinions. E.g. there are people who think that the world should be turned into a caliphate where pagan children are used as sex slaves. Clearly someone who pretended to hold those opinions could be a successful troll in a Western context, and they'd be indistinguishable from someone who earnestly holds those opinions.
Bots are probably a bigger threat overall, but a particularly dedicated troll can cause more damage than any bot. Thankfully, most trolls are just looking for quick and easy sources of amusement, so they aren't particularly dedicated - but the ones who are actually trying to prove some kind of point through deception, infiltration, false flagging, and other bad faith tactics can be quite dangerous.
I love that this is a bannable offense. FDB bans mono-obsessed types who only want to talk gender ideology, ACT bans know-it-alls who don't share what they know. Both very on-brand!
I mean FDB improved (I guess?) from banning dissident takes on gender ideology to kinda banning any talk of gender ideology. Scott doesn't seem to have remotely the adversarial relationship with his commentariat that FDB has
Yeh, he doesn’t seem to like his comment section at all. Gender ideology is important, in my view, one of the most important aspects of the culture wars, and something that leftwing posters could easily oppose. That said I rarely comment on it unless it’s in the main post.
FDB stands for Freddie deBoer, for anyone that had to do some confused googling like I did. This [1] is the comment policy post in question. (Someone let me know if direct-linking another blog's drama like that crosses the line into bad form)
Looking again at his blog, I realized I had previously looked into FDB when I ran out of things from Scott to read, and had bounced off of it when my initial (and possibly incorrect) impression that most of his popular articles seemed to be sneering at liberals/the left (like Scott tbf), and that unlike Scott his commentariat leaned heavily conservative to outright reactionary.
Freddie therefore seems a lot more surprised than I would be that such a commentariat would veer into "simple, straightforward transphobia" and not flag any of it. (The tumblrite in me suggests the "surprised pikachu face" meme). There's a lot to say on how his method of comment cultivation seems to validate the popular "bad" takes on the paradox of tolerance. It also impresses me at how well Scott seems to have cultivated his own commentariat.
That being said, finding out that FDB the author and FDB the commentariat are so at odds with one another makes me realize that my initial evaluation of his blog was incorrect and I should update on that.
Thank you for sharing that link, I definitely don't want to confuse people. I was just struck by seeing 'bannable offenses' coming around the same time period from two people I admire greatly (and who have been influences on my own perspectives). I'm not against either of their very specific bans, it was just striking to me.
Despite the sneering at certain elements of current progressive sociopolitical culture, Freddie is a very-left socialist. However, because he is anti-woke discourse, his substack certainly includes a kind of built-in audience that may be surprised at his actual political stances. I in turn have been surprised at their surprise. He makes no secret of his Marxism.
I think the distance between Freddie's politics and some of his commentariat's politics has been off-putting to him. It looks like he has tried to clarify that with this post:
I would also argue that a lot of Freddie's readers are both anti-woke and genuinely leftist. I recognize that this is a rare combination of views in the discourse, but I think it's pretty common in Freddie's commentariat. Hence why the level of mutual incomprehension between FdB and the commentariat is so high when it comes to gender ideology. At least some number of commenters who know exactly what his opinions are feel like Freddie is making a weird exception to his otherwise anti-woke leftist views (which are also their views) by his uncomplicated support for modern trans activism. And then being unnecessarily intolerant of people asking why he makes this weird exception.
Interesting assessment, I didn't look at it that way. I may be guilty of assuming that most of his substack commentariat are more center-left, as I see an overlap between his audience and the basically center-left audience of BARpod.
However, I wouldn't necessarily say his support for trans activism is "uncomplicated" as he has put forward a few thoughts here & there on the unnecessary divisiveness of certain trans activist tactics (prior to banning the topic altogether). I think what we may be seeing is Freddie making a choice to ban discussion of this topic because (1) he has personal stakes in unequivocably supporting trans communities and (2) he has a lot of topics that he'd like to discuss and is irritated when this specific topic appears to return repeatedly, no matter the topic discussed. It is certainly an exception but he's articulated his reasoning clearly enough for me to not consider it a weird exception or even unnecessarily intolerant.
I regularly read the comments on Freddie's blog and I never saw the trans issue come up except where he'd brought it up in an article. Granted, if he did bring it up, even in passing, the issue was liable to eat a large amount of comment space. That's a fair criticism, but I think he goes too far in saying it 'always comes up' regardless of the context.
It was good of Freddie to finally admit his personal stake in the issue. To my knowledge, he hadn't ever brought it up before, and I bet commenters won't push him as hard to make his views make sense now that he's located those views as more or less emotionally and relationally motivated.
I don't think this is a fair read. Freddie isn't a fan of the woke approach in this field any more than any other. The article that set this off was partly a critique of woke political strategy in this as well as other areas. What he does is uncomplicated support of trans *people*, which gets push back in the comments as he described - California turning its prisons into an all you can rape buffet and so - which shocks and pisses him off. It's not people in his comments gently questioning his support for the woke in this instance, it's them repeatedly and at great length misgendering trans-women and accusing them, as a class, of being male perverts looking to batter their way into way into women's spaces in order to sexually abuse them.
Read the comments on the article that pushed him over the edge. They'll blow your hair back.
(oh good, people are talking about this elsewhere, I'd so wanted to comment on said policy change but not risk a ban doing so in that particular garden)
The weird part for me, as a member of said minority group ostensibly having this done for our own good and sensibilities, is...like...Freddie's bafflement that No One Bothered To Flag These Egregious Comments. I saw them all, including the Exhibit A buffet one, and didn't flag because...I wasn't aware that was considered part of my job as a reader? Many things I read online cause some amount of offense. But I don't ever Officially Flag them unless it's *way* outta line. Partly cause I learned to grow a really thick skin in previous roles as a content moderator. (If you chase every minor offense, you'll never do any real work and/or burn out. Especially if you yourself are a minor minority. Gotta get used to harder punches faster.)
But partly, or maybe mostly, cause of picking up the Principle of Charity heuristic from Scott. Even when someone directly attacks me, I am much more inclined to <s>epically take them down with a huge Wall of Text</s> civically debate and try to make them admit error, or at least take a social status hit. This is both much more personally satisfying, and also avoids cultivating the victimhood culture/Karen habit of Calling The Manager when faced with self-solvable problems. I feel like it goes against the sort of "We're All Adults Here" vibe that helps differentiate the ACX commentariat from FdB's.
So yeah, those comments were unpleasant and I don't condone them; yet they still didn't bother me *enough* that I felt compelled to either reply with my own comments or escalate the matter to security. Like many such comment shitstorms, it sure looked like one of those inevitable disasters that coulda been headed off early by not pouring fuel on the fire. That seems just as much a self-policing failure as no one filing Official Reports. It's <current_year>, I don't know why people haven't more broadly realized knee-jerk whiteknighting protects no one and is a huge bait for further offensiveness...
(I guess that's a "selection effect"? Comment policy ever has some effect, but the starting commentariat matters a ton too. FdB is an intentionally abrasive guy, so that's the kind of scrapper who's attracted to his blog, for worse or better.)
Yeah I agree that was especially noxious. I, having never posted a single comment pertaining to gender issues, cancelled my subscription over it. He practically dared people to leave.
I usually comment here rather than over there, so I didn't see it until it was over. If I had, I don't know that I would have reported either. I typically only report in pretty extreme circumstances. More likely I would have either gotten involved or closed the page.
I think someone he knows in real life saw the comments and said something like "WTF, dude? You're hosting trans-hate board. That's fucked up." But really, it might just have been that he tripped back into the comment section after having written a piece he was (justifiably) proud of, and then read with mounting horror until he was fed up and decided he was done.
Thing is, I don't think he'll be able to keep his new policy. One of his big topics is political strategy, and how the current Dem version is dumb, because it brings focus to the least popular parts of our agenda while being quiet about the most popular ones. He almost can't write an article about that without touching on our handling of support for the trans community.
Thank you, in turn, for sharing that link to his views. It appears I was indeed severely mistaken as to his actual views, since that article aligns very closely with my own, save some minor quibbles.
He appears have a real optics problem, especially in regards to the "most popular" section on his substack landing page. It seems to be one he wants to address as well, given the desperate tone in both those links, but I'm not sure what to suggest there.
Can anyone point me to a trustworthy source of info on the bioavailability of protein from various sources / amino acid coverage / ways to increase absorbation of protein ?
I'm not a scientist so I can't tell you how trustworthy the source is, but there was a recent study of this that suggests animal protein has higher uptake in human cells than plant protein: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220622101314.htm
It's neither open access nor on scihub, so I can't comment in detail.
From the abstract and methods, they show that on average, soybean meat analogue proteins (not all plant proteins!) penetrate cells with more difficulty than proteins from chicken breast. However...
- the reduced permeability might still be enough to absorb nearly all of the plant protein
- there'll be a fraction with good permeability and a fraction with bad permeability in both soy 'meat' and chicken, it's just that their proportions might differ
- the digestion is simulated in vitro, which may have important differences with the in vivo process
There's also this gem of a sentence in the abstract:
> The amino acid composition showed fewer essential and non-essential amino acids in the MA permeate than in the CB permeate.
So uh... there's more essential than non-essential? The opposite? Less protein per unit mass? From their own chart the profiles are pretty similar, with small differences in both directions.
Each individual protein from a given organism will have somewhat different bioavailability of its amino acids (depending on how difficult it is to break it down with your digestive enzymes). On the level of an entire cell all this noise should mostly cancel out.
Is there any particular reason you want to increase protein absorbtion? It seems easier to just drink a whey protein shake every now and then if you're concerned you may be deficient.
Thanks for refrence, most helpful. Particular reason is I'm interested in increasing muscle mass but don't enjoy supplements, shakes, and am a choosy eater. So looking to min max sources.
For dietary sources, mushrooms are a good, low calorie, addition. IIRC they supply some essential amino acids that are otherwise (relatively) scarce.
My source, once upon a time, was a paperback published by the FDA called something like "Nutritional sources", but a brief search didn't turn it up, so they may have stopped publishing it.
The endpoint of this research will ultimately be the "Master Amino Acid Pattern" type supplements. Essentially, a Real Doctor did research on the ideal ratio of the various amino acids for absorption by humans, and then formulated a supplement that was just pure amino acids in exactly those ratios. The patent ran out not too long ago, and now there are a lot supplements that follow the formulation, eg Perfect Aminos, Fortagen, the original MAP supplement, etc.
Quite a few protein yoghurts and puddings have appeared lately, so much that between diversity and good macro profile, I consider the issue solved. Most have milk as a protein source, which is up there in the top tier of sources.
What's the best resource for explaining how natural selection can produce changes that seem to require a concert between systems (the ability to fly) or are highly complex (the eye)? The old how do you get to certain evolved outcomes through gradualism when it seems that the benefits would only accrue at the end question. I think I understand the answer but I make a hash of explaining it.
My understanding is that the eye isn’t actually a good example of that. I believe jellyfish are an example of an animal that has a primitive eye: it can basically only sense how much light is going onto it. This is still useful (you can tell which way is up, day/night cycles, etc). Since the base case is already useful, it’s pretty easy to imagine how intermediate developments could be better, as opposed to flight, where you can glide or you can’t it seems.
I think flight could have been gradual too. You start with an animal that jumps, or slows its fall by spreading out its body (ordinary squirrels do this on the rare occasions they fall out of trees). Then it evolves skinflaps or bigger feathers in order to jump further or slowfall more effectively. After a while it become a glider, and after a while more its glides start to edge into true flight.
We have examples of animals now that do the jump-and-glide strategy, so this seems plausible. But I don't know about insects. Maybe there are intermediate steps where you use wings so when you fall (you could drop a beetle from an airplane and it would suffer no harm, thanks to high surface area/volume) you get better control of where you land? Or for catching breezes and gliding where you want to go?
With insects it's more complex to explain, because below a certain size larger wings are worse. It seems that wings probably evolved as a thermoregulatory measure for smaller insects, and then morphed into flight aids as the size increased.
All Dawkins' biology books are good - the man become famous for a good reason! Some contain things now know to be false but AFAIK all things that were thought true at the time of publication.
It is a shame his militant atheism has made people forget about his excellent prior work, regardless of whether they agree with his views on religion
I think a lot of modern evolutionary biology textbooks would handle this pretty well, most of the standard examples are not really that difficult to explain through gradualism.
Something is getting lighter for some other reasons. Then it is jumping for some reason or other. Then it is getting some extension of tissues to glide further, then it is flapping occasionally the extend flight. And eventually flying. Meanwhile there are all sorts of other changes slowly accumulating/varying. Some things start down the "path" towards X, then go backwards. Look at whales, came to live on land, then went back to the sea.
IMO (biologists, please correct me), one problem is that 9th grade biology would give peppered moths as a primary example of evolution. It makes it seem like an all or nothing thing. But for most traits, something that turns a certain death into a 99% death could be enough to become dominant with a large enough population and enough generations.
Darwin used the evolution of the eye to explain natural selection, so he's best. As for the evolution of flight, it's a lot easier for a small animal to fly than a big one. Most of our ancestors were smaller than us and bred a lot. Evolution doesn't require us to fit our environment, it requires us to have ancestors who fit their previous environment. We are on our own.
The distinction is usually made between traits for which each step along the evolutionary path is advantageous, and traits for which intermediate states do not seem advantageous. In the first case, it does not matter that the structure is complex like the eye, it is enough to add additional evolutionary steps, each of which is advantageous and therefore likely. The diversity of present-day eyes of mollusks are fine examples of present-day eyes with widely varying levels of complexity.
For traits like flight where gradual selection does not seem possible because the intermediate steps are not advantageous (a half wing does not allow flight...), the usual explanation is exaptation. This term was proposed by SJ Gould to replace the loaded term "pre-adaptation" and it means that the intermediate steps were in fact advantageous, and therefore easy to explain by classical natural selection, but for another function. A half-wing does not allow you to fly, but it can allow you to glide somewhat; wingless feathers do not allow you to fly, but they can insulate you, etc.
surprised nobody linked the lesswrong sequence on evolution, there's a great explainer of this
basically, first you evolve trait A, which conveys positive fitness and reaches fixation in the population
then you evolve trait B, which conveys positive fitness etc
then you evolve trait A*, an alternate version of A which is only fitness-positive in the presence of B.
Then you evolve C, which is only fitness-positive in the presence of A* and B
Then you get B*, and D, and C*, etc etc etc
in the end you have a huge system of interlocking traits that all depend on each other, where if you remove a single part the whole thing breaks, but it still evolved incrementally one gene at a time
Maybe because the sequences are pretentious and not better at explaining their topics than most introductory texts on the relevant field? That is an uncharitable response, but a semi-serious one.
I'll preferentially consult the relevant textbook when I have it in arm's reach and know where in the book to look, but that usually takes having read the book before in the first place. "Read some introductory texts in the relevant discipline, maybe the answer you want will be in there" is an extremely inefficient strategy compared to a link. (Especially when the link might be in a jargon the reader is already familiar with!)
I think it is likely much more efficient than consulting the sequences? IDK I find textbooks to mostly be super easy to follow and tractable, often providing of relevant graphics and supporting information, and salient examples. And typically they build off themselves, so if you don't understand one section, you can go back to the previous one.
Just going back and looking at the sequence on evolution just now, I would strongly recommend someone look up a textbook instead. I don't find it a particularly good response to the original question.
-- "Look up an introductory textbook" isn't actionable - *Introductory Text* isn't a title I can look up in a library. There's typically a wealth of sources to choose from, and little to no evidence as to which will be useful or well-fitted to the asker's question or level of existing familiarity. If the responder can give a specific title and chapter a different story, but then you run into issues of accessibility.
-- "Take an introductory course" is an overgrown version of the courtier's reply, where the responder is telling the asker to dedicate a couple hundred hours of work in response to a question. It's not a bad-faith response per se, since it probably *will* answer the question, and have the side benefit of making tangential knowledge easy to access in the future, but it's massive overkill to address *the question asked*.
IME, people who give the first answer often themselves got the answer originally by doing the second, and there's a huge discrepancy between what you can learn from a refresher and what you can learn from first exposure. Curse of Knowledge, and all that.
(There's a longer rant about how this intersects with the Sequences in particular, but that's probably just a personal sore spot and not really germane. Maybe another time.)
I think your response is fair, that said...my first response to point 1 is:
Well sure "look up an introductory textbook" is absolutely Actionable! You do some googling or go to a library, and open a book. I might be a little too flippant about it because I have a couple thousand books in my house (library book sales FTW).
The vagueness of my response was because I don't think the particular textbook likely matters a lot, most will cover the question of how you get "macroevolution" from "microevolution" because it is always one of the first questions people have and was one of the main arguments against Darwin during his time.
Nor do I have a particular favorite textbook myself that I remember (I took advanced biology in 1997?).
I agree it is not as high quality or useful a response as "here is a link to a specific discussion that covers this exact topic succinctly and well".
But I did not have such a link/resource. And while my suggestion might take a couple hours to implement, he might not get a suggestion of your preferred type for several days/hours or possibly ever. So providing him the knowledge that this is likely covered in any random intro evolutionary biology textbook he picks up is valuable.
Scanning through a couple textbooks for a discussion you are interested in is absolutely not remotely as much work as "taking a whole course".
And I also did take into account that I don't think this particular topic is going to involve a lot of jargon or require reading a bunch of other sections of a textbook to understand. The people who frequent this blog are mostly fairly bright and have a decent level of background knowledge.
I'd check out multilevel selection theory. I think it specifically focuses on systems-level natural selection - systems of cells, genes, people, groups, etc..
Uncomplex Thing A and uncomplex Thing B evolve and then it turns out that Thing A and Thing B can combine to form a *more* complex Thing C (which is the eye or whatever).
So, I saw the open thread before anyone else had posted and was suddenly filled with an urge to post “first!” I’m not normally one to do such things, and it got me wondering about why there was a temptation, whether it was because it was forbidden, or some obscure sense of accomplishment. Did anyone else get this urge, and if so, thoughts as to why?
Not sure what this says about me, but I also hate when people do this, and I never pass people... I'm always the one driving slow. When someone goes to pass, I slow down to make it easy. I want them as far out of my life as they want me out of theirs.
After seeing the post come in in the early morning here and seeing two comments already I resisted the urge to post “Third!”. Which wasn’t illegal in the letter, but perhaps in the spirit of the rule.
Which is why I wanted to post it. I chickened out.
Because doing things to spite whoever thinks they can order you around is an excellent, if antisocial, heuristic. Scott is nice enough for most of us to go along with his wishes.
You can sometimes use the introduction of a rule to infer the existence of an advantage to be exploited by approaching or breaking the boundary set by the rule. You do not need to necessarily understand the advantage to exploit it.
Is there an accepted way for an English speaker to pronounce "metis"? I've been saying mettiss, but should I be saying meetiss instead? I want to sound not like a pedant, but like a regular schmuck who goes around saying "metis" a lot.
So, this came up in the Intelligence course I taught for the New Centre. The correct answer (according to my co-teacher, PhD in ancient phil) is MAY-tis.
I don't know how complicated it really is – the first sentence of the top answer is "As Asteroides has said, the 'classical' pronunciation (from the fifth century BCE or thereabouts) is reconstructed as /ɛː/, a longer version of the vowel in English 'red'." The second answer, by the referenced Asteroides, likewise points out that η is always a monophthong and that "The standard reconstruction for Classical Attic Greek η is [ɛː]". The rest is just various minor disputations about why textbooks sometimes deliberately give it wrong, or how the language changed in subsequent millennia.
As for the circumflex I'm sorry to have to contradict you: it is actually understood to denote a *falling* pitch (on a long vowel only), not a rising one, which would be denoted by the acute. However, since English is not a pitch-accented language I think it's fair to say this has no clean bearing on the correct pronunciation in English, in the same way that we would expect Chinese tones to be omitted even for the purpose of an otherwise "proper" pronunciation – that trait of the languages is just too far apart to account for.
What struck me is that there's a second system (Erasmus!) that seems to be used for pedagogy. That's the one I must have learned in my brief exposure years back.
I think we agree on the pronunciation, though — a sort of elongated "e" that stays "pure"/doesn't turn into a dipthong. I promise not to try to sing it.
It appears there's some sort of confusion here – I am absolutely saying that eta is to be pronounced as e-as-in-red, only long. "Red" and "fellow" contain the same vowel sound, at least in my dialect. I too would pronounce Pericles' name that way.
Or, do you just mean that it's weird that others could be confused on this point? In that case I apologize for this pointless reply.
The way I've always heard it, Greek names ending with -es rhyme with cheese. I would not be at all surprised to learn that this is not the authentic Greek pronunciation, but it would weird to hear an English speaker pronounce it differently.
I am a relatively new father. My daughter will be three in October. It's a bit early as she is not exactly school age, but I am considering unschooling her (or, as people in that community prefer to call it, "self-directed learning"). I am posting here in the hopes that someone in this community of free thinkers might have some advice for me (or be willing to talk to me sometime).
For those who are not aware, self-directed learning is a version of homeschooling in which children decide what they want to learn, and parents (or other mentors) act as facilitators. My daughter is interested in cars? Ok, I try to find her a mechanic in my community who can show her how to repair an engine. Later she is interested in amphibians, so we spend time at the creek observing the frogs. Supplement this with some instruction in things that I have decided we should invest in (basic mathematics, literature, etc.), and those are the rough contours of her education. The basic premise is that children are deeply curious and love to learn -- nourishing whatever interests them will make them independent, curious, confident.
I know this is not scaleable (at least not now). That's why I am not proposing this as a solution for all children. I also know that she will benefit from socialization, which is why she would still take part in our town's sports, play with friends, etc. And I know this will be time consuming. Thankfully I am a remote employee and my partner raises our daughter full time. We live in the woods in Massachusetts, which gives us ample time, space, and resources to pull this off.
In broad strokes, here is what inspired me to consider this form of education:
- Looking back at my own education, I'm often disappointed that I learned about the French Revolution five times but never learned the basics of financial responsibility, never learned how to fix a car, never learned how to talk about how I was feeling, never learned how to cook. Purely from a curriculum perspective, I want to offer my daughter an education that is more aligned with a full life.
- Our schools (rightly) seem to optimize for scale. After all, those teachers have a lot of students to teach! I think this means we revert to the tools and values that operate best at scale -- tests with very specific answers that make grading more efficient, memorization, obedience to authority, etc. The output, at least for most of my friends, was a bunch of high work ethic capitalists who knew little of themselves, the land around them, and the skills that really sustain one in this world (aside from making money).
The part of this whole thing that gives me the most pause is that I have done quite well as a product of these aforementioned schools. I became a critical thinker who knows myself well. I play the working game well enough to make a great living but not so well that it's the only game I have time for. So, if I did fine, maybe I should just trust the process and hope that my daughter does fine as well?
Thanks in advance for any articles, experiences, acerbic comments, or other opinions :)
I'm a product of public schools and a public university and did well enough but also know that I have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of human behavior and decision-making and I think that's served me well in life (to the irritation of many to this day that must listen to my questions). My son went the same route and well....not the same outcome. Would he have done better with "self-directed learning?" Hard to say as neither of his parents really had the time to devote to supporting that (another topic altogether). Bryan Caplan has some of the best advice I've read on this topic - https://www.econlib.org/emergency-homeschooling-a-how-to-guide/ and agree with his emphasis on math.
We home school, so I wholeheartedly support that component. However, we’ve read our fair share of horror stories of homeschoolers who unschool, so we are definitely not doing that.
FWIW, my wife and I are products of the system, and we did well, but we both feel that we did well “by accident”.
We used curricula that practitioners of the field that also homeschool use. So, my wife found a “mathematicians who homeschool” group somewhere and used what the majority of them used for math. And then we found a literacy coach who homeschools and used what she used for reading. And so on
We practiced laissez faire homeschooling in my family, starting out more structured with the basics, and becoming increasingly interest driven as we progressed, until as a teen I was mostly just doing a dozen 4-H projects and reading lengthy novels, then transferred to community college at 16.
For the most part, this was good. You don't seem likely to fall into the most common traps of religious extremism and oppressing children in order to have your family look a certain way. As far as I can tell, conscientiousness and intelligence are the biggest determinants of what kind of job a person will do well at, which schooling has little effect on.
Some things are way easier to arrange than others, depending on your network and organizational skill. Learning the kinds of things taught by things like scouts and 4-H -- very easy, because there's already a structure in place. Cooking, art, goats, chickens, "home" sorts of skills -- very easy. Getting a neighborhood mechanic to spend hours teaching your daughter to work on engines -- likely rather hard, unless they're your relative? Just based on trying to do anything mechanical as a women, things like engines and old washing machines seem to mostly call for large, strong hands. Also, homeschool groups are often rather gender essentialist. I kept going to homeschool girl get togethers where moms would tell me it's a bad idea to go to college or learn non-home skills, because I should really get married as soon as possible and my husband would do all the outside the home work. My father gently suggested that I might have to work, that might not be realistic. A lot of those girls ended up working fast food for a while because they were generally bright and conscientious, but knew nothing at all about basic things related to finding, applying, interviewing, and so on. But I digress.
I'm not sure what we'll do with our own daughters, now three and seven months, since it depends on some unknowns, such as work situations and whether the kids like public school or not.
I can't speak to the larger question (I was a school-loving nerd who now works in academia), but I strongly encourage the frog thing! It quickly became apparent that my youngest son was not going to be a sports kid, but I wanted him getting outside (especially during Covid) so we took up "herping" - looking for amphibians and reptiles. Depending on where you are, there are likely some very cool frogs and salamanders that you could find locally without too much effort, and that could lead to all sorts of learning. (Teach her about normal reproduction, then blow her mind with unisexual salamanders!)
I was educated via my families own version of unschooling from 1st grade through the end of highschool, and I think I turned out alright by most normal metrics (PhD in engineering, pretty social though mostly only after I went to college). I don't have too much specific advice, just the encouragement that it will probably be easier than you think even if it seems a bit daunting at first. If legal requirements for homeschooling in your state are a hardship you can look into what are called 'umbrella schools' which are basically private schools you sign your kid up for that cater to homeschoolers, so your kid will legally be attending a private school but in practice you can still mostly do whatever you want and they never once need to physically go anywhere (my family used one of these, and it wasn't even in the same state as us. Clonlara https://clonlara.org/ if you are interested. I can attest that they were great back in the 90s and I hope they still are). An umbrella school during highschool can also help with college applications since your kid(s) will get all the normal paperwork (diploma, GPA etc) that colleges expect to see, and they can help hook you up with educational resources though at least in my case this was optional and on a subject by subject basis, there was no requirement to use any part of their curriculum.
It’s great to have the option of homeschooling / unschooling, if that turns out to be what’s best for your particular kid! That said, I would recommend trying the standard schooling approach first, to see if it suits her. If it doesn’t, you can switch over to a more personalized approach - which she’ll likely regard as a big improvement. If it does, you can rest assured she’ll learn some useful things which you never would have thought to teach her.
> but never learned the basics of financial responsibility, never learned how to fix a car, never learned how to talk about how I was feeling, never learned how to cook
Lots of people did learn these things, though, whilst also going to school. You teach kids basic life activities like cooking by letting them watch you cook, then letting them help you cook, and then helping them to cook.
I would see homeschooling as a high-risk limited-reward activity. The upside seems limited, and there's lots of ways to screw it up and wind up with a young adult who has missed out on something major, whether it's (a) some basic skills or knowledge that they never felt like obtaining (fractions are boring!) or (b) the social skills you need to navigate a community of peers or (c) the discipline to sometimes sit down and do things that you don't especially feel like doing. And of course it's a huge investment of time and/or money on the parents' part.
I posted this comment about thee Khan World school in a thread last week. It's very new so not much evidence to back it up (this year is the first year, although they ran a lab school in Southern California for the past couple of years I believe). It sounds like it might fit what you are looking for, and by the time your daughter is old enough to enroll, it will likely have some data to back it up:
I homeschooled my daughter til middle school, and was pretty unschooly in my approach.
I'm too tired to write prose right now, so here is a list of things I know, having done it.
-I was homeschooling from conviction. Discovered that most homeschoolers were doing it either because they were religious fundamentalists or because they had kids with special needs of some kind -- often very bright kids who were on the autism spectrum, or chaotic but charming ADD kids, a few kids with pretty bad learning disabilities. Neither group was a great fit for me and my kid. I live in a big coastal city full of highly educated people and was surprised to find so few people in the homeschooling community that I felt like were sort of like me in their interests and their point of view.
-It's not as easy as it sounds to find settings for homeschooled kids to socialize with other kids. A lot of sports stuff is school related. Something like gymnastics is not, but even there the other kids will know each other from school, and you daughter will have to work to find a way into the little school-based social groups.
-It's hard to do unschooling really well. You need to be a gifted teacher to pull it off, and also be willing to drop what you're doing at any time to seize the teachable moment and plunge into a big messy project with your kid.
-On the other hand, although I was not awesomely gifted as unschooler, I think my daughter had more fun in her early years than most kids, and she truly did pursue some interests of her own pretty far.
-It is really not a big deal if your kid gets behind on academics. In the last year before my daughter went to school I caught her up on all the really schooly stuff: multiplication tables, math through 5th grade level, spelling, grammar, punctuation. We worked a solid 3 hours a day most days. The idea that kids need 7 hours a day for 5 years to master that stuff is a crock.
-Here's a nice story about the effects of homeschooling. I was talking with a classical musician in his 20's whom I'd just met, and some topic came up that he didn't know anything about. I forget what it was, but it wasn't particularly obscure, & some people his age might have been embarrassed by their ignorance. Let's say the topic was the double helix. So I mention it, and he says, "what's the double helix?" I give him a 2-sentence summary, & he says, "Really! Is that how it works? Can you tell me more about it?" And his interest was clearly sincere. So I asked him if he'd been homeschooled, because he just had the mentality that lots of homeschooled kids have -- like he's pretty liberated from the idea that there are certain things he *should* know, but curious about stuff and confident that he can learn it if he wants to. "Yup," he said, "me and my brothers all were. But we each got a different version of it. I'd be in the living room in a collared shirt getting ready for a recital, and my brother would be in the back yard climbing trees naked."
A really good resource is https://www.hoagiesgifted.org. Not everybody there is homeschooling, but many are, and everybody there is interested in giving their child awesome learning experiences.
We homeschool/virtual school. Not unschool. I’ll second the idea that everyone homeschools for their own reasons, so it is harder than I would have thought to find a group of other homeschoolers with the same goals and approaches.
None of the unschoolers we know make it look like a good idea. They mostly didn’t end up going to college, but maybe that wasn’t their goal. With a highly educated parent and naturally driven child it could maybe work better, but we haven’t seen it.
"I was homeschooling from conviction. Discovered that most homeschoolers were doing it either because they were religious fundamentalists or because they had kids with special needs of some kind -- often very bright kids who were on the autism spectrum, or chaotic but charming ADD kids, a few kids with pretty bad learning disabilities. Neither group was a great fit for me and my kid. I live in a big coastal city full of highly educated people and was surprised to find so few people in the homeschooling community that I felt like were sort of like me in their interests and their point of view."
Just a side comment on this paragraph. A coastal city full of highly educated people is exactly the sort of place where I'd expect homeschooling to be thin on the ground. Based on the commentary I've seen (mostly here), people who are doing homeschooling generally have pretty big issues with how they were schooled. Most of the educated coastal elites enjoyed school, remember it fondly, and wouldn't dream of denying that experience to their own kids. Certainly that's the case in my educated midwestern urban blue circle.
Yes, I see what you mean. Still there seems to be a fair amount of interest in homeschooling here on ACX. I myself didn't have a coastal elite education prior to college. I went to public schools in small southern towns. I did not suffer acutely in school just experienced 12 years of chronic pain from being bored, bored, bored. Actually, 11 years, because in my junior year I ordered some college catalogs, saw that some of them did not require that you graduate from high school, and applied & was accepted in my junior year. College set my mind on fire and I adored it. I went from reading shit like the Reader's Digest, which was what my parents read, to Chaucer & Wittgenstein.
Most of the people I know who went to ivies in recent years went schools, camps, etc. that were sort of ivy prep-oriented. Those may be better & more fun than my grade school in Augusta Georgia, & even if they aren't the people & their parents saw them as important for admission to an ivy, which no doubt they are. But since I got into coastal-elite educationland without that sort of preparatory experience, I'm not that compelled by the idea that it's necessary.
Not suggesting it's necessary. Just that the group of people you're talking about isn't going to have that many people interested in things like homeschooling. That makes group formation hard.
You're right about ACX. But. Scott *hates* school. He's written multiple essays comparing it to prison or child torture. He doesn't typically come out and say it, but my impression is that he considers sending kids to school to be incomprehensible and immoral. It only makes sense that his fan base includes a higher rate of people interested in things like homeschooling.
Also, thinking about it, homeschooling might be seen by people in that group (highly educated coastals) as a weird thing conservatives and anti-govt religious types do. Which would also tend to push down the number of people interested in doing it. Especially if, when those of them who, like you, are curious, look, that's more or less what they find. Hmm, no one here looks or talks like me, I think this isn't my party is a pretty natural human reaction.
I think when coastal elites want better options for their kids' schools, they do private, charter, or magnet schools.
Jonathan, our exchange is happening on open thread 235, is that right? Something weird has been happening last couple days with ACX postings on threads I'm on. When I reply from within my inbox they don't show up on the thread for a while -- or maybe they do, but I cannot find them when I go to the thread by using the search function for either my user name or the other person's. Went to 235 on ACX itself just now and did a search for both my name and yours. Box finds a couple postings by each of us, but not the homeschooling posts. If our exchange is happening not on 235 but another thread could you let me know? And if you get a chance, can you try searching your username to see if search identifies your homeschooling posts?
I do see my stuff, but . . . I haven't closed the tab. My solution to replace the old "~new~" function from SSC is that I keep the Open Thread open on my browser, and from time to time search "new repl". That let's me see new stuff on the thread. Not sure if there's a better way with the current comments, the tech is pretty bad.
I did just open a fresh tab to check and all of my posts showed up when I searched my name.
Probably none of that's helpful, sorry. Good luck.
Probably the best thing you (and/or your partner!) could do prior to embarking on this is get some teaching fundamentals under your belt - talk to teachers, observe in classrooms (if possible, volunteering at a local elementary school is probably the way to go), find some books that appeal to you, etc. There's a lot of little things that are simple but hard to figure out on your own, like "start with the easy questions and work your way into the hard ones" and "always say one good thing about the work before critiquing it" that make teaching (especially difficult concepts) much smoother. One particularly good book is "Classroom of Choice," by Jonathan C Erwin - it has a lot of good perspective and is short/readable.
In terms of public schools - the greatest determiner of how a kid does in life is their home environment. If you send your daughter to public school and keep her home environment one of love and learning, she will be absolutely fine. And if public school is a disaster, you know you have options.
It is more a lot work/time than you expect, to actually do it well, so be ready for that.
Most people who get into it and plan to hit target X, tend to make compromises and retreats on this and are aiming for X-10 by the end. (So it starts out "schools are bad I will do better than them" to five years in "my kids will be just where they would have been if hey went to school" to 10 years in "my kids will do fine in college even if they might have done better in school".
You do get to spend a lot more time with your kids, depending on your personality, this can have immense value, or be grating.
Most of the kids I know who go through homeschooling tend to have some significant social deficits compared to random kids. Less able to say jump into living alone at 18.
That said I don't have a super high opinion of schools, so think beating them isn't impossible. Just more work than most people are ready for, particularly if they have 3+ kids (which a lot of homeschoolers seem to have).
You say you have enough time, but you only mention one child. If you later have two or three children, will you still have enough time?
Following the topics the child is interested in sounds great, with two caveats. First, you need to somehow introduce *new* topics, because your daughter can only choose from the topics she is aware they exist, right? So in addition to the child-directed lessons you should also have some world-exploring lessons. (You could actually use some school textbooks as an inspiration here: just as a list of topics to mention.)
Second, some skills are just super useful, for example *reading*. If your daughter can read, that allows her to consume tons of knowledge related to her interest, and it allows you to spend your time doing something different than reading to her. Unless you are a native English speaker, at some moment English will be a great help, because it is easier to find an English book or online material on most topics. Also, math; most homeschoolers suck at it, but can't do serious science or financial education without it. (Khan Academy should probably be sufficient.) So I believe these three things should be gently encouraged no matter what your daughter happens to be naturally interested in at the moment.
Now we have a question of expertise. How will you distinguish between actual knowledge and pseudoscience? For example, in my opinion, 90% of "financial literacy" information is bullshit, and if you ask online, you just invite scammers. (Similarly, 90% of anything written about quantum physics is bullshit, but that will be important much later.) One possible solution is to use actual textbooks, but at your own pace. I think you can handle most of elementary-school knowledge yourself, but high school will require some external help; for example I wouldn't do chemical experiments at home, sounds too complicated and dangerous (poisoning).
Another opinion: to me, the decision to homeschool or not should have much more to do with the experience of school versus homeschool, and less to do with the end result of the education. I think that unless you are considering Captain Fantastic like "unschooling", totally cut off from society, the type of education will not make that much of a difference on the values or knowledge you impart to your daughter. If you want her to learn to talk about how she feels, you can definitely teach her that, even if she goes to a regular school (and cars do not not need fixing anymore I'd say!).
As far as school/homeschooling experience, I think homeschooling is generally fine for young children, up to about 5 years old. After that, I think the balance really depends on how social your child is. If your daughter is very unsocial, homeschooling might be nice, but if you have access to a reasonably good school and she likes to be around other kids, then I think school would be a better fit.
Up to about 5? Doesn't kindergarten happen around that age? Pre k and pre pre k and K weren't even real things until the recent past--I think 5 is about the age "schooling" would actually begin.
I think that the opportunities you can get at a school can heavily depend on the attitude of the school administrators. My school let me do a lot of independent projects/study, so I was able to get by in that way (still didn’t like school, but I survived). So, my first point would be to talk with parents/admins at the school your kid might go to and see what opportunities you could get.
I also think that the social experiences from school are probably important. I’m not a person who has good intuition for social situations, so if I hadn’t gotten so much exposure and experience from school, I don’t think I’d be able to function in society as well. Also, the social aspect is what makes school fun for many kids, and I think home-schooling is going to struggle to recreate this sort of experience.
I'm also a new father and have been working through some of the same questions you raise. In addition, I've been involved in a handful of education projects, so I'm somewhat familiar with the landscape. I'd be happy to chat: protopiacone ~at~ gmail
You should consider whether self-directed learning will actually improve anything regarding your specific gripes with public education? Will she learn more about financial responsibility if her learning is self directed? Are you going to teach her to that being disobedient to authority (you) is good?
I have been unable to locate a source of such jars in almost a decade, and would like to increase our stash of them. Does anyone in here know of somewhere online that still sells jam/jelly in such jars? Failing that does anyone here have any empty jars of this type that they'd be willing to part with? If be willing to pay about $10 a piece plus shipping.
I believe that's a quilted canning jar. Or a quilted jelly jar. I say "I think" because it depends on the top. Normally you have a sealed top with a screw on top to secure it. But you might be looking for a snap on variety. There's a variety of tops but traditional simple snap ons have fallen out of favor because they're less secure than other varieties.
You might have trouble finding the specific quilting pattern or top. But if that's a sticking point you might need some kind of private run to get them made.
Fair enough. If the quilted pattern on the bottom few inches is a sticking point I'd look at eBay or somesuch. Or a private run if you've got the money.
Ebay has disappointed, as have a variety of similar sites. I'm here as a last stab in the dark. I'll look into private run but that might be a lot excessive.
You could try to contact the sellers that were previously selling these, and see if they have any leads? Also, one of the above links has the tag Anchor Hocking, have you tried contacting that company?
I would call up places that jar products and ask if they have any lying around they'd be willing to part with. If those jars have fallen out of favor like Erusian says, then there are likely tons of them in some business's basement.
In 2017, the New Zealand Labour Party (standard center left party) formed a coalition with NZ First (a much more rightwing, anti-immigrant party)- a relatively unusual coalition in the West. Also, it was a minority coalition government. Why was this coalition formed? Here are the breakdowns in electoral seats won (combining district and party list seats):
National Party (center right) 46.6%
Labour 38.3%
NZ First 7.5%
Green Party (I'm assuming far left) 6.6%
NZ First could have easily formed a coalition with the National Party- the far right and the center right together. Plus, it wouldn't have been a minority government. Why didn't they do so/what were their motivations to get with the center left instead? Imagine Hillary Clinton and Marjorie Taylor Greene teaming up for a coalition. Also, why didn't Labour team up with the Green Party instead?
Basically, this dynamic is kind of scrambling what I understand about normal left/right divisions in the Western world, so I'm curious to learn more. What happened here?
To add another confounding factor, the coalition didn't go well for NZ First. In the 2020 election their vote share tanked and all their MPs (including party leader and deputy pm Winston Peters) lost their seats. Which, even though Covid was an intervening surprise, still seems like it should've been predictable back in 2017. For what it's worth, not the first time the party has been shut out, they're kind of boom and bust.
I don't have a super great answer for you (I'm no New Zealander, let alone an insider on their politics, but I followed the 2017 election and its aftermath back when it happened) but one thing I will point out is that NZ First isn't exactly 'far right' in all the ways that term might suggest in America. They're economically pretty populist, even leftist, it's just that they hate immigration (which is a higher salience issue than, like, the minimum wage, which NZ First secured a commitment to raise as a condition of support in 2017) and have other generally right-coded cultural messages.
Another factor to consider is that NZ First has only ever been led by Peters, who founded the party after angrily quitting the Nationals back in the early 90s. He went into coalition with the Nats in the late 90s, but also went into coalition with Labor 2005-2008. This was the last time NZ First was in government, but it was also the last time Labor was the government until 2017! So combine the fact that the party is basically the 'Stuff Winston Peters Likes' party, the fact that he doesn't especially like the Nats, and the fact that the most recent Labor government was a coalition with NZ First, and it starts looking pretty reasonable.
I don't know why the Greens weren't brought on as coalition partners
I think you've found an issue where these "low resolution" shorthands (centre left, rightwing, "Jacinda is Hilary, Geene is Peters") — and the US-centric assumptions they bring of policy and ideology — don't always map well to reality, and that what gets deemed "left and right" in countries 'across the western world' can wildly differ by county. Hilary Clinton and Ardern are not that much alike; Winston Peters is absolutely nowhere near Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
I've lived in NZ and I usually find American takes on NZ politics absolutely bizarre, I reckon for this reason.
In US terms, I think the Democrat party would be the closest match for all three leaders — Jacinta Ardern, Winston Peters and Bill English. NZ First aren't necessarily "rightwing anti-immigrant", or at least often don't carry the assumptions that phrase brings; they're hard one to categorise.
I'd deep-dive into long RNZ explainer news articles if you're interested in learning about NZ politics. .
NZ first is right on some cultural issues, but not so much on economic issues. Their leader also had a historical axe to grind with the centre right party, and there was a certain amount of spite in the decision. He has been their leader as long as the party existed and had the power to make the decision. Plus he got powerful foreign minister role and deputy prime ministership out of it. The greens were in that coalition too.
> NZ First could have easily formed a coalition with the National Party- the far right and the center right together. Plus, it wouldn't have been a minority government. Why didn't they do so/what were their motivations to get with the center left instead?
NZ First leader Winston 'Winnie' Peters has been bickering with his former party, National, for a few decades now and isn't going quietly into retirement:
> Peters says the “sex maniacs” within the National Party are proof he made the right choice in forming a coalition Government with Labour in 2017.
As other commenters have said, a left-right binary oversimplifies. And I predict that few people in NZ would call NZ First 'far right.' Relevant survey:
> Very few Kiwi Trumpers identified with arch-populist Winston Peters, however. Only 4.9 per cent of them said he is the party leader they felt closest to, perhaps because of his coalition with Labour after the 2017 election. They were more attached to National's Judith Collins (46.6 per cent) and Act Party leader David Seymour (30.2 per cent).
One final point: NZ First has similarities with Europe's pensioner parties. Pensioner parties support policies that promote the welfare of retirees who are not wealthy.
I suspect it’s related to why the Lib Dems in the 2010 UK election went with the Conservatives rather than Labour. In order to maintain its identity as a distinct party, a smaller party has to credibly commit to at least sometimes making a different coalition choice than one would expect on grounds of pure ideological closeness. It probably shouldn’t happen often, but should happen sometimes (unless you’ve got a stable thing going like Australia's Liberals and Nationals, or Germany’s CDU and Bavaria’s CSU).
I have started working as a software engineer. Do ya'll have any suggestions about things I can do to be my best in this line of work? As in books I should read, concepts I should know (this can be things you don't learn in undergrad CS, or things you do learn that really are useful), best practices, methods for self-improvement, or really anything else. Thanks in advance!
Do you have any idea of what you specifically want to do with it? The best general advice I can give is to have a hobby project that challenges you, unless you have an unusually fulfilling job your work may start to become procedural and you won't learn much from just codemonkeying web UIs or database software. If you don't know what to do, just think of what software you use that you don't think is implemented very well, videogames are a low hanging fruit in that regard but it could be anything. I'd also recommend trying out different languages and paradigms that you aren't used to, I imagine you probably didn't use much other than C++/python/java/js in school. Learning how to work in something like rust or lisp can help you with other languages. For example, if you frequently get frustrated with memory management in C++, if you familiarize yourself with the borrow system in rust you can take the general principle of it over to C++.
Yes, but you might not like it: become more sociable, focus on good writing skills, use the writing skills to be more sociable in your work.
You're going to improve as an engineer almost whether you want to or not by working, asking questions from mentors, and getting code reviews.
It's *not* so natural that you'll improve as a communicator, and being a good communicator will have easily as much impact as anything else. It will help you learn from mentors. It will help you find great projects. It will help you drive projects *to* greatness. It will help you save projects from failing. It will help you get noticed. It will help you notice things. It might be *the* thing you need to become a principal engineer.
I agree with this. Additionally, think at a slightly higher level than you may want to. Think about who is using your software and why. Don't just complete the work to spec, think about if the spec is complete and serves the users purpose. Maybe your company won't want you to do this, but you can still think about it and try to complete your work to take this into account.
If the original question asker is still reading this, realize that you will often have wide freedom to complete your work how you want to complete it.
I don't advocate working too hard, and I really don't like being a perfectionist, but I think it's really healthy to have your own private quality standards and your own private practices that help you make your software in a way you personally can be proud of.
I have no idea what you learned at school, and what you learned outside of school, so no advice here. I don't even know which programming language you use. Perhaps, if you made your own small project and shared it on github, we could comment on that, and then the debate could perhaps expose some blind spots.
Did anyone here read the Network State? Highly recommended if not. I thought it was extraordinary. Definitely something I’ll need to read a few times to digest. Only major quibble is rather minor on the grand scheme, on having a plan at inception for when Networks have to replace nations but overall, like I said, I found it incredible. Would love to hear other thoughts.
Currently reading it, Kindle says I'm 20% through. Couple takeaways so far.
#1 There's a lot of really good political philosophy here. The author can go from referencing Yarvin to Deboer to Drehrer to Scott in a couple pages. I'm not sure his interpretations are 100% on point but if you wanted to catch up on the past decade of cutting edge blogging/political thought from a grey/right wing perspective, this is probably the best book available.
#2 This is also a really good endorsement of decentralized finance but also, like, decentralized everything. I'm struggling to think of a good way to communicate this, because the examples of, like, crypto contracts and crypto history feel...off to me. But I think there's something real and important in the big, centralized "networks" we have now and their influence. Like, if you live primarily online, like many of us do, then which online networks you're part of are...kinda more important than your country. Like, if you work at home and then spend all your time on "woke" Reddit and "breadtube" and then go to bed, you probably have more in common with a "woke" Romanian than a "based" American. Like, we all know we consume a lot of media, see Netflix's valuation, and we're increasingly self-segregating into communities and the things that happen in that online community feel MUCH more important than things that happen in your local community. Like, I have much stronger opinions on the Scott/NYT thing than anything that happened in my local city politics in the past 5 years.
#3 There's nothing practical in here and that surprises me. Like, I'm in this situation. I have a "remote" job. And it's actually pretty remote, I can live anywhere in the US I want. But, and I've had this with numerous recruiters, ask if they're ok with you moving to Bangkok on a Thai Smart Visa (1) or something similar, and you'll quickly find out that remote doesn't mean that remote. And it makes sense, if you hire an American and he moves to Thailand, does the company pay taxes in Thailand now and to what extent, if any, is it now bound by Thai law? Like, there's a lot of legal liability and complexity there. And Srinivasan has had executive roles, he must know the legal liability/risks of letting workers be globally remote and he must have some ideas about it. Maybe that's later in the book. I dunno, but I picked this up as a US tech-ish worker who was actively looking to remotely work a US job overseas, am still interested in setting that up, and this book has nothing for me so far. So, like Balaji, if you're reading this, I'm here for the Network state, sign me up bro, but I should literally be the target audience for this and I haven't read any actionable advice and I'm kinda not expecting to.
States not organized around geography aren't going to work. They will fundamentally be like clubs, or insurance, or pre-paid legal or something. The main thing a state provides is a monopoly of coercive force. It is not remotely clear how network states get into that world.
Pretty much this. An organization of crypto investors would have exactly as much sovereignty as an organization of Amazon investors.
That is to say, while they might in some sense have a lot of influence over some part of the economy, they have no way to actually separate themselves from the state they live in, or to compel the state to negotiate with them as an equal rather than as a special interest voting bloc. Amazon has a trillion dollars in market cap but it's still not a sovereign state.
Not trying to be accusatory in any manner, as at some level I even agree with you, so please do not be offended but want to confirm: did you read the full work? There was a lot of non trivial innovation in there, at least to my mind. I think Balaji was thinking an economic show of force in the form of the crypto census would replace some of the need for arms although he does not say so directly and I think his short term and mid term thinking was that the host nations would provide security. That’s me reading a bit between the lines, and while I disagree somewhat, I did have to cede him some credit there.
I mean, if we called them NGOs instead of network states, would that change your mind. Because, and this has been annoying me, sometimes when Srinivasan is talking about Networks he clearly means crypto and sometimes he means NGOs more generally and he silently switches between the two a lot.
Because if we talk about NGOs, I mean, the US is in a 2+ decade war against non-state terrorist groups, many of recruit and organize online. Or consider massive criminal organizations like the Mexican cartels, which can militarily fight and defeat federal forces. And criminal organizations were, like, the original and best use case for crypto. So, in the abstract, yeah, NGOs have a proven history of conflict, and occasional successful conflict, with state actors.
But in reality, no, the crypto-bros are not going to build an army of crypto drones and invade Grenada. But what's the real world case where the crypto bros NEED an army? I mean, it's not like Scientologists or Catholics or "the woke" have an army but they all have at least theoretical hierarchies that massively influence their followers lives and are able to collect tithes/subscriptions/etc.
Well I mean if someone wants to write a book saying that NGOs are possible, umm that seems silly. Yes crypto currency makes them slightly easier in some ways. They still are not states.
A state/NGO without enforcers, is like I said a "club", or service (insurance). What is my membership in a network state offering me? It is not exempting me from local taxes or harms. It is not protecting me from criminals.
Absolutely groups of people can and do tithe or have memberships in a variety of real world organizations. Almost none of these are ""state like".
It really comes down to the core feature of a state is the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. And if you don't have that, you don't have a state.
And yes that means insurgent areas the government does not control in places during civil wars are in some sense mini-states. I think that is exactly right. And the regular states generally go to great lengths to eliminate such areas all things being equal.
The thing that enforces speed limits (unless it's Germany) or gun control laws (unless it's Texas), is not going to be an NGO. And it's not going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other things-tha-enforces-speed-limits-and-gun-control-laws. The reason people want speed limits and gun control laws is not because they want to be constrained in their *own* ability to drive fast and carry big guns, or to constrain people like themselves (who are of course in the top 20% of drivers), it's because they are afraid of *other* people, people they don't trust to act responsibly, who are close enough to hurt them with their fast cars and big guns. And a thousand other things like that.
The thing that prevents an enemy army from abducting you and your entire family and packing them off to a forced-labor camp, or stealing or breaking your stuff, or just killing you to send a message to people like you, is not going to be an NGO. And it is not going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other mutual defensive organizations, because effective military defense works a *whole* lot better in a contiguous territory with defensible borders and interior lines.
So the thing that collects taxes or tax-like revenue streams to pay for these services, isn't going to be an NGO either, and it isn't going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other tax-collecting authorities. And it probably won't accept bitcoin for tax payments.
You're going to live in a geographic territory controlled by a government that will collect taxes from you and force you to abide by its laws. If, on top of that, you want to pay fees to some NGO that forces you to abide by other constraints, knock yourself out. But in a conflict between the two, the one with a real army is going to win and you're probably going to be ground into a fine paste between them, so probably best to pick an NGO that has a strict no-picking-fights-with-the-local-government policy.
In reality, the Thai government is updating their talent visa to try to bring in foreign workers and investors. One of the big changes is a flat 17% income tax rate. This is almost certainly because, while the Thai tax rate is a pretty normal progressive tax system, your average foreign worker is going to hit the 35% max rate in a month or two.
Now the core question Balaji seems to be posing is, imagining he could get 3,000 crypto/tech bros on the same page, could he then go to the Thai government and negotiate a 15% income tax rate, based on the credible offer of bringing in 3,000 rich tech workers? Could he negotiate, say, lower penalties for marijuana possession since, ya know, techies really like their weed and Thailand is famously harsh on drug offenses? I don't know but that seems pretty important, especially if Thailand turns them down and the crypto state can go make the same offer to, say, El Salvador.
If that works out, it's not hard to imagine tech workers working for cyrpto/DAO companies, being paid in bitcoin that partially gets converted into local currency (just like USD would be), and being primarily loyal to this crypto state.
None of this is guaranteed, it's very speculative, but it's all based on currently existing systems, just assuming they prove a lot more resilient, scalable, and popular than they currently are. Which is basically the bet you'd have been making on Bitcoin in 2011 and that would have paid out very well.
And in no part of this is anybody remotely interested in armies of crypto drones. You seem to have this mental model of what this book is arguing, and it does go off into some weird spaces, but I think you're arguing with your mental model of the book rather than it's reality. If we called this weird crypto network state idea a "Flimflamfoom" instead of a "Network State", I don't think any of your criticisms would make any sense. But "Flimflamfooms" would still be an interesting possibility worth exploring. And if the sum total of your criticism can be boiled down to terminological arguments...what's the value?
If you want to do this with one existing country, a la the Libertarian "free state project" but on a grander scale, that's certainly plausible. Whatever piece of land you end up on will certainly have a lot of people who would prefer the way things were (you're proposing to basically gentrify the place), but with numbers and money you can maybe persuade the existing legitimate government to go along with your plan and then as a legitimate government they can force the naysayers to shut up and go along with it.
If you want to do this on a geographically contiguous plot of land but without using its currently-legitimate government as your ultimate source of police power and military defense, you've got a harder sell because you'll basically be limited to mercenaries and militias to suppress local opposition, which makes you look bad and encourages further opposition. And the opposition will likely inherit a measure of legitimacy from their prior presence and status as part of an established nation-state, which will help them recruit an army and secure foreign support. But it's at least possible you can succeed within your new borders.
If you want to do this in a hundred tiny enclaves scattered around the globe, then every one of those enclaves will be surrounded by people who don't understand what you're trying to do, see you as a bunch of vaguely scary weirdos, and don't want scary weirdos living that close to them. Note that you are almost by definition doing things that they have decided should be illegal, and/or not paying what they have decided is everyone's fair share for being a part of the local community, or you'd not have bothered creating a new state. And they won't want their legitimate government, with its army, tolerating the existence of ungoverned freeloading scary weirdos within their traditional borders.
This was interesting! I think he found some of the same things I did, and curious how he pushed a bit at the religion piece which is where I think I was most strongly aligned with Balaji.
I read a review. Was it here? It’s clear that the writer doesn’t really explain the ability of an online state to raise taxes or do really anything that government does. Eventually he wants all the networked people to move to and take over a state, but a functioning polity needs normies to police, teach, soldier, taxi, build, repair, fix the electrics and so on. Silicon Valley already has the maximum ratio of nerds to normies, and as a state California isn’t that successful.
The weirdo thing about books like this, is that 99% the first "new vision for state entity organization" is for sure going to be based on physical distance.
It is either going to be some sort of sea colony in international waters. Or it is going to be some sort of space colony. Maybe I guess you could see some group trying to buy/take over some portion of some failing country, though I doubt most of the rest of the world would recognize it and would deal with it through the host country failed or not.
The other big problem is most of the things people hate most about society...are things a new society would immediately reinvent but be less efficient at, society has a lot of problems, but it is at some "equilibrium". So that is really going cut down on how attractive/successful the whole enterprise is. "Wait you mean there is still going to be ZONING?" Yes Mr. "freedom uber alles" zoning is even more important in societies with small footprints because the efficient use of space becomes extremely important.
People have really distorted and poor understanding of what they pay, and what all they get for their money in a modern society. You will have a rural county in the US where a standard 2BD 1BA house is paying $600/year in property taxes. For that you get: Plowed streets, police show up when you call, fire show up when you call, a court system, a school to send any children too, rudimentary public transit (dial-a-ride), the city ensuring no one sets up a tannery or machine shop next door to your house, animal control, traffic lights on roads, street lights to reduce crime, libraries, parks, public services and minor public events.
Now is that all super efficiently done? No. Could there be improvements? Sure. How much would individually pricing all that out cost? Ten times as much... More? You get the savings because the state can coercive require everyone participate, and gets some big economies of scale that way.
But that coercion is often the exact thing the people looking for new states are trying to flee. That isn't even getting into the issue of the fact a new state is going to attract a bunch of weirdos with different non-standard views about how the world should operate, and so is going to have big problems getting alignment between its members.
I've been wondering about this recently, because I remember reading about them as a particular type of auction in game theory, which tends to result in negative sum outcomes for all participants including the winner. I think I can remember how they were supposed to work, except that when I tried to google them recently to check whether I'm remembering it right, I wasn't able to find any evidence that there's any recognized type of auction by this name at all, nor could I find any type of auction by any other name which works in quite the way that I remember a pain auction working.
As best I remember, a pain auction is a type of all-pay auction where participants "bid" simultaneously (although the bids may not be in money, and I think I remember reading about the concept being applied to an auction where the "bids" are made in actual suffering,) and have the option to either add to their bid each round, increasing their sunk costs, or drop out. The last participant remaining wins the prize, but like a dollar auction, the format will tend to lead to participants paying more than it's worth, even to the winner, because they compete to recoup some portion of their sunk costs. I vaguely remember it being called a pain auction specifically because it was a format designed to produce even more perverse outcomes than a dollar auction, where not just the winner and runner up, but every participant, ends up worse off than if they hadn't participated. But, I can't find any confirmation that the concept even exists, and might just be making it up.
That idea of an auction where *everyone* is worse off no matter what doesn't make too much sense to me because then why would anyone at all participate? Penny auctions and the dollar auctions work because there's a winner, at least if you don't carry out the induction far enough to realize that the winning outcome is possible but won't happen, even if they are negative-sum overall.
You might be misremembering some of Scott's posts about game theory like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A2Qam9Bd9xpbb2wLQ/game-theory-as-a-dark-art Or, are you sure you aren't thinking of fiction, maybe some anime scenario, like _Kaiba_ or _Akagi_ or the eating contest in _Night Is Short, Walk On Girl _ (highly recommended, BTW)?
I might be, but I feel like I'm remembering more specific details about pain auctions than I'd expect to if I'd made them up based on that.
In theory, you could end up better off by participating in a pain auction, operating as I remember them, but it's like a dollar auction; at the start, winning offers better outcomes than not participating, but by the end, winning will probably only allow you to partially recoup your losses.
I have a feeling that I might be remembering this in relation to something Eliezer wrote many years back, but I might be completely mistaken about that. But I think I remember it from the time when I was following and participating at Less Wrong, or maybe even Overcoming Bias.
Yes, I think I know what you're referring to, although my memory is also fuzzy. I'll try to summarize it as best I can from what I remember.
Let's say your teacher has a $20 he wants to auction to you and a friend. He starts the bidding price at $1 but there's a catch: whether you win or lose the auction, you have to pay your bid. Since the starting price is $1, naturally you bid $2 since you would make a profit of $18 if you won. However, you're friend is also being greedy and bids $2. Now if you lose the auction at this stage, you're down a dollar since you lose your bid no matter what (due to your teacher's special rules). So you bid again at $3 and your friend ups the bid to $4 and so on.
This continues until the bid reaches $20. At this point in the game, neither you nor your friend can make any profit. However, this doesn't stop you two from bidding since if you win the auction, you can at least recuperate $20. So you bid $21 hoping that you win the auction and lose only 1$. The bidding continues in this way and NEVER stops since both you and you're friend are following the same greedy algorithm of "by betting one more dollar I stand to win (recuperate) twenty". At the end of the day, your teacher walks away a rich man, one of you gets a twenty dollar bill and the other gets nothing.
There are of course solutions to this problem. One is to not bid against you're friend at all and just agree to split the winnings after the auction.
I'm not sure why a "winner and runner-up pay" auction would be fundamentally different to an "all bidders pay" auction. Both can easily wind up in an everybody-loses-including-the-winner situation, neither necessarily does.
Here's an all-pay pain auction where it nonetheless winds up worthwhile for the winner (fifty hours of standing around to get a $300K car sounds worthwhile to me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsgdOVGA04
That's an interesting point. If the cost of the auction comes in actual suffering, and the prize has some lasting value greater than the amount of suffering that the participants are capable of forcing themselves to endure, the expected value of participating could be highly positive despite most participants being worse off for participating.
It doesn't seem like a sort of auction people would normally have much incentive to arrange though.
Thanks, I appreciate it. That does seem to be what I was thinking of, although it seems like in my memory I abstracted it out more than he originally described it, so the same format he described with pain could also be applied to money.
As I expected, I didn't remember exactly how the idea was originally presented, but it's nice to know that I do seem to have retained the actual format of how it was supposed to work. It's reassuring, because if nobody had been able to find it, I would probably have to conclude that it was a heavily distorted recollection of the idea of a dollar auction, and I'd made up many of the details I thought I remembered.
That post reminds me of Sartre's application to love of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The partner who loves the other one less becomes the more powerful in the relationship.
Not ringing a bell for me (and I immodestly think I'm about the most likely to know!) but if it's a thing then I definitely want to know about it!
PS: Ha, just as I was about to hit submit I saw @atgabara's answer and oh my goodness that post is amazing! Of course it has me itching to defend the honor of (non-pain) auctions in relationships.
PPS: My favorite quote:
> I want to note that as far as I know, I am the first person to call relationship drama "basically an auction" *and* the first person to use the term "pain auction".
(I'm pretty sure I can claim the first conjunct there though.)
On an individual level, it it taken for granted that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But at the level of entire countries, it is taken for granted that the rich countries can't maintain their advantage forever and that poor countries will eventually catch up.
The former is valid on aggregate. Some rich people and/or their descendants end up poor and vice versa, others will continue in the bracket where they started off. There aren't enough countries in the world to apply the same statistical analysis, but it's clear that some formerly poor countries are catching up, and some formerly rich countries are flagging badly, but also that many rich countries keep increasing their economic advantage and vie versa. I don't think there is a dichotomy of the type you describe. Are there any academic articles you base your statement on?
Every measure I have ever seen shows that the poor are getting richer in an absolute sense. This is true within countries and also overall across the world.
I think when people say this, they purely mean in a relative sense, and relative specifically to the very richest people. To me, whether I die of a preventable disease or most of my children die before age five verses that not happening is a bigger consideration than whether Elon Musk gained another $20 billion and outpaced my gains.
I used to take this line, but I don't think it's obviously true anymore. (Hinging on how one defines "Wealth")
Poor people have more access to food, water, transportation and medical care; but they have less access to housing and land to live on. Fancier widgets do not replace having a place to live.
I don't think that's true - poor people have more access to housing than in the past. The percent of income that goes to housing is a little larger than it was 100+ years ago, but is offset by significantly lower costs elsewhere (especially food). Prices for housing are going up slowly, with the bulk of the difference in urban areas. There are still plenty of cheap places to live outside of NYC/SF and other expensive cities.
I don’t think it’s taken for granted that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. All the measures of within-country inequality that I’m aware of are stationary (albeit with long memories), i.e. in the very long run, inequality is constant over time.
I find that rather hard to believe. A long time ago, the poorest members of society were slaves, and the richest were people who owned large amounts of those slaves. The differences between rich and poor in today's Western societies don't seem, to me, to be anywhere near that.
Slavery wasn’t common in Europe from the medieval period. And that’s a low bar. When people talk about the poor getting poorer they mean both relative to the rich and often in real terms.
If you don't already know it, Walter Scheidel's book "The Great Leveller" goes into this question is some detail. His broad conclusion is that, absent plagues, wars, famines etc. the rich do get richer and the poor do get poorer over a historically-significant period of time. It's not hard to see why. If you are a wealthy stockbroker owning three houses and I am your gardener whose wife works as a nanny, then you start with a massive series of advantages over me, and almost every imaginable economic or even political change works in your favour. You can influence politicians, for example to reduce certain taxes: I can't. You aren't worried about increases in fuel prices for your four cars, I am for my one that I can't afford to repair. You can take massive share and property price benefits: I have to pay more every year to rent, and so on. I'm sure mathematicians among you will recognise this: as you start with advantages you accrue more.
This is why "everybody's better off" is not an adequate reply. Fuel prices in Europe are already rising, and many private sector tenants are going to have to choose between heating and eating. An acquaintance who works for a social landlord was saying she's had a string of people in her office in tears over a likely increase of €100 per month in their fuel bills. A pensioner or a supermarket checkout operator may not lose any gross income this year, and may even get a tiny increase, but their standard of living is being wrecked, and that money is increasingly going to those who already have too much. And don't forget, that if we limit our discussions to income, and not wealth, incomes of ordinary people have been static over the last couple of generations in most western countries. Growth has been at the top end.
This is a Marxists perspective so take it or leave it.
The rich within a country are rich because of their claims on assets and the returns on those assets, this provides them with a surplus thy can use to acquire more claims on more assets in a positive feedback loop.
Since they only accumulate claims and aren't necessarily creating new real assets, the process is zero sum, any gains they make only come at the expense of non-asset holders i.e. workers. That's why market economies always tend towards growing inequality, and inequality would grow even if the economy as a whole wasn't.
Inequality between countries is caused by a difference in real assets within the countries, i.e. wealthy ones have more assets, called the capital stock, not a difference in claims on assets (although quite often capitalist from wealthy countries do have claims on capital in poorer ones).
Capital stock usually grows exponentially, because more machines can create more machines more quickly etc... , unless an economy has reached the limit on how much capital stock can be employed profitably, in which case they need to push the technological frontier to create new kinds of capital, a much slower than exponential process.
Wealthy countries are usually in the second scenario and so grow slowly, poor countries are usually in the first so grow quickly. So obviously the gap between the two will close over time.
Thank you for writing this, as it has helped me identify what has long been my core problem with Marxist perspectives, but I have had trouble articulating.
If economic conditions were truly zero sum, then I would agree with this take on asset distribution. There's in fact great reason to think that a few people (or even one) would eventually own everything, absent some outside force preventing it. (Being wasteful and losing the wealth is also a strong possibility, seen plenty of times).
Real history involves constant growth and expansion, such that new wealth greatly outpaces old wealth. There are about 20 million millionaires in the US, with total combined assets above $24 trillion. I would rather own 1% of the top 1% of the US economy than 100% of Ancient Athens (or all of Greece, or even the entire Roman Empire at its height ~$43 billion). In terms of absolute wealth, pretty much everyone in the middle class in a Western nation is richer than almost all kings in history. Zero sum is so clearly incorrect that someone bringing it up in earnest should be laughed out of the discussion.
Well if I hadn't been laughed out the discussion I'd respond that the Marxist model only entails zero sum inequality growth in a steady state economy. In a growing economy capitalist can appropriate the gains from growth without negatively affecting workers, like the ~40 year period of stagnant wages we've lived through during the neoliberal period. That's still probably undesirable because it leads to much lower median standing of living than had the gains from growth been distributed more equally.
The reason modern workers are better off than Athenian peasants is because there have been previous periods of redistribution significant enough to reverse the general tendency to inequality, mostly during the post war period. During periods of economic history with high growth but insufficient redistribution, like the early industrial revolution, the bulk of the population did live at subsistence level. If modern neoliberal states stopped the small amount of redistribution/labour regulation they do (enough to wages steady but not rising) you would expect median incomes to start declining.
There have been declining economies and economies growing very slowly, but has there ever been a truly steady state economy? It's another economic assumption that hasn't passed the test of time.
Had Marx's theories won the day, we could have tried to lock in the economy in an egalitarian way back in the late 1800s. Do you think that would have been a good idea? Is there a time since then where we should have locked in the economy and willingly stymied growth? Obviously I answer both questions with a resounding no, but I would be interested if you had a different opinion.
I get that you would prefer a society that's *more* egalitarian, even if not a steady state or perfectly egalitarian. There's certainly room for discussion on that. What I see from countries that attempted Marxist planning is ruination and falling well behind the capitalist world. To me, that's good reason to look elsewhere for ideas and to prefer a system shown to create fantastic wealth over a system more often known for misery and lower standards of living - especially for the poor.
The steady state is just a hypothetical to illustrate that capital gains can be zero sum and, to the extent that they are, capital will erode labour's purchasing power. And even a growing economy is no guarantee of raising wages. The historical norm seems to be somewhere between the two and wages usually only rise in times of redistribution, the exceptions are sudden drops in population like after the black death.
In terms locking in the economy, yeah I'd say if you could lock in the inequality level from the 1970s but slow growth that would be an improvement over reality, at least workers would see some gains in their living standards as opposed to complete stagnation. Ideally you'd have a situation like the post war period where growth was strong and inequality was steady or declining. Realistically though there probably is a trade off between growth and inequality and it would difficult to achieve the ideal, but it seems like we've been on the extreme growth end of the trade off for far too long.
"Real history involves constant growth and expansion, such that new wealth greatly outpaces old wealth."
It's not constant, certainly not to the extent of new wealth consistently outpacing old wealth. There have been numerous cases in history of collapse and decay, and if climate pessimists are right we'll see another in our lifetimes. Most wealthy people in the UK today are the direct descendants of people who were already wealthy a hundred years ago (and at that point they were already shopping around for rich, vulgar American women to refill the coffers). However, *in the 16th-19th centuries* new wealth almost certainly outpaced old wealth in the UK many times over; they were the boom empire of that time. This is the niche that the US occupies now, and indeed has occupied since the mid-19th century or so. Notably the case is the same for a few of the more or less post-Soviet European dependents of the US, e.g. the Nordics, West Germany, Poland, the Baltics. In the case of the literally post-Soviet nations this is clearly just because they were artificially depressed before due to being forcibly attached to the shittiest, losingest empire of all time, but the Nordics and West Germany can also date explosive growth to the aftermath of WWII in a way that's pretty correlated with American success, broadly.
That doesn't work, I don't think. Even if the process is zero-sum, there's still a steady-state level of inequality when you actually do the math--Piketty has an explicit equation, but the intuition is that unless every generation saves exactly the same amount of money as the last one, there's a point where regression to the mean pulls you back down (because occasionally you get rich kids squandering their inheritance). Nonstationary processes for anything meaningful are *ridiculously* rare.
From memory Piketty's equation is: inequality will grow if returns of investment are larger than overall economic growth, which seems the same or very similar to the model implicit in my comment.
You're right it will reach an equilibrium eventually, civilisation would collapse other wise, historically that limit seems to be that wages can't be suppressed below subsistence level (all the workers would die). In the modern world, with it's large surplus, the limit is probably determined by the profitability of new investments, which will decline as capital accumulates, increasing capitalists propensity to consume rather than invest. rich kids squandering the built up wealth would act as limit theoretically, I guess (dividing estates through inheritance seems like it would be more significant), doesn't seem to shift the equilibrium much though irl.
The point is market economies will tend towards a high inequality equilibrium for social reasons, and inequalities between national economies will tend to shrink because of the real material properties of industrialising economies.
Because the first part isn't actually true, it's just something people say to sound hip and cynical. They probably believe it, but they haven't put a lot of thought into it and can't back it up except by pointing vaguely at the unread copy of Piketty on their coffee table.
Thanks for linking that! I'm actually about halfway through God Emperor of Dune right now and have been curious about where Herbert got his ideas and/or how he developed them.
The only connection to SSC, as far as I can tell, is an implied claim that Vitalik Buterin has permanent brain damage from reading rationalist blogs.
In general I can't recommend reading David Gerard. His schtick is finding things to hate, and then writing a lot about how much he hates them. He hates blockchains, and he hates rationalists, so he threw in a dig at rationalists in his ranting about blockchains.
(Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency industry. I obviously therefore disagree with his hate for blockchains in full generality. I also quibble with people who hate NFTs in full generality, but in practice the vast majority of NFT projects are awful or scams, especially the high-profile ones, so I probably wouldn't dispute most if any specific NFT projects he's hating on in the post.)
If I had bought a bitcoin every time one of David Gerard's "don't buy bitcoins, only an idiot would do that" articles was displayed at the front page of Hacker News, I would be a very rich person now.
But from his perspective, I guess it is okay, because he is also selling a *book* about "why nobody should ever buy bitcoins" and promoting it in those articles, so even if he happens to be wrong about everything, he can still get rich from the book sales.
*
I still have no idea how NFTs could be useful. I mean, if I understand it correctly, the NTF basically means that you "own" a certain string in a certain database. Like, you could own a string "Astral Codex Ten" in my database -- that still does not give you any rights with regards to the *actual* Astral Codex Ten.
I could imagine e.g. making a game, like a MMORPG, where some precious objects would have a unique identifier, and whoever "owns" that identifier in the NFT database, also owns the object in the game -- because the game itself says so! The only advantage would be that you could trade those objects outside of the game. But this still seems like too little benefit of a complex technical solution.
Yeah, as long as you change it to "only an idiot or an asshole" it checks out. Lots of people make money from scams. Some of them are even among the idiots who earnestly believe in the whole setup.
I'm a professional game designer (narrative and systems design focus) looking for a technical partner to help me make a single-player computer RPG in the vein of Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with a dash of Napoleonic War-era technology and politics, and a soupçon of Dungeon Meshi. This would be paid work.
I've been in the field for about a decade and am conversant with programming concepts and fundamentals, but learning to program well enough to make the game I want, entirely on my own, seems like a doubtful approach compared to other options.
I'm keeping it short and sweet here on purpose--if you're interested and have some demonstrable experience, please respond here *and* send a note to CSLewin at gmail dot com with whatever info you think would be relevant.
> The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.
Scott had a few similarly skeptical posts on the topic, it is interesting to see that this view is slowly becoming more mainstream, and maybe some day might result in reduction of overprescribing psych meds, and potentially more focus on therapeutic rather than psychiatric approaches where warranted.
Is this really that surprising? Not an expert, but I’ve been on the patient side of things for a few years and nobody has ever told me depression is a simple serotonin deficiency — I was generally told the chemical/biological part of depression wasn’t well understood, but that we use ssri’s because they work empirically even if we don’t know why. When this paper first came out I felt like it was attacking a straw man by misinterpreting “chemical imbalance” (which people use as a shorthand for “something is up physically”) to mean “literally just low serotonin”, which I didn’t think people had believed for a long time.
As I saw someone put it elsewhere, it's like taking an aspirin to cure a headache. You weren't "aspirin-deficient", but the aspirin still helps. We don't know exactly why SSRIs work, but the fact that depression is not "seratonin-deficiency" doesn't mean that SSRIs don't help.
I think people have been aware for a long time that the "chemical imbalance" picture of how depression works is just silly. On the other hand, serotonin comes into it somehow, because SSRI's do work better than sugar pills (though not all that much better).
> Depression is complicated, but it seems to involve disruptions to the levels of brain chemicals in some important way
I guess one has to add "and some SSRI/SNRI/antihistamines/... seem to work better than placebo for some people, so serotonin is most likely involved in some way somewhere"? Which is a bit of a vacuous statement, since serotonin is almost always involved one way or another, as far as I understand it.
I guess my hope was that therapy, where appropriate, would be the first-line approach even for psychiatrists. In my limited and anecdotal experience they are quite eager to spin the psych meds rolodex in the hope that one of the drugs does the trick.
Did the rationalist community at large profit off the January 2021 Gamestop short squeeze? I know similar data has been collected with regard to crypto and I'm curious to see if there's any difference now, since both represented uniquely asymmetrical low risk/high reward investment opportunities.
Probably depends on where you draw the boundary lines. I made some money in general in 2021 playing around with Gamestop timing, but not very much, and I lost more money on tech overall from the crash this year.
Has anyone read any good blog posts or books about relationship attachment styles? Please share them. Additionally, what are your thoughts on attachment styles?
I was once referred to attachmentquiz.com and its related resources. It struck me as similar to personality-type surveys, although with a different focus. Good for becoming aware that the concepts exist, less-good if taken as a complete model of reality.
I found _Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment_ by Levine and Heller to be useful in understanding the framework and applying it to my experiences, especially but not only in the context of romantic relationships. While it discusses science and studies, I have no idea if it's accurately representing the science.
This site has taught me a lot about Randomized Controlled Trials, required for having evidence taken seriously in the medical world. However, they are so difficult and costly that often only large institutions can do them. I am wondering what factors drive the cost?
And, what happens to the cost of an RCT if there's a standing army of 10,000+ volunteers eager to participate in it, whose demographic info is all already on file?
Scenario: various outfits have name-recognition from studying Amish communities. Amish are experts at group co-ordination, and have very legible and extensive family-history records. I understand their groups and Iceland are often the two favorite places for genetics researchers to work.
Here is a recent example in media, quoting an Amish man as saying "I like to do every study that comes along."
Amish are also quite interested in health. However, I have the impression that the health-related things they would be most interested in having studied via RCT might not overlap very much with the interests of those doing most RCTs today. If there was a group that could grassroots / crowdsource this within their communities, saying "nominate and then vote for the thing you'd like to see studied this year," and then bringing in the PhD-class people as needed... would it still cost as much as it does for a pharma company to find out if a substance is medically effective or not?
Basically good - using the NHS we did a bunch of Covid treatment trials in the UK in the pandemic. And Zoe app is used to test all sorts of things now.
As to what drives the cost, anything that involves having a large number of people interacting with an army of people is expensive. In many cases, you have to get that army of people to show up to be seen by a nurse at least once (imagine doing that for 1000 people!), you need someone to enter all of their information in the system, you need someone to do the distribution of that drug you're testing plus the placebo, you need someone to follow up with all the people who don't reply to their e-mail... This all takes a lot of human hours, and since you can't hire just anyone to do many of these things, the people you hire are going to be expensive.
Speaking of bannable comments I think promoting a podcast is close to the line. But I am dressing it up as a suggestion that Scott reviews Edward Shawcross’s brilliant The Last Emperor of Mexico so it will be fine!
Mencius Moldbug’s ideas about the superiority of a monarchy have been discussed here and in fact Mexico was unique I think among the Latin American countries in becoming independent as a monarchy but that didn’t last long. Following Moldbug’s logic the Mexican conservatives felt the problem was that the old monarch wasn’t conservative enough and wanted a heavy hitter from Europe. And a Hapsburg Prince seemed ideal.
Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Less well known is who he said it about and that was Napoleon I and Napoleon III. But Napoleon III was for a long time very far from a joke and his willingness to lend the French army to the scheme made it a practical possibility.
Not least of the benefits for Mexico was that being ruled by a European monarch under the benevolent eye of European states would have provided some protection against the USA and made it a more comfortable neighbour. See Canada for example. As it was ‘Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States!’
How it all turned out you can find out in this excellent podcast. Edward Shawcross is a fantastic speaker - very droll and very wise.
(Incidentally I am also a big fan of the rock group Cake and I was always intrigued by their lyric ‘I don’t know much about Cinco de Mayo, I’m never sure what its all about’. If you are in the same boat the podcast will sort you out.)
And regardless of the podcast I really, really recommend Edwards book, The Last Emperor of Mexico for anyone interested in history, European or American or who just enjoys a story with jaw dropping twists and turns. I genuinely think it would be a great candidate for review by Scott.
Is there any experimental evidence for how tools affect the outcome of remote meetings? I imagine an experiment in which groups of collage students are tasked to solve a cognitive task that requires teamwork during a remote meeting (e.g. solving the SAT together). Groups are randomly assigned communication technologies, e.g. text chat, voice chat and video chat. Preferably we could also compare low-quality voice/video with high-quality dito.
This has obvious implications for us doing work from home.
I'd be interested in this as well. From my personal experience at work, the technology can help but having a good leader/proctor/host of the meeting is the most import predictor of success for the task.
I've tried to research this question. I've narrowed it down to "The CPU does stuff" -> "the control unit is the only part of the CPU that's not passive" -> "the instruction cycle (or fetch/decode/execute cycle) is doing stuff". But there I've gotten stuck.
(To clarify: the ALU inside the CPU, for example, is entirely passive. It essentially implements a mathematical function, something like "ALU : (input1, input2, command_code) -> (output)", and you can build that entirely out of logical gates made out of transistors. But it doesn't *initiate* any computations. I want to know what's doing the active thing, the first part of the causal chain after the user presses the ON button on the computer.)
Unfortunately, every source on the instruction cycle I've found leaves it at statements like "the processor fetches the instruction from the memory". Yes, I know. What I want to know is, *how*? What actual physical mechanism is implementing this? It has to bottom out at something like a mechanical thing turning a transistor on or off. Is there any source that explains this aspect?
The control unit has a bit of memory (the program counter, or PC) that holds the next address from which to read an instruction. On the start of running an instruction, the control unit reads that <instruction length> from memory (by activating the address lines of the memory bus and setting it to read from it), separates out the parts of the parts of the instruction that encode the opcode and the operands, and increments the PC by <instruction length>. The opcode chooses the operation to do, and the operands choose what to do them to.
I don't really remember exactly how memory is implemented or instruction decoding exactly works, but most of what I know about the basic functioning of a CPU is from nandgame https://www.nandgame.com/, a game in which you create all the components needed for a CPU, then a CPU, starting from nand gates (apparently now you actually start from relays).
I think the second video already answers the question. It explains how the clock works, and once you have the clock, that's the only active component you need. I mean I don't know if it works like that, but I presume it does; given the alternating clock signal, all you need to do is build the control unit as a function that iterates through the instruction cycle based on the clock command. It's not exactly a mathematical function since it includes memory, but memory is straight-forward with flip-flops.
Remember that kid's game Mouse Trap? You've got a bunch of gadgets that knock one thing into another and in the end a ball gets from point A to point B. The same sort of thing is going on at a low level with a microprocessor.
When you press the "on" button, a bunch of dominoes land into a certain pattern. This causes the first instruction's contents to fall out of their container. Several of them, the ones that represent the command (ADD, let's say) knock into the ALU and put it into whatever mode. Several others, the ones that represent the operands wind up inside the ALU. The ALU spins them around and they fall back out, landing in a destination register. The action of spinning just so happens to flip the dominoes back up, causing the next set of instructions to fall into a container and then fall back down so the cycle can repeat.
Designing a simple CPU is like setting up a fixed set of little Mouse Trap courses. Most of the work is making the control unit open and close certain gates in a certain sequence. You're thinking at this level rather than at the level of transistors, which are of course the actual substrate.
Imagine in this visual slate that there's a wire running along the top which carries a voltage, and another wire running along the bottom which is the ground. And this is the way most of these logic diagram schematics are drawn, is you'll have sort of a bus running across the top that has a voltage, which is just a pressure, essentially, created by a power supply. And anchored at the bottom is another wire, sort of a bus running horizontally that is the ground. You then - you interconnect things in between this positive power supply potential at the top and the ground at the bottom.
If we had two resistors - a resistor is a component with two wires coming out of each end which, as the name sounds, resists the flow of current through it. Essentially what it does is you run current through it, and it gets hot. It dissipates current in the form of heat. So imagine in this circuit diagram that we have two resistors connected, the first one at the top, coming down to the second one, which then connects to the ground at the bottom. So that we have a circuit formed just with two resistors in series. And for the sake of simplicity we'll assume that they have the same amount of resistance. Well, this forms something called a "voltage divider" because essentially, when we make this circuit with just two resistors in a series, voltage will flow through this circuit...
...if we put a positive voltage on the base of the transistor, that is, the input of the transistor, some current will flow through the base, which turns the transistor on. But remember that when the transistor is on, it pulls the lower end of that resistor that's coming down from the supply voltage, it pulls it down to ground, that is, down to zero. So what we have is an inverter because, when we put a positive voltage on the input of the transistor, it turns on, which pulls that junction between the resistor and the transistor down to zero. So a one goes in, and a zero comes out. And if we move the voltage on the base of this transistor, the input of the transistor down to ground, then the transistor turns off. And with the transistor off, then that junction between the resistor and the transistor goes up to the power supply voltage. In other words, a one.
So what we have is this, with just two components, this resistor that goes up to the positive power supply with a transistor hooked to it going down to ground. We have an input into the transistor, and the output is that junction between the resistor and the transistor. And that creates an inverter. So we have with these two components probably the most basic logic system that you can have.
So that's an inverter. It doesn't, I mean, it's certainly useful by itself. But we can do something, make one additional change to it to begin to create some logic gates. And that is, we take another transistor and hook it to the same place. That is, we put these two transistors in parallel with each other. Another transistor hooked to the same place so that either of them are able to be turned on and pull this output down to ground, that is, hook the bottom of the resistor down to ground. So now look what we have. If we turn either transistor on by putting a one, binary one into either of the inputs, then that transistor will turn on and pull the output down to ground. And they can both be turned on. We get the same result. So what we have is a, in logical terms, is called a NOR gate. Which NOR stands for "not or." So if either input is a one, the output is a zero. So we have the beginning of logic...
In general, the key insight is that while the computer does indeed read its next instruction from memory; it can also modify its own memory to change what the next instruction would be. You don't even need a modern computer to do this. Consider a simple cart on wheels , with an electric motor that controls its steering. If the voltage on the motor is positive, it turns to the right. If it's negative, it turns to the left. If it's zero, it goes straight.
Now, consider that we equip this cart with two little light sensors, looking down at the floor. The brighter the light that the sensor can "see", the more voltage it applies to the steering motor. The right sensor is hooked up in reverse, so that it applies negative voltage. The left sensor applies positive voltage.
If you paint a bright white line on the floor, and put the robot cart on top of it, the cart will follow the line unerringly, all by itself. If it starts drifting right or left, one of the light sensors will start applying more voltage to the steering, thus moving the cart back toward the center of the line.
This simple device is not even a computer, it has no memory (as such) and no CPU; and yet, it can execute an apparently complex behaviour (following a complicated-looking white line), just by using a combination of simple rules. That's how modern computers work, too (only much more so).
I don't know if this will tell you anything that isn't covered in all the youtube videos that people linked already, but anyway.
The active component is the clock and the flip-flops. A flip-flop is storing a bit of information and outputting it on its output line. It also has an input line which is being ignored most of the time. When a clock pulse arrives on the clock input, the value on the input line gets remembered and asserted on the output line until the next clock cycle. In between the clock cycles, the new outputs from flip-flops propagate through the "passive" circuits.
What happens at the start. Complex stateful integrated circuits generally have reset inputs. When a signal is asserted on the reset input this causes the IC's internal registers to take on some predefined values putting it in a known state. For a CPU this will likely involve configuring the instruction fetch logic so that it starts fetching and executing from some fixed physical memory address. It's up to the system designer to ensure that the memory contains meaningful code at this address.
Whence the code? The ROM (or EEPROM or whatever). A memory IC that upon getting an address asserted on its address pins will output the word stored on its output pins.
CPU isn't wired directly to memory modules, but to another IC called the memory controller. The memory controller can be connected to multiple memory modules and keeps track of how physical memory address space is mapped to them. It translates memory read/write requests from the CPU to signals that can be understood by the memory modules. It's also connected to the ROM and maps some part of the memory address space to the contents of the ROM.
So what happens when you press the button is: reset signal goes to the CPU and memory controller for a while, and puts them in an initial state in which the CPU will start fetching instructions from some address in memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_vector) and the memory controller will translate these fetches into fetches from the ROM. The rest is a matter of software.
Obviously everything above is super oversimplified. The memory controller isn't wired directly to the ROM and isn't actually a separate chip in modern computers. And CPUs fetch data from memory in big chunks rather than single words, because they have caches, etc.
I am curious if anyone else has experience with ameliorating trypanophobia (needle phobia). This didn't used to be much of a Life Problem, cause one only gets so many routine medical shots in life, and I can Grin And Bear It when *someone else* does the inject/draw. But ever since I switched one of my regular medications to at-home self-administered injections...oof. Every week there's that one day when I get this creeping sense of Doom, cause I know I gotta shoot up sooner or later. Putting it off just leads to feeling worse in the long run: not just from lack of meds, but the whole, you know..."I'm a failure for obeying a cognitive fallacy, should be rational enough to argue myself out of phobias!" thing. There's something specific about the self-inflicted nature that makes a semi-tolerable level of Squick into "oh shit oh fuck oh god I can't do this" x[several times], possibly followed by downing a shot. You know, to steady the nerves. (This *never* works. Don't try to self-inject while tipsy, or you're gonna have a bad time, mmkay.)
There are certain large practical payoffs to taking this particular medication in injectable form rather than oral or dermal...specifically it bypasses liver metabolism, which is something I've gotta be careful about (family history of cirrhosis, hep B, liver cancer, etc). So the motivation is definitely there, and it passes long-term cost-benefit easily. At the same time, if there's any more tractable One Weird Trick than just trying __really hard__ to not think about a <s>pink elephant</s> needle, I would be very grateful! This singular voluntary event comprises at least 10% of any given week's Stress Budget, so I'm looking for any efficiencies I can get. (Note that I don't consider this quite worthy of a therapist's time, it's not so horrific yet that I wanna spend big Units Of Caring to ameliorate it.)
If it's relevant, I normally have a masochistically high pain tolerance and don't even notice/enjoy most everyday injuries, even bleeding ones...so it's not the hurt itself that bothers me. Sharp objects in general don't trigger me either, knives are Super Cool. Just needles specifically are NOPE. Real shame that aerosol injection technology dead-ended...
I think it does for most people, but if someone has done this for a while and not gotten better, it suggests something different. (I took part in a longitudinal study of COVID antibodies and had to do a finger stick a few times. The first time was very difficult and took a while to psyche myself up for, but the second and third were no trouble.)
Oddly enough the finger-prick types don't bother me, I think because it's over so fast? Instantaneous mild pain with immediate cessation, and usually the needle isn't even visible cause the mechanical housing obscures it. I used to have to do those during clinical trials of Truvada(tm), and I honestly think the *lab tech* had a worse time of it than I did.
(Still confuses me that Gilead was willing to hand out gobs of STD study money to lifelong virgins. I guess we'd be the Extreme Control Group?)
Gilead Sciences, the patent holder until 2020 of Truvada(tm)*, the non-generic HIV prophylactic medication that's been pretty much the single biggest Big Deal in the fight against AIDS in decades. I haven't checked recent prices, but a prescription used to go for hundreds of dollars, and they made millions or possibly billions on that investment. Yet the pharmaceutical company used to sponsor a ton of research studies to prove its safe use and potential contraindications, mostly within LGBT populations (obviously), all of which hand the drug out like candy and often include significant cash compensation as well. These studies could often be lied to about one's "qualifications" (level of sexual promiscuity). I didn't do that, but the researchers who did the screening (many themselves LGBT) hinted that they wouldn't complain if I did, nudge nudge wink wink, cause better us to have money than Some Big Pharma Company. Doubt there are any official records of such shoddy practices, so I only have my n = a few to go by here.
Maybe for some folks, but I had a normal level fear of needle sticks until my college days when I volunteered for a diet study that involved blood draws every 5 days for several months, and since then I have trypanophobia. (Thanks for teaching me a new word.)
This may be dumb, but... Can you find someone else to do it for you? Even if you don't have anyone in mind, it might be possible to get a pharmacist to do it. I know that they provide this service for some kinds of injections in my part of the world, although I don't know if it's restricted to the types that actually require skill, which actually I don't even know if it's your case. Anyway, you might try to shop around in the pharmacies around you to see if some nice person there does it for you.
Oh, it used to be offered by the friendly nurses at my doctor's office! I always had that fallback option in case the Heebie Jeebies from jabbing got too janky. Did use it a few times.
But then, you know, covid happened and Hospital Capacity and...all that. Haven't had any doctor visits since Jan 2020. It's not like they'd turn me away at this point (probably?), I guess it's more like...it now feels like a much bigger ask than merely risking some Minor Social Awkwardness? I'd really prefer both to: not go through all the tedious prevention Sacrifices to the Gods one is expected to perform to visit a medical facility, and not lie about having done such things (e.g. "oh yeah I totally had a negative test both before and after"). Such Trivial Inconveniences continue to constitute a sort of "soft lockdown" here, still...I may be legally allowed to do most things, but the cost of potential or actual Dirty Looks still effectively keeps me at home basically always.
No clue whether a typical retail pharmacist could do that, I wasn't aware that was a service offered at all! I wonder if insurance would cover that. I guess I could ask a friend, it's sort of...uncomfortably personal though? This particular med is intramuscular injection, so it's gotta go in either the thigh, or, uh...the ass. I dunno about Median Peoples' Median Friends, but that's definitely beyond the pale of what I'd consider asking any of mine, outside a real emergency! (like if I needed an EpiPen or something, that's cool)
Well, good luck! I think it might be worth the cost to actually ask someone to do this for you, be that a pharmacist or a friend. They can say no, and then you lost something in the process, sure, I get that asking this kind of thing is hard. I would also feel awkward asking this of my friends. But if they say yes, that's your problem solved more or less forever. So it's a fixed cost for a possibly very large benefit. Getting over your fear of doing it yourself would be better, sure, but I have no idea how to do so. Specially since my best guest would be to get through it enough times that it stops being scary, but if you were doing this before covid started, I guess that didn't work.
Also, in my opinion not being able to stop feeling scared about this does not constitute a failure of rationality or whatever. Sticking sharp things in our skin is usually very much *not* recommended. I'm not sure it's possible to train my instinctive brain to make such a fine distinction between sharp-things-that-are-good-for-me and the other kind. Maybe it would be, maybe I have low expectations for myself in this regard. I don't want to discourage anyone from trying to improve themselves. I just wanted to say, well, there are alternatives, and no shame in taking the easy path (or the socially and logistically hard but otherwise easier path, in this case). In fact, it could be argued that taking the easy path to solving a problem is the rational thing to do.
Self administering intramuscular injections doesn't sound like a good idea to me. If it can't be given subcutaneously, maybe there is a possibilty of a depot preparation injected every few weeks? By the way, suppositories also bypass the vena porta and have no first pass effect, which you probably mean by "liver metabolism".
Eh, it's safe enough as far as at-home procedures go? Doctors won't let you take any of the drugs or equipment[1] home until you've demonstrated adequate technique to their satisfaction at the medical facility, which of course they'll demonstrate as many times as needed[2]. It's only the vastus lateralis thigh muscle, hard to fuck up in any really significant way without trying...the worst I've ever gotten was accidentally hitting a superficial vein (mine are really prominent, you'd think this would make it easy to avoid them but alas), which bleeds decently. But even then, the z-track method is pretty good at minimizing "backwash".
It's already a depot injection, standard dosing slow-releases over around a week, and dosage can be scaled linearly to have effects last longer. Although at too-high doses the meds get metabolized into...whatever the drug equivalent of anti-nutrient is. Anti-drug. So it cancels out and is therefore wasteful. If I knew my optimal maximum dosage, I suppose I could try and get an extra-extended-release formulation that lasts like a month? That'd be infrequent enough to not be bothered much phobia-wise. Just pair it with Rent Is Due Day, get all the pain over at once! (Sadly dosing is an inexact science for this med; there are substantial error bars due to measurement error, so standard practice is to aim for safe median dosages rather than maximizing.)
Yes, first pass effect, thank you for the proper terminology. Didn't know to look that up on my first pass of writing this comment. As far as I'm aware, no one's ever formulated this med into a suppository; it's almost always given orally via sublingual pills, with a minority doing intramuscular injections like me, and even fewer using dermal patches. Which mostly don't work, other than being very convenient to administer.
[1] Worth a whole separate rant-comment sometime: it's really silly that the War On Drugs(tm) effectively made regular size medical grade needles illegal for individual consumers without medical licensure to buy online. Everyone's happy to sell syringes...with no needles. Or needles useful for tattoo artists. This really should not require a prescription. The one time I managed to snag a 1000ct box of needles off Amazon, the seller was immediately banned for Purveying Ill-Advised Consumer Goods. Kind of funny really...
[2] Or at least, that's how it worked for me. But I guess I was using a clinic that specializes in such things and knowledge, so it might be different with a GP or hospital.
Thanks for all the info. I had no doubts about your competence concerning the injection. Intramuscular to me meant bigger needle (not in your case, I see), more pain and the need to relax the targeted muscle. I'd expect a lot of people to get a little tight where they are about to push something spiky, which would lead to worse experience and probably more aversion to it next time. Best luck with your efforts, anyway.
1.5" 22 gauge needle, yep. Not a horse tranq or anything. The relaxation part is weird, to me: when getting shots/blood draws in the deltoid muscle, standard practice is indeed to relax and not get all tightened up. They only ask me to flex if it's hard to find a good vein that day. But for at-home thigh poking, making sure the muscle is fully flexed and tight is part of what makes the z-track method work. It definitely doesn't help with lessening the tension load. I am not actually squicked out by blood, but medication loss is concerning, due to all the trouble involved in shoving it in there in the first place...
I'm a psychologist who treats phobias, and I have a couple suggestions: I think the reason you're not getting over your fear is that the shots are too infrequent. Most people who are phobic of something have occasional encounters with the thing that scares them, but those infrequent encounters do nothing to reduce the fear -- they just give the person a nasty shock, and afterwards the person says,"thank god that's over." On the other hand, it seems a bit much to ask you to stick the needle in yourself over and over one day. So here is a suggested hierarchy -- it's a way to do some desensitization using things that are miniature, less challenging versions of the shot you fear:
(1) Leave an old needle from a previous shot out someplace where you can see it all the time. Have the cap off the needle. You need to desensitive to that damn needle. Play with it some. Suck water up with it and squirt it around, that kind of thing.
(2) Stuff one leg of a pair of your jeans or leggings with a towel of something so that it looks like your leg's in it. Give that leg shot after shot with the needle you use for your real shot. Do it for at least 5 mins straight, and if it still creeps you out keep doing it until it does not bother you. You can make get some extra mileage out of this by stabbing really violently, yelling ow!, anything to summon up some version of the creeped -out feeling. Maybe do this a few days in a row.
(3) Next step: figure out a way to sit in front of a mirror so that you can see yourself, & it looks like the stuffed leg is your leg. Like maybe hang a towel in front of your real leg, and hold the stuffed one in front of the towel. Have a stab fest, as above.
4) set 2 mirrors at right angles. When you sit in front of them, you'll see a left-right reversed version of youself. Hide one of your real legs and put the fake one on top as before. Let's say the fake one is your right leg. In the mirror, it will look like your left leg. Now give yourself shots in the fake leg while looking on the mirror. It will look like you're giving youself shots in your left leg, which you know is the real one, so should be creepier.
(5) Get a pack of the little syringes they sell on drugstores, I think for diabetics. The needle on them is maybe 1/4" long, & the needles are so thin they hardly hurt at all. Wash your hands and arms well & wipe them with rubbing alcohol, then stick yourself a bunch of times with that needle. You can start by just pricking your finger tip lightly, just enough to get a little drop of blood. If the blood creeps you out, put some on a piece of paper towel or something & leave it in view until it doesn't bother you any more. (By the way, I'm reasonably sure giving yourself multiple jabs with this tiny needly is safe and very unlikely to give you an infection, but maybe double-check with a medical professional before you do it).
After climbing this hierarchy, do not let any days elapse before you give your real shot, because the fear will start to come back. Keep doing these exercises up until the day of your next shot.
(6) On shot day, get up, have some coffee or whatever you like to start the day with, and give yourself the shot. Don't wait until you "feel ready," because you that time won't come, & waiting will just give you an opportunity to creep yourself out. Just do it immediately and smoothly.
Gosh, that's a lot more specific and authoritative help than I was expecting to get! Thank you so much! I might not end up bootstrapping that entire sequence - suspect things will get better enough before reaching (6) - but just knowing I'm going in the wrong direction by spacing shots out rather than increasing frequency helps a lot. (I went from dose x weekly to dose 2x biweekly cause of the fear, but as you say, that's just doubling down on unproductive "feel ready".) I bet I can get a lot of mileage out of just doing shots first thing in the day rather than before bed; procrastination is fertile soil for fear and anxiety.
ACX subscription: not just self-recommending, but the investment pays for itself too. Such grateful, much appreciate, wow.
I'm glad to hear you feel optimistic about some version of this solving your problem. That in itself is quite a good sign.
As for ACX help: I asked here for help on a project of mine that requires some kinds of expertise I utterly lack, and got help from a medical professional and someone who understands how to publicize things.
Sometimes I daydream about having a help exchange on here in one of the threads with sections for people to talk up their blogs, look for people to date, etc. I often can give people helpful general information people about psychological issues. (But rarely anything specific like what I gave you. I felt safe giving you a desensitization protocol for injections only because it's a simple localized problem, & the worst plausible outcome of your following it would be that it didn't work, & then you'd be no worse off than before.)
I don't have any reason to act on this phobia myself, but I think it's worth saying that avalancheGenesis won't be the only one who benefitted from your post - it makes sense, and looks most useful.
Now I'm going to try to brainstorm ways to desensitize myself to other annoying microphobias I have, like falling 3-4 feet, or jumping narrow but deep gaps while hiking.
I'm glad to hear it's useful to others. Process is always the same -- start with miniature versions of the thing you fear, work up. For some fears there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of repetitively looking at images and videos online of the thing that creeps you out.
Interesting. That's might be a unique challenge for me, then, and now I'm wondering if you've run into this: given that my phobia of interest is falling from great heights, I *enjoy* watching videos of people doing high-up things like rock climbing, parkour on skyscraper roofs, radio antenna repairpeople, etc. I like the thrill. If I get used to it, well, thrill's gone, and I can watch a lot more thrilling videos than I'll have occasion to hike clifftops. So I might have to trade one mental feature for another!
Huh -- I replied from inside my email app when your comment came in, and it's not showing up here. Let me know if it didn't & I'll re-write it. Freakin Substack reply feature is buggy. Sometimes it cuts me off halfway thru a long reply & I lose everything I wrote.
Not sure what you mean. I don't know what comment I'm not seeing. :-) But I'm fairly sure that if you're not seeing it here, then it's not here for anyone else either.
I self-inject a monthly migraine prevention medication. My best "one weird trick" is to shout a "battle cry" just before the needle stick. My current one (inspired by me being in the process of listening to a bunch of political histories and royal biographies about Medieval/Renaissance England) is "FOR ENGLAND AND SAINT GEORGE!"
There was a period of about a year where I was often self-injecting daily into my thigh, & the needle was not short. At first I did it fast & powerfully, the way you do, though without the battle cry. Then I discovered that if I slid the needle in slowly the amount of pain was still small, & somehow the whole experience was calmer & less traumatic. For some reason I'd started out with the idea that you had to jab it in fast -- otherwise it wouldn't penetrate, or would hurt more, or -- or something. But that turns out to be totally untrue. However, I'm all for whatever works for somebody with things of this sort.
My med unfortunately is only available as an autoinjector these days, which only gives me the option of a rapid spring-loaded jab. It used to be available as a pre-loaded manual syringe, which I greatly preferred: both because I had better control over the injection with the syringe and because ironically I find the supposedly easier-to-use autoinjector more persnickety.
Oh, yeah, those auto-injector things. Used one a few times for a migraine rescue med. They always made me think of Russian roulette. You press the give-me-the-jab button & sometimes they go SNAP! & do it & sometimes they don't and sometimes you're not sure.
If you know statistics, I have a maybe obvious question for you about the multiple testing problem.
I am reading a scientific paper in which the authors want to test a fairly large number of predictor combinations (about 100) with a data set of n=1000. The authors do a first step of selecting the predictors with a Lasso procedure ( Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). I understand (vaguely...) the procedure but basically, I don't see how it solves the problem of multiple testing: it seems to me that when you test a large number of predictors with a relatively small dataset, there is a high risk of false positives, even if you have done a predictor selection step. What is your opinion?
I do not see an obvious difference between testing 100 predictor within one model, getting 10 "significant" results with probably a large proportion of them being false positive, and selecting through a procedure (LASSO, stepwise regression, etc) before doing the analysis. Why wouldn't the LASSO procedure select exactly the same false positive?
I think the resolution is that the multiple testing problem isn't actually a problem. If you test more hypotheses, you should expect to get more false positives (and more false negatives, and more true positives, and more true negatives).
No I'm saying that such corrections weren't necessary in the first place - it's normal that the more science you do, the more false positives you will accumulate.
But you probably want to end up finding some way to distinguish the false positives from the true positives, since you eventually were hoping to learn something from the study instead of merely remarking on the fact that you ran 1000 comparisons and got 22 that seemed significant at 0.05.
Right - using multiplicity correction increases the stringency of your significance threshold which reduces your false positive rate at the cost of increasing your false negative rate. There is no reason why you should be happier to accept that tradeoff when testing more hypotheses than when testing fewer hypotheses.
Multiplicity correction defenders seem to say that if I pick a hypothesis X at random from among the 10 hypotheses I am interested in and test it and get a p value of 0.04, then that counts as a significant result... but if I then go on to test the other 9 hypotheses, then the first result stops being significant, regardless of the results of the other 9 tests. This is absurd.
The best I can say for multiplicity correction is that if researchers feel they have to do it, they will be disincentivized from wasting time by testing many dodgy hypotheses to increase their probability of lucking into a significant result. But it doesn't solve the underlying problem, because it doesn't stop 20 researchers each testing 1 dodgy hypothesis and coming up with on average 1 false positive between them. The more philosophically justified solution is to require stronger evidence to accept dodgier hypotheses on a case by case basis, regardless of whether those hypotheses happen to be tested by the same researcher or different researchers.
Could you just split the data into training and test datasets, do your exploration on the training data, and then validate it against the test dataset? Maybe show that you get the same result for many randomizations of the original data into test vs training?
Analogously, if you play ten games of football, you can expect to lose more than if you play one game. But most people wouldn't see this as a problem.
I do think there's potentially an issue with the study you describe if it is using the same data set to decide which predictors to test as to actually perform the test, as that sounds like it risks double counting evidence. But I wouldn't agree with framing this as a multiplicity testing issue, since it isn't the multiplicity which causes the problem. Suppose that a second researcher looked at the same data and picked a single predictor at random without lassoing. I claim that if that second researcher performs the same test on that predictor and gets a positive result, then this positive result is no more reliable than a randomly selected one of the positive results that the original researchers got, even though the multiplicity problem has been fully eliminated.
I think that's true, but I suppose if your whole paper is only allowed to test 1 hypothesis, you'll pick something vaguely reasonable, while if you can test 100 you're probably throwing spaghetti against the wall (e.g., "this drug works but only in elderly Hispanic women"). Hence the expected fraction of true hypotheses is smaller.
Are the coefficients of interest the ones on the variables being selected via LASSO? If so, I agree that that seems very problematic for exactly the reasons you describe, although I also could be missing something obvious.
But e.g. if you ran an RCT and used LASSO to select covariates to control for, or if you were trying to do a predictive model and used LASSO to select the covariates that go into it, it would feel different to me -- in the latter case because you'd presumably have a hold-out testing set to see how you did, and in the former case because you're just using covariates to lower the variance of the treatment effects estimator (and LASSO gives you a data-driven way to pick covariates, so it limits your p-hacking!) rather than trying to interpret the coefficients on the covariates themselves. (The hypothesis tests on these covariates will still be "wrong" -- it's just that you shouldn't care about the results of those hypothesis tests.)
Thank you very much for your input. In the paper that I am reading, it is the first case: the coefficients of interest are the ones on the variables being selected via LASSO.
I ran a quick simulation in R, and it looks like the problem you're worried is definitely real -- with 1000 observations and 100 variables that didn't actually affect my dependent variable (everything was a standard normal), LASSO selected 7 to stay in the model. Of these, 1 was significant at the .1 level, three more at the .05 level, one more at the .01 level, and two more at the .001 level.
Wow, thank you so much for doing a simulation! I am really glad to have an answer to my question and very gratetful that you took the time to test the question. Many thanks :-)))
Are they really testing 100 (combinations of many predictors, or 100 individual predictors - I didn't find this clear from your question) for 'statistical' significance? That's (IMHO) a dubiously useful thing to be doing at lot of the time, but in any case it's certainly not the only thing you might be doing. (You might, for instance, want to find a combination of predictors that together make good predictions.)
If they are testing, are they just testing the single result from the Lasso? They I don't know how easy that is to answer, though it looks like there's a bit of literature on the subject. If I run the following preliminary procedure "choose one predictor (or set of multiple predictors) at random", then do a test of that choice, I clearly have no multiple-comparisons problem. But if I run the procedure "choose the predictor (or set of predictors) with the largest empirical correlation", then run a final hypothesis test on the choice, then (roughly speaking) I've essentially just buried the full multiple-comparisons problem. But If I run some _other_ procedure to preselect variables, which isn't fully dumb but on the other hand is not purpose built specifically to select for statistical significance, isn't the answer going to be "somewhere [probably messily so] in between"?
I've developed a fear of flying. In particular I get stressed (adrenaline, sweaty hands) during minor turbulence. A year ago I had a 1/500ish bad flight. Recently found a life partner, may have 'more to live for'. What are some mental tactics to try? The two minor helpful I've found so far is repeating a Buddhist mantra and reminding myself if I ever chose to go to war I'd need to be calmer under larger uncertainty.
See if you can find a pilot to talk to about flying? I find my fears often get better if I learn more about something. Ask a pilot about what makes them want to fly, see if you can get a look in the cockpit etc. It's hard on a large jet, but on smaller regional flights I've found that pilots often enjoy talking about their profession. There are some great YouTube channels by pilots too.
You might want to meditate, journal or do some other culturally equivalent practice to try to find out what's behind this fear. Does it happen especially at takeoff and landing, during turbulence, or is it the idea of flying that worries you? And what kind of person are you? Does more knowledge make you feel better? Do you trust statistics? Are you technically inclined? Are you afraid of dying in general? Are you comforted by the experiences of others? Do you accept the opinions of people in authority?
In my experience (forty years of flying), I find that this kind of fear falls into one of a number of different types.
First, is the person for whom the whole idea of flying doesn't make sense? Aluminium tube? Eight hundred km hour? How does it even stay up? You won't get me in one of those. Such people can be comforted by knowledge and flight simulators, by having aerodynamics explained and suchlike. In the old days you could even sit in the cabin.
There's another kind of person who just finds the whole thing frighteningly complex. All these things have to work properly. Look at how narrow the runway is and the airport is surrounded by buildings. Even a tiny error. All those aircraft coming and going. here, reading or watching videos about flight procedures can be very helpful, as can simple experience. Ok, it looks forbidding but it's possible.
There are people who feel vulnerable in anything they cannot control. You can't even see the pilot, you hear noises but don't know what they refer to. That's a case where you could reasonably work on *why* you fear the loss of control, and don't, by extension, trust others.
Then there are purely physical things. Turbulence upsets me, for example, because I have poor balance, and inner ear problems. I don't think we're going to crash, it just makes me feel bad.
And so on and so on. I really would encourage you to try to pin down a bit more exactly what it is you are afraid of. It's rarely the same thing in all cases.
Maybe getting one of those apps that plots your phone's accelerometer data would help with physical discomfort during turbulence. Give you an objective reference against which to interpret what your inner ear is telling you.
When I was a kid I was on a plane that hit such bad turbulence *while already angled downward on the landing approach* that a lot of people onboard started screaming and I thought I was about to die. I've been scared of flying ever since and now that I'm an independent adult will go to somewhat extreme lengths (long bus rides to make an amtrak connection, etc.) to avoid it. I sympathize and I hope you find something that works.
If I get anxious about turbulence, I usually just look at the flight attendants. For two reasons, really. One, they usually completely ignore turbulence. There is absolutely zero concern on their faces. Two, most of the ones I've seen seem pretty old. The fact that they've flown daily for 30-40 years and are still happy to do it suggests flying is pretty darn safe.
Anyone interested in an impromptu ACT meetup on Saturday, August 13 in downtown Anchorage? I don't actually live there but will be visiting. Or, if you already run a meetup in Alaska, can I help you?
(I am coming from the meetup organizers' retreat and very enthused...)
I haven't seen this book ("Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks") ever quoted or referenced in the rationalist-sphere and I was wondering if it is worth to read considering that my goal is to improve forecasting and decision making skills. I am a completely novice in Bayesian networks and decision theory, so I am not sure if it is even the right book to start with. The authors of the book also sell a pretty expensive software, called AgenaRisk, which also I have never heard before.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh it's interesting that civilization and widening understanding is associated with difficulty running. See Enkidu's reaction to 2 weeks of mind-expanding love-making.
>But when he turned his attention to his animals,the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.Enkidu ... his utterly depleted(?) body,his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had broadened.Turning around, he sat down at the harlot's feet,gazing into her face, his ears attentive as the harlot spoke.The harlot said to Enkidu:"You are beautiful," Enkidu, you are become like a god.Why do you gallop around the wilderness with the wild beasts?"
Seems to be a problem to this day. "Inner voice while running" returns many hits on google about how to quiet our narrative. I wonder if increased inner narratization was a boon for civilization but a fitness hit for activities like running.
I've read that the harlot brings him out of the wilderness and civilizes him. Maybe becoming civilized has made him worse at doing animal stuff, like chasing prey.
This is one of those things that rings psychologically true from 3000BC to today; a man who settles down with a woman is happier but loses some of his power and energy.
It's not the sex, it's the whore. In Mesopotamian literature generally, whores are seen as an obvious fruit of civilization. Apparently, prostitution did not exist among semi-nomadic cattle drovers or whatever they were doing there before agriculture. And since they didn't have modern Western sexual morals basically at all, the prostitutes were apparently seen as an unalloyed positive of urbanism, maybe the way we would think of hospitals now. So the whore in this episode is a real serious Symbol of Civilization and Enkidu sleeping with her symbolically takes him into the city/human/artifice realm and away from his previous animal/wild/nature realm, which comes at the expense of his former wild-man powers.
About the Mesopotamian view of prostitution specifically? I have no idea, sorry. This is accumulated knowledge from reading commentaries to Mesopotamian texts (and the Bible, actually), layman's histories of Mesopotamia and stuff like that. If there's a Wikipedia page on Shamhat that's probably a good place to start looking for specifics.
A question for old farts like me. I'm getting near to taking Social Security (SS). When I read online all I see is that if you wait longer you get more per month.... about 8% more. However I see no discussion of how long you expect to live. Which seems wrong. At 8% it takes about 12 years for you to make up the money you missed by waiting a year. And if you only expect to live 10 more years, then you should take SS as soon as you can. I think the only cavet in this, is if you expect to keep working, and if you don't wait till 'full retirement age' then you lose some of your benefits if you make over some amount... though I'm not at all sure about this point. Any tax, SS experts here?
The problem with death is that it screws up the utilitarian calculations. On the one hand, you can't take it with you - but on the other hand, you don't want to under-estimate your longevity and wind up with less in your later years. I think the saner way to approach it is to ask what you really want & expect out of those years, then come up with a plan that maximizes your happiness in the normal scenarios while not immiserating you in the tail scenarios. Sometimes, like with buying insurance, it's worth taking a small expected loss in order to protect against the extremes.
The other problem is that most people aren't relying solely on SS, and so you have to look at how you want to manage your other resources & time. For example, if you have some money you might like to leave to your heirs, that might mean starting SS sooner rather than later.
I think it's probably a no-brainer to at least wait until you're no longer working (or waiting as long as possible). From what I understand, you don't exactly lose SS benefits themselves when you have other income, but your SS gets taxed at a higher rate so it winds up being similar.
Once you stop working, then, you should evaluate whether it makes sense to start taking SS now to save your other assets, or to wait until 70 to 'insure' against longevity, or something in-between. Your medical history can certainly inform that, if you think normal life expectancy doesn't apply.
Oh I'm totally happy and have enough money (AFAICT). I mostly plan to keep working as long as I enjoy it. And yeah if I thought I was going to live to 100 it would make sense to delay till I was 70. My dad died of a massive heart attach, asleep one night at age 72. Which TBH seems like a nice way to go... though I haven't experienced dying of a massive heart attack yet so I don't really know. Hey if I live longer than expected it's a win win for everyone. I take less money from the government and I live longer. I should say that the point of getting more money is to pass it on to my heirs (kids).
I read somewhere, though I can't find it now, that you (or this might just be me) will lose $1 of SS for every $2 of income I make over ~$20k. (So if my SS is $20k and I make $60k, I get no SS...) but don't quote me on that I could be totally wrong.
Random but a podcast called “Words and Numbers” had a episode on SS recently that was short and I enjoyed. Wasn’t directly related to your question but more about how we would fix it if people knew/cared and politicians cared about longterm health of SS.
And if I don't spend the SS money, but invest it at say 5% return, then waiting a year only gives me a 3% advantage and it takes ~30 years to catch up.
If Alex Jones had voiced his Sandy Hook conspiracy theory during only one episode of his show and then never mentioned it again, would he still be facing the massive lawsuit and having to declare his company bankrupt?
I'd guess not since the lawsuit started from the families being harassed. It would be much harder to claim that the source was one specific instance if the harassment was continuous.
I believe the current cases started after the statute of limitations passed for the original statements. I've heard about other lawsuits, but allegedly InfoWars got out of most because the families had no or inadequate representation, so they made missteps.
If you live in the Seattle area, there's going to be an ACX meetup this Wednesday (August 3rd). Free pizza for all participants (until supplies run out).
"Reminder: if someone here asks a question, it’s a bannable offense to comment something like “the answer to this is obvious” or “I can’t believe anyone could not know the answer” without providing the answer."
Bless you. Seriously, I wish every public comment section or social-media type platform enforced that rule.
> 3: Reminder: if someone here asks a question, it’s a bannable offense to comment something like “the answer to this is obvious” or “I can’t believe anyone could not know the answer” without providing the answer.
I am normally not in favor of bans, but I am in favor of this. Though I'd make it a short-term ban to start with...
Any advice and/or resources regarding inpatient mental healthcare? Without going into too many details, a close family member of mine is having some severe mental health problems right now, to the point where we as family are afraid of self-harm. Money is not an issue, but I don't even know how to start evaluating options. Any advice? Thanks!
Anyone have an argument for why a right to privacy is important? I have an emotional preference for it, but I get the feeling that the justifications I’ve given in the past were kinda post hoc.
Depends on what you mean by right to privacy, and what details you cover as keeping private.
Take something simple like your home address. If someone knows it, they can do anything from mail you glitter bombs to send SWAT after you. This is especially bad if you're some kind of public figure. For a lesser example, if a company has your address on file and gets hacked, it's that much easier for your identity to be stolen.
Something vague like web browsing habits are a little harder. You could theoretically get blackmailed for both bad things (cheating on partner) or arguably innocuous things (looking up LGBT stuff if you're in a deeply anti-LGBT family). I can't think of a hard reason why your 17 searches for homemade mayo has the same right to privacy other than that it's harder to make detailed rules about what should or shouldn't be protected.
Thanks! This came up in the context of data mining. Do you think data mining significantly contributes to our echo chambers? I was thinking we self select to such an extent that surveillance would have no effect. What do you think?
I don't think data mining for data mining's sake does. However, I do think data mining is part of it. A company such as Facebook has the goal of making money. Their model is entirely advertising driven, so a user spending more time on the site means more money for them. How can you get people to spend more time? By collecting lots of information on them to give them the "best" stuff to look at. Additionally, having more characteristics to use when targeting advertising is a plus for advertisers so they are more inclined to buy ad space.
I think the echo chambers arise from the "giving people the best stuff to look at part" and a flaw in how "engagement" is measured. A positive comment and a negative comment both look like engagement/time-on-site, but people are more likely to post negative things than positive ones. Eventually that turns into an us-vs-them scenario where more debated posts get pushed forward. Places like Reddit counter this with an actual upvote/downvote system, but places like Twitter only have the upvote/like part so any engagement is positive.
I'm not an expert on this, but that's my pet theory.
I can't prove that privacy has some innate objective importance, but I believe if you accept that intimacy (physical, emotional, or otherwise) is important, then I think you can conclude that privacy is important. To the extent that intimacy is sharing yourself with someone else in a special way you don't share with just anyone, we need privacy to be intimate with others.
Imagine if you had a screen on your forehead that broadcasted your innermost thoughts and emotions 24/7. Then sharing them with your lover wouldn't seem very intimate. You wouldn't be giving him/her privileged access to you in any way.
If you take self-determination as a cornerstone of all rights - which is my preference, but the reasons why are beyond scope - then the right to privacy emerges quite naturally.
Self-determination implies that nobody but the agent may choose how the agent is to act or not act. Therefore, the agent's actions - insofar as they do not impact another - are nobody's business.
This gives us the private/public distinction: the sphere of actions where other agents are directly impacted (one may always derive any number of epicycles necessary to show indirect impact, to the point of rendering self-determination moot) is the public sphere, where the various agents must coordinate in order to avoid conflict between their differing desires, and individual self-determination is constrained somewhat to leave room for everyone else; while the private sphere (where other agents are not directly impacted) remains the sole domain of the individual.
In practice, there tends a hierarchy of private/public wherein household matters are private with regards to wider society, whilst within the household different matters may be public or private with regards to its members (e.g. the kids should not ask about what sometimes happens in their parents' bedroom), etc.
Now, granted "privacy" is often taken to mean information rather than direct influence (indeed, this is also a meaning I use here), but if we take it as a given that (some of) my actions are none of your business (self-determination), then it follows that you have no business knowing about them either (generic you throughout, of course).
As a practical matter, how would we construct a world without privacy? As a super-panopticon where everyone watches everyone else all the time? It might provide an answer to who watches the watchmen, but what beyond that?
Either everyone watches, but nobody ever says or does anything - in which case: what's the point? Or - if they actually start to act on what they're seeing - we're back to the conflict of opposing teleologies wherein the right to self-determination is preserved by the last man standing.
In reality, of course, people calling for no right to privacy overwhelmingly mean "no privacy for *you*". "Privacy for *me*" remains as important as ever. This sort of asymmetry is incompatible with other basic rights such as that to equal treatment (itself a derivative of self-determination, incidentally), and ultimately results in the same sort of conflicts that we're trying to avoid through constructing a rights framework.
To sum up: if we take it as a given that people have no right to tell others what to do when the matter doesn't concern them, they *ipso facto* lack justified interest in knowing what the others *are* doing, unless it concerns them directly.
Moreover, privacy - like the entire framework of rights - is social grease to minimise conflict between agents possessing opposing teleologies, through minimising the exposed conflict surface (what you don't know, you can't get mad about).
Hypothetical question: There are two major social platforms you're considering joining with equal user bases, communities, and features. They only differ in two ways:
- Platform A will let you sign up with just an email address and password. You can use whatever display name you like. However, it has a rather strict policy about conduct on the site similar to ACX's but requiring all three pillars (kind, true, necessary). Passes are made for lighthearted jokes. Assume that the technology and logistical issues of knowing what's true or kind are somehow solved.
- Platform B has almost no conduct policy. As long as it isn't illegal, you are free to say what you will. However, you must fill out a form and have your identity verified before posting. Your profile picture must be a clear picture of you. Your full name and relative location (perhaps the 0.02 by 0.02 square block of coordinates you live in) are public on any post you make. You're not in danger of getting SWATted, but if someone knew you offline and read your post, they'd know for sure it was you who posted it. Posts are automatically deleted after 2 years. Assume that you cannot somehow fake your identity to get onto the website.
In other words, would you rather have stricter rules for posting but have more privacy, or would you rather be free to speak but must own your words publicly?
Unquestionable A. A's content moderation policy does sound stricter than I would prefer, but still better than having no moderation at all. And I definitely prefer the privacy - I barely post on Facebook as it is; for anything except the most innocuous topics, I would much rather post under a pseudonym.
A. I like some privacy, and I try to behave in an alright way anyway, so it doesn't seem like something that would feel too restrictive.
But of course which one to choose depends on what my specific needs and intentions around joining one of them at that time. What's freedom in one situation can be something that just gets in the way in another.
It would also be interesting to join both, intend to behave the same way, and see if there were any unexpected chafing from either, or how they affected what I chose to post. That assumes my intention in joining was not too specific, or it would probably not work.
The internet needs all sorts of sites. The day it becomes a monoculture is the day it dies.
That said, for me personally, the threshold for joining would certainly be much higher for platform B. But I have been known to post personally identifiable information online without too much hesitation.
Since realistically it's just *begging for trouble in loud capital neon letters* to join Platform B(luecheck), I'm forced to go with Platform A(nonymous). I imagine that there'd be significantly less content there than here, though; Scott postulates a hypothetically ideal three-legged stool of moderation, yet in practice it's allowed to fall over on the regular, since enforcement costs are too high otherwise. A place that actually took all three really seriously, all the time, and had no enforcement costs...well. I'd be a hell of a lot more reticent to post *pretty much anything*, honestly. (Necessary seems the hardest criterion to consistently meet.)
But I would prefer to inhabit a counterfactual world where Platform Bluecheck was the norm, and societal trust levels were high enough that all the dangers and harassments below SWATting were equally unlikely. If dath ilan ever allowed social media, it'd probably look something like that.
I didn't realize I'd aligned the letters that way! Hah!
I think I worded my choices poorly in a way that favored A for too many people. Assuming that random people wouldn't be finding and harassing you, but many of your friends/family/coworkers were on the site, would that change your answer? How strict would the moderation policy need to be for you to pick B over A?
Friends mostly all know I'm a <s>raging racist bigot who spouts nothing but conservative talking points</s> center-right libertarian, so whatever; family wouldn't like it, but I don't have a great relationship with any of them anyway. Coworkers are where I do start to worry, since At-Will Employment means I can be fired at the drop of a hat for no reason...and saying critical things about work is an unwisely large percentage of what I post on Substacks. Only thinly disguised by never directly naming the company or location, but it's super easy to figure out. I worry somewhat less about other grunts at my same hierarchy level, since I'm kind of an outlier pariah already, and those that do come to know my conservative views usually don't care overly much. (It's funny how being an unequivocally exceptionally talented worker earns bipartisan respect. Big Fish Small Pond effect.)
I suppose it'd also complicate dating somewhat, but...still a dateless virgin at age <mumbles>, so it's not like I'm sabotaging a bright future or curtailing current prospects. Can't lose anything if you already start at zero.
In terms of strict moderation...I think if those subjective three criteria got to the point of being *quantified*, especially by some blackbox algorithmic bullshit, then I'd B(ounce). It's very rare for me to find a community's Laws that are enforced in spirit more than in letter. Online rules are anti-inductive though; making them extra-legible frequently seems counterproductive, or at least it's a correlation I've noticed. One of those Internet Rules. Same thing happens with exacting "X strikes" policies. The inevitable consequence of gamifying systems is that people will try to game them.
Or more concretely: I can do Kind, and usually claim at least locally valid Truth, but am bad at Necessary. Possibly up to 50% of all my comments are running-my-mouth typing-from-the-hip, just me going around vaguely trying to build Niceness, Community, and Civilization by seeding hopefully fruitful conversations. They're not really *necessary* though. I'm rarely the most qualified person to answer others' questions on this blog. (Or even qualified period, honestly. I try to keep up with the class, but definitely still reach exceeding my intellectual grasp in obvious embarrassing ways too often. Guess the Teacher's Password, and all that...)
I think Necessary is a place where scrupulous minds get excessively hung-up- personally, I don't think that there has actually been a single "Necessary" post in the history of the internet, just like there's never been a "necessary" book, song, film, etc. I generally take it as an invitation to think twice and go "Yes, calling this guy a bellend is probably TRUE, and if I was being a bellend I'd want someone to call me out so it's KIND, but is it going to help construct a conversation or just mire it in name-calling?"
Helping other people learn new words to add to their ad hominem arsenal seems True and Necessary to me. Discourse is improved by using more creative insults, I feel. "Elegance is required in all things, even bellicosity"
But, yes, fair enough - if one feels Unworthy To Post in the first place, that's gonna make Necessary a big personal hang-up. I think if hypothetical Platform Anonymous had a...um...more...typical social media userbase compared to ACX...then probably I'd feel less Unworthy. That effect is a particular artifact of the SSC/ACX demographics being such strong outliers in directions where I'm mostly not. If a commentariat includes a lot more Jo Everyperson, then I'm more at home, and the average standard for Necessary is probably graded on a gentler curve. Otherwise there'd be no users and Network Effects would kick in. "how can it be social media if I'm not allowed to post cat pics?"
A, not for the witches, but for the pseudonimity. There is plenty of things that I want to say/write (and can be deemed true & necessary, if not kind), are not illegal (outside of the UK, I guess), but still don't care to see tied to my name for every hostile agent to see.
Fairly uninformed opinion (passing on anecdotal experiences from friends, no personal experience nor have I done a deep research dive):
The copper one makes some people's periods way worse. If this happens to you, it is very unpleasant and keeping it is pretty much intolerable. If this doesn't happen to you, it generally has less overall side effects.
The progesterone one is quite likely to cause the same sorts of relatively minor side effects as hormonal birth control (weight gain, breast sensitivity, mood changes, etc.). This is generally more annoying than the good outcome with the copper one, but less annoying than the bad outcome.
I don't know anything about how predictable reactions to the copper one are (i.e., whether there's any way to tell if you'll react badly other than getting it implanted and finding out).
Seconding this entirely, this is my understanding also. If you can handle the non-hormonal IUD it's better because it doesn't fill your shit up with exogenous hormones, one of few forms of birth control which don't. Some women can't deal, however.
(EDIT to add source: had an ex-girlfriend who was brutalized by the pill and opted to switch for this reason)
Thirding. My wife didn't well tolerate the IUD and went back to the pill. A few years and an unplanned pregnancy later, she forcefully suggested I take care of things surgically.
I'm not sure if my opinion qualifies as informed; I'm not a doctor. But I've seen studies, and I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence.
If I had a daughter, I'd do my best to convince her not to use a hormonal contraceptive, unless she absolutely must. Here's why.
1. Many women on hormonal contraceptives are made miserable by headaches, depression, and other problems. If you look at studies, you'll see also that many women drop out before the end of the study.
2. There's research showing that hormonal contraceptives mess with brain structure. (Other hormones also affect the brain structure, so it's not really a surprise.) I don't know enough about this, but it sounds like something to be wary of.
3. If you're unlucky, you might get one of the serious side effects, and you might even die. (I knew someone who nearly died.)
4. Hormonal contraceptives have been very widely promoted by people whose motivations are suspect. This suggests that everyone's perceptions of them are likely to be wildly skewed and a lot more favorable than they should be, due to negative information likely not being widely publicized or being glossed over. As if points 1-3 above weren't enough already, I'd say this should also make you suspicious.
I know some women can't tolerate copper IUDs. But for those who can, they look like a much safer bet.
I'm doing my best not to get a flame war started here, so lets not.
I mean people who use women's health as political football, e.g. (but by far not only) a certain recent president one of whose major achievements was passing a law giving all women free oral contraceptives. I don't object to the coverage itself (especially compared to the rest of the law), but I object to the shameless promotion, as I'm pretty sure this skews media's coverage and people's perceptions of not only benefit, but also safety. I object to normalizing something that people should really understand the risks of and problems with before using it.
They both suck in different ways, as does all birth control, haha. I've had both but do not currently have either. I'm also not medically trained, and my experience is anecdotal but somewhat informed by general interest in the reproductive system.
I had a hormonal IUD first and I had it removed after less than a year because it triggered chronic migraines. (It also gave me periods that were very light but twice as long, which I would have put up with were it not for the headaches.) I'm also sensitive to other hormonal BC and I already got occasional migraines, so although the headaches are the worst BC side effects I've had, they weren't exactly a surprise. I tell you all this because I think a person who has been on other types of hormonal BC could probably estimate their likelihood of having issues based on their experiences with other methods. If you tolerate hormonal BC well but want a long term invisible option, it would probably be fine.
I had the copper IUD put in when I had the hormonal IUD taken out. After about 6 months my body rejected it and I had it yanked out in an ER (edited to add: it didn't perforate my uterus or anything, but my body started to push it out through my cervix). I didn't get another one because I concluded (somewhat superstitiously) that my body just didn't want an IUD. If my body hadn't rejected it, I would have put up with the slightly-heavier periods because I liked being on a long-term non-hormonal BC.
Last one of these for a while, for the sake of not polluting the threads - many thanks to the community for all its engagement so far, and to Scott for his indulgence of us.
My partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf, for anyone who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages.
Nukes are fake. Ok, not "fake" fake, but am I supposed to believe the stuff made of radioactive material, left unused for decades, untested for the last 30 years outside of computer simulations, would still be working as intended? Even more for the arsenals of countries that underwent financial hardships, such as Pakistan or Russia, or those that underfunded their military for decades, such as France.
The suspect radioactive material is tritium, which is used in "boosted fission" designs where a relatively small amount of deuterium-tritium fusion is used as a neutron source to increase the efficiency of turning plutonium into boom. Tritium decays into Helium 3 with a half-life of 12.3 years, and while He3 is also a potential fusion fuel, D-He3 fusion throws off protons instead of the desired neutrons. The net result is that unless the He3 is regularly filtered out and replaced with fresh tritium, the bomb will fizzle and go off with only a small fraction of its designed yield.
My understanding is that boosted fission designs are ubiquitous in modern nuclear arsenals, both for efficiency of nuclear material production and because a boosted fission design can be made much more compactly (fitting better in a MIRV warhead or other delivery mechanism) than pure-fission weapons of similar yield. Even full-on Teller-Ullman H-Bomb designs that get most of their yields from a fusion secondary stage (which produces its own tritium from stable lithium as part of the explosion process) will typically use a boosted fission design for the "fission" primary that sets off the secondary.
Right, but this is something everybody understands, that can be trivially measured and corrected for. And everybody who maintains nuclear weapons, has a nuclear-weapons budget that can easily afford enough tritium to top up the reservoirs.
I suppose it's possible that corruption in the Russian military has left someone out in the cold, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons they're responsible for maintaining but barely enough money to afford the colonel's dacha and mistress, so they just deliver fake readiness reports for actually-useless nukes. But those would almost certainly be the weapons in the reserve stockpile, not the warheads of operational missiles.
True. I seem to recall carping in the lmid-90s that the Clinton Administration had skimped on tritium replacement and other nuclear arsenal servicing costs, but I'd guess that was more in the nature of postponing servicing a year or two past optimal rather than letting the weapons become nearly useless.
Also, my memories of highly technical defense policy issues from 25ish years ago when I was in high school may be a little fuzzy.
Related to that, I've found the Phantom Type Hypothesis intriguing since I first heard of it. The short version is that the reason there's so little archaeological and documentary evidence of the 7th through 9th centuries AD in Europe and the Near East is that most of that time period didn't actually happen. Specifically, everyone lost track of what year it was around 614 AD (the height of the last great Byzantine-Sassanian war and a bit of a nadir for the Gothic and Frankish successor states to the Western Roman Empire), and then a few generations latter when things had come back together, the HREmperor Otto III, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, and Pope Sylvester II cahooted together to standardize the calendar to make the then-present year the auspicious round number 1000 AD that they could use to propaganda advantage by tying in the things they were trying to do at the time with millennial prophecies. This was off by almost 300 years from the "real" calendar, causing a bunch of "mythical" history (most notably the entire Carolingian period) to get promoted (augmented by forgery as needed) to fill in the gaps. This can even be made to work with British, Viking, and Muslim sources if you don't look too closely, since there are big gaps in the historical record in those places as well at around the same time period, and modern scholars have had to expend considerable effort sifting out actual history from myth and legend: one could suppose that these areas also lost track of what year it was and contemporary chroniclers and later historians used Byzantine and European sources
Where this conclusively falls apart, besides being wildly implausible and a lot of the details not quite lining up, is that there's no proposed explanation for Chinese and Indian sources being in on the scam, and there are several anchor points both inside the proposed phantom time period (most notably the Battle of Talas between Abbasid Persia and Tang China) and outside it (several plagues that ran along the silk road and various comets, eclipses, novae, and other celestial events that are attested in both European and Asian records) that fail to show a ~300 year discrepancy.
Is it known why there are gaps in the historical records just around that time, as compared to before? Is it wars, migration, societal collapses, natural disasters, destruction of sources?
Well, that is the million dollar question of European history.
I'm no historian or expert or history buff, so I can't explain anything, but I would like to mention (not argue for, not lay out, not detail, just *mention*) the most interesting explanations I've heard. More than one can apply.
Explanation three: a chain of events triggered by Roman conquests. The Romans conquered a Mediterranean that was already prosperous and sophisticated, and then everything started to go south very slowly, because Roman rule was destructive, and the eventual effect of this were the dark ages.
That last one isn't something you usually hear, but I remember that 15 or 20 years ago I came across a page that laid it out in a beautiful, detailed and convincing way. I've always regretted not bookmarking it.
Substack won't show me the end of your comment for some reason, but to respond to the part I can see:
The original meaning of the Dark Ages was that, in the early middle ages, the region that had been the Western Roman Empire was poorly documented and therefore "dark", meaning it's hard for historians to see.
It can't be because of Islam, because the Dark Ages were well underway when Islam started. Also Islam hit the eastern empire earlier and harder than they hit what had been the west.
I don't buy your explanation #3 either; it was the eastern Mediterranean that was prosperous and sophisticated before the Romans, but it was the west that went dark. The west benefited hugely from Roman rule, and suffered hugely from the loss of Roman rule. The big question is why the western empire fell, which might well be your explanation #2.
The Greek East during the early Middle Ages (aka the dark ages) was much less sophisticated than it had been during classical antiquity. So I don't think that the notion that "it didn't go dark" refutes those theories. It did go a little dark.
It makes sense that, at the lowest point, the West would be worse off than the East, because the West had always been economically and culturally inferior to the East, and much of the prosperity of Italy was a "fake" one derived from forcibly diverting the resources of other regions.
People tend to think that from the fall of Rome follow the Dark Ages. But the fact that the East also declined suggests that there's more to the onset of the Dark Ages than that. I'm no historian but I suspect it's more helpful to frame it the other way around: from the gradual onset of the dark ages follow the "fall" of the West and the decline of the East. This is compatible with the explanations 2 and 3, while 1 alone does not explain the fall of Rome but can help explain the stagnation of both East and West.
My understanding is that it was probably a combination of factors leading to a general remission (not quite collapse, but definitely well in that direction) of the kind of complex, urbanized, literate civilization that leaves decent historical records.
At the super-macro level, the Dark Ages were the nadir of a multi-century decline from a peak around the second century AD (the late Principate phase of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, particularly the Five Good Emperors period). Things had gone rather to pot during the Crisis of the Third Century, got patched back together somewhat by Diocletian, Constantine, and Julian, and then fell apart again with the Vandal, Hun, Gothic, and Frankish invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries. Some degree of Romanesque urban culture and long-distance trade networks persisted under the "Barbarian" kingdoms and especially in the surviving Eastern Empire, but the overall trend was downwards for a combination of political/military and demographic reasons.
There was another round of big shocks in the 6th century, with the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain (which went almost completely dark at this point, to the point where modern historians are like "we're pretty sure this guy was a King because he got buried with a bunch of cool stuff, and that's pretty much all we know about him" and "Beowulf has many shortcomings as a historical source because it's almost completely made up, the monsters and the dragon being a bit of a give-away, but it's what we've got so here goes..."), the Justinian/Belisarius/Narses wars of Roman reconquest in Italy and North Africa (which pretty much wrecked the Vandal and Ostrogoth successor kingdoms to the Western Roman Empire, at ruinous cost in blood and to the Eastern Roman Empire), and the Plague of Justinian which killed something like 20-40% of the urban populations of the affected areas.
Then in the seventh century, we get several more waves of bubonic plague (often lumped together with the Plague of Justinian and its immediate aftershocks as the "First Plague Pandemic") along with stuff like the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628 where both of the Middle Eastern superpowers (the Byzantine [or Eastern Roman] Empire and the Sassanian Persian Empire) spent almost 30 years completely wrecking one another with the odd internal throne war here and there for a change of pace.
And then a bunch of mostly-illiterate desert nomads decided to unite under the banner of a charismatic prophet and invade the weakened Byzantine and Sassanian Empires not long after that war ended. These desert nomads wound up conquering big chunks of the Byzantines, pretty much all of the Sassanian, and went on to also conquer most of the Visigoth kingdom and also launch a massive raid into Frankish territory. The Muslim conquests also completely disrupted what was left of the Roman trade system in the Mediterranean, which indirectly drove further de-urbanization in places like
Francia.
The Muslims did develop into a highly sophisticated and learned culture, of course, but this didn't happen right away, so there was a century or two of very sparse historical records while stuff came back together. Byzantine civilization bounced back as well under the Macedonian Dynasty, as did the Franks under Charlemagne, but Phantom Time theorists dismiss these as historicized legend.
"The Muslim conquests also completely disrupted what was left of the Roman trade system in the Mediterranean, which indirectly drove further de-urbanization in places like Francia."
Can you please explain in what way Muslim expansion disrupted trade and caused people far away to leave cities? It's interesting but in my ignorance I don't get it. You wouldn't expect conquest to disrupt trade over a scale of multiple generations. When the Romans were conquering the world, trade was still going on across Europe and the Mediterranean, right?
"At the super-macro level, the Dark Ages were the nadir of a multi-century decline"
That a prosperous ancient world would just decline and almost collapse goes against all intuition of what should happen. So, ultimately, why did it happen? Pointing to specific waves of invasions and civil wars just describes *how* it happened. There must be a greater reason, one, in your words, at the super-macro level.
Most of the remaining big cities in the former Western Roman Empire were dependent on the surviving portions of the Roman Mediterranean trade system for their reasons for being: i.e. they were hubs for trade, industry (artisanship), and commerce on that network. They'd buy and make local goods for export to elsewhere in the network, and they'd act as distribution hubs for import. If the trade network goes away, so does most of the reason for those cities' continued existence.
The network at that time was heavily weighted towards the Eastern Roman Empire, which had survived the 4th and 5th centuries much more intact than the West and which had been richer than the West for some time before that, and in addition there was significant amount of trade through the ERE to places further East: particularly Persia, India, and China.
Now, the ERE got gutted by the Muslim conquests and the trade routes that pass through Muslim territory were largely cut off for some time. The devastation of war played a major role, since the conquests took the form of several multi-year waves of sieges and harrying over the course of a century or two. And while these wars were going on, trade through the active war zones tended to be rather limited. Furthermore, it took some time for the conquerors to settle down and rule in a way that's conducive to the recovery of trade networks: early on, the new Bedouin overlords' idea of taxation of conquered peoples was little more than giving receipts after pillaging. They started trying to resurrect something like the Byzantine and Sassanian systems of Poll and Land Taxes within the first generation, but it took quite a bit longer to get the details workable as a lot of institutional knowledge and state capacity hadn't survived the conquest. And the pump of Imperial taxation turning administrative centers (especially Constantinople) into major markets for imported goods got turned down quite a bit as the ERE lost most of its territory outside Greece and Anatolia: without that sweet, sweet tax money from Egypt and Syria, Constantinople can't afford to import anywhere near as much goodies from Marseilles and Barcelona.
>There must be a greater reason, one, in your words, at the super-macro level.
That's a huge open research area, with several credible proposals being debated. The big ones I know of:
1. Climate cycles: the early Roman Empire happened under particularly favorable climactic conditions for high crop yields in the Mediterranean with Classical agricultural tech, termed the "Roman Warm Period". This reversed around the 5th century AD, followed by a couple centuries of unusually unfavorable climate, termed the "Late Antique Ice Age".
2a. The Classical world was largely a victim of its own success, with trade routes growing to span Eurasia. The former lead to an exchange of diseases between Rome, Persia, India, and China, kicking off cycles of recurring pandemics of diseases like smallpox, measles, and eventually bubonic plague. These weren't quite as devastating to Europe as the same diseases were when Europeans introduced them to the Americas a millennium or so later, but they weren't great for Europeans either.
2b. The growth of strong Classical empires lead to destructive military competition where they butted up against one another, particularly between Rome and Persia. Rome in particular didn't have the resources long-term to defend Hadrian's Wall, the Rhine-Danube frontier, and the Persian frontier, so they eventually abandoned the former two to secure the latter. But this was in the longer-term counterproductive since it moved the centers of gravity of the two Empires closer together so they beat one another up more intensely than ever.
3. My personal favorite: Rome in particular never really recovered from the Crisis of the Third Century. The institutions that had made the Principate and the Late Republic pretty much collapsed, and the ham-fisted centralized replacements instituted by Diocletian and Constantine largely served to sacrifice long-term growth and posterity in order to restore medium-term stability.
Thank you so much for the history lesson. I really appreciate it.
I feel bad taking so much of your time over this. I am going to read up on some of the events you mentioned. (If anything immediately comes to mind on what I should read or what not, I'd appreciate it, but I don't want to take more of your time on this.)
As to sources to seek out, I heartily recommend Philip Daileader's "Great Courses" lecture series on the Early Middle Ages. It's excellent in both style and content, and his account starts with the Crisis of the Third Century in order to fully set the stage.
As for sources to avoid, Tom Holland's "Shadow of the Sword" about the origins and rise of Islam should be read very critically if at all. It's well-written, and has a lot of good stuff about the early Muslim conquests of Byzantine and Persian territory and their aftermaths, but his thesis on the origin of Islam (that Mohammed is best understood as a mythical figure and most of the story of his life and teachings was invented retrospectively by Muslim theologians a couple centuries later to explain myths and doctrines that had developed organically from late Roman-era Jewish and Christian heresies) is very far outside the mainstream and Holland severely overstates his arguments for it.
And now that Moldbug reminded me of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, my *second* favorite crackpot theory is the Crollalanza theory of Shakespeare authorship.
Remote viewing. The fact that it would be so world transforming if it existed, coupled with the "recently revealed secret government program" nature of its history, makes it fun.
Is there a simple way to see who replied to my comments on Substack?
There is https://substack.com/activity which is a mix of "liked your comment", "replied to your comment" and "also commented", but for some reason it only shows the things that happened 2-4 months ago, but doesn't show the things that happened e.g. last week.
"for some reason it only shows the things that happened 2-4 months ago, but doesn't show the things that happened e.g. last week."
I think this is either a plain bug or some setting which counterintuitively exists and which you toggled. I just looked at that page (hitherto unknown to me) and it shows a list of my activity in reverse chronological order from my most recent comment on down.
So there are pros and cons to all of the Big 5 personality factors. I notice that a recurring theme at my job is a serial deficit of Conscientiousness. This manifests as widespread poor time management, inattention to detail, shoddy maintenance of communal areas/property, noncompliance with "ought to know" basic rules (e.g. keeping cold stuff refrigerated), etc. As a Lawful person who scores high on this factor, I find the Chaotic environment deeply distressing, even if the individual people making it up are usually pleasant. It's fairly common that I end up in a sort of disorganizational paralysis, where the annoyance is so high that I can't get any real work done until I've sorted, cleaned, tidied, etc. to make a Sane Work Area. Sometimes swearing is involved. (Yes, I'm Neurotic, Disagreeable, and low-Openness too. Thanks autism.)
On the one hand, this tendency runs all the way through to the top level of management at the store I work (other branches necessarily aren't like this). So it is a sort of trickle-down of what I'd consider bad unproductive habits, as no one important is setting a good example. I realize these are stiff headwinds to act against. On the other hand - this is a hill I feel compelled to die on? One of the major unifying factors in us continually setting huge piles of Value on fire. I try to be the change I wish to see, every day, but no one takes me for a role model. It just doesn't feel like too many people are motivated to Make Things Run Well, unless it coincidentally involves avoiding punishment. The incentives aren't aligned to work efficaceously, either, since there's minimal accountability anyway.
I guess I am just wondering if this is part of Growing Up that I'm refusing to grok. Especially living in a very liberal area, where Conscientiousness in general isn't highly prevalent or in demand. It feels wrong not to aim for efficiency and maximal profit...let no Value be destroyed that doesn't have to be, and all that. But the world keeps on turning each day anyway. So maybe in the big picture, we are so wealthy that it doesn't make much difference about not capturing/destroying Value. "I get paid by the hour" mindset. That feels wrong...but maybe it's the only sane way to live? (Or just a poor environment fit for me.)
This may not be terribly helpful, but it sounds like you are simply a poor fit for your workplace (yes, there are times where "poor fit" is actually meaningful). There's nothing inevitable about how your workplace functions, but - to be fair - there's nothing fundamentally Good, True and Beautiful about your approach either. Instead, you and your co-workers have arrived at different normative judgements starting from the same brute facts.
I do want to focus on one thing you wrote:
> One of the major unifying factors in us continually setting huge piles of Value on fire.
(I assume you meant o say "is us continually etc.", because you don't mention any factors, hence it seems like the Value-burning *is* the factor. The following applies in any case.)
You can't, in a very real sense, set huge piles of Value on fire because "value" is a normative judgement. That something is offhandedly discarded/destroyed itself demonstrates it to be held of little value.
In other words, your co-workers have a different concept of what is valuable than you do, and so long as that persists you will remain unhappy. It is generally difficult to persuade someone that something is valuable (unless you can demonstrate it to be exchangable for something they already hold valuable at a good rate), so don't expect to persuade them by example.
You'd probably be best off finding a job with a workplace culture that's more compatible with your preferences.
I think that's probably accurate. It's the workplace I have (first real job ever, to be honest), and is super convenient in many ways (e.g. under 15 minute commute, even if walking, from a <$750/mo room), so I'm willing to do a lot to make myself fit in the round hole...at a certain point it's way too much sanding the edges off though. Maybe I just can't fit ever, and shouldn't try.
The factor would be lack of conscientousness, according to the Big 5 Personality Factors model. So yes, "in us".
By Value, I mean...well, it's a for-profit company in a capitalist economy, so mostly money. Not always directly money, because people will put up with a lot of abuse to buy necessities like groceries. But it's entirely possible to assign a monetary cost to alienating customers, demoralizing employees, harming company reputation, and so on. Sales foregone one day aren't really made up for on following days...the people who couldn't buy an out of stock product don't come tomorrow and then buy twice as much. They only buy once, or they find a substitute at some other business. So really, every single day is a recurring string of limited-time opportunities that one ought to capitalize on as often as possible.
Whether it's neglecting to sell product cause it wasn't available, or having to pull expired product cause one didn't properly rotate the stock first, there is always some money left on the table at the end of each close of business. I just feel like minimizing that is really important, cause in a competitive industry, no company can ever get so comfortable as to coast along on inertia. We've already been bought out once before by private capital, and I have no illusions about being sold off again if our fundamentals slip too much. There is a real danger in not seeing the forest for the trees - that covid-related demand shifts mask an underlying rot and malaise. At some point, there won't be any more political capital to take for granite about being an Essential Business selling Necessities; customers are gonna hold us to the same standards they did in 2019. If we are still bumbling about Chaotically at that point, well, God help us.
I don't feel like this was at all an inevitable outcome...it's something I've seen coming at each turn, but have been largely powerless to do anything about. It takes someone able to see, to be able to point out that the blind leading the blind leading the blind is maybe a bad idea. (One doesn't recognize brain drain without having a drainable brain in the first place. Most of our employee exodus has been skilled veterans like me, who tried to Care and got similarly smacked down.)
Anyway...point taken. Maybe *I'm* the asshole, to use an Internet turn of phrase. Although I do notice even my non-conscientious coworkers are not, in fact, happy. They too think the job sucks bigly and are not that pleased with the constant dysfunction, despite contributing to it majorly (in my view). It's a bad Nash equilibrium all around, where no one has quite enough incentive to shift their own behaviour for the better net good. Maybe I can find somewhere else that hasn't fallen into such a trap in the first place.
When I leave a job, I often wish I had some "spy" left in place who would tell me, 5 or 10 years later, what happened afterwards, and which of my predictions were correct. I usually don't have such information source, because the former colleagues I stayed in contact with usually also quit in a few years. In the few situations where I had such source, the results were various. For example:
a) The problem I predicted turned out to be real, but not damaging for the company as a whole. Yes, a few smart people got frustrated and quit, but more equally smart people were hired. A project or two failed predictably, but more projects were started. As a whole, the company seems very successful and growing.
b) A few decades later the company exists almost unchanged: still has the same problems, the employees who stayed are still frustrated, but the company keeps generating money, so... from the perspective of the owner, everything is okay, I guess.
c) After a few people quit, the company woke up and fixed the stupid problems. Now everything seems okay.
d) The disaster I predicted and couldn't avoid happened 100% as I expected. The entire project was a failure, the company lost a lot of money and had to sell a fraction of ownership to survive. Since then, the company seems doing great.
Note that missing from this list is "the company went out of business". In my experience, no matter what degree of dysfunctionality, this never happens. Which is weird, considering how competition is supposed to work.
My current best guess is this: most companies fail at the beginning. If they somehow manage to survive a few years, the best bet is that they will keep existing, no matter how horrible they may seem to people such as me and you. Because they are doing something right that happens to outweigh all the things they are doing wrong. (Could any economist please confirm or disconfirm my guess?) In worst case, someone else buys a company or its part, and fixes some of the worst aspects of it, but not necessarily all of them.
So... my advice is to move elsewhere if you are dissatisfied, but not worry about the company. Companies can survive surprising amounts of apparent dysfunction. I think there is a 80-90% chance your company will still be in business 10 years later (possibly with a new owner).
Yeah...I don't think the company will fold, or even that particular location (supposedly #3 top grossing in the country, there are also rumours of building a new 3k unit apartment complex right next door, which would ensure basically permanent prosperity). Probably most of what I and others criticize doesn't even affect the bottom line that much. But I'd still maintain there's a lot not captured in official accounting figures, assuming they even are kept totally honestly...there are so many things we don't put an official price on, with employment, cause they're externalities.
Being a major job-creating magnet/anchor store. Giving people positive, resume-reinforcing employment vs spirit-crushing "wasted my time, embarrassed to have worked here". Maintaining the community character, a sense of regularity and anchoring steadiness (we have a lot of regulars where shopping here is the highlight of their day/week). Pipelining future generations towards or away from the labour movement (we're right next to a noteworthy college that attracts young impressionables from across the globe, they're the bulk of our hires and often customers). And so on.
I guess that's a roundabout way to say that, my workplace used to be a Shining Store On A Hill to me and many others, the one bright spot in our otherwise shitty dysfunctional life that was like a second home. But it's slid so far downhill since then. Covid shifts couldn't be helped, we muddled through that like every other company in the world...but even beyond the forced-hand changes, upper management's continued ratcheting-up of making the place hospitable has been deeply disturbing. Maybe the profits keep coming, but I've seen the human cost over and over and over...watched literally hundreds of people leave in just 4 years. They weren't all Dear Comrades, some I don't miss whatsoever, but so many of them really were unapologetically just...fucked over. It hurts and I wish it would stop.
10 years later: Meet the New Company, same as the Old Company. At least on paper. But what's actually inside is completely different. I worry that recapturing "the magic" is at this point simply impossible, and that too many either can't see that or simply don't care. This would be my main motivation to unionize - not because I'm particularly anti-capitalist or pro-labour, but because I want management to stop digging the hole deeper. To stop chasing out my friends and, yes, loved ones. I want to be proud of where I work again.
(fuck, writing that made me tear up irl. I guess it does bother me a lot more at the emotional level no matter how much I try to rationalize away the pain. maybe the best move really is not to play anymore, to leave.)
I've been thinking about how good social environments are *fragile*. They're unlikely to last, and it would probably be worth studying the ones that do.
This is true in general. But specifically in context of a job, your social environment is just something that your next manager can choose to sacrifice in return for a temporary increase of profit, which would bring him a bonus and a promotion.
The company is there to make a profit, not to make you happy. Sometimes, making employees happy is a side effect of trying to be profitable -- happy employees are less likely to quit, willing to stay even if they could get a higher salary elsewhere, you don't have to hire and train the new ones -- but sometimes you can increase the profit by taking their happiness away.
I try to keep my hopes outside of my job. Like, if the job is nice, that is great, but if I allow it to become a pillar of my emotional balance, I am very likely setting myself up for an unpleasant surprise.
For example, I try to avoid teambuilding and similar stuff, and instead socialize with my friends who *aren't* my colleagues. Because those friends will remain an emotional support in my life even after I quit my current job. Some of my friends are my former colleagues... but most of my former colleagues I have never seen again after changing my job.
> This would be my main motivation to unionize - not because I'm particularly anti-capitalist or pro-labour, but because I want management to stop digging the hole deeper.
Whether people like their jobs is a big quality of life issue, so it might make sense for you to look for work in an environment that suits you better, maybe even a transfer to another store at the same company.
I'm a little surprised at identifying lack of conscientiousness with liberalism, but I suppose It Depends. My bet is that it's more about personalities at the top than about political orientation.
>I'm a little surprised at identifying lack of conscientiousness with liberalism
Liberals and Tories get conscientious about really different things usually. If you don't take the time to think about examples of your own side being unconscientious, then you'll automatically assume the other one is correlated with unconscientious behaviour.
I started writing this comment thinking "Obviously it's true!" but then was able to think up enough counter examples that liberals would think were unconscientious.
For instance; Liberal voters will think nothing of piling another X hundred billions of dollars of debt onto unborn children so that they can spend more on old people today.
I consider this extremely unconscientious.
But as a counter example, Liberal voters probably think the same thing of Tory voters unwilling to pay $10 a gallon for gasoline to help slow sea level rise.
Gosh, I'd be so much happier to work at a counterfactual company that cares about water and energy. We super don't. One of the baffling things about living in bluetopia SF, home of frivolous CEQA environmental review lawsuits, is...how sloppy people are in everyday actual practice of environmentalism. Leaving fridge and freezer doors open, wasting food (Everyone Knows CA agriculture uses up 90% of the water supply, why do we not better shepherd its hard-won treasures), leaving sinks running while washing dishes and hands, buying bottled water at all, leaving lights on 24/7...nobody knows the composting and recycling rules (yes I know this has practically zero impact on actual climate metrics, but if even leftists can't get it right, why are we even collectively bothering as a society to try at all). Don't get me started on rent control and historical preservation norms ensuring the building supply is stuck with ancient architecture that no one wants to pay to upgrade with modern insulation, double pane windows, low-flush toilets, etc.
CA is basically permanently in a drought, but you sure never see anyone acting like it. Other than complaining that the Water Bill Is Too Damn High, so then governments subsidize it for qualified low-income worthies. Water Tax Holiday. It makes me sad every night I get out of work and the automated mall lawn sprinklers are spewing everywhere (about 25% ends up on the pavement, not the grass), even though it's often foggy and/or raining. Nobody cares. Go to a restaurant anywhere here, they'll have those placards stating that We're In A Drought, Water Only Served On Request...what's the first thing a server does anyway? Bring you a glass of water. And so on, and so on...
Whew! That's a lot. For what little it's worth, when Philadelphia had a drought some years ago, the no water until you ask your waiter for it rule was actually obeyed.
I don't know whether it would be obeyed now. It might be an indicator that I'm seeing restaurants which only take cash. More of them than I used to, and I wonder whether they're paying sales tax. One of them even has a no-charge-for-customers ATM.
You're reminding me of an account of a business which failed, and when the place was being cleaned out, multiple tool kits turned up-- the boss would just order another tool kit when they couldn't find one.
Haha, don't get me started on our utility closet situation...no one knows where any of the equipment is or what we own. Half the time people bring in their own toolsets or make ad hoc trips to the hardware/office supply store rather than look. It wasn't even under lock and key until recently, when a customer literally walked in, stole our hacksaw, and also appropriated the laptop-cable-locked utility room computer. I kinda don't blame him, that's just shoddy practices and now we do slightly better...
Curious about the posited correlation between cash-only and the voluntary water thing. One of those "confounder for SES/class" things? Sales tax I figure a gov't audit would catch eventually, though of course that's easier to launder with just cash receipts...the ATM is baffling, not sure how the bank would agree to that. Or did you mean they just reimburse any fees/charge non-customers to access it? Sounds kinda sketchy either way...though I am reminded that my banking situation is unusually generous. I didn't know until adulthood that most banks charged "out-of-network" ATM fees just like doctors. Seemed like a totally absurd concept meant to punish the poor and immobile.
It references another study [Gerber et al., 2011] suggesting a fairly strong (for social science) anti-correlation between conscientiousness and liberal identification.
This matches what I'd heard in the past, but I haven't dove deeply into the literature.
Same, that's what I was gesturing at. One of those commonly held Everybody Knows. It's social science though, so large grains of flavour mineral obviously...but I figure that if the MSM is onboard with advertising this (in one sense) flaw of liberal/left mindset, then it's probably relatively aboveboard? Or in other words, it's not a random factoid I picked up from The Federalist or whatever...it's something that would perennially come up in WaPo, Vox, etc. (Usually used in a reverse-stupidity-is-not-intelligence way, though: tying "conscientiousness" to conservatives via a dig at purity culture. To explain them being anti-immigration or homophobic or idk. Or just going all the way nuts with Punctuality As White Supremacy nonsense...)
Obviously, I do not know you and thus anything I say is nonsense and without any real value, so my apologies:
I personally used to feel a great deal of guilt whenever I wasn't being productive with something at basically every moment of the day, to the point where I'd neglect my own physical health and welfare in the name of "working harder" (I mean things like refusing to eat for entire days so I could work more, even as the quality of my work degraded, because when I was not-working I felt a crushing sense of guilt that I was wasting my abilities, or fantasizing about being an automaton because then I could do nothing but work). I eventually realized this desire wasn't me, but instead the result of me internalizing the ideas of Catholic Guilt and my mother's work-ethic and allowing them to become toxic and life-hating, and that, while I thought of myself as a normal person, I was in fact much happier once I gave myself permission to be a human being.
Once again, I don't know you at all, but it sounds like you might have a less severe form of my own scrupulosity problem. Of course, you might be perfectly happy with the way you are, but I would suggest, as others have, that the issue may be with you and not with everyone else. So by all means for now I'd recommend trying to find another position that fits you better, but if you find that no matter where you go you feel a simmering anger at the wastefulness you see everywhere you look, I would advise looking inward.
"Scrupulosity" has religious overtones that don't quite ring true to me...unless you had a more particular formulation in mind than the generic Wikipedia article tells me? I inherited my work ethic from immigrant culture rather than a faith-based upbringing...the mindset and practices that helped my family bootstrap themselves into modest success upon moving to the Land of Opportunity. Perhaps there's more than one way to arrive at scruples though.
>guilt that I was wasting my abilities, or fantasizing about being an automaton
This is very relatable though. Some abilities I consciously choose not to engage much, because they are high-cost or otherwise painful...but it feels wrong not to push myself towards the Pareto frontier of efficient ability deployment. There's almost always more work than hands to go around...when the odds start stacking up to impossible, though, my instinct is to then __work impossibly hard__. It's within my ability to do so, and I feel some desire to pick up the slack left by others working less hard/with less ability. That's "customer service", to my mind...not having an adversarial relationship with customers. I'm there to serve them, and my own needs should come second to that. Everyone we fail to help in a timely manner, fail to provide a fun and easy shopping experience to, fail to stock a product when we have it available...well, okay, I guess maybe that does approach a religious level of guilt. Hmm.
Needles to say, I do frequently find physical needs like sleep or food irritating. The mind is firing on all cylinders and still wanting to carry on the Good Fight; my internal radio is set to aggressive metal or other high-energy anthems by default. Sucks not being able to reliably turn that off after work, but it does contribute to the time-magic effect of me appearing to move much faster than everyone else. I don't know if it's just a perception hack or I am actually reinventing Time-Motion Studies practices. An economy of action for ideal results...there's beauty in both that form and function.
Thank you for the thoughts. Something to reflect on. I think pattern-matched advice to strangers is still of value, in that "you can't help others, they have to help themselves" and it just might shake up an internal inadequate equilibrium.
By "scrupulosity", I refer to a mental attitude best characterized as "self-destructive conscientiousness", characterized by what I would characterize as a "life-hating" attitude (a resentment of completely ordinary qualities possessed by the overwhelming majority of humanity, both in oneself and in others, as defective or flawed, a sense that one's efforts are never good enough no matter how much one works, constantly setting oneself goals only to despise them upon being reached, telling oneself even as one goes above and beyond all of one's peers "I'm not even meeting the bare minimum", etc.)
I will venture beyond giving an opinion there: becoming irritated by one's physical limitations that cannot be overcome is a deeply unhealthy mindset to cultivate. This is a simple fact. Yes, maybe some future generation will be beyond sleep or eating, but it isn't going to be ours. If I am wrong, I am wrong, but given that no miracle science seems evident- adjust your expectations of yourself. I would suggest meditation, melatonin, exercise, and listening to documentaries. That is what helps me when my mind is racing.
Perfectionism is a known character flaw, although I'd maintain the incremental pursuit of perfection is a worthy endeavor. Tsuyoku naritai and all that. I don't inside-view feel like it spills over into more-general "life-hating", but, point taken...if it comes off that way to a random Internet stranger, at least some people irl probably get that impression from me too. Sort of a social fox pass to explicitly say "no, I don't hate you as a person, I hold myself to extremely high work standards and unintentionally project those onto others, please don't be intimidated/alienated by me, I am actually very lonely and want more friends". Much more tractable to just change my underlying behaviour...
Life isn't an anime and I can't, actually, surpass hard physical limits just by Believing In Myself. Even if my hard limits are harder than many peoples'. This has been a hard lesson to unlearn. More (consistent, spread out) exercise would definitely help...the way I throw myself at work 110% by default, and then crash vegetatively upon getting home/days off...isn't ideal, at all.
>telling oneself even as one goes above and beyond all of one's peers "I'm not even meeting the bare minimum"
That does hit home. The problem with performing really high to start with, and still gaining skill and expertise like anyone else, means...my Bare Minimum is now above some people's Absolute Maximum. I should therefore be less harsh in my self-assessment, because official grading always happens on a curve here. Thank you for another perennially-needed reminder that "actually, no really, no one likes a martyr". Not like I get paid more either - therefore it's irrational behaviour...
(Flow states are really incredibly addicting though. Racking up enough combos at work to the point where every single action feels like a perfectly executed QTE move and I'm in Bullet Time - I think that's when I'm maximally happy work-wise. Not sustainable, but it did grant me enough skill XP to take the Ambidexterity feat, which has been objectively useful in all the rest of life too.)
Would anyone else be interested in a Thread specifically to discuss the Book Review finalists so far? I realize I can just comment here, but it might be nice to have a centralized spot for discussion. There are strong contenders this year!
I enjoy watching people do high-up things too, & not only am I not phobic, I'm a former climber myself. Anything intrinsically dangerous is going to stay thrilling even if you do exposures to get over your actual phobia. Fear is the hot sauce of climbing.
As for the fact that you enjoy videos of parkour, etc.: Images & videos don't work for everybody, they're just an easy option that works for some. You probably would need to do something that involves safely hanging out on the side of a big drop if you wanted to get over the phobia (if indeed it's a phobia. Most people are uneasy right next to a big drop, even if they are secure and cannot fall).
small groups of people with shared jobs living in a single building must be very common. it would be beneficial to the residents to learn from each other and a great germination ground for developing new technologies.
is there a repository of such spaces around the world?
Does anyone have experience with using ML to assist in language learning? It seems like it should be possible to use something like GPT3 to automatically parse foreign language texts, recognize different conjugations or colloquial spellings of words, figure out which words are related or easily confused and build a customized study order for vocab, automatically pull up example sentences which demonstrate different meanings, etc. But I'm not sure if this is possible and have no idea where to start even if it was, other than step 1 "buy a multimillion dollar compute cluster", which is a bit out of my budget :(.
I've actually been idly thinking about doing something like this for a while. Specifically, there are a bunch of words which it's really hard to learn the differences between from just the definitions, such as 然后 and 后来 which mean something like "afterwards." I was thinking about doing searches such as finding a pair which the model judges to be maximally similar, conditional on one containing 然后 and the other containing 后来. That way I can see some sentences which are similar, but which require one word or the other.
Self-driving cars aren't looking great in the short-term (see Tesla layoffs for example). That being said, maybe that's already the conventional wisdom and they're therefore appropriately hyped.
In the '90s, the stereotype for receiving email was that it would generate warm fuzzy feelings: AOL used "You've got mail!" as part of its advertisements. Today, the stereotype of email is that it's a many-headed monster which is out to get you. Clearly, some of it is that the composition of inboxes changed: "You've got mail!" isn't going to generate warm fuzzies when the mail is your boss asking for a report due yesterday. However, my impression is that even personal emails (which used to be personal letters, and are presumably what the AOL advertisements were actually referencing) are currently regarded as part of the many-headed hydra to be slain, not as small electronic bundles of joy.
1. Are my impressions even accurate? Maybe people still enjoy receiving personal emails as much as they enjoyed receiving letters. Or maybe people didn't actually like receiving letters all that much.
(Also, maybe people were bad at responding to personal letters in exactly the same way that they're now bad at responding to emails.)
2. If yes, what changed? Is it that letter ("one-on-one communication consisting of one or more paragraphs") is just not a particularly good communication format, and now that alternatives exist, it get outcompeted by either blogs (multiple paragraphs but broadcast) or by chat (one-on-one but in regular conversational format, at most a few phrases at a time)? Or is it something else?
The spam-to-content ratio went through the roof as our tolerance for inconvenience became non-existent. This is the sum total of it. Most old people I know still enjoy receiving emails and just plain mail.
Can you elaborate on the "spam-to-content ratio"? I use gmail outside of work, and its spam filter seems to be decently successful at keeping things I might read in my inbox, and things I really won't out of it. (Every once in a while it'll file a thing I genuinely wanted under "promotions," but not often.) I do get a number of hard-to-classify newsletters that I may or may not skim depending on how bored I am that week, but it's questionable whether those are spam.
OK, on reflection I'm puzzled. I imagine the spam-to-content ratio to be roughly age-invariant, after conditioning on using email at all. Yet you suggest (in seeming agreement with my claim that something has changed) that only the old people still enjoy receiving emails and mail. Why? Is it because they started out enjoying it, and their preferences haven't shifted as much under the onslaught of spam? (Also: what, if anything, do young people use for that purpose for which the older people used letters and emails -- is it something like Discord?)
Interesting, thanks! Are discord private messages (ever/sometimes/often) places for long asynchronous conversations (i.e. letters) rather than real-time chats? Or is it a consequence of the modern intolerance for inconvenience that conversation happens in short real-time bursts or not at all? (I don't know how I expect you to know the answer to this question.)
My personal opinion is that it is both and neither. Discord and similar services have as their great strength an incredible degree of elasticity. They can be (almost) all things to (almost) all people and thus might be used as one wishes.
I'm trying to figure out whether writing letters on discord instead of on email (or snail mail) will suddenly make them popular with the recipients, so the question is "what does one wish.". My guess is that it's not just a platform thing, and that there's also a preference for a different format, but maybe I'm wrong.
We stopped receiving mail. We get notified of creating an account, of recovering a password, we receive bills, we get newsletter we haven't already signed off of, we get asked for feedback from various services we used, but we don't receive mail anymore.
I just checked, out of my entire first page of gmail, there's ONE thing that was remotely conceivable as mail, and it was from my university, asking me if I wanted to give a testimony of my post-graduation career to current students. All the rest was automatized paperwork.
I think this is too easy of an answer, or at least that it's answering a slightly different question. My impression is that even on the rare occasions when we *do* receive mail, it's no longer considered to be a pleasant experience, and I'm wondering why *that* happened.
Then I'd go for "mail has lost it's comparative advantage".
I'm guessing you were happy to receive mail when the alternative ways of communication were "receive a letter" or "receive a phone call". It was asynchronous & written like the first, but immediate like the second. Then first came SMS, then smartphone and direct messaging services, and whatever you may send by mail, you may now send via messenger, whatsapp, discord or god knows what else.
I, for one, am still very happy to receive such a message from my close friends (at least the ones I don't see all the time).
Here are the key grafs: "In my little circle of the world, the debate between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave on the impact of social media has been making the rounds. The overall event was fascinating, but towards the end, a statistician pushes back against Haidt in a heated way, which can be found here...
After a little digging, I found the paper that Haidt was referencing in the video with Soave. It is a team effort, co-authored by Jean M. Twenge , Jonathan Haidt, Thomas E. Joiner, and W. Keith Campbell, titled “Underestimating digital media harm.”
As I started reading, I was quickly pulled back.
The Haidt paper was yet another piece that this group had written in reaction to parallel work from researchers in the United Kingdom, Amy Orben and Andy Przybylski. I’ve written about work from Orben and Przybylski before. There is a long history between these two groups, and I tend to be more persuaded by the work of Orben and Przybylski rather than by the arguments of Twenge and Haidt.
To understand what Haidt is arguing, you need to know a bit of the backstory, which I have tried to lay out below. But to understand the importance of what is being said, it is important to know a bit of theory."
Under Mount Rushmore, there's a large pile of rock leftover from when the mountain was carved. It's visible in most photos of the monument, like this one:
I think the National Parks Service should make money by selling those rocks in its gift shop. One guy would be in charge of bringing a rock to the back room of the shop, shattering it into smaller pieces with a hammer, and then selling them for, say, $5 apiece.
"Own part of Mt. Rushmore" the sign over the basket of rocks would say.
I also like this idea because the pile of rocks looks messy, so it would be good to get rid of them.
Let's say the rocks prove to be very popular, and all of the scrap rocks are removed from beneath the monument. Would there be any downside to that? Is the pile of rocks preventing erosion, or stabilizing the cliff, or doing something else useful?
The rocks are part of the aesthetic of the monument. I guarantee you many people would object to drastically changing the visual appearance of the sculpture in any way, including via your idea.
Has anyone else noticed the demise of the word "take" in the sense of transporting something from one place to another?
To me, you take something from here to there, and brings something from there to here; one does not bring a thing from here to there.
Typical context: "In the next decade or so, Elon Musk's spacecraft will bring humans to Mars."
My inside voice: "Wow, how did you get to Mars so soon to tell us this? Did Elon take you to Mars first?"
This falls into the same category, for me, as the demise of the word "lend" - e. g. "Jimmy is going to borrow me his trailer on the weekend."
And of course I'm reminded of the Pearls Before Swine comic where they hold a funeral for the word "said". One of the animals questions this, but then two young women walk by in conversation, saying some thing like: "Oh yeah, so then he's like let's go to the beach", and she's like "It's way too hot", and I'm like ..."
I know, it's a living language, and I'm an old fossil. Even so, it bugs me. Anyone else?
Using "bring" instead of "take" (in this context) sounds completely fine to me. I'm 41.
Using "borrow instead of "lend" strikes me as a redneck thing.
Using "is like" instead of "say", and also using the present tense for things that clearly happened in the past, is just slang. I wouldn't say it in a formal context, but otherwise it doesn't bother me.
> CFTC Staff Withdraws No-Action Letter to Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Regarding a Not-For-Profit Market for Certain Event Contracts
Perverse incentives for people with the ability to manipulate outcomes. Great opportunity for money laundering. For those and other reasons the information/value supposedly present is likely useless or at best severely flawed/compromised.
So you have big likely or at least potential downsides with real world implications, and no actual upsides or useful value.
Watching people like Scott and many commenters here treat these prediction markets like the Oracle has been...off-putting to say the least.
Hi Scott, this comment should really be a direct message but I wasn't sure how to send you one.
I intended to reshare a short story from your old old blog (from the LiveJournal era), partially to rescue it from oblivion since it is no longer available there, and was not sure how best to go about it. Since the original is deleted, my first impulse would be to rehost it in full and give you attribution, but given that you presumably deleted it on purpose I'm not sure you would actually want it attributed to you or might prefer that it not be reshared at all. (This is specifically the "Whispering Earring" story.) How would you prefer a person go about sharing your very old content like this?
I've seen this referenced (with the same joking take) twice now. As best I can tell, here is the policy as explained by the superintendent.
>The expectation is that teachers and administration will not have political flags or religious
>messaging in their classroom or on their person. This expectation includes pride flags.
>This expectation relates to staff emails and email signature lines. This expectation
> prohibits pronouns, political language, religious views etc.
Quote purports to be from a school board meeting, as reported here https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/school-district-in-wisconsin-makes-decision-on-pride-flags-use-of-pronouns/
This link claims "he also said that Black Lives Matter and Make America Great Again (MAGA) signs are included in the ban." https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/school-district-bans-pronouns-teacher-email-signatures-make-people-uncomfortable/
While I do broadly agree, as an atheist myself, I also am pretty hesitant about this line of reasoning. What’s the difference here between truth from spiritual experience and from mathematics? Many mathematics papers claim to describe fundamental truths about reality. But some are written by cranks proving the irrationals are denumerable or whatever. To a lay person, those are indistinguishable from normal math papers except that the math establishment doesn’t endorse them. The establishment has a complicated procedure that it says can determine exactly which papers are the good ones, though if you look into it they mostly don’t really use that procedure and just apply more general heuristics and admit that there are often errors (but say they’re rarely substantial). Religions also might have rules and procedures that tell you when a spiritual experience does or does not reveal the truth, and they might even have to fudge the rules a bit so that only traditional experiences stay intact. But so does math! What’s the distinction? I think there is one, but it’s kind of nontrivial.
I think there are a few serious mistakes in this post – for one, Protestantism didn't do a disproportionate share of the grenade lobbing: early Christianity, including the apostles themselves, was highly engaged in refuting and denying all other gods and faiths, and the Catholic Church's stance on supernatural events has always essentially been "they don't exist, you stupid cow" with very minor exceptions for the intercession of saints etc. I don't think they even officially acknowledge any of the visions of the various visionary monks and nuns who started orders and so on as being divinely inspired.
With that in mind another more serious issue is that your whole arrangement is wrong, since it leaves out possible interpretation 3) All these experiences are illusory because the weird spastic twitching of your subconscious mind when inebriated by psychedelics or afflicted with migraines have absolutely nothing to do with God or religion, and do not represent authentic insight.
This interpretation of ecstatic phenomena is, I won't go so far as to say the official one, but *much closer* than either of your options to that of the major sects of Christianity, as far as I know.
What’s the difference between that option and option 1? Also, is it true that most Christians don’t believe that sometimes people can receive direct evidence of the existence of God through a spiritual experience? I just found a Pew poll that says 35% of all US Christians say that God speaks directly to them. Presumably the number for believing that some other people are spoken to is noticeably higher, and even higher if you include nonverbal divine experiences. Either way, the original question was whether this argument is a dead end, not whether it is ubiquitous.
(Interestingly, one percent of atheists also say they’ve been spoken to by God, so there’s the lizard man constant again.)
I'll reply to both of you here: the critical difference is the part of Machine Interface's option #1 which says "there are no gods at all". My point is that you *don't actually need to disavow any gods or religions to reject ecstatic insight as false*. This notion of psychedelic/hallucinatory/etc. experiences being somehow doorways to a deeper truth, more accurate view of reality or what have you is *specifically* a hippie/New Age idea. I suppose it's typical of such a Bay Aryan-inflected community to confuse 1960s San Fransisco with the entire history of the world, but they are, nevertheless, not isomorphic. Hippieism is a set of crank beliefs which briefly replaced Christianity among one actually quite small group of people who found the "having any rules or limitations at all" aspect of traditional religion stifling, it doesn't have any particular claim to being the null hypothesis or the starting point of philosophical investigation.
And TGB, there are *lots* of things that lay Christians believe that their clergy and actual principles both absolutely disavow. Tons of South American Christians venerate various straight up pagan shit, either with a sloppy coat of saint paint or just outright and unashamedly. The clergy do not endorse this one bit. Similarly (very similarly, actually) many Western Catholic women still see tarot readers or mediums. *Christianity* as a dogma, organization, what-have-you still considers these people hucksters and has done for literal millennia.
In other words, *most Christians* may well believe in spiritual experiences giving them direct evidence of God, nevertheless mainstream *Christianity* is highly skeptical of these claims at minimum.
It sounds like you agree with the original argument that spiritual experiences are an invalid justification for a religion and therefore a theological dead end, right? Whether there are gods or not is rather tangential to the discussion of whether this one particular argument shows that they exist.
I’m not sure why you think this is about hippies and drugs. It’s more about speaking in tongues and having prayers answered.
I’m far from an expert on Christianity, but I think you’re simply mistaken that no major Christian establishments think God communicates literally with ordinary people today. Pentecostals, for example, by my superficial understanding.
There's an extremely strong preference among the left/liberals/progs/whatever your preferred term is for mental blank-slatism, in spite of it being obviously untrue and increasingly untrue as the evidence mounts. This is strongly related to liberals/etc. having massive problems with accepting the heredity of intelligence in spite of accepting the heredity of strength, looks and even intangibles like "musical talent". I think it's basically because many of the policy preferences of liberals/etc. such as equality of outcome are tripped up pretty badly by mental traits being hereditary (and perhaps this will be seen as snide, but it also seems obvious to me that liberalism being heavily overrepresented among academics, many if not most quietly believe that being stupid makes you a lesser human being, therefore they don't want to admit the possibility of stupid being genetic). Also, in the case of sex specifically, any mental difference between the sexes is seen to massively disrupt the core claims of feminism (judge for yourself whether rightly or wrongly).
"many if not most quietly believe that being stupid makes you a lesser human being, therefore they don't want to admit the possibility of stupid being genetic"
I think this is it distilled.
I like thinking I'm smart; it makes me feel good about myself, and is a point where (I think) I'm superior to the average person. When I was an atheist who didn't believe in a God who created us all and commanded us to love each other as "made in his image"; and who rejected leftist dogma; it was very quick and easy to go from "I'm smarter than this person" to "I'm legitimately a better human being and it would be perfectly rational for me to advance my interests at the expense of lesser people, so long as it doesn't backfire."
These people want to hold onto one of the end products of religion "Love everyone equally" but reaaaaally don't want it to be a religious principle, so end up twisting themselves into ridiculous knots to get the outcome they wanted. (One can argue that religions themselves are equally ridiculous knots to get to their outcomes.)
Speaking about blank-slatism, the popular idea that universal love is the product of religion is completely backwards. If anything, religion parasitises on this part of human utility function getting credits by association.
Of course if you happened to experience universal love only in religious context, typical mind fallacy will make you assume that people who do it without religion are twisting themselves. As a person who felt universal love in both contexts, I have to say that without the intermediaries of religion it's actually a much more pure experience.
Assuming for the moment that your assertion that this predates religion is true; and that the fact that I certainly do not experience it without religion; that would lend itself more to an explanation of "Religion took a good experience X% of the population felt and made it available to x+y% of population." Which hardly sounds parasitic.
Religion is parasitic (bad), thus anything it does is parasitic (bad) even if we would describe it as good if a non-religious body did the exact same thing.
The problem is that an important reason why you didn't experience this feeling without religion is due to this feeling being commonly framed in our memetic space as a religious one in the first place. That's what I mean by religions being parasitic. We now have a huge cluster of completely valid ideas so tightly assosiated with religious bathwater that it takes actual cognitive effort to access them in secular context.
Ape, I was a full out atheist. Believe me, I thought about this issue a lot. And everytime I kept coming back to the conclusion that "A lot of these people are not only really bloody inferior, and do not deserve *any* of my time or help, but I would really honestly prefer if they died and no one wasted resources on them."
Why should we help the 50 year old drug addicted pedophile who runs around exposing himself, making people uncomfortable, and stealing stuff?
Even if I could experience universal love without religion, which I doubt, that wouldn't be an argument for why I *should*.
Because it's Good. Because it's awesome. Because it's the right thing to do. Because it would make you and everybody else happier and more fulfilled. Because you actually care about other people well-being and generalising this care to everybody feels much better than limiting it.
One can always retreat to is–ought problem and claim that nothing make them *should* anything. But religion wouldn't help here in anyway.
Three variations on the same circular argument followed by two repetitions of an unsupported assertion. At least Christians who call for universal love can fall back on the argument that it's the only way to avoid getting tortured by their all-powerful dictator. All their atheist imitators have are circular arguments and wishful thinking.
Why does acceptance of innate differences inherently undermine leftist arguments for equality of outcome?
Freddie De Boer, a regular commenter here, wrote a book arguing precisely the opposite: that it *legitimizes* massive redistribution to the less innately-gifted, by demolishing meritocratic arguments about the successful having earned their wealth through hard work and good choices.
It doesn't; if you have another strong basis for arguing for equality of outcome. "God told us all to love one another" works if you can accept religion.
Something something, inherent dignity & equality of human beings. (weak man) APPARENTLY works for a lot of lefties. But it just... contradicts observed facts on any objective level, so, to me, and to many, it seems like a religious principle without a religion.
It doesn't *inherently*, which is why I tried to be careful with hedging: "tripped up" rather than obliterated; "seen to disrupt"; "judge for yourself". That said, we can see that in practice, most self-identified liberals do not take these positions, and that Freddie is atypical – from what imperfect grasp of his beliefs I have, I gather he's a frank socialist and believes, as you say, in massive redistribution. As an observable fact, however, we don't see a lot of lefties/liberals saying e.g. "blacks are helplessly retarded as a group, therefore we're justified in giving them a large amount of free resources so that their debased mental condition doesn't affect their social position". This is a type of advocacy which would be seen as incredibly patronizing at the very best and more probably get the person all but stoned by an enraged mob.
Instead, it seems to me that most liberals take some form of the position that since everyone has the exact same starting capacities, hard work and application = merit, and since the ability to apply yourself is also mental and thus evenly distributed, we should see equality of outcome at least between broad groups; if this is not happening, it must therefore necessarily be due to some form of oppression or persecution deliberately fucking over the disadvantaged groups, thus if we can eradicate the oppression we will, *a priori*, achieve group-level parity of outcome *without* having to resort to redistribution. If one does not believe some version of this, those claims of e.g. white supremacy which point to differences in outcome as proof are completely nonsensical.
My belief is that this contorted logic is at least partially the product of an awareness on the left that Americans hate redistribution worse than they hate Nazis, so if they want to have a politically viable ideology to the left of Reagan they need some other principles that don't imply redistribution as a solution; then they kind of... try to quietly tack on some redistribution when nobody's looking.
EDIT: And Ian is correct about the justification problem. I skipped over that because he'd already covered it, but I endorse what he wrote.
I think your claim that this doesn't happen with non-mental diseases is wrong. Just recently while looking for info on heart diseases, I stumbled on a claim that they are underdiagnosed in women due to less explicit symptoms. There is also a general idea that women are often underdiagnosed due to specifically male symptoms being assumed to be "norm", men overrepresented in clinical trials and so on.
The whole narrative may have something to do with previous failures of the opposite approach. The fiasko with autism, for instance, when autistic women were just ignored because everybody assumed that it's a male thing. If anything, I think current failure mode is less bad.
This question reminds me of a paper I came across in the journal of controversial ideas. https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/131
cognitive creationism (I think) is the tendency for people to think that evolution only created sex differences from the neck down. It seems like if this is the perspective one takes, you might imagine disorders being evenly distributed across sexes.
By genetic selection, do you mean artificial methods coming down the tube, or just normal natural selection of who gets to successfully mate?
Either way, I'm not seeing either of those effects softening the demographic collapse.
If it's artificial Gataca style stuff that gives us ubermensch, only a small portion of society is going to go for it, upper-classers and upper middle classers.
If it's just natural selection, well, the people I meet with the most kids always tend to be either A. religious lower middle class (a declining portion of the population today.) or B. So lower class that they're already dependent on charity and taxpayer handouts. (This group does seem to be growing.)
Before reading your article; this sounds like the theory that religious conservatives will outbreed secular liberals; but in practice it seems like defections from that lifestyle counter out the higher reproduction rate.
Even if the genetic factor is very strong, I would assume that it's over represented in the religious conservative types, and we should already be seeing evidence of this.
Having now read the article; a few things.
He's right on the general "We're not going to go extinct" at some point, the population decline will stop, partially because we're down to just folks like this.
How soon that stop comes... well... To Be Determined, at least in part by the trajectory of the culture war.
>but in practice it seems like defections from that lifestyle counter out the higher reproduction rate.
How are you measuring the practical defection rate? Because if it's "number of ex-religious-conservatives in my mostly-secular bubble", or anything like that, there's an obvious selection bias at work.
The Amish population is growing at ~3%/year. The Mormon population is growing at ~1%/year. The Israeli population, including secular Jews, is growing at ~2%/year. At the margins, obviously, there is a population that just barely qualifies as "religious conservative types", that by definition will reproduce at rates similar to secular liberal types and see substantial crossover with same. But if you go far enough into religious conservatism, you see fertile, expanding populations in spite of defection.
That's where you'll find the meek who shall inherit the Earth. OK, the Israelis aren't all that meek, but no surprise there.
I agree that this is probably true.
What deeply frustrates me is that basically everyone who talks about this sees it as a *good* thing--they're happy about how their own side is going to outbreed their culture-war enemies. That's certainly the tone taken by the article linked above, with its bizarrely blithe reassurance that the nasty, Taliban-style thing we think of when we hear "patriarchy" isn't actually *true* patriarchy.
But while I dislike much of contemporary Western wokeness and am sympathetic to criticisms of our excessive atomistic individualism, by the standards of all other human cultures I'm still a flaming liberal egalitarian individualist.
I fundamentally think individual freedom--including, most significantly for the issue of fertility rates, the freedom of women to do things with their lives beyond constant pregnancy and childcare--is an *extremely good* thing.
The fact that societies in which half the human race is treated as little more than breeding stock (and I want to make clear that I *don't* think mainstream contemporary Western social conservatism falls into this category--but they're not the ones with downright explosive birthrates like those of the Amish, Quiverfull types, Hasidim, or Wahhabis) or ) really do seem destined to inherit the earth is an incredibly disturbing social trend that I wish more people thought about how to prevent.
It seems like a Molochian phenomenon: cultures that make the people in them worse off seem destined to outcompete other cultures that care more about individual happiness than about maximizing fertility.
The people in the Amish, Mormon, and Israeli cultures don't seem "worse off" by most standards. Note that they all have the opportunity to defect, even the women, and are still growing.
The way-too-early hot take du jour seems to be John Fetterman for the Dems
does there need to be more? the "would have a beer with you" theory suggests maybe not.
Probably the fact that Fetterman has policies that are popular among the blue base while his attack ads are relentlessly hammering the anvil of "Dr. Oz is a carpetbagger from NJ who wears 4-5 figure custom suits, owns a yacht, has three very expensive watches he'll wear at the same time to flex on people, and then tries to LARP as Joe Average from PA." It turns out "this guy's a phony, he's richer than you, he doesn't care about you, he'll wipe your problems off of his shoes before he gets in his limo to go party with all his rich friends" is a playbook that can cut both ways.
ditto Mayor Pete
I never understood why use of a comb as an improvised fork got negative attention. (I'm assuming someone sanitized the comb first.) If she had been a soldier or a lumberjack eating in a remote area, it would be celebrated as ingenuity, wouldn't it?
From Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar:
> This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers travelling back and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.
That's the style I find strange.
That seems surprising to me. Are people saying this because of moved she has made? It’s much more plausible that some of the younger 2020 candidates who were newer on the national scene then will run again.
Is this really a popular take right now? He’s got memes and momentum, sure, but he does need to actually win the seat he’s running for. Most commentators worth their salt seem pretty hesitant to suggest anyone except Harris as a favorite (despite acknowledging she is a weak candidate who could easily be beat).
My dark horse pick, FWIW: Sherrod Brown. Ohio is gone for the Dems in 2024, he might as well aim for the big one.
Brown would be good. I don't think anyone is seriously betting on Fetterman but it's just more fun to say than *deep sigh of despair* 'probably Kamala'
> He’s got memes and momentum, sure
Filter bubbles must be active, because I've never heard of him. One glance at his picture on wikipedia and I feel one hundred percent confident that he will never be President of the United States, though he does look qualified to host some kind of motorcycle repair reality show on the History Channel.
I saw a bumper sticker with his name yesterday, and I'm not in his home state.
He doesn't look like a regular president, but I think that would work to his advantage. Looking blue-collar would help draw blue-collar voters.
My (boring) predictions: DeSantis vs Harris.
The Republican nomination belongs to whoever can correctly hit the right note of being Trumpy enough without being too Trumpy. Mike Pence is the only other candidate I can think of who might be able to split the difference correctly.
Kamala or (unless someone can find a way to prop up Biden and make him look lifelike) for the Dems; anything else would be a repudiation of the current administration and I can't see any major Democrat having the guts to do that. And that's before we even get into the whole race-and-sex thing.
Was she a better campaigner in her earlier races? Or was she always pretty lackluster but just didn't have hard competition before?
Pence's problem is that the "trumpy" base _hate_ him for his post-election actions. I don't see a world in which he can win a primary with any other trumpy candidate.
I think that hating Mike Pence for agreeing to certify the election results is a pretty fringe position for anyone not currently wearing a buffalo's head as a hat.
You can think the validity of the election result is highly questionable while also acknowledging that Mike Pence had no other realistic option; the idea that he wouldn't was a crazy 4chan pipe dream.
Or to put it another way, anyone who hates Mike Pence for January 6 is in the "too Trumpy" category,
I mean, by that definition the republican base is in the too Trumpy category. The claim is no anti Trump candidate can win, which seems? true in an open field (possible Trump cant beat a particular single challenger, but has enough clout especially in state level local politics to take down any particularly annoying to him one)
Among the broader set of "people who identify as republican or usually vote for republicans", sure it's pretty fringe. But that's not the important section in a primary. Primaries magnify the voice of the fringe (for both parties, this is not a republican only issue). So yes, Pence would probably do about as well as a generic candidate among republican voters during a general. But I'm not sure he could make it there because the small minority that hates him is important enough during the primary to exclude him.
I could be wrong about this, but it doesn't even have to be that people care much about his specific actions. Just the fact that _Trump_ hates him and would denounce him and support someone else (assuming he wasn't running himself) would be enough.
It could be a 2012 primary again. Mitt Romney was perpetually in second in the polls, behind Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich or whoever. But they ended up splitting the vote and he won. It didn’t work in 2016 for Jeb! but it’s not out of the question that Pence could get lucky.
Yeah, pushing aside a black woman for some more charismatic white guy would probably be a hard thing for the Democrats to do, even with mostly friendly media trying not to comment on it too much.
But voters decide not party officials.
I think this would risk upsetting some blocs of voters, especially if there were attack ads based on this, which there would be.
Voters love to upset other blocs of voters. It's why they vote.
This is a tough one. Basically I cant see Biden or Harris beating a non Trump republican. And I think if Trump announces early Biden will either announce he's running or not endorse Kamala (he doesn't like her) and it'll be a massive open field on both sides. I think Trump Biden is the most likely scenario (maybe 25% chance?), only thing I'm unusually confident in is Kamala won't be in the matchup. My guess would be Klobuchar? May be bias because I liked her (after Pete, but he's not electable and I get that)
At this point I'm not confident Biden or Harris could beat ANY Republican, Trump included. Biden's approval ratings are worse than Trump's, which is something I never thought I would see. Harris' approval ratings are worse.
It's amazing to see the Democratic field shaping up to be a rehash of 2020, even though most of the candidates were very old by historical standards even at that time.
I do agree that Trump/Biden is the most likely outcome at this point, which is frustrating and sad on many levels. I could see DeSantis as a viable Trump alternative, but I'm having trouble seeing any Democrat as viable other than Biden - and Biden only because he's the current president.
Fair enough, but if that lane goes to Warren, I can't say I'll be impressed.
I thought Sanders, Warren, and Biden were the only old candidates in 2020. Buttigieg was notably younger than candidates in other years, and Harris, Yang, Klobuchar were about standard age.
Yes, there were younger candidates, but they never stood a chance. The top candidates were the three oldest, and the top candidates four years prior were also the oldest. It's remarkable that as many as eight years later, candidates who were known as notably old at the time are still even considered.
Klobuchar and DeSantis would at least seem like two appropriately-qualified people of a reasonable age for the job. I don't recall much of Klobuchar, other than that she kinda seemed sane and rational as these things go.
She didn't get enough coverage early on to know what she was like, and then the attack articles were all about how she was a terrible boss. I don't have much of an opinion on her, because I don't trust we got much of a complete view.
Both parties have some options that are reasonably qualified at reasonable ages. Given the last two cycles, I have very little confidence that we will see those candidates on the national ballet. I want to say that the Republicans have a better chance of getting a DeSantis than the Democrats have of getting a Klobuchar, but that's a gut feeling that has more to do with the events of 2016 than any update relevant to 2024.
There was a weird missing middle, with the top-placing candidates having been born in either the 1940s or 1980s. Klobuchar, Steyer, Patrick and Bennett were the only ones in the more conventional 50-65 age range, and I'd forgotten about 3/4 of them.
My theory at the time was that Hillary Clinton had spent the whole Obama administration carefully undermining any other prominent Democrat who could possibly be a threat to her in 2016, leaving a massive hole in the party. The only prominent Democrats left by 2016 were those who were either too old or too young to be considered a threat to Hillary's 2016 nomination.
Strong agree. Even in 2020 there was a very obvious top-down effort to clear the field so that Biden could beat out Sanders.
How did Hillary undermine other prominent Democrats during the Obama administration?
For the Reps, I'm hoping for a dark-horse campaign out of the Bushes: Marvin?!.
Jenna and Barbara will be 43 by then, old enough for a JFK-style youthful push at the big chair. Is America ready for an all-female all-twin Bush/Bush ticket?
I went away and thought about this, and now I'm convinced that eight years of Jen/Barb followed by eight years of Barb/Jen (ideally in alternating terms) is what the country needs to get back on its feet. They could be the Republican FDR!
My mother and step-father are *convinced* it'll be Hillary. I keep telling them that whatever news they're watching/reading is flat out lying to them, but it doesn't do much good.
Maybe Booker? Assuming it's not Joe, the Dems need to move hard to shore up African-American support. Trump/Booker might be a fun race.
For the Reps, I've been stanning Tim Scott for a while, but I now think DeSantis has a non-Trump primary race sewed up. His anti-anti-covid stuff, the don't say gay bill and the Disney horse-whipping all play really well with the base.
Since you seem to root for the party that picks presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices using race as one of the most important considerations, I can see why you would assume the same about GOP. But you'd be wrong - Republicans don't elect their officials based on their race, they elect them because they like them. Unlike with Democrats, a Republican candidate's race is normally never even mentioned while he's running.
As to Tim Scott, South Carolina obviously likes him. Unless I'm missing something, everywhere else he doesn't have enough of a presence. He'd have to make a really good case for himself in order to win the primaries, and so far he doesn't seem to have started.
He's been in Iowa, he's been wooing donors. That kind of thing. Hard to raise your profile from the Senate the way DeSantis has done. Like I said, I think DeSantis is the non-Trump to beat at this point.
South Carolinians like him, and he has a national profile. As to whether or not they like him generally, that's what the primary process is for. My impression is that Republicans really like voting for people of color because they really hate being seen as the party of white people. I think they'd be excited to vote for a black president at least partly to tell everyone who calls them racist to go f themselves. But IANAR, so I may have that wrong.
You're not a Republican, so I think you have this wrong. If anyone on the Republican side still cares about being called racists and GOP a party of white people, they are a really tiny confused minority. You can only call people racists for no reason for so long until they all wish everyone who calls them racist to go f themselves.
I think you confuse Republicans liking candidates because they are likeable with liking them because of their race (which is really not a thing).
It's absolutely possible for a black or Latino Republican to get some mileage towards looking cool for the cool background story. Grew up in a slum, broke out, started a business, was an amazing success story because this country is the land of opportunity, now wants to do the right thing for other black kids? Cool, sounds like a good person for the job. Jamaican immigrant who grew up in extreme poverty, became a Marine, and is now living the American dream? Cool, we also believe in this country, and we really like to hear from other people who do (and also we really respect the Marines). Son of Cuban immigrants, anti-Communist, knows how things worked in Cuba, understands really well what he doesn't want to happen in this country? Cool, we need more people like that, would like to invite him to a bbq to talk more about this.
I don't know if you get the idea from these examples, but they are not about race. They are about people having a cool story and personality and sharing the Republican values.
So no, Republicans are not looking to please people calling them racist by showing to them something they would approve of - even if that was at all possible. It's worth noting that any time a black Republican gets elected somewhere, he or she gets subject to insults about just being a house slave following the master's orders (Tim Scott is one of the examples of this, see also e.g. https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/11/07/winsome-sears-and-the-rise-of-woke-racism/ for another of those cases). So, damned if you do, damned if you don't - even if Republicans cared, which they don't, why bother?
When I first read about this, perhaps in 2015, I checked if there were any contrary studies that found no association. I couldn't find any.
So approached it through expected utility: even a small chance of a huge negative outcome, dementia, outweighed the likely modest benefits of taking a certain anticholinergic as an antihistamine. Thus I stopped taking it. (I can't remember which one it was. These Greco-Aztec medicine names can be hard to keep straight.)
I'm interested to hear from others who know more about dementia, statistics, or both.
This motivated me to stop taking diphenhydramine for sleep. But, I actually don't think that was rational. It's likely only to affect people who take these drugs every day. So—if you are taking anticholinergics every day, I assume you have pretty serious medical problems, and I would be looking at whether a good alternative exists.
For what it is worth, the UK has deprecated use of medicines containing diphenhydramine. Occasional use in younger people might not be the problem but the misuse potential in elderly is just too high. There are better antihistamines for allergies and better medicines for sleep anyway.
What alternative can you recommend for sleep? I found anti-histamines to be a good choice so far as they don't have a strong hang-over effect, dont build tolerance too much and don't have a lot of side effects.
It definitely does -- the concept originated AFAIR in the context of different flu strains, based on the observation that your immune response to future exposure to the *first* strain that you caught (in your life) is significantly more effective than to different but similar versions.
This led to the idea of a "pan-flu" vaccine that you can take *before you ever get the flu*, which would theoretically be much better than the current seasonal strain based approach. This has not yet borne fruit, and is probably harder than it sounds.
The beef specific to the mRNA covid vaccines is that since they are tightly focussed on a specific subunit of the virus, a mutation in that area could not only render the vaccine ineffective against the new strain, but also hinder one's immune system from developing antibodies (and thus future immunity) to the mutated version.
Omicron has pretty much proven the first part of that to be true; however so far it seems like people are *probably* developing reasonable long-term immunity post-infection, even if they were previously vaccinated. (It's slightly early to say at this point, as to know for sure one would need to compare outcomes between vaxxed/unvaxxed convalescents over the longer term, say a year or so -- and even if anyone were interested in doing this study, Omicron has not been prevalent for long enough yet)
Immunologically it was and remains (since the possible effect of future mutations can't be known) a perfectly valid reason to be concerned about the long-term impact of taking the vaccine particularly for low-risk/young people -- sadly it was swept aside by the flood of articles along the lines of "no vaccine evah in the history of vaccines has had side effects that didn't manifest within a month or two of administration".
Is this likely to be worse if you take multiple boosters? Since I get a flu shot every year (they change the strains over time, but I think often reuse the same strain a couple or three years in a row), it doesn't intuitively seem like this should be worse.
We're fortunate that so far, the vaccines' versions of the original spike protein are enough to trigger an effective T cell response. If that ever stops happening, then we'll lose the major benefit of the vaccines so far, which is that even though you can still catch covid, you're much less likely to end up in the hospital or the morgue because your body can clear the infection efficiently.
I don't think so, no -- there's supposed to be other potential issues around immune fatigue (something like your body just giving up deciding to live with the "new normal" when continuously juiced with the same immune agitator) but I haven't really looked into that.
For OAS the only thing that matters (AFAIK, IANAI) is the first strain you were presented with and how different it is from the current one. Importantly more boosters won't really *help* with this, though.
Here’s a UK nurse study that shows this antibody imprinting effect for covid.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1841
Omicron boosters helped against the old strains, but not the Omicron ones, when they looked at antibody responses and compared them with boosting with the original vaccine.
One of the guys from the FDA advisory panel also raised that as a concern, saying that these Omicron boosters proposed for the fall didn’t seem compellingly better than the original ones used as a boost (maybe 2x antibody levels, unclear if that’s clinically relevant, and only against the early Omicron strain not the current BA4/5 ones). Better not to take additional imprinting risks with new vaccines when the old ones seem almost (just?) as good. Summary of the 45 minute interview below, with links to TWIV where you can watch it yourself.
https://www.fragiledeal.com/t/booster-shots-when-will-you-get-a-booster-3rd-shot-of-the-vaccine/4243/329?u=xerty
All I know is that I’ve wanted to use a specific meme format to illustrate the effect.
Body: can we get some COVID antibodies for all this omicron?
Immune system: we have COVID antibodies at home.
The antibodies at home: classic Wuhan strain
Being needlessly excessively rude, or maybe just strong ad hominim attacks. Thinhs like that.
Don't post "first". Don't make big cultural war/political flame wars. Try to be an earnest and fair interlocutor and not resort to ad hominem. Try and understand what someone is saying, rather than just replying to what you wished they had said, or what you assume people like them say.
Basically treat the people here like you would people at a cocktail party instead of anonymous internet punching bags? That is my understanding.
Jerkface!
Lol, thanks this was a helpful summary, seasoned countenance .
What does it mean to post "first"?
Writing "first" into the comment box and submitting.
Why would anyone want to do that?
It's a way of saying "I'm the first one to comment on this new post!", like jokingly congratulating yourself on that. It's an old Internet meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/first
Ah. Thanks. (I'm old enough to remember that but also old enough to have forgotten it!)
Even Neil Armstrong, descending from the Apollo 11 capsule, was tempted to say "First!". But he didn't give in to temptation, he said something meaningful and memorable instead.
ACX posters should not give in to temptation either, even if they are prominent and popular scientists; Scott *will* ban them.
The recent links post shows that "jerkface" is overused. Try "dirthat" or "libnozzle" instead.
Wouldn't you rather be able to claim ignorance?
Great answer!
If ignorance were always a defensible justification, forum threads everywhere would become an tug of war between veterans who know all the rules and want to get further in the topics that interest them, and an endless parade of newbies who come in and break every rule until someone "potty trains" them.
If ignorance were *never* a justification, forum threads would be a no-man's land where the veterans are sherpas who alone know the way through the minefield, dodging shrapnel thrown up by the newbies continually getting themselves blown up. The vets gradually get lonely, but the newbies soon become too fearful to make themselves visible.
One of the arts to forums is bridging that divide between the extremes. (Sometimes I wonder if "ACX Junior Varsity" would be worthwhile.)
Scott wrote this post which summarizes his policy: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
Yup, the things mentioned in 3. above would seem to be a straightforward case of being egregiously neither kind nor necessary. "I can't believe you don't understand this basic fact" isn't great phrasing at the best of times†, but at the very least it ought to precede actually answering the question.
† https://xkcd.com/1053
Something I've been wondering for a while. Is there ever a good reason not to be kind?
Unfortunately, the answer is unambiguously *yes*... at least, for certain definitions of "good reason". When voluntary engagement is the name of the game, there are any number of reasons why it is instrumentally useful to be provocative.
Speaking for myself, I've spent time in multiple places on the internet where a milquetoast response will be ignored when an inflammatory one at least gets *some* engagement - when I find myself deliberately dialing up the snark beyond my own prodigious baseline, it's usually a sign that it's time to move on to greener pastures.
In terms of unqualified "kind", definitely yes. Scott wrote a post about this (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/).
In terms of "superfluously rude"... it's a decent way to assemble an angry mob, and it's a good threat display. These are usually not good ideas, but there are exceptions.
I can't think of even a single instance where *initiating* unkindness (aka meanness) on a forum was productive.
Being mean *in response to* initiated meanness, OTOH, is probably better than the alternative, for the same reason that the TIT-FOR-TAT strategy works, and for the general reason that makes feedback work. I mean, if you touched a hot stove and the stove didn't inflict immediate pain on you, you'd likely keep your hand there until the third degree burns kick in and cost you actual functionality. Mean responses can work like that mean stove.
This is assuming, of course, that meanness deters you from something you genuinely ought not be doing. If I'm being mean to you because you're clogging every forum up with "First!", that might be worth the pain. But if I'm mean to you because you once said you can understand why someone would vote for Trump, it's less clear whether it's worth it.
Then again, meanness on a forum isn't going to achieve much either, in my experience. Meanness is naturally dampened to just pixels on a monitor. Words might mean things, but the reader doesn't have to take the writer seriously, so if you launch a scathing response to a troll on the internet, all the troll has to do is say "lol" and continue, and the only positive value the writer might get is some entertainment for her confederates. Which, granted, might be enough - provided the writer is truly entertaining.
Because of all this, I default to being kind unless someone else started being mean. And even then, it only works if they really believe they ought not be mean. If they think it's okay - including people who think that's the only way to get a response - I typically just ignore them.
>Then again, meanness on a forum isn't going to achieve much either, in my experience.
In general, no, but if you're a mod or can assemble a large-enough angry mob to coerce the mods it's a bit different.
(Yes, user revolt forcing staff concession is rare, but it does happen. The Fram incident on English Wikipedia, the Superprotect incident on German Wikipedia and the Athene incident on SpaceBattles are the biggest cases I know; I've also personally led such a mob on a much smaller board.)
Didn't Scott once permaban Deseach, only to relent in the face of a commenter revolt?
If you have a large enough mob, yes, you can drive someone off. But that's just it; *anyone* with a large enough mob can be mean until the opposition leaves - even if that mob is wrong. That's good news for anyone in that mob, but is it good news overall?
If a bad mob drives off people with a good idea, either the good people are gone forever and that idea is unlikely to ever spring up again, or the good people hide, lick their wounds, and slowly reassemble until they can coordinate meanness on their own. Then they return and it's worse than if the bad mob had never driven them off.
If a mob is *good*, then maybe it's okay. So meanness being good depends a lot on whether the coordinated meanness is good or bad. How does one tell? It's independent of the ability to coordinate.
It's a very good rule. I don't think I've seen it before. Is it new?
I'm not sure about this exact rule (involving answering questions specifically), but Scott has often expressed his dislike of contentless criticism. He usually doesn't seem to ban people for it though, unless it also contains a dig or is otherwise unkind.
I am amazed that you need to ask this
I was looking for this response. Thanks for not letting me down!
Happy to oblige James
It's worth reading the old https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ - anyone following that is very unlikely to get a ban, or even a warning.
I asked this on OT234 but I think I was too late, so here it is :
Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My gut tells me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I was wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively. What are the variables than influence policy choice and what is their relative importance ?
I don't know any, but I am sure there are some. My guess would be some big elements would be: popularity, cost, popularity among large political donors, popularity among "political intelligentsia", whether it helps one or both major parties.
Of course evaluating all that would be hard.
Yes, I agree with your guesses. I'd love it if it could be confirmed by a study. Also to see the relative importances. But I couldn't find any so far, it's weird because it seems like a pretty important thing to study.
I remember seeing a chart that showed it correlates well with popularity at high income levels, but not so much at low income levels
Do you think you could find it ? Or was it too long ago ? I'd be really interested.
I’ll take a look
It's from this Princeton study:
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
Here's a rebuttal from Vox:
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
Scott's thoughts on the study:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/19/plutocracy-isnt-about-money/
Thank you ! I will take a look at this soon
I remember seeing this too.
I think large parts of public choice theory address this. E.g., policies that support a small, concentrated interest group at the expense of a larger, more diffuse class tends, ex ante, to be likelier to be adopted. Sorry, this doesn’t address your request for an individual study.
Yeah, I think the field that studies this should be Public Choice.
Specifically look at the work of Mancur Olsen, who was very concerned with places where vocal interested minorities could override majorities by just knowing about the issue and caring more. (If I take a dollar from everyone and then split half what I collected among 1000 people, hardly any voters care because it's just a dollar, but those thousand people will fight tooth and nail to keep my program going.)
Yes, but the work in public choice I am aware of is largely theoretical (Buchanan and co). The reason I asked the question is precisely to get an empirical assessment of public choice predictions. I was wondering if the more recent work in public choice included empirical studies. I just found this for example, in which the author creates several PCT based predictions and tests them :
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095399702034001005?casa_token=1TQ4oOb3y_wAAAAA%3AAAGlk-KcQc25q9JAO3r3Xz18r9g8ZtBjX0rbLxbw5sJUJ8KdBsShy89JmQKGTjs7k_9uxIKYRskjFw&
He finds little support for PCT. But I remember reading somewhere that initial PCT models failed empirical tests but were then updated and then could account for many more stylized facts. I would be nice if we could find a study empirically assessing the latest PCT models.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
This study was fairly famous in 2014, which basically said economic elites and business interests have substantially more impact than total public opinion. However, it seems there's reason to believe that study's conclusions were flawed and/or overstated:
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
IMO, oligarchic domination of politics by the rich is somewhat overrated (at least among liberals in my bubble) as a source of the US's perceived problems, compared to factors like voters being status-quo-biased or genuinely trusting business over other interest groups.
Thanks a lot ! That's the stuff I was looking for. Combined R2 of average voter opinion + rich voters opinions + interest group alignment is 0.074, that's surprisingly low ! Less than 10% of the variance in policy outcome is explained by public opinion and interest groups. I wonder what the other explanatory variables might be, politicians ideology ? Probably not because change in governing party doesn't seem to have a large impact of the agenda (Routledge handbook of public policy p.168). Perhaps then policy outcome is determined in large part by budget constraint, that could explain why it doesn't correlate very well with the governing party, public opinion (rich + poor) or special interests. In other words politicians, on any given issue, just choose the policy then can afford which would explain the findings above.
Are the raw data posted anywhere?
Yes, it's supplementary material #6 if I'm not mistaken :
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#supplementary-materials
Sadly, it seems the dta file extension is only available with paid versions of excel, and my open office version will not suffice. Unless I've totally misinterpreted how to open that file.
It's a dta data file, it's usually used with stata I believe. I'm pretty sure you can open it in a Jupyter Notebook.
For obscure stuff, some have argued that the values of high SES individuals are much better predictors than average representations. I'm not sure how accurate that is as I didn't dig into the methodology of the study so I apologize if I'm passing along misinformation. Of course, there are a few wedge issues like gun rights, abortion, etc. which may not follow that trend.
Obviously, lobbying is an issue but it's hard to disentangle influence from wanting to back a winning horse. Of course, if I understand your question you're not really trying to disentangle those things.
Considering that policies can be modified significantly and aren't really discrete, I suppose one starting question would be; how do you define a policy.
Public Choice Theory seems to be a field tailored to addressing your question, in any case. It's interesting but I'm not deeply familiar with it.
A good part of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying" is about this. One big takeaway is that sustained popular support trumps all in the long run, but this is very hard to maintain. In practice, a concerted effort by a dedicated interest group is disproportionately able to maintain status quo.
So, if I recall well, the big three would be popular support, lack of polarization, and no opposing lobby.
> a study
The way I'd think of this is that it's less about a specific study and more like "the entire field of political science." There are entire textbooks written on this; I'd suggest emailing a professor of political science at your local university to ask questions about this.
My motto of the day is:
"In this dialogue, maybe I'm Simplicius."
With that said I have two questions:
How would one assess one's own learning that one has done by using the internet over the past 4 four years?
How would will we assess learning that happens through AI usage in the future?
These are interesting questions - I'm not entirely sure what you mean by them, though. I'm in education and have a fairly narrow definition of the word "assess" so I assume in the first question you mean something like, "how do I determine how much and how well I've learned the amorphous things I feel I've learned from being online?"
Working backwards is hard here, but you could start by trying to figure out *what you feel you've learned.* Trivia from Wikipedia rabbit holes? Philosophical concepts? New ways of thinking? Once you have some of these that you feel confident in, you'd want to determine the best way to assess your abilities. Play wikipedia trivia! Check to see if the philosophy stuff you feel you know has names and try to redescribe them to someone you know is more knowledgeable and get feedback from them! Tackle a new problem in a similar genre and try to approach it methodically with a new method you feel you've learned, and see how it goes!
Trying to assess yourself here would be a learning experience in and of itself and probably help you solidify the things you've learned.
I don't have a good guess at what you mean by your second question - learning that happens through AI by who? What type of AI? What type of learning?
Sorry if I'm really off-base with what you wanted!
Well, I'll take the role of Sagredo in this conversation.
What do you mean by "assess"? Are you asking for our subjective views of what we've learned using the Internet? Or are you asking for a mechanism that we could use to quantify our structured and/or unstructured learning using the Internet?
And why did you select the past four years as the timeframe for your question? I'm curious if you're trying to tie this assessment of our assessments to a particular societal, political, or economic trend, or cycle.
As for AI, I don't expect AI will be helpful to my personal learning ambitions during the timeframe of my remaining lifetime (probably another decade, but hopefully *not* two decades). My current personal learning goals are probably too diverse and too detailed for the current generation of GPT AI's to handle—and I suspect they won't be for many years to come. For instance, is there an AI that can tutor me pros and cons of the logistic vs the exponential models of biodiversity hotspots over earth's history? I am very interested in that question at the moment. Also, I've been translating Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry as a hobby. I need an AI that searches through Chinese and Japanese scholarly literature when I need to understand an obscure literary reference and, for the Japanese, one that will translate the Japanese sources for me (the Japanese have a vast accumulation of commentaries on Chinese literature, but it's inaccessible to me because I don't have any facility with Japanese). Also, I've taken a recent interest in Merkavah and Kabbalistic mysticism. Can AI help me? Anyway, other than catching up on 30 years of new developments virology and immunology (to better understand SARS2) that's how I've been spending my time on the Internet for the past couple of years. That and downloading and viewing naughty Galitsin videos.
> How would one assess one's own learning that one has done by using the internet over the past 4 four years?
I've personally tried to do what Sarah Constantin calls "fact-posting": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sdx6A6yLByRRs8iLY/fact-posts-how-and-why
Then I let Cunningham's law do the rest. ("The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.")
Are animals from today 'more evolved' than similar animals from, say, 100 million years ago?
I had the impression that sharks have been around a while. If we put a shark from today in the ocean 100 million years ago, would it be some amazing badass who'd quickly dominate?
Or is it more like, once a niche gets saturated, animals start adapting to smaller and smaller changes in the niche, so our shark today would probably die out quick because the ocean was different 100 million years ago in ways that the sharks back then were more fit for.
Yes and no. So overtime the fitness landscape is constantly changing, and sometimes highly derived (longer chain of large evolutionary changes) creatures die out, while more basic ones live. So there is a lot of "backwards" and "forwards", but everything is always making small optimizations. So even something that is "essentially the same" as it was 400 million years ago, probably isn't literally the same unless it is very simple. It is more a cloud of constant vibration around a fitness environment.
Some things like for instance jaws seemed to be big "advancements" that radically changed the entire ecology and possibilities for what creatures might do and what strategies they could pursue. So there is some decent argument for seeing say "jaws" as more "advanced." Jawed creatures can pursue and evolve a lot of the strategies no jawed creatures could, plus others. Certain paths don't seem to have a lot of downsides, so you might consider those more "advanced".
A great example of this is fish. People think of fish as rather primitive creatures that have been around since the Devonian and led to the evolution of tetrapods, eventually leading to mammals and us. But the majority of fish species living today (the teleosts) are highly evolved organisms that are nothing like the jawless fish of the Devonian or even like the "primitive" fish of the Mesozoic. The teleosts have developed a mobile premaxilla that enables them to shoot their mouth forward and suck in their prey. There is a second set of jaws, called the pharyngeal jaws, which evolved from gill arches, which can grasp and in some species grind up the prey that was sucked into the mouth (the pharyngeal jaws were the inspiration for the jaws of the xenomorph in the Alien movie).This is a highly evolved feeding mechanism adapted for water that millions of years to evolve. So it's not like fish stayed the same while tetrapods continued to evolve towards reptiles and mammals.
I don't think animals today would necessarily fare better millions of years ago because, as you say, niches were different. That said, there are invasive species even today. Are rabbits more evolved than... whatever was in Australia before because they've outcompeted them? Arguably I suppose. I would guess that same would happen if you transferred species between time as if you transferred them between continents. Some would do better, some worse, some about the same.
The fact that sharks haven't changed much in millions of years though seems like evidence that their niche hasn't changed much in that time either.
As a caveat, we don't really know that sharks haven't changed for millions of years, because all we have are fossils. For all we know, the sensory, locomotive, and mental capabilities of sharks have drastically improved, and their behavior could be unrecognizable from what it was millions of years ago.
>Are rabbits more evolved than... whatever was in Australia before because they've outcompeted them? Arguably I suppose.
What was there before = marsupials (of various sorts). And yes, eutherians outcompete marsupials in essentially all cases. That's why the "Tasmanian tiger" became extinct on the Australian mainland; feral dogs were introduced and outcompeted them. Likewise, a lot of South American marsupials went extinct when the Isthmus of Panama formed and let eutherians in.
OTOH, it's worth remembering that the opossum traveled up to Virginia. And humans paid a large part in the extinction of the "Tasmanian tiger". As for rabbits...they moved to an area where there wasn't a native predator adapted to eat them. This is a big reason why lots of "invasive species" are successful.
Yes, it is debatable whether the dingos directly led to the extinction of the thylacine through competition, since the thylacine was more of an ambush predator than a pursuit predator like the dingo. Human arrival and land use patterns probably had more to do with it, though no doubt both contributed to its demise. Humans are particularly bad for predators for three reasons: 1) humans view predators as competitors and outright kill them, 2) humans compete with predators for the same prey but are able to shift to other sources of food if prey becomes scarce, while many the predators can't, and 3) humans can form large packs to drive predators away from their kills to steal them.
There are quite a few marsupial species thriving in South America (about 120 species). The Great American Interchange did not lead to the extinction of the sparassodonts (metatherian predators), as these were already extinct by then for reasons that are not settled. However, it is true that metatherians were outcompeted by eutherians in Laurasia and went extinct there, after being the dominant mammals in the Cretaceous and decimated in the K-Pg extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.
The neutral theory of evolution says that the bigger population, the finer the adaptations that can exist. So that's a reason to expect Australian organisms to be objectively superior to island organisms and objective inferior to big continent organisms. I'm not sure it's the correct explanation, though.
Intuitively, there is a certain point at which you can say that organisms that came previously are 'less evolved' than the ones that came after. Prokaryotes vs eukaryotes, anaerobic vs aerobic metabolizers, vertebrates vs invertebrates, and so on.
Sharks are obviously 'more evolved' than anaerobic bacteria, because they have eyes, teeth, a nervous system, etc. But the shark has its niche in predating on organisms much larger than that, so obviously when you put it in an environment with only anaerobic bacteria it won't survive.
However, in any environment where the shark can find prey reasonably similar to what it normally eats, it's going to be better at doing that than similar predators that didn't evolve eyes, teeth, motorics, or electroreception as well as the shark has. So, I'm pretty sure the shark would outcompete Anomalocaris even if it didn't evolve in exactly the same niche.
I don't think 'adapting to smaller and smaller changes in the niche' is as important as it seems, because the flip side of that is that it makes the organism less adaptable to changes. If you hyperspecialize in eating just eucalyptus leaves, and a fungal plague wipes out all the eucalyptus trees, then all that evolution you went through was for nothing.
>vertebrates vs invertebrates
As a general rule with animals, at small scales arthropods are The Best while at large scales vertebrates are The Best. Those two groups are *miles* ahead of everything else, but between them it's more a matter of tradeoffs and niches than "one is better".
Interestingly, dinosaur fiction seems to be convinced of the reverse: you get things like characters saying "T. rex was forged by millions of years of evolution to be the ultimate predator," presumably in contrast to modern animals, who have those same years of evolution, plus 65 million more. I guess the implication is that the K-T extinction event "reset" evolution? The sentiment never made much sense to me.
Yeah that type of narrative is exact the sort of thing most biologists tend to hate. but the ones who are willing to say stuff like that are the ones who get asked to be on shows!
I mean, certainly the "large land animal" niche had to be rebuilt from scratch after K-T (because anything in that niche got wiped out; big things need lots of food to sustain a breeding population, and there was no food). And it should also be remembered that we just had another extinction of large land animals (Pleistocene extinction a.k.a. the March of Man), so the remnant modern megafauna is legitimately less impressive than usual (Africa somewhat excepted).
I remember that a long, long time ago, we used to play a computer game of the combat type with friends (the original Starcraft, if anyone is interested). The first thing we did was to try and send in troops right away, before the enemy was prepared. Obviously, everyone got wise to that pretty quickly, and set up defenses first thing. So people stopped rushing and adopted a second-order strategy to evade those defenses. This evolved further and further; at some point, the strategy of choice was huge and expensive late-game flying destroyers. And then, when I had this strategy working almost on autopilot, and was just laying the foundation for my long-term success in a new game, I remember my shock when I got rushed and annihilated within the first minute.
I guess you could say that latest strategy was *more* evolved than the first one, just because it did evolve for a long time. However, it's harder to claim it's *better* evolved since it was exactly the same strategy as the first one, just arrived at via a long detour.
I can't answer the original question, because I know little about zoology. However, in keeping with my game analogy, I guess that you'd get the best results if you put an organism a *short* while back in time, so that it is one step ahead. As an illustration, consider moving a shark not 100 million years back in time, but 1 billion years. The shark would be much more evolved than anything else around - but since that anything else would be the simplest of multicellular organisms, the shark would perish while the other organisms would prosper and live long.
There's a term StarCraft players use for the phenomenon you describe: the metagame. We talk about the evolution of the metagame over time, as people figure out new strategies and the developers adjust stats to balance the game.
Thanks. There's presumable a philosophical essay in there somewhere, or a novel, or both.
You are making me almost physically itchy to go fire up Total Annihilation and see if anybody is still hosting online games.
I don't know if it's evolution, but the light blue background gives an advantage to white icons that they didn't have with a white background.
I find it really interesting when there's a known optimal strategy that dominates even specific counters, but human limitations prevent its execution ("In the year 20XX"). You get a mix of the normal cyclic metagame interjected with attempts to capture a shadow of perfect play, but which aspect each top player focuses on leads to some delightfully unstable dynamics.
This is pretty clearly a rock-paper-scissors sort of situation, but the implication in Jurassic Park et. al. is that the dinosaurs are objectively better life-forms than modern animals. E.g., T. rex beats, say, tigers, both now and in the Cretaceous Period.
I vaguely remember one of the Jurassic Park novels where, despite the heroes' best efforts, some of the dinosaurs make it to the mainland. Where they promptly die because they're less evolved and can't compete with modern wildlife.
I think you have rediscovered a pretty well known starcraft dynamic; in a nutshell, with
all else equal:
conservative play beats rush
expand/tech beats conservative play
rush beats expand/tech
when both players are familiar with this dynamic, much of the game becomes trying to identify what strategy your opponent is pursuing, while preventing your opponent from discovering what strategy you are pursuing
It's standard with deckbuilding card games (in the Magic the Gathering genre) too.
You have aggro, mid-range and control decks. Aggro is about nuking the opponent from the start, mid-range is about reacting flexibly, gaining board control and winning, control is about shutting down the enemy until you can invoke an unchallengeable presence.
I would steelman it as "the evolution counter resets when the animal changes substantially".
I don't have a definition of what counts as "substantially", but the idea is the difference between optimizing within a certain local maximum (for millions of years) and moving towards a different local maximum (the reset).
But perhaps this doesn't make sense either. The fitness landscape can be a fractal, so there may be no substantial difference between "the same" and "different" local maximum. Also, there is no reason to be impressed by spending millions of years in the same local maximum; maybe the entire local maximum just sucks.
You might look up evolutionary arms race. But note that those usually end with both sides going extinct.
Evolution is surprisingly tricky and subtle.
One charitable interpretation of the hypothetical attitude you mention would be as a statment about path-dependence. That is : there is only 1 dinosaurs (I realize there a multitude of ways this sounds wildly wrong, ignore them). The bag of tricks and strategies that Evolution hammered into dinosaurs is unique and peculiar. When they were wiped out, that bag was gone forever. Modern animals are not "better", they are different, they aren't "further" along the same path as the dinosaurs, they are along another path entirely, a path that you know and can defend against (by virtue of being counter-evolved against it). So the movie character's attitude is a perfectly valid concern, dinosaurs have a unique bag of tricks and strategies that died with them, and reviving them revives this bag of tricks and strategies against organisms that spent the last 65 million years *not* adapting against it.
Consider another situation vaguely similar, cultural evolution. When we say that, e.g, the Greeks had hundreds of year to craft amazing stories and mythologies, this can't be countered by the fact that, say, Egypt or China had more time because they are older. Egypt or China crafted different bags of culture entirely. There is only 1 Ancient Greece, and the bag of culture it crafted was unique and, if lost, irretrievable. The space of all possible culture, like the space of all possible organism, is impossibly vast; you can't recover, let alone improve upon (this implies recovery: improving upon something means starting with it and iterating) dinosaurs or ancient greek culture, no matter how many millions or even billions of years you spend.
But after the KT event, the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere dropped 30%. In the modern atmosphere larger dinosaurs wouldn't be large, they'd have to adapt to the current atmosphere
Only short-term -- air is actually much more oxygen-rich *now* than it was in the Mesozoic. In fact, a big part of the success of dinosaurs was being better at extracting oxygen from poor air with their extensive air sacs, which then were put to good use by their descendents the birds.
The point still stands, though: there is no such thing as inherently "more evolved", fitness is entirely relative to the environment, and dinosaurs specialized to suit conditions that no longer exist.
Which they have done in spades, given that birds are their descendants!
One thing worthy of note:
Dinosaurs were (largely) daytime creatures while the mammals of that era were nighttime creatures. As a result, mammal ancestors had less reliance on vision, and less investment in things like sharp edge detection and color discrimination, that dinosaurs had. In the past few tens of millions of years, with most of the dinosaurs gone, many mammals evolved back into these daytime niches. But our vision just isn’t as acute along any of these lines as those of the dinosaur descendants that remained diurnal (notably hawks and eagles, but probably many birds).
But it’s also likely that modern diurnal mammals have sensory combinations and capabilities that dinosaurs never had. Wolves and tigers don’t see as well as a tyrannosaur, but they may have a better combination of sight, hearing, and smell.
Well, there's no dispute that the current apex predator, Homo sapiens, is a more "ultimate" predator by far than T. rex ever was
In the specific case of the T. rex, there's a good argument to be made that its dominance surpasses that of any other non-human predator that has evolved since except. T. rex is thought to have been so effective at large prey that it prevented any other large predators from being able to evolve that could compete with it -- the next largest predators known from North America during the time the T. rex lived were only around 1/20th of its size. No known predator from after the Mesozoic has been able to replicate this feat.
There are many facets to this topic. Here are some considerations:
1. Even if the outward appearance of an animal doesn't change, there might be a lot of stuff happening at the molecular level that we can't tell from fossils. Scorpions are a good example of this. They haven't changed since they crawled out of Silurian seas, but their venom has been evolving all along to answer innovations made by the vertebrate nervous and circulatory systems.
2. There have been some global "species X-risk" events. All modern species have adaptations against these, because if they hadn't, they'd have died out. Modern shellfish have anti-drilling adaptations, for example, because specialized drillers and crushers evolved during the Mesozoic and promptly ate everything that couldn't adapt. So yes, modern animals are more adapted because they have inbuilt counters to some major evolutionary innovations.
3. Speaking of which, there are examples where one animal group is widespread, and another comes along and displaces it because it's just better at that particular niche. Brachiopods used to be all over the place back in the Paleozoic, but once bivalves evolved, they got sent to the shadow realm (i.e. the deep sea) alongside stuff like forams and sea lilies. Marsupials in Australia used to have it good until we came along. Seed ferns had global dominion before angiosperms appeared. So there ARE cases where a species (or other clade) is just better than the other.
4. That said, there are also some "easy" niches that seem to be filled by pretty much whoever gets there first. Think the giant filter feeder niche, I don't know who would come on top in a battle royale between whales vs. whale sharks vs. giant belemnites vs. Aegirocassis vs. Leedsichthys vs. Vortex. Or coral reefs vs. sponge reefs vs. snail reefs vs. clam reefs vs. brachiopod reefs (okay, fine, the brachiopods aren't living through that one).
(and 0. As always, it's good to keep in mind that evolution has no memory and only cares about the current situation. An Archean era cyanobacterium is still "more evolved" than us air-breathing losers on its home turf.)
My ballpark guess is 75% your modern shark adapts to the Cretaceous but doesn't cause a revolution, 20% it dies out because local environmental factors are different enough, 5% it conquers the world (or at least displaces a lot of other sharks).
To me, it seems, embedded in this question is the idea that evolution has an aim or is "progressive." But there is no aim or goal.
It's not simply survival of the "fit", it's also survival of the lucky. There is no objective improvement, nor predisposition to progress. It could well be that mass extinction events are the primary drivers of change, aka evolution.
Society tells itself it has everything under control, then nature or another uncontrollable force introduces chaos. All while we land an aircraft on an asteroid, take soil samples, and bring them back to earth, or launch a telescope that reveals previously unseen worlds.
If evolution has a goal, it's to adapt.
> If evolution has a goal, it's to adapt.
Not even that, because the meta level also changes. Sometimes the nature changes relatively quickly and the less flexible species go extinct. Other times the nature stays the same for millions of years, and the species with more potential flexibility keep paying a higher price (bigger genome, longer pregnancy, need more food, etc.) for the features they never use, which reduces their fitness in the meanwhile.
That assumption doesn't have to be embedded in the question. Under some circumstances, evolution resembles an arms race. On an island filled with cheetahs and gazelles, you'll probably see both species becoming gradually faster from generation to generation, and a cheetah transported thousands of years into the past will outclass its competitors.
But evolution is more complicated than just arms races. A modern cheetah sent back a million years (say) will probably be able to outcompete the fast-running savannah proto-cheetahs that filled the cheetah's ecological niche back then... but if we keep going further back then that niche will no longer exist. The savannah animals of today will do very poorly in the Mesozoic, before there was grass.
This stuff is complicated and (as you noted with the “probably”) is not predictable. For example the speed has metabolic costs and a predator needs to be only just able to catch its usual prey. A super fast predator that needs 2X as much food as a just-fast-enough predator that conserves energy for outbreeding the new guy may be a loser in the long game. Cool to think about.
Cheetahs are weird. Most pursuit predators are a little slower on average than their favorite prey, because they only need to be fast enough to catch the slowest individuals. But cheetahs are way faster than anything they hunt. I don't know what's going on there.
Was there a faster herbivore that went extinct some time in the last million years or so?
These predators have larger predators upon their backs to bite em (after novum organum)
The non social cheetahs suffer from socialized competitors such as lions
Exactly. Far too often, people speak of evolution as if it were an intelligent design (i.e. God). Evolution only appears to have aimed at a destination when we look at the path taken and anthromorphise an intelligent design upon that path.
Evolution is instead a crowd of organisms with each individual exploring a different evolutionary path. The organisms discovering a slightly better path advance evolution only with a slightly higher reproduction result.
One of the things that has changed over the last 100 million years is which pathogens and parasites are common. I am not a biologist, but I wouldn't expect a shark today to be particularly well adapted to pathogens and parasites that haven't existed for millions of years.
Yes, the Red Queen Hypothesis says that most evolution is about very specific arms races against parasites. It's usually suggested that it goes both ways: the sharks of today have probably lost their defenses against the sharks of the past, but the parasites of the past probably had very specialized offenses that might not be so relevant.
We don't know if dinosaurs had faster neurons than us like today's birds. If they did they might have been as smart as today's small monkeys, throwing rocks and using tree branches to poke into anthills. Imagine T-Rex throwing rocks and branches to bring down prey.
Not with those teeny little arms.
Just look teeny next to the bulk.
Teeny compared to the bulk that they would need to feed. Also, only two fingers on each hand and no thumbs.
Just chucking a rock or a stick doesn't take fine manipulation. And predators don't pick on someone their own size every time they want lunch- a T Rex that knocked down small prey would out-eat a T Rex that went after big prey that could fight back effectively.
The very premise of the question sort of assumes a goal. So in that sense, no. No species is more evolved than any other because there is no "end goal" towards which a species can be closer or further. Now, one can argue that certain species are better or worse suited for the niche in which they find themselves, but that makes comparison across time impossible since at the scales you are asking about, so much is different than comparing doesn't make sense. And it is _highly_ unlikely that modern species are better adapted for ancient niches than the species that lived in those niches (and vice versa).
And even when comparing modern species to each other, mostly similar species often differentiate and split niches up in very fine grained and hard to obsere ways. There are over 60 species of Rockfish (all in the same genus; Sebastes) from Alaska to Baja. Many of them live in the exact same habitats and eat very similar things, and yet they coexist (and have for quite some time). Presumably, they are exploiting very narrow adjacent niches that we have not yet figured out what the differences are.
Additionally, many of the adaptations that occur are sort of a Red Queen's Race where two species are both changing but in ways that more or less offset. Immune system adaptations can be an example of this. Theyy change very rapidly in response to novel diseases, but they aren't necessary "better" in any general sense (although there are more and less sophisticated immune systems).
Basically, the question is impossible to really answer and almost doesn't even make sense. While there are particular tasks or goals that one species may be better at than another, that is not the same thing as "more evolved".
Evolution does not only make organisms better adapted to their environment. Sexual selection can make them less adapted too. An animal sent millions of years back in time could be a hyper-sexualized creature that can't get enough food in competition with less sexualized specimens.
Here's an interesting study that suggests something like that:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0020-7
Teeth come immediately to mind! Mammalian dentition has evolved in a variety of specialized directions that allow Mammalia to exploit food sources more efficiently and it has allowed them to diversify into all sorts of different ecological niches. The Synapsids and then the Dinosauria didn't have the diversity of dentition that modern mammals do. And since mammalian dentition has allowed mammals to better exploit their environments, the plants eaten by mammals have evolved in response to the increasing efficiency of mammalian teeth probably creating a diversifying feedback loop. (Excuse my inexact terms, it's late and I'm writing quickly.)
I don't think 'more evolved' is actually a meaningful concept. (See e.g. https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/833) If by that you mean "more complex" (like the commenter below re: sharks vs bacteria), just say "more complex".
Even "more complex", doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because simplicity and complexity coexist.
There is no such thing as "more evolved".
> Even "more complex", doesn't make a lot of sense to me
There are plenty of complexity measures out there. I was thinking in particular of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity (where you can make it mathematically precise), and Wikipedia tells me there are way more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_measure
> There is no such thing as "more evolved".
That's correct.
Yes, there are measures of "complexity", but I don't we can really say evolution (change) even has any goal/aim/direction toward "more complex", since both less complex and more complex continue to co-exist.
What does "more evolved" mean? Does it mean "a longer chain of evolutionary changes" or does it mean "more able to compete in their environment"? I imagine you are probably referring to the latter, but on the off chance you mean the former - I would expect there to be longer chains of evolutionary changes today than 100 million years ago, based purely on time, but would be interested in further views on this.
As I understand it, 100 million years ago the XY sex chromosome system was virtually nonexistent, the ZW sex chromosome system was the dominating one in the ecosystem. (I'm not doing a "headcount of X0 insects" here, just looking at which organisms are the dominant ones). XY's path to ascenscion was quite difficult, but it seemed to gain momentum in the aftermath of the meteorite 65M years ago, and the XY's became the ecosystem's dominant organisms after that period -- ultimately culminating in the uber-predator, Homo Sapiens. (virtually all mammals are XY, whereas the platypus seems to be a relic of the complex transition from the ZW to the XY system)
Evolution is an ongoing process, and therefore asking "were organisms more evolved 100M years ago?" is a bit akin to asking "was I older 20 years ago?". Evolution always adapts to the environment, but the reason I mention the ZW -> XY switchover is that it represents a small watershed in *evolution's speed of adaptation*. The XY system sacrifices overall population size for greater speed of evolution, and that tradeoff has been extremely successful.
The ZW organisms will often balance out in a high female-to-male ratio (e.g. an order of magnitude more chickens than roosters), while XY organisms are "forcibly" balancing out at an equal ratio. Genetic studies suggest that in humans, about 80% of women and 40% of men have reproduced. The disparity is lesser since the advent of single-partner marriage cultures, it was likely higher before that, and is higher in most other XY organisms.
Therefore with XY there is significant genetic filtering at work, in terms of males that will not be chosen for reproduction. In contrast, in a high female-to-male ratio ZW arrangement, almost all males and females get to reproduce - but less genetic filtering happens as result. (both XY and ZW are subjected to "filtering by environmental selection", of course, but XY is more strongly subjected to "filtering by partner selection" than ZW is, overall - with consequent impacts on the speed of evolution)
This is a layman retelling, but the end-result is quite visible. Sharks didn't change all that much in the last 100M years, while mammals went from rodent-like creatures to horses, lions, giraffes, bats, whales and humans. Which are more "evolved", in terms of their genomes having further changed in ways to exploit the environment and niches?
Interesting! Do you have any links or books that you'd recommend on ZW vs XY sex ratio theories? There does seem to be a pattern (but the devil is in the details). ;-)
Considering that monotremes use an XY system (albeit with a different arrangement from placental mammals), that suggests the XY/ZW split happened after the Dinosauria branched off from the Synapsids—but probably before monotremes and Therians diverged in the mid-Jurassic (say ~170 mya). And considering that <checking Wikipedia hurriedly> some reptiles seem to have also convergently evolved an XY sex-determination system—I'm not sure if it offers any selective advantage over the ZW system. Anyway, I'd like to read up on those sex ratio theories if you can point me to the literature. Thanks!
I had read it in a book almost a decade ago, I can't recall now which one, sorry. But as I recall, the main issue has seemed to be the fixation of alleles that would lead to sex ratio disparity in the offspring - and how differently that works out in XY vs. ZW.
It would be advantageous for any organism (whether male or female) to produce more female than male offspring, in terms of total descendants down the line. Of the organisms surviving to maturity, nearly all the females will reproduce while only some of the males will do the reproducing. Having 8 female and 2 male offspring may thus be a less risky way of passing genes to the subsequent generations, than 5 female and 5 male offspring.
The problem with XY being, it is the paternal gametes which determine the sex. Any mutation that would lead to a male producing more female than male offspring, would simultaneously and by that same method, be effacing itself from the gene pool. This is practically ensuring an equal-ratio deadlock.
It is the opposite case with ZW, where the maternal gametes determine the sex. In that setup, females *can* collect mutations which ensure that they produce more female than male offspring. They will *not* "auto-erase themselves from the gene pool" by doing that, at least not up until exceeding the ratio that follows from the female vs. the male chances of reproducing. (i.e. if it comes to female A producing 100% female offspring and female B producing 75% female, the B genome will soon get the upper hand again even in a setup where a mature female's chances of reproducing are quite higher than a male's chances)
XY's "equal-ratio deadlock" is thus producing a higher total number of organisms that won't reproduce in turn [male, mostly]. But that also implies a higher degree of genetic filtering over time than the one found in species with a higher ratio of females, and in which a lesser proportion of organisms that survived to maturity do /not/ get to reproduce.
As I understand, the switch from ZW to XY has happened before the switch from oviparian to viviparian/mammal. That switch-to-mammal was in itself perhaps even more complex than the ZW->XY switch; but the XY's "faster evolution" might have ensured that it's the XY's who got to become mammals. As you noted, some branches of reptiles also "paralelly discovered" the ZW->XY switch, without making it quite as far as becoming mammal, and no ZW has ever made it into a mammal. The platypus seems to be a relic from that transition period, with a strange hybrid sex determination system depending on a multitude of chromosomes.
If males and females are born in equal numbers, then the average male and average female will have same fertility rate; if only a small number of males mate, that doesn't change the average, it only changes the variance.
On the other hand, if one sex outnumbers the other, the strong strategy is to produce the rarer sex; a member of a rarer sex has a better shot at finding a mate (or multiple mates, if it's males that are rare).
I said "risk" but a better word might be "quantization".
Say that in a species' circumstances, 80% of mature females and 20% of mature males will get to reproduce. An organism which produces 5F + 5M that reach maturity, can supposedly count on 4F producing further offspring and 1M producing 4x offspring -- making it a wash from a F/M perspective.
That is simplified - there might be small deviations, like 1M producing 3.5x offspring, 1M producing 0.5x, and 3M producing 0 - but the effect remains that only the "winning" M's reproduce [a lot], whereas almost all F's reproduce.
Why is quantization tricky here. For most periods of ecosystem equilibrium, the organism will *not* have 10 offspring reaching maturity. In the competition for resources in an ecosystem saturated with that species, an organism that did reproduce can mostly count on one to three survivors to maturity. Having 1F + 1M, there's significant odds that the organism did not produce a "winning M", which is a significant cut in the total number of descendants compared to having 2F. That 1M wouldn't have produced "20% of the descendants" but 0.
In addition to quantization loss, if the "overall stats" of a species is that 80% F and 20% M reproduce, it doesn't mean that the "elasticity" is the same across all individual organisms. A genotype with some slight defects might experience the chances of F reproduction decrease from 80% to 75%, while its chances of M "being the winner" decrease from 20% to 10%. It's asymmetrical in that way. Alleles that favor a higher chance of F offspring, can attain a better fixation through the iterations of this process. (this asymmetry is at the same time the reason why the *evolution* of such a species would proceed at a slower pace)
Lastly, note that XY organisms cannot "by nature" attain a fixation of a significantly higher chance of female offspring, but they *could* attain fixation of a significantly higher chance of male offspring. And yet, to my knowledge, that has happened never. The opposite scenario with ZW organisms, does happen.
Do you know the mechanism by which the ZW system produces unequal sex ratios? I'd expect it to produce equal ratios for much the same reason as the XY system: a ZZ male always produces Z sperm, while a ZW female would produce 50% Z eggs and 50% W eggs unless there's an extra step to cull one or the other.
Chickens are probably a bad example. My understanding is that the primary sex ratio for barnyard chickens is about 50/50, but humans cull most of the rooster chicks shortly after hatching because roosters are less economically useful than hens. Only hens lay eggs, and in the most popular meat breeds, hens grow faster and yield higher-quality meat than roosters, so roosters are only kept for breeding, to defend the hens from small predators, and to fill a social role in the flock. Pre-20th-century, surplus roosters were usually caponized (surgically castrated) and raised for meat. And among the Red Junglefowl wild cousins of domestic chickens, adult roosters fight one another for territory and access to hens, similarly to many mammalian species with polygamous habits.
Valid point. Turns out I was wrong about chickens, they are a bad example, since the culling of roosters is actually done by farmers. (if they let the natural sex ratios develop to maturity, all those roosters spend most of their time fighting for dominance, which is not anyhow useful to farmers even if it is useful to evolution)
Sex ratio disruptors can be "external", such as the said farmers, or such as e.g. a Wolbachia infection, a parasite transmissible to offspring which decimates specifically the males. The F:M ratio of the affected butterfly species turns out like 100:1, which actually puts the species at risk of extinction in the longer term. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0304068101
The "Fischer equilibrium" postulates that there cannot be an "internal" sex ratio disruptor which could achieve fixation in the long term. But that principle is at best valid for "unconditional" sex ratio disruptors (I mean when an organism would *unconditionally* suppress a given fraction of male gametes after meiosis). In contrast, *conditional* sex ratio disruptors would not be ruled out by Fischer's postulates.
Here's an interesting paper which mentions some conditional disruptors that were observed, with references: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/36534 . In short, a female in really good condition is "evolutionarily incentivized" to produce more sons, because if those sons end up winners, the "returns" will be really large. Conversely, a female in a not-so-good condition is "incentivized" to produce more daughters, since the sons are less likely to be "winners" whereas the daughters will likely reproduce nonetheless.
The said paper does not offer the exact genetic mechanisms, but clarifies that this has been empirically observed. The paper is in fact guidance for Conservation Biology, and explains how this natural mechanism can be leveraged by conservationists to attain a non-balanced sex ratio which suits their purposes. The main thing is, such a *conditional* sex ratio disruptor *can* bypass Fischer's postulates.
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Supplementary feeding of the few remaining individuals of that species may have led to male-biased sex ratios because females in good conditions turned out to be more likely to have sons than daughters (Tella 2001, Clout et al. 2002). At one point in time, about 70% of all recorded offspring of this species were sons. Robertson et al. (2006) found that the male bias was significantly reduced when female condition was altered. Lenz et al. (2007) used this line of thought to work out the likely genetic and demographic consequences of analogous management actions in an existing captive breeding program for a Spanish population of the lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni), another polygynous bird that shows a correlation between family sex ratio and female condition: more daughters are born by mothers of average conditions, while more sons are born by mothers of good condition (Aparicio and Cordero 2001). The authors found that a sex-ratio management within the range that seems possible would significantly increase the efficiency of an existing captive breeding program.
... so XY vs ZW doesn't matter?
I'd say that XY vs ZW *does* matter. This is a strategy that can only work for females, and that presumes the female can control the sex ratio. This is the case with ZW, not with XY. All the references in that cited passage were to birds, i.e. ZW.
To recap the strategy of the *conditional* sex ratio disruptor. /Conditional to/ being in above-average condition, the female organism will suppress female gametes (skewing to more sons), and /conditional to/ being in average condition or below, the female organism will suppress male gametes.
I don't know the details of the mechanism, but this looks very possible for a ZW female organism to do. (A female organism of the XY system cannot have much influence on the sex of the fertilizing gamete - that ratio is up to the male organism)
The principles of Fischer's equilibrium will prohibit the "fixation" of any genetic trait that would *unconditionally* disrupt sex ratios -- i.e. a trait for *always* producing 2x more male, or always 3x more female -- but those principles cannot stop the fixation of such *conditional* traits which are clearly beneficial for maximizing the count of descendants in the given circumstances. Such a species might even out at a 1:1 F:M ratio *overall*, but its higher-tier females will skew to more sons (given the high odds that *their* sons will be the winners), and the lower-tier females skew to more daughters. Basically, females are "betting on different tickets"; those tickets likely to yield the highest return (in grandchildren & beyond) *for them*.
This conditional strategy can work only for females. For males, the "conditional to being average or below average" part translates to "will not reproduce anyway" from the outset. Any sex ratio disruption enacted by *winning* males in XY systems, would not (effectively) be conditional, and will thus be wiped out by Fischer's equilibrium principles.
This seems to make XY systems "deadlocked" to 1:1 ratios across all parents, while ZW systems can let individual females skew the sex ratio of their offspring to the one that's most beneficial in their circumstances.
The threshold for females should not be simply average. The threshold for males should obviously not be average, but that doesn't mean it can't exist. And XX females can select on sex of sperm because X sperm and Y sperm are easily distinguished. For example, Y sperm move fast and die young.
There's (somewhat contentious) evidence that adaptive evolution happens quite quickly, and then there's a "drunkard's walk" kind of variation around that optimum. So if you put a bunch of modern sharks in the same environment as a bunch of ancient sharks, which would dominate would depend mainly on how closely the environment was to the one the particular groups of sharks were adapted form.
Most of the experiments confirming this have been done on bacteria, but there's some mildly confirmatory studies on the beaks of Galapagos finches. (I read it in print, and I didn't keep a copy, but you can probably find it if you search. It had to do with rapid evolutionary response to a drought.)
Is Eldredge and Gould's punctuated equilibrium really contentious?
There are several different versions of "punctuated equilibrium". Some are widely accepted. Others are widely rejected. And there's a large clump in the middle.
I think most professionals feel that Gould went far beyond plausibility in "Wonderful Life", but much of the time he was quite plausible. And there's additional supporting evidence.
It's my impression that the general idea of punctuated equilibrium is widely accepted. How widely applicable it is, and how extreme the punctuation can be, are contentious.
(OTOH, I'm not a biologist, much less a specialist in that area.)
One of the big changes about 100 million years ago was the development of flowering plants, as well as a parallel set of developments in insects (including the true social insects like some termites, ants, and bees). The flowering plants and the social insects were obviously hugely successful over evolutionary time. But a modern one needs a whole ecosystem as it’s support (grasses won’t win if there aren’t grazers, and bright flowers won’t win unless there are insects attracted to them).
What are people's thoughts on how much retrenchment there is going to be in the housing market?
My wild guess has been 20-30%, from whatever is the peak in next year, to whatever is the low. A decent number of my social circle look to me for guidance and this is what I have been guessing. Does that seem reasonable to people? homes seem overpriced right now, but I am also not sure the structural things driving them up are going away.
I would agree with your 20-30% prediction but I think that monetary policy will be loosened again before it goes that low -- not to "save" the RE market but to lower the debt to gdp ratio.
I think it's gonna vary greatly from one submarket to another. E.g. in Sweden, it's been normal to have a 1% 50-year mortgage, giving a total cashflow of around 3% per year, whereas in Malta you'd typically have a 2.7% 30-year mortgage, giving a total of 6% per year, so an interest-rate hike is gonna hit twice as hard in Sweden as in Malta. Add to that that 81% of Swedish home owners have a mortgage, whereas only 27% of Maltese ones do. Just those two factors should give a difference of 6x in impact.
There are opposing pressures between inflation and popping the bubble driven by cheap credit. The exact balance depends on the market.
In the EU, I'm expecting the nominal prices to stay roughly the same while the currency devalues.
In London at least I don’t think they’ll crash - inflation may erode them a bit. While houses are over priced, everything else is cheap so people will continue to pump all their spare cash into housing. It is a supply of mortgages driven market. And even when mortgages cost more, people are reluctant to sell below what they last paid, so it will more freeze things.
Without other large market interventions (rental rights, stopping second or foreign home ownership, Georgism etc) I can’t see a crash happening. Without riots by young people about this, and political change.
(I expected larger crashes with the financial crisis and the pandemic and there weren’t so partly I’m learning by example)
There are few if any places with an excess of homes right now (other than markets like the rural Midwest that have been shrinking for decades). The work from home revolution has also caused a lasting increase in demand for housing space per household (which had already been slowly increasing for decades). It seems very plausible that there will be some kind of correction, but these structural factors will keep prices on a generally upward trajectory until there is a supply side fix.
20%-30% of housing equity or housing assets? The two get conflated a lot but the former is a levered return on the latter. If housing equity is down 20% and typically (in the US) mortgages are 80% LTV (loan to value) then the asset is down 4%. The same is true of volatility. If house equity has a volatility somewhat lower than equities (say 10%-15% per year) then housing asset volatilities are 2%-3%.
But if you believe in efficient markets, then the housing market should already have taken future interest rate and recession probabilities into account. Any particular house is not likely to look like an efficient market, but the housing market in aggregate should. There have been articles talking about how listed property prices are already being marked down. (https://www.redfin.com/news/price-drops-increase-may-2022/).
So I personally would not bet on prices dropping more unless the economy turns out to be worse. People in the aggregate are smarter than I am individually. And have deeper pockets.
Meh I don't have a lot of faith in the "efficient market hypothesis" for things like this, perhaps unless you go very long term. It was clear housing prices were badly overvalued in like 2003 in the US and yet they continued to rise for another 4 years before the shit hit the fan. I just don't think humans, even large numbers of them, or large institutions, are actually good at pricing in future changes, particularly if they are at all contingent.
You didn’t answer equity or assets, so I assume you mean equity. So housing assets down 4%-6% in a year. I think your band is too narrow (for 95% confidence) and too negative. But it will also be very dependent on what country and city you are in. (Not everyone on this blog is in the US.)
There are degrees of efficiency. The housing market has a lot of transaction costs and imperfect information so it is easy for an individual house to be priced inefficiently. With that said, if you knew, or it was known generally, that the house equity was going to fall 20%-30%, then prices would drop rapidly today on their way there.
My own view is assets will be somewhere between down 1% to up 1% in the next year (house equity will be down 5% to up 5%) where I am locally. Note that this implies I think that housing won’t earn its risk adjusted return so if I didn’t own a house, I wouldn’t buy one.
"With that said, if you knew, or it was known generally, that the house equity was going to fall 20%-30%, then prices would drop rapidly today on their way there."
Well maybe, depends on how many deluded/irrational buyers there are out there. We might all know that this painting is a piece of worthless garbage, but if 20 idiots want to trade it back and forth at $50 million +/- a couple %, then the price can easily stay that high.
I do agree that if there were widespread understanding there would for sure be such retrenchment, starting immediately.
IN my market which was not very overheated, but a bit hot housing prices have already fallen~5-10% over the past moth or two.
I think of places like Raleigh/Durham where housing is like 70% more expensive than it was 3 years ago. I would expect large retrenchment there, but I am totally open to the possibility I am wrong.
Only in some markets will there be a significant reduction in prices. Many markets may see prices stagnate. The structural issue is lack of supply and rising rates will only exacerbate that as builders won't build as much (to say nothing of zoning and regulatory issues). Unlikely 2008, lending standards have remained pretty high so you don't have lots of low quality mortgages out there with balloon payments or 0/negative equity.
I recently bought a house and in the process talked with realtors in three different markets (an easy coast primary, a mid west tertiary, and an east coast below tertiary). In all of them there were still high income people looking for houses and many willing to pay cash.
My simplistic view is that the past two years have seen high earners buying houses and driving up prices. Unlikely 2008, we haven't seen poor people going well beyond their means to buy houses. So there aren't many people who will be ruined by interest rates rising therefor they are unlikely to have to sell there homes which would increase supply.
I'd bear in mind that the current wave of inflation means that real housing prices are increasing by about 9 percentage points less than nominal housing prices, so some retrenchment is happening automatically and invisibly already.
The big structural things I see are:
1. Wealth effect from the big run-up in stock prices over the past few years. People with successful upper-middle-class careers and decent financial habits suddenly have a lot more assets (especially those who get paid partially in stock) available to spend on housing.
2. The proliferation of working from home during the plague years. If you're spending more time at home and you're doing more stuff that calls for dedicated home office space, then it makes sense to spend more of your income on housing.
WFH has also redistributed housing demand, as people freed from daily commutes have moved further from work. To pick one pair of datapoints, I moved from Sunnyvale (suburban Bay Area, a little but up the peninsula from San Jose) to Gilroy (exurb about an hour's drive south of downtown San Jose) a couple years before Covid hit. I just checked Redfin, and their current estimate for my old house is 21% higher than what I sold it for (almost all due to inflation) while my new house is estimated at 82% higher.
I’m looking for a recommendation for a very intro level monetary policy book. Also a history of money. I’m particularly interested why we went from a gold standard to what ever the standard is now. If the the book is available through audible that would be an added plus thanks!
Ha! That’s wild thanks!
They are "nothingbucks" no more than glittery piece of metal is worthless as long as central bank limits the supply of them and the government will accept them for payment of taxes and people trust either of them. I think it makes sense to view the fiat money as "backed" by their scarcity compared size to the economical value taxable by the government and the government's debts.
Like, any metal or land-based currency could also become much less valuable if everyone decides that gold, silver or land has much less value. (Land value notoriously can fluctuate. Maybe Musk finds an asteroid made of precious metals.)
edit. double negatives
I think even if you don't recognize the legitimacy of the government on an ideological level, fiat money still makes sense as "don't get thrown in jail by government thugs for tax evasion" coupons. The government issues the coupons, and demands that everyone hand over a certain number every year to not get arrested, your property seized, etc, with the amount based on tax law and the amount and type of economic activity the person or corporation engages in.
So under those circumstances it seems perfectly sensible for people to be willing to trade you valuable goods in exchange for those coupons.
Here's my 2c.
Government exists to allow coordination and pooling of effort for common goals, in large groups of people. When done right, this gives the governed group (ie country) exponentially greater capability to survive, expand, gather resources, manipulate the physical world, increase knowledge, defend itself and many other desirable ends. This is why I think that (functional) government is legitimate.
Those "nothingbucks" are in fact a common contract between all users of that currency, to accept it as payment for things. This contract is enforced by the government, and is a good way to improve coordination.
I shouldn't be so disdainful of an agreement between a country's worth of individuals, backed up by their pooled, concentrated ability to apply physical force. Even a small country.
>I will never work and pay taxes again under any government
I assume you mean you intend to survive by what are, essentially, state handouts. That this is possible is proof that the people around you (ie your government) would rather provide its members with a minimal level of subsistence, than deal with the consequences of their sinking beneath it. The problem is that they might some day change their mind and stop supporting you. Not sure why you think that this will never happen, but that's your business, not mine.
>paying taxes in nothingbucks is mandated nonconsensually by government
Except that it isn't, if you aren't earning any, in any countries I'm aware of. Admittedly I have very limited knowledge about tax regulations.
Anyway, probably the term "contract" wasn't well chosen. Should have rather said "working arrangement" or some such. Either way, it's consensual, in that the arrangement can be revoked or altered, by (some form of) common agreement.
If you think that it's unethical towards yourself, that it's the majority imposing their will on you, you're right. But the system does work, on the average, rather well.
>But I didn't say that I think that this will never happen.
True, and I'm not criticizing your choices. Just pointing out a possible mode of failure, and why I wouldn't make that choice myself. Commenting gratuitously, as it were.
>Except that an actual contract is consensual and paying taxes in nothingbucks is mandated nonconsensually by government.
No, paying taxes is consensual in exactly the same way that a contract is. If I want you to contract to do something for me, you can choose to opt out, but you then have to forego whatever benefits I'm offering you, otherwise you leave yourself open to legal punishment. Likewise, if the government wants you to pay taxes, you can opt out, but then you have to forego whatever benefits the government is offering you, otherwise you leave yourself open to legal punishment.
The two situations are practically different in that some of the services a government offers, like defence against foreign attacks, are things that are offered indiscriminately to all those in a particular territory rather than to specific people. For this reason, opting out might require avoiding living in a particular area, which is not usually the case with a private contract. I see no reason why this difference should have any moral relevance, though.
> personally want nothing to do with - can't imagine - I also don't believe
So, we are now aware of your intuitions. What about people in the audience who do not share your intuitions?
For example, you mentioned housing property. I wouldn't find value of land/housing very much more trustworthy than government fiat. Value of housing property depends on economic outlook in general, not unlike fiat money. There is a possibility that VR becomes a genuinely big thing. If you can have hyperrealistic virtual experience with anyone, anywhere, maybe the physical distance is finally reduced to nothing and much fewer people have a pressing need to live in the cities. And value of housing property in cities comes from people finding it valuable to live where all the other people are.
Nevertheless, even if the Metaverse kicks off, I am quite certain that transactions in Metaverse and equipment to access it will be subject to VAT by some form of government.
I mean, if we're asking "why have money at all", the answer is "because it lets you run an economy with a lot less deadweight loss".
Barter economies have a lot of economic activity that can't happen (outside a tight-knit commune) because person A produces X and demands Y, person B produces Y and demands Z, and person C produces Z and demands X. For goods you can *somewhat* compensate via chain-of-deals, but this requires everyone to know the relative value of all things at all times (overhead loss via time wasted), tends to require a lot more moving of items (overhead loss via transport costs), and doesn't work for services.
Money cuts through this - it's easily transported, and people only need to know the price of things they produce or consume in money.
The problem with property title (at least if you mean real estate) is that different blocks of land aren't fungible; I don't know how much your house is worth compared to other houses, and it is expensive for me to discover this.
In theory, I suppose you could have some large communal lot of which people owned shares, and then use the shares as money, but then you're right back to "we promise we won't print more shares" (Revolutionary France basically did this with the assignats).
Trouble with energy is that it's expensive to store and retrieve, making it tricky to use it as a sound currency. Also, not everywhere is necessarily plugged into the grid.
I'm not sure that everyone needs to know the relative value of all the things all the time for a barter network to function. My guess is that people need to know relative values a few steps from themselves, but not for the whole net. Thoughts?
Not everyone needs to know everything, but enough people have to know enough things to establish liquidity.
For a history of money I'd go with Jacob Goldstein "Money: The True Story of a Made up Thing". He's a good communicator and doesn't come with the same baggage as the other title I've read on the topic (Debt by David Graeber).
Very cool, thanks!
I enjoyed/hated "Debt" – if nothing else, it was provocative for me!
I agree completely. I constantly think about ideas I got from that book, but it’s also one of the few that annoyed me so much I couldn’t finish it.
I vaguely remember it either getting better towards the end – or else I was just numb to the annoying/frustrating assertions!
We needed more money than there was gold to back it I think is the basic answer. We wanted to use shrinking and growing the monetary supply as an economic tool, and that is much easier if its value doesn't need to be directly tied to gold.
Unless a cent was backed by less than a single gold atom, then I don’t see how this is supposed to work as an explanation. Mind filling in that argument a bit?
They tried to maintain a fixed exchange rate.
but if there's "not enough money" that just makes each individual dollar bill more valuable... the only time you run into problems is, as Adam V states, if the smallest possible denomination of money doesn't match up with the smallest possible denomination of gold, at which point we'd have to like, start using halfpennies or whatever
but clearly that wasn't the case at any point
Say we want 10,000 monies. And we want 10 monies to be worth 1 gold. So we need 1,000 gold to "back up" our monies.
There are 10 other identical countries, and combined there is 15,000 gold in the world. So countries hold 2/3rds of the gold to back up their monies.
Now economic conditions change and he countries want there to be 20,000 monies.
But we are unable to get another 1,000 gold because other countries are doing the same thing, and there is not enough gold for all countries to hold 2,000 monies to back up their gold.
Yes we could all devalue our monies, but if we anticipate needing to increase the supply of monies again in the future, and we worry that constant devaluing is going to reduce people's trust in the value of monies.
It might be thought as more beneficial to just rip off the bandage and let the value of monies float in relation to the price of gold instead of maintaining the fiction that a fixed amount of monies are in theory exchangeable for a fixed amount of gold.
Let's imagine you are a king with a pile of gold. You need the gold to pay for the army which secures your throne. You also need gold for a bunch of other government stuff, but as long as you keep your army you can get more gold raising more taxes or invading other kingdoms.
Now, the quantity of gold may be very large, but it's finite. There's only so much gold you can capture until it's either not enough for all the things you want to do or maybe there is but it's controlled by other kings with large armies you won't necessarily be able to defeat. If you want to grow past that point, and you do because the alternative is to be conquered yourself, you need some mechanism to increase the gold supply.
Since your regular alchemists failed again and again to physically turn lead into gold, you call your super-alchemists (aka: economists) and they suggest you look for other valuable stuff your soldiers would accept for payment instead of gold, such as silver or lead or salt, and you find out that instead of 1 gold they agree to accept 10 salt. Then you realise that when you make a symbolic abstraction like that, stuff becomes virtually interchangable. The same way you valued gold as some amount of soldiers you could hire with it, and your soldiers saw gold as some amount of food or cute outfits they could buy, people can see anything as "some amount of gold they can buy". Then as A = B and B = C implies C = A, you can skip the gold, and if you want you can have pieces of infinitely printable "king-paper" represent money.
For the scheme to work it must cut boths ways. For example if you raise taxes, people must be able to pay you in king-paper, or it won't be considered real money. You are a very smart and powerful king with a big army, so there is an incentive for people to want to have a reserve of king-paper to pay you with, and now there is a king-paper economy as people scramble to get enough king-paper.
However, if you have to much king-paper lying around, people won't have to work as hard to get the amount they need and it will become less valuable and you'll have inflation. At the same time, if you start losing wars or ruling poorly in general, people won't think you're such a smart and powerful king with such a mighty army and won't feel as pressed to pay your taxes, and you'll have a similar effect.
I enjoyed What has the Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard. It's concise, easy to read and understand for a non-economist, and spans a really long time frame of monetary history.
It's been a while since I read it, but I enjoyed this one by Milton Friedman. It's not as technicle as his Monetary History of the US. https://www.amazon.com/Money-Mischief-Episodes-Monetary-History-ebook/dp/B003WUYQ6Y/ref=sr_1_4?qid=1659320906&refinements=p_27%3AMilton+Friedman&s=books&sr=1-4 And speaking of money, it's 2 bucks on kindle.
Just fyi, it should be “technical” rather than “technicle.” (It could have easily been a typo, but if not, now you know!)
Heh. Missed that. I'll offer as an excuse that I had to get up early yesterday for a flight, so I was exhausted. My other excuse is that I suck at spelling.
Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" is a pretty good history of money. Or at least, I assume it is. I read it about five years ago and can't remember a word it said, but I enjoyed it at the time.
It's quite good, yeah. A nice pairing with the Graeber Debt book as well, since they have roughly opposite biases. (Ferguson is a bit more careful than Graeber with his sources, though)
I’m not his biggest fan, but The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is a pretty decent primer on the evolution of economic history and the development of most major financial institutions and arrangements. Might be up your alley
Nobody mentioned "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous. It's written from a pro-Bitcoin, Austrian-school point of view. The Austrian school of economics is quite fringe, but popular within Libertarian and NRx circles.
The book is interesting in terms of its account of economic policy up to the Great Depression, though I don't know how much of what it says is true. Later, it says
> it was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.
and the book doesn't get any better from there. It also tries to discredit Keynes by accusing him of being a paedophile.
Also, Ammous is a rabid Covid denier who says we shouldn't eat anything but meat.
And he is definitely no friend of Israel. I got interested in his Austrian School economics course but the Israel thing turned me off. Still I like Allen Farrington's writing ("Bitcoin us Venice" and many posts) though everyone I talk to about bitcoin tells me it stinks.
Hey, that's my question exactly! I don't have a clear picture of money in my head, but I got a couple of useful pieces from various sources.
* [core econ](https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/0-3-contents.html) -- that's the general intro to economics, very little is dedicated to money per se, but it taught me the relationship between unemployment and inflation (specific ideas: 1. some amount of inflation is good because it makes it easier to "cut" wages when the situation calls for it 2. with low unemployment wages go up, which causes the price to go up, which is one reason for inflation). It also taught me what the heck the business cycle is.
* [modern monetary theory](https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Money-Theory-Macroeconomics-Sovereign/dp/1137539909) -- heterodox economics book with rather obnoxious writing style, but it did clear up some things for me which were glossed over in other sources. Specifically, how the money actually originate. Specific ideas I've learned from it is interdependence of monetary and fiscal policies: state budget is not like a family budget, logically, the state just burns whatever revenue is gets (from, eg, taxes), and just prints the money whenever it needs to spend. There's no physical "conservation of money" law which would require the money emitter state's budget to be balanced. The second idea I've learned is that of the trilemma of "pick any three of a) independent monetary policy 2) stable exchange rate 3) free flow of capital across the borders"
* [Global Capitalism](https://books.google.pt/books/about/Global_Capitalism_Its_Fall_and_Rise_in_t.html?id=wv0oDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false) this is macro-economic history of the XX century. I don't think I've learned any specific economic ideas out of this book, but I got some corroboration for the ideas I got elsewhere.
With that, my layman explanation for the gold standard thing. The core explanation is the trilemma mentioned above. Basically, the following three things are desirable:
* Active monitory policy: as a state, you'd like the ability to control, to some extend, the value of money. You'd like to print, or burn, money when it is convenient. Two specific cases you'd want this in is for counter-cyclical stabilization (if there's a recession and no one spends, you want to use lose monetary policy to promote spending), and for competitiveness on global markets (if you are a developing country, you want your currency to be cheap, so that its profitable for other countries to import the goods your produce)
* Stable exchange rate: knowing, for sure, that x dollars is the same as y pounds helps with long-term planing
* Free movement of capital across the borders, so that you can make money in one country and then invest in another one.
If you allow free capital movement and fix the exchange rate, you can't just print money. If you allow active monetary policy and stable exchange rate, you need to restrict capital movement to prevent arbitrage. If you allow active monetary policy and unrestricted capital movement, than relative price of two moneys would vary!
Gold standard is one particular way to set a stable exchange rate. So, gold standard has to go if we want free capital movement and active monetary policy. In the XX century, this happened twice.
At the start of the century, major economies were on independent gold standards. But then WWI and great depression happened, and they motivated governments to establish active monetary policy, so gold standard was abandoned.
After WWII, we got Bretton Woods, which re-installed gold-standard for dollar, and, indirectly, for other currencies (by virtue of mostly fixed exchanged rates with dollar). Up until 1970, this worked well, but then we got a big, raising inflation. To combat inflation you can use monetary policy, but to have monetary policy the gold standard has to go.
Empathically, I am very much not an economist, so the above can be terribly off the mark! As I've said in the beginning, I myself am looking for a source which describes how global financial system works and the current limits of our understanding of it.
"The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression" by Scott Sumner sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Full disclosure: I haven't read the book itself, but have read his econoblogging for over a decade.
I found Money, going out of style, by Zvi Schreiber a good read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58093398-money-going-out-of-style
Thanks for this recommendation! Indeed, an excellent book!
>I’m particularly interested why we went from a gold standard to what ever the standard is now.
The short version is that most of the big, rich countries went broke in the Interwar years, between war debts, veterans' pensions, the depression, dysfunctional domestic politics, and the mess around German war reparations. Devaluing currencies and suspending gold payments was the most politically feasible way of defaulting on national debts and promises to veterans at the time, especially once the first few countries had set the trend.
Post-WW2, everyone got together and "restored" a sort of make-believe gold standard. Most countries promised to redeem their currencies to all comers in a fixed ratio to US dollar and the US promised to redeem dollars for gold at a fixed ratio (but only to central banks of countries with dollar-backed currency). This worked pretty well in the 50s, limped along during the 60s, and collapsed completed in the early 70s. The core problem was that everyone had inflationary monetary policies, causing periodic fiscal crises in countries with more inflation than the US (where they had to either suddenly devalue their currencies against dollars or somehow scrape together enough dollars to cover redemptions) and causing US gold reserves to dwindle as the easiest way to get more dollars in a hurry was to cash in what dollars you had for gold at $35 dollars an ounce, then sell gold on the open market ($97 dollars an ounce in 1973 when the US officially suspended redemptions of dollars for gold). Before suspending redemptions, the US had tried import and international investment restrictions (to make it harder for dollars to leave the country and get into the hands of foreign central banks), joint efforts with other countries to manipulate the international market price of gold, and badgering other countries into limiting their redemptions of dollars for gold.
I really enjoyed The Alchemists by Neil Irwin. It starts with a history of central banking and goes into how they acted during the 2008 crisis.
Is it possible lo distinguish between a troll (bad faith antagonist) and a good faith adversary for purposes of law, policy, ethics, etc.?
Also, which is a greater problem online: human trolls or bots
I think a troll will usually respond to what the stereotypical person with your beliefs would have said, whereas a good faith person responds to what you actually say
This has been my go-to for troll detection since waaaay back in the day (Usenet newsgroups) and still works quite well on modern social media.
A sufficiently good troll will be indistinguishable from a sufficiently mind-killed True Believer, for whatever value of "sufficiently" you wish to use. Also, there's a form of not-very-serious exploratory argumentation I've sometimes engaged in where even I'm not sure whether or not I'm trolling. So as a discreet variable: no, but as a continuous one: also no in terms of being correct in your diagnosis, but maybe you can do well enough to manage for purposes of ethics et al.
As to the second question, human trolls have to be dealt with by humans, while bots have to be dealt with by AI. This makes human trolls a thornier issue, but not necessarily a greater problem, if only because labeling trolls a "problem" isn't so straightforward (with Michael Malice and company screaming from the sidelines). I can offer only my opinion that I prefer trolls to bots, but YMMV.
I think your first point is good enough that it makes me think trolls are the bigger problem. Since figuring out who is a bot and who is a human is at least theoretically possible (for now) but figuring out who is a troll....
Funny you ask, I actually just wrote a post a few hours ago where I propose a system for signalling good faith on Twitter, and that solution, if it worked, would work for bots too.
https://chefstamos.substack.com/p/twitter-and-trust
For purposes of law, it is trivial, as there already exists plenty of law that relies on intent. In practice, I believe that it is impossible to tell the difference between a troll and a person with exotic opinions. E.g. there are people who think that the world should be turned into a caliphate where pagan children are used as sex slaves. Clearly someone who pretended to hold those opinions could be a successful troll in a Western context, and they'd be indistinguishable from someone who earnestly holds those opinions.
Bots are probably a bigger threat overall, but a particularly dedicated troll can cause more damage than any bot. Thankfully, most trolls are just looking for quick and easy sources of amusement, so they aren't particularly dedicated - but the ones who are actually trying to prove some kind of point through deception, infiltration, false flagging, and other bad faith tactics can be quite dangerous.
I love that this is a bannable offense. FDB bans mono-obsessed types who only want to talk gender ideology, ACT bans know-it-alls who don't share what they know. Both very on-brand!
I mean FDB improved (I guess?) from banning dissident takes on gender ideology to kinda banning any talk of gender ideology. Scott doesn't seem to have remotely the adversarial relationship with his commentariat that FDB has
Yeh, he doesn’t seem to like his comment section at all. Gender ideology is important, in my view, one of the most important aspects of the culture wars, and something that leftwing posters could easily oppose. That said I rarely comment on it unless it’s in the main post.
FDB stands for Freddie deBoer, for anyone that had to do some confused googling like I did. This [1] is the comment policy post in question. (Someone let me know if direct-linking another blog's drama like that crosses the line into bad form)
Looking again at his blog, I realized I had previously looked into FDB when I ran out of things from Scott to read, and had bounced off of it when my initial (and possibly incorrect) impression that most of his popular articles seemed to be sneering at liberals/the left (like Scott tbf), and that unlike Scott his commentariat leaned heavily conservative to outright reactionary.
Freddie therefore seems a lot more surprised than I would be that such a commentariat would veer into "simple, straightforward transphobia" and not flag any of it. (The tumblrite in me suggests the "surprised pikachu face" meme). There's a lot to say on how his method of comment cultivation seems to validate the popular "bad" takes on the paradox of tolerance. It also impresses me at how well Scott seems to have cultivated his own commentariat.
That being said, finding out that FDB the author and FDB the commentariat are so at odds with one another makes me realize that my initial evaluation of his blog was incorrect and I should update on that.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/so-heres-how-its-gonna-be
Thank you for sharing that link, I definitely don't want to confuse people. I was just struck by seeing 'bannable offenses' coming around the same time period from two people I admire greatly (and who have been influences on my own perspectives). I'm not against either of their very specific bans, it was just striking to me.
Despite the sneering at certain elements of current progressive sociopolitical culture, Freddie is a very-left socialist. However, because he is anti-woke discourse, his substack certainly includes a kind of built-in audience that may be surprised at his actual political stances. I in turn have been surprised at their surprise. He makes no secret of his Marxism.
I think the distance between Freddie's politics and some of his commentariat's politics has been off-putting to him. It looks like he has tried to clarify that with this post:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/here-are-my-actual-dumb-opinions
I would also argue that a lot of Freddie's readers are both anti-woke and genuinely leftist. I recognize that this is a rare combination of views in the discourse, but I think it's pretty common in Freddie's commentariat. Hence why the level of mutual incomprehension between FdB and the commentariat is so high when it comes to gender ideology. At least some number of commenters who know exactly what his opinions are feel like Freddie is making a weird exception to his otherwise anti-woke leftist views (which are also their views) by his uncomplicated support for modern trans activism. And then being unnecessarily intolerant of people asking why he makes this weird exception.
Interesting assessment, I didn't look at it that way. I may be guilty of assuming that most of his substack commentariat are more center-left, as I see an overlap between his audience and the basically center-left audience of BARpod.
However, I wouldn't necessarily say his support for trans activism is "uncomplicated" as he has put forward a few thoughts here & there on the unnecessary divisiveness of certain trans activist tactics (prior to banning the topic altogether). I think what we may be seeing is Freddie making a choice to ban discussion of this topic because (1) he has personal stakes in unequivocably supporting trans communities and (2) he has a lot of topics that he'd like to discuss and is irritated when this specific topic appears to return repeatedly, no matter the topic discussed. It is certainly an exception but he's articulated his reasoning clearly enough for me to not consider it a weird exception or even unnecessarily intolerant.
I regularly read the comments on Freddie's blog and I never saw the trans issue come up except where he'd brought it up in an article. Granted, if he did bring it up, even in passing, the issue was liable to eat a large amount of comment space. That's a fair criticism, but I think he goes too far in saying it 'always comes up' regardless of the context.
It was good of Freddie to finally admit his personal stake in the issue. To my knowledge, he hadn't ever brought it up before, and I bet commenters won't push him as hard to make his views make sense now that he's located those views as more or less emotionally and relationally motivated.
I don't think this is a fair read. Freddie isn't a fan of the woke approach in this field any more than any other. The article that set this off was partly a critique of woke political strategy in this as well as other areas. What he does is uncomplicated support of trans *people*, which gets push back in the comments as he described - California turning its prisons into an all you can rape buffet and so - which shocks and pisses him off. It's not people in his comments gently questioning his support for the woke in this instance, it's them repeatedly and at great length misgendering trans-women and accusing them, as a class, of being male perverts looking to batter their way into way into women's spaces in order to sexually abuse them.
Read the comments on the article that pushed him over the edge. They'll blow your hair back.
(oh good, people are talking about this elsewhere, I'd so wanted to comment on said policy change but not risk a ban doing so in that particular garden)
The weird part for me, as a member of said minority group ostensibly having this done for our own good and sensibilities, is...like...Freddie's bafflement that No One Bothered To Flag These Egregious Comments. I saw them all, including the Exhibit A buffet one, and didn't flag because...I wasn't aware that was considered part of my job as a reader? Many things I read online cause some amount of offense. But I don't ever Officially Flag them unless it's *way* outta line. Partly cause I learned to grow a really thick skin in previous roles as a content moderator. (If you chase every minor offense, you'll never do any real work and/or burn out. Especially if you yourself are a minor minority. Gotta get used to harder punches faster.)
But partly, or maybe mostly, cause of picking up the Principle of Charity heuristic from Scott. Even when someone directly attacks me, I am much more inclined to <s>epically take them down with a huge Wall of Text</s> civically debate and try to make them admit error, or at least take a social status hit. This is both much more personally satisfying, and also avoids cultivating the victimhood culture/Karen habit of Calling The Manager when faced with self-solvable problems. I feel like it goes against the sort of "We're All Adults Here" vibe that helps differentiate the ACX commentariat from FdB's.
So yeah, those comments were unpleasant and I don't condone them; yet they still didn't bother me *enough* that I felt compelled to either reply with my own comments or escalate the matter to security. Like many such comment shitstorms, it sure looked like one of those inevitable disasters that coulda been headed off early by not pouring fuel on the fire. That seems just as much a self-policing failure as no one filing Official Reports. It's <current_year>, I don't know why people haven't more broadly realized knee-jerk whiteknighting protects no one and is a huge bait for further offensiveness...
(I guess that's a "selection effect"? Comment policy ever has some effect, but the starting commentariat matters a ton too. FdB is an intentionally abrasive guy, so that's the kind of scrapper who's attracted to his blog, for worse or better.)
Yeah I agree that was especially noxious. I, having never posted a single comment pertaining to gender issues, cancelled my subscription over it. He practically dared people to leave.
I usually comment here rather than over there, so I didn't see it until it was over. If I had, I don't know that I would have reported either. I typically only report in pretty extreme circumstances. More likely I would have either gotten involved or closed the page.
I think someone he knows in real life saw the comments and said something like "WTF, dude? You're hosting trans-hate board. That's fucked up." But really, it might just have been that he tripped back into the comment section after having written a piece he was (justifiably) proud of, and then read with mounting horror until he was fed up and decided he was done.
Thing is, I don't think he'll be able to keep his new policy. One of his big topics is political strategy, and how the current Dem version is dumb, because it brings focus to the least popular parts of our agenda while being quiet about the most popular ones. He almost can't write an article about that without touching on our handling of support for the trans community.
Thank you, in turn, for sharing that link to his views. It appears I was indeed severely mistaken as to his actual views, since that article aligns very closely with my own, save some minor quibbles.
He appears have a real optics problem, especially in regards to the "most popular" section on his substack landing page. It seems to be one he wants to address as well, given the desperate tone in both those links, but I'm not sure what to suggest there.
He’s a Marxist.
Can anyone point me to a trustworthy source of info on the bioavailability of protein from various sources / amino acid coverage / ways to increase absorbation of protein ?
I'm not a scientist so I can't tell you how trustworthy the source is, but there was a recent study of this that suggests animal protein has higher uptake in human cells than plant protein: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220622101314.htm
It's neither open access nor on scihub, so I can't comment in detail.
From the abstract and methods, they show that on average, soybean meat analogue proteins (not all plant proteins!) penetrate cells with more difficulty than proteins from chicken breast. However...
- the reduced permeability might still be enough to absorb nearly all of the plant protein
- there'll be a fraction with good permeability and a fraction with bad permeability in both soy 'meat' and chicken, it's just that their proportions might differ
- the digestion is simulated in vitro, which may have important differences with the in vivo process
There's also this gem of a sentence in the abstract:
> The amino acid composition showed fewer essential and non-essential amino acids in the MA permeate than in the CB permeate.
So uh... there's more essential than non-essential? The opposite? Less protein per unit mass? From their own chart the profiles are pretty similar, with small differences in both directions.
Thanks for the rundown, and thanks Milo for the reference.
That's interesting, I wonder if that's related to why plant protein is less likely to trigger elevated levels of IGF-1.
Each individual protein from a given organism will have somewhat different bioavailability of its amino acids (depending on how difficult it is to break it down with your digestive enzymes). On the level of an entire cell all this noise should mostly cancel out.
Amino acid profiles are all over the internet, e.g. https://fitaudit.com/food/104790/amino .
Is there any particular reason you want to increase protein absorbtion? It seems easier to just drink a whey protein shake every now and then if you're concerned you may be deficient.
Thanks for refrence, most helpful. Particular reason is I'm interested in increasing muscle mass but don't enjoy supplements, shakes, and am a choosy eater. So looking to min max sources.
For dietary sources, mushrooms are a good, low calorie, addition. IIRC they supply some essential amino acids that are otherwise (relatively) scarce.
My source, once upon a time, was a paperback published by the FDA called something like "Nutritional sources", but a brief search didn't turn it up, so they may have stopped publishing it.
Now this is a fun lead, thanks!
The endpoint of this research will ultimately be the "Master Amino Acid Pattern" type supplements. Essentially, a Real Doctor did research on the ideal ratio of the various amino acids for absorption by humans, and then formulated a supplement that was just pure amino acids in exactly those ratios. The patent ran out not too long ago, and now there are a lot supplements that follow the formulation, eg Perfect Aminos, Fortagen, the original MAP supplement, etc.
Quite a few protein yoghurts and puddings have appeared lately, so much that between diversity and good macro profile, I consider the issue solved. Most have milk as a protein source, which is up there in the top tier of sources.
What's the best resource for explaining how natural selection can produce changes that seem to require a concert between systems (the ability to fly) or are highly complex (the eye)? The old how do you get to certain evolved outcomes through gradualism when it seems that the benefits would only accrue at the end question. I think I understand the answer but I make a hash of explaining it.
My understanding is that the eye isn’t actually a good example of that. I believe jellyfish are an example of an animal that has a primitive eye: it can basically only sense how much light is going onto it. This is still useful (you can tell which way is up, day/night cycles, etc). Since the base case is already useful, it’s pretty easy to imagine how intermediate developments could be better, as opposed to flight, where you can glide or you can’t it seems.
I think flight could have been gradual too. You start with an animal that jumps, or slows its fall by spreading out its body (ordinary squirrels do this on the rare occasions they fall out of trees). Then it evolves skinflaps or bigger feathers in order to jump further or slowfall more effectively. After a while it become a glider, and after a while more its glides start to edge into true flight.
We have examples of animals now that do the jump-and-glide strategy, so this seems plausible. But I don't know about insects. Maybe there are intermediate steps where you use wings so when you fall (you could drop a beetle from an airplane and it would suffer no harm, thanks to high surface area/volume) you get better control of where you land? Or for catching breezes and gliding where you want to go?
With insects it's more complex to explain, because below a certain size larger wings are worse. It seems that wings probably evolved as a thermoregulatory measure for smaller insects, and then morphed into flight aids as the size increased.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16aGSx9gFO4
Even snakes!
Richard Dawkins, _The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution_ is an excellent book that, among other things, deals with this issue.
All Dawkins' biology books are good - the man become famous for a good reason! Some contain things now know to be false but AFAIK all things that were thought true at the time of publication.
It is a shame his militant atheism has made people forget about his excellent prior work, regardless of whether they agree with his views on religion
I think a lot of modern evolutionary biology textbooks would handle this pretty well, most of the standard examples are not really that difficult to explain through gradualism.
Something is getting lighter for some other reasons. Then it is jumping for some reason or other. Then it is getting some extension of tissues to glide further, then it is flapping occasionally the extend flight. And eventually flying. Meanwhile there are all sorts of other changes slowly accumulating/varying. Some things start down the "path" towards X, then go backwards. Look at whales, came to live on land, then went back to the sea.
IMO (biologists, please correct me), one problem is that 9th grade biology would give peppered moths as a primary example of evolution. It makes it seem like an all or nothing thing. But for most traits, something that turns a certain death into a 99% death could be enough to become dominant with a large enough population and enough generations.
Darwin used the evolution of the eye to explain natural selection, so he's best. As for the evolution of flight, it's a lot easier for a small animal to fly than a big one. Most of our ancestors were smaller than us and bred a lot. Evolution doesn't require us to fit our environment, it requires us to have ancestors who fit their previous environment. We are on our own.
The Wikipedia article on the evolution of the eye isn't bad at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Stages_of_evolution
The distinction is usually made between traits for which each step along the evolutionary path is advantageous, and traits for which intermediate states do not seem advantageous. In the first case, it does not matter that the structure is complex like the eye, it is enough to add additional evolutionary steps, each of which is advantageous and therefore likely. The diversity of present-day eyes of mollusks are fine examples of present-day eyes with widely varying levels of complexity.
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0084-1
For traits like flight where gradual selection does not seem possible because the intermediate steps are not advantageous (a half wing does not allow flight...), the usual explanation is exaptation. This term was proposed by SJ Gould to replace the loaded term "pre-adaptation" and it means that the intermediate steps were in fact advantageous, and therefore easy to explain by classical natural selection, but for another function. A half-wing does not allow you to fly, but it can allow you to glide somewhat; wingless feathers do not allow you to fly, but they can insulate you, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
surprised nobody linked the lesswrong sequence on evolution, there's a great explainer of this
basically, first you evolve trait A, which conveys positive fitness and reaches fixation in the population
then you evolve trait B, which conveys positive fitness etc
then you evolve trait A*, an alternate version of A which is only fitness-positive in the presence of B.
Then you evolve C, which is only fitness-positive in the presence of A* and B
Then you get B*, and D, and C*, etc etc etc
in the end you have a huge system of interlocking traits that all depend on each other, where if you remove a single part the whole thing breaks, but it still evolved incrementally one gene at a time
Maybe because the sequences are pretentious and not better at explaining their topics than most introductory texts on the relevant field? That is an uncharitable response, but a semi-serious one.
I'll preferentially consult the relevant textbook when I have it in arm's reach and know where in the book to look, but that usually takes having read the book before in the first place. "Read some introductory texts in the relevant discipline, maybe the answer you want will be in there" is an extremely inefficient strategy compared to a link. (Especially when the link might be in a jargon the reader is already familiar with!)
I think it is likely much more efficient than consulting the sequences? IDK I find textbooks to mostly be super easy to follow and tractable, often providing of relevant graphics and supporting information, and salient examples. And typically they build off themselves, so if you don't understand one section, you can go back to the previous one.
Just going back and looking at the sequence on evolution just now, I would strongly recommend someone look up a textbook instead. I don't find it a particularly good response to the original question.
Here's where I'm seeing the problem:
-- "Look up an introductory textbook" isn't actionable - *Introductory Text* isn't a title I can look up in a library. There's typically a wealth of sources to choose from, and little to no evidence as to which will be useful or well-fitted to the asker's question or level of existing familiarity. If the responder can give a specific title and chapter a different story, but then you run into issues of accessibility.
-- "Take an introductory course" is an overgrown version of the courtier's reply, where the responder is telling the asker to dedicate a couple hundred hours of work in response to a question. It's not a bad-faith response per se, since it probably *will* answer the question, and have the side benefit of making tangential knowledge easy to access in the future, but it's massive overkill to address *the question asked*.
IME, people who give the first answer often themselves got the answer originally by doing the second, and there's a huge discrepancy between what you can learn from a refresher and what you can learn from first exposure. Curse of Knowledge, and all that.
(There's a longer rant about how this intersects with the Sequences in particular, but that's probably just a personal sore spot and not really germane. Maybe another time.)
I think your response is fair, that said...my first response to point 1 is:
Well sure "look up an introductory textbook" is absolutely Actionable! You do some googling or go to a library, and open a book. I might be a little too flippant about it because I have a couple thousand books in my house (library book sales FTW).
The vagueness of my response was because I don't think the particular textbook likely matters a lot, most will cover the question of how you get "macroevolution" from "microevolution" because it is always one of the first questions people have and was one of the main arguments against Darwin during his time.
Nor do I have a particular favorite textbook myself that I remember (I took advanced biology in 1997?).
I agree it is not as high quality or useful a response as "here is a link to a specific discussion that covers this exact topic succinctly and well".
But I did not have such a link/resource. And while my suggestion might take a couple hours to implement, he might not get a suggestion of your preferred type for several days/hours or possibly ever. So providing him the knowledge that this is likely covered in any random intro evolutionary biology textbook he picks up is valuable.
Scanning through a couple textbooks for a discussion you are interested in is absolutely not remotely as much work as "taking a whole course".
And I also did take into account that I don't think this particular topic is going to involve a lot of jargon or require reading a bunch of other sections of a textbook to understand. The people who frequent this blog are mostly fairly bright and have a decent level of background knowledge.
You could try "Climbing Mount Impossible" by Steven J. Gould.
I believe you're referring to "Climbing Mount Improbable" by Richard Dawkins.
I'd check out multilevel selection theory. I think it specifically focuses on systems-level natural selection - systems of cells, genes, people, groups, etc..
Uncomplex Thing A and uncomplex Thing B evolve and then it turns out that Thing A and Thing B can combine to form a *more* complex Thing C (which is the eye or whatever).
So, I saw the open thread before anyone else had posted and was suddenly filled with an urge to post “first!” I’m not normally one to do such things, and it got me wondering about why there was a temptation, whether it was because it was forbidden, or some obscure sense of accomplishment. Did anyone else get this urge, and if so, thoughts as to why?
Not sure what this says about me, but I also hate when people do this, and I never pass people... I'm always the one driving slow. When someone goes to pass, I slow down to make it easy. I want them as far out of my life as they want me out of theirs.
After seeing the post come in in the early morning here and seeing two comments already I resisted the urge to post “Third!”. Which wasn’t illegal in the letter, but perhaps in the spirit of the rule.
Which is why I wanted to post it. I chickened out.
I too felt this urge and I have always hated such posts.
i think because there were calls to give the recent poster who did this special treatment; and we are all eager to expose a double standard.
BECOME UNGOVERNABLE!
Because doing things to spite whoever thinks they can order you around is an excellent, if antisocial, heuristic. Scott is nice enough for most of us to go along with his wishes.
LAST!
You can sometimes use the introduction of a rule to infer the existence of an advantage to be exploited by approaching or breaking the boundary set by the rule. You do not need to necessarily understand the advantage to exploit it.
Is there an accepted way for an English speaker to pronounce "metis"? I've been saying mettiss, but should I be saying meetiss instead? I want to sound not like a pedant, but like a regular schmuck who goes around saying "metis" a lot.
Now this is the sort of appeal to authority that I can get behind! Thank you! I assume it's the second syllable that is stressed?
So, this came up in the Intelligence course I taught for the New Centre. The correct answer (according to my co-teacher, PhD in ancient phil) is MAY-tis.
The first wife of Zeus?
Was just reading D'Aulaire's Greek Myths to my niece and I stumbled over the pronunciation.
The first time I read D;Aulaire's Greek Myths I pronounced Zeus Zee-us, so I have nowhere to go but up with that book.
But I meant more as used in Scott's Seeing like a State.
I believe the Metis are a relatively common protected class/race/something in Canada
The word is μῆτις, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dmh%3Dtis1, therefore, the correct pronunciation is MEEH-tis, as the E in "fellow" but long. In practice I expect most Americans to say MEAT-is.
So this seems to get complicated; see, e.g., https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/15002/the-pronunciation-of-eta-η One issue is that the eta is accented, ῆ, and this would have been a pitch-accent, so a rising pitch on the syllable, if you wanted to be (overly) accurate.
I don't know how complicated it really is – the first sentence of the top answer is "As Asteroides has said, the 'classical' pronunciation (from the fifth century BCE or thereabouts) is reconstructed as /ɛː/, a longer version of the vowel in English 'red'." The second answer, by the referenced Asteroides, likewise points out that η is always a monophthong and that "The standard reconstruction for Classical Attic Greek η is [ɛː]". The rest is just various minor disputations about why textbooks sometimes deliberately give it wrong, or how the language changed in subsequent millennia.
As for the circumflex I'm sorry to have to contradict you: it is actually understood to denote a *falling* pitch (on a long vowel only), not a rising one, which would be denoted by the acute. However, since English is not a pitch-accented language I think it's fair to say this has no clean bearing on the correct pronunciation in English, in the same way that we would expect Chinese tones to be omitted even for the purpose of an otherwise "proper" pronunciation – that trait of the languages is just too far apart to account for.
What struck me is that there's a second system (Erasmus!) that seems to be used for pedagogy. That's the one I must have learned in my brief exposure years back.
I think we agree on the pronunciation, though — a sort of elongated "e" that stays "pure"/doesn't turn into a dipthong. I promise not to try to sing it.
I myself am often made to promise not to sing. I feel you.
In any event, one would not want to mispronounce the name of a wife of Zeus.
Weird. I'm used to Eta being pronounced as an e, like in "red". For example, Pericles is always pronounced as "peh-rihk-LES".
It appears there's some sort of confusion here – I am absolutely saying that eta is to be pronounced as e-as-in-red, only long. "Red" and "fellow" contain the same vowel sound, at least in my dialect. I too would pronounce Pericles' name that way.
Or, do you just mean that it's weird that others could be confused on this point? In that case I apologize for this pointless reply.
I saw the "ee" and thought it was pronounced as an "i" sound as in "meet". Then I saw a youtube video that pronounced Pericles as "Periclis".
The way I've always heard it, Greek names ending with -es rhyme with cheese. I would not be at all surprised to learn that this is not the authentic Greek pronunciation, but it would weird to hear an English speaker pronounce it differently.
I used to work for a company partially called Metis and we pronounced it "mettiss"
I am a relatively new father. My daughter will be three in October. It's a bit early as she is not exactly school age, but I am considering unschooling her (or, as people in that community prefer to call it, "self-directed learning"). I am posting here in the hopes that someone in this community of free thinkers might have some advice for me (or be willing to talk to me sometime).
For those who are not aware, self-directed learning is a version of homeschooling in which children decide what they want to learn, and parents (or other mentors) act as facilitators. My daughter is interested in cars? Ok, I try to find her a mechanic in my community who can show her how to repair an engine. Later she is interested in amphibians, so we spend time at the creek observing the frogs. Supplement this with some instruction in things that I have decided we should invest in (basic mathematics, literature, etc.), and those are the rough contours of her education. The basic premise is that children are deeply curious and love to learn -- nourishing whatever interests them will make them independent, curious, confident.
I know this is not scaleable (at least not now). That's why I am not proposing this as a solution for all children. I also know that she will benefit from socialization, which is why she would still take part in our town's sports, play with friends, etc. And I know this will be time consuming. Thankfully I am a remote employee and my partner raises our daughter full time. We live in the woods in Massachusetts, which gives us ample time, space, and resources to pull this off.
In broad strokes, here is what inspired me to consider this form of education:
- Looking back at my own education, I'm often disappointed that I learned about the French Revolution five times but never learned the basics of financial responsibility, never learned how to fix a car, never learned how to talk about how I was feeling, never learned how to cook. Purely from a curriculum perspective, I want to offer my daughter an education that is more aligned with a full life.
- Our schools (rightly) seem to optimize for scale. After all, those teachers have a lot of students to teach! I think this means we revert to the tools and values that operate best at scale -- tests with very specific answers that make grading more efficient, memorization, obedience to authority, etc. The output, at least for most of my friends, was a bunch of high work ethic capitalists who knew little of themselves, the land around them, and the skills that really sustain one in this world (aside from making money).
The part of this whole thing that gives me the most pause is that I have done quite well as a product of these aforementioned schools. I became a critical thinker who knows myself well. I play the working game well enough to make a great living but not so well that it's the only game I have time for. So, if I did fine, maybe I should just trust the process and hope that my daughter does fine as well?
Thanks in advance for any articles, experiences, acerbic comments, or other opinions :)
I'm a product of public schools and a public university and did well enough but also know that I have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of human behavior and decision-making and I think that's served me well in life (to the irritation of many to this day that must listen to my questions). My son went the same route and well....not the same outcome. Would he have done better with "self-directed learning?" Hard to say as neither of his parents really had the time to devote to supporting that (another topic altogether). Bryan Caplan has some of the best advice I've read on this topic - https://www.econlib.org/emergency-homeschooling-a-how-to-guide/ and agree with his emphasis on math.
Thanks for sharing this article WayUpstate.
We home school, so I wholeheartedly support that component. However, we’ve read our fair share of horror stories of homeschoolers who unschool, so we are definitely not doing that.
FWIW, my wife and I are products of the system, and we did well, but we both feel that we did well “by accident”.
Thanks Yuri. Yeah I have heard some versions of unschooling that are pretty awful. And yeah, I think I might have done well "by accident" too.
Can I ask how you decided on your curriculum for home schooling?
We used curricula that practitioners of the field that also homeschool use. So, my wife found a “mathematicians who homeschool” group somewhere and used what the majority of them used for math. And then we found a literacy coach who homeschools and used what she used for reading. And so on
We practiced laissez faire homeschooling in my family, starting out more structured with the basics, and becoming increasingly interest driven as we progressed, until as a teen I was mostly just doing a dozen 4-H projects and reading lengthy novels, then transferred to community college at 16.
For the most part, this was good. You don't seem likely to fall into the most common traps of religious extremism and oppressing children in order to have your family look a certain way. As far as I can tell, conscientiousness and intelligence are the biggest determinants of what kind of job a person will do well at, which schooling has little effect on.
Some things are way easier to arrange than others, depending on your network and organizational skill. Learning the kinds of things taught by things like scouts and 4-H -- very easy, because there's already a structure in place. Cooking, art, goats, chickens, "home" sorts of skills -- very easy. Getting a neighborhood mechanic to spend hours teaching your daughter to work on engines -- likely rather hard, unless they're your relative? Just based on trying to do anything mechanical as a women, things like engines and old washing machines seem to mostly call for large, strong hands. Also, homeschool groups are often rather gender essentialist. I kept going to homeschool girl get togethers where moms would tell me it's a bad idea to go to college or learn non-home skills, because I should really get married as soon as possible and my husband would do all the outside the home work. My father gently suggested that I might have to work, that might not be realistic. A lot of those girls ended up working fast food for a while because they were generally bright and conscientious, but knew nothing at all about basic things related to finding, applying, interviewing, and so on. But I digress.
I'm not sure what we'll do with our own daughters, now three and seven months, since it depends on some unknowns, such as work situations and whether the kids like public school or not.
I can't speak to the larger question (I was a school-loving nerd who now works in academia), but I strongly encourage the frog thing! It quickly became apparent that my youngest son was not going to be a sports kid, but I wanted him getting outside (especially during Covid) so we took up "herping" - looking for amphibians and reptiles. Depending on where you are, there are likely some very cool frogs and salamanders that you could find locally without too much effort, and that could lead to all sorts of learning. (Teach her about normal reproduction, then blow her mind with unisexual salamanders!)
I was educated via my families own version of unschooling from 1st grade through the end of highschool, and I think I turned out alright by most normal metrics (PhD in engineering, pretty social though mostly only after I went to college). I don't have too much specific advice, just the encouragement that it will probably be easier than you think even if it seems a bit daunting at first. If legal requirements for homeschooling in your state are a hardship you can look into what are called 'umbrella schools' which are basically private schools you sign your kid up for that cater to homeschoolers, so your kid will legally be attending a private school but in practice you can still mostly do whatever you want and they never once need to physically go anywhere (my family used one of these, and it wasn't even in the same state as us. Clonlara https://clonlara.org/ if you are interested. I can attest that they were great back in the 90s and I hope they still are). An umbrella school during highschool can also help with college applications since your kid(s) will get all the normal paperwork (diploma, GPA etc) that colleges expect to see, and they can help hook you up with educational resources though at least in my case this was optional and on a subject by subject basis, there was no requirement to use any part of their curriculum.
It’s great to have the option of homeschooling / unschooling, if that turns out to be what’s best for your particular kid! That said, I would recommend trying the standard schooling approach first, to see if it suits her. If it doesn’t, you can switch over to a more personalized approach - which she’ll likely regard as a big improvement. If it does, you can rest assured she’ll learn some useful things which you never would have thought to teach her.
> but never learned the basics of financial responsibility, never learned how to fix a car, never learned how to talk about how I was feeling, never learned how to cook
Lots of people did learn these things, though, whilst also going to school. You teach kids basic life activities like cooking by letting them watch you cook, then letting them help you cook, and then helping them to cook.
I would see homeschooling as a high-risk limited-reward activity. The upside seems limited, and there's lots of ways to screw it up and wind up with a young adult who has missed out on something major, whether it's (a) some basic skills or knowledge that they never felt like obtaining (fractions are boring!) or (b) the social skills you need to navigate a community of peers or (c) the discipline to sometimes sit down and do things that you don't especially feel like doing. And of course it's a huge investment of time and/or money on the parents' part.
I posted this comment about thee Khan World school in a thread last week. It's very new so not much evidence to back it up (this year is the first year, although they ran a lab school in Southern California for the past couple of years I believe). It sounds like it might fit what you are looking for, and by the time your daughter is old enough to enroll, it will likely have some data to back it up:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-234/comment/7964610#comment-8010286
I homeschooled my daughter til middle school, and was pretty unschooly in my approach.
I'm too tired to write prose right now, so here is a list of things I know, having done it.
-I was homeschooling from conviction. Discovered that most homeschoolers were doing it either because they were religious fundamentalists or because they had kids with special needs of some kind -- often very bright kids who were on the autism spectrum, or chaotic but charming ADD kids, a few kids with pretty bad learning disabilities. Neither group was a great fit for me and my kid. I live in a big coastal city full of highly educated people and was surprised to find so few people in the homeschooling community that I felt like were sort of like me in their interests and their point of view.
-It's not as easy as it sounds to find settings for homeschooled kids to socialize with other kids. A lot of sports stuff is school related. Something like gymnastics is not, but even there the other kids will know each other from school, and you daughter will have to work to find a way into the little school-based social groups.
-It's hard to do unschooling really well. You need to be a gifted teacher to pull it off, and also be willing to drop what you're doing at any time to seize the teachable moment and plunge into a big messy project with your kid.
-On the other hand, although I was not awesomely gifted as unschooler, I think my daughter had more fun in her early years than most kids, and she truly did pursue some interests of her own pretty far.
-It is really not a big deal if your kid gets behind on academics. In the last year before my daughter went to school I caught her up on all the really schooly stuff: multiplication tables, math through 5th grade level, spelling, grammar, punctuation. We worked a solid 3 hours a day most days. The idea that kids need 7 hours a day for 5 years to master that stuff is a crock.
-Here's a nice story about the effects of homeschooling. I was talking with a classical musician in his 20's whom I'd just met, and some topic came up that he didn't know anything about. I forget what it was, but it wasn't particularly obscure, & some people his age might have been embarrassed by their ignorance. Let's say the topic was the double helix. So I mention it, and he says, "what's the double helix?" I give him a 2-sentence summary, & he says, "Really! Is that how it works? Can you tell me more about it?" And his interest was clearly sincere. So I asked him if he'd been homeschooled, because he just had the mentality that lots of homeschooled kids have -- like he's pretty liberated from the idea that there are certain things he *should* know, but curious about stuff and confident that he can learn it if he wants to. "Yup," he said, "me and my brothers all were. But we each got a different version of it. I'd be in the living room in a collared shirt getting ready for a recital, and my brother would be in the back yard climbing trees naked."
A really good resource is https://www.hoagiesgifted.org. Not everybody there is homeschooling, but many are, and everybody there is interested in giving their child awesome learning experiences.
We homeschool/virtual school. Not unschool. I’ll second the idea that everyone homeschools for their own reasons, so it is harder than I would have thought to find a group of other homeschoolers with the same goals and approaches.
None of the unschoolers we know make it look like a good idea. They mostly didn’t end up going to college, but maybe that wasn’t their goal. With a highly educated parent and naturally driven child it could maybe work better, but we haven’t seen it.
"I was homeschooling from conviction. Discovered that most homeschoolers were doing it either because they were religious fundamentalists or because they had kids with special needs of some kind -- often very bright kids who were on the autism spectrum, or chaotic but charming ADD kids, a few kids with pretty bad learning disabilities. Neither group was a great fit for me and my kid. I live in a big coastal city full of highly educated people and was surprised to find so few people in the homeschooling community that I felt like were sort of like me in their interests and their point of view."
Just a side comment on this paragraph. A coastal city full of highly educated people is exactly the sort of place where I'd expect homeschooling to be thin on the ground. Based on the commentary I've seen (mostly here), people who are doing homeschooling generally have pretty big issues with how they were schooled. Most of the educated coastal elites enjoyed school, remember it fondly, and wouldn't dream of denying that experience to their own kids. Certainly that's the case in my educated midwestern urban blue circle.
Yes, I see what you mean. Still there seems to be a fair amount of interest in homeschooling here on ACX. I myself didn't have a coastal elite education prior to college. I went to public schools in small southern towns. I did not suffer acutely in school just experienced 12 years of chronic pain from being bored, bored, bored. Actually, 11 years, because in my junior year I ordered some college catalogs, saw that some of them did not require that you graduate from high school, and applied & was accepted in my junior year. College set my mind on fire and I adored it. I went from reading shit like the Reader's Digest, which was what my parents read, to Chaucer & Wittgenstein.
Most of the people I know who went to ivies in recent years went schools, camps, etc. that were sort of ivy prep-oriented. Those may be better & more fun than my grade school in Augusta Georgia, & even if they aren't the people & their parents saw them as important for admission to an ivy, which no doubt they are. But since I got into coastal-elite educationland without that sort of preparatory experience, I'm not that compelled by the idea that it's necessary.
Not suggesting it's necessary. Just that the group of people you're talking about isn't going to have that many people interested in things like homeschooling. That makes group formation hard.
You're right about ACX. But. Scott *hates* school. He's written multiple essays comparing it to prison or child torture. He doesn't typically come out and say it, but my impression is that he considers sending kids to school to be incomprehensible and immoral. It only makes sense that his fan base includes a higher rate of people interested in things like homeschooling.
Also, thinking about it, homeschooling might be seen by people in that group (highly educated coastals) as a weird thing conservatives and anti-govt religious types do. Which would also tend to push down the number of people interested in doing it. Especially if, when those of them who, like you, are curious, look, that's more or less what they find. Hmm, no one here looks or talks like me, I think this isn't my party is a pretty natural human reaction.
I think when coastal elites want better options for their kids' schools, they do private, charter, or magnet schools.
Jonathan, our exchange is happening on open thread 235, is that right? Something weird has been happening last couple days with ACX postings on threads I'm on. When I reply from within my inbox they don't show up on the thread for a while -- or maybe they do, but I cannot find them when I go to the thread by using the search function for either my user name or the other person's. Went to 235 on ACX itself just now and did a search for both my name and yours. Box finds a couple postings by each of us, but not the homeschooling posts. If our exchange is happening not on 235 but another thread could you let me know? And if you get a chance, can you try searching your username to see if search identifies your homeschooling posts?
Yes, 235, and that sounds weird and unpleasant.
I do see my stuff, but . . . I haven't closed the tab. My solution to replace the old "~new~" function from SSC is that I keep the Open Thread open on my browser, and from time to time search "new repl". That let's me see new stuff on the thread. Not sure if there's a better way with the current comments, the tech is pretty bad.
I did just open a fresh tab to check and all of my posts showed up when I searched my name.
Probably none of that's helpful, sorry. Good luck.
Probably the best thing you (and/or your partner!) could do prior to embarking on this is get some teaching fundamentals under your belt - talk to teachers, observe in classrooms (if possible, volunteering at a local elementary school is probably the way to go), find some books that appeal to you, etc. There's a lot of little things that are simple but hard to figure out on your own, like "start with the easy questions and work your way into the hard ones" and "always say one good thing about the work before critiquing it" that make teaching (especially difficult concepts) much smoother. One particularly good book is "Classroom of Choice," by Jonathan C Erwin - it has a lot of good perspective and is short/readable.
In terms of public schools - the greatest determiner of how a kid does in life is their home environment. If you send your daughter to public school and keep her home environment one of love and learning, she will be absolutely fine. And if public school is a disaster, you know you have options.
My main thoughts on homeschool are:
It is more a lot work/time than you expect, to actually do it well, so be ready for that.
Most people who get into it and plan to hit target X, tend to make compromises and retreats on this and are aiming for X-10 by the end. (So it starts out "schools are bad I will do better than them" to five years in "my kids will be just where they would have been if hey went to school" to 10 years in "my kids will do fine in college even if they might have done better in school".
You do get to spend a lot more time with your kids, depending on your personality, this can have immense value, or be grating.
Most of the kids I know who go through homeschooling tend to have some significant social deficits compared to random kids. Less able to say jump into living alone at 18.
That said I don't have a super high opinion of schools, so think beating them isn't impossible. Just more work than most people are ready for, particularly if they have 3+ kids (which a lot of homeschoolers seem to have).
You say you have enough time, but you only mention one child. If you later have two or three children, will you still have enough time?
Following the topics the child is interested in sounds great, with two caveats. First, you need to somehow introduce *new* topics, because your daughter can only choose from the topics she is aware they exist, right? So in addition to the child-directed lessons you should also have some world-exploring lessons. (You could actually use some school textbooks as an inspiration here: just as a list of topics to mention.)
Second, some skills are just super useful, for example *reading*. If your daughter can read, that allows her to consume tons of knowledge related to her interest, and it allows you to spend your time doing something different than reading to her. Unless you are a native English speaker, at some moment English will be a great help, because it is easier to find an English book or online material on most topics. Also, math; most homeschoolers suck at it, but can't do serious science or financial education without it. (Khan Academy should probably be sufficient.) So I believe these three things should be gently encouraged no matter what your daughter happens to be naturally interested in at the moment.
Now we have a question of expertise. How will you distinguish between actual knowledge and pseudoscience? For example, in my opinion, 90% of "financial literacy" information is bullshit, and if you ask online, you just invite scammers. (Similarly, 90% of anything written about quantum physics is bullshit, but that will be important much later.) One possible solution is to use actual textbooks, but at your own pace. I think you can handle most of elementary-school knowledge yourself, but high school will require some external help; for example I wouldn't do chemical experiments at home, sounds too complicated and dangerous (poisoning).
Another opinion: to me, the decision to homeschool or not should have much more to do with the experience of school versus homeschool, and less to do with the end result of the education. I think that unless you are considering Captain Fantastic like "unschooling", totally cut off from society, the type of education will not make that much of a difference on the values or knowledge you impart to your daughter. If you want her to learn to talk about how she feels, you can definitely teach her that, even if she goes to a regular school (and cars do not not need fixing anymore I'd say!).
As far as school/homeschooling experience, I think homeschooling is generally fine for young children, up to about 5 years old. After that, I think the balance really depends on how social your child is. If your daughter is very unsocial, homeschooling might be nice, but if you have access to a reasonably good school and she likes to be around other kids, then I think school would be a better fit.
Up to about 5? Doesn't kindergarten happen around that age? Pre k and pre pre k and K weren't even real things until the recent past--I think 5 is about the age "schooling" would actually begin.
I think that the opportunities you can get at a school can heavily depend on the attitude of the school administrators. My school let me do a lot of independent projects/study, so I was able to get by in that way (still didn’t like school, but I survived). So, my first point would be to talk with parents/admins at the school your kid might go to and see what opportunities you could get.
I also think that the social experiences from school are probably important. I’m not a person who has good intuition for social situations, so if I hadn’t gotten so much exposure and experience from school, I don’t think I’d be able to function in society as well. Also, the social aspect is what makes school fun for many kids, and I think home-schooling is going to struggle to recreate this sort of experience.
I'm also a new father and have been working through some of the same questions you raise. In addition, I've been involved in a handful of education projects, so I'm somewhat familiar with the landscape. I'd be happy to chat: protopiacone ~at~ gmail
You should consider whether self-directed learning will actually improve anything regarding your specific gripes with public education? Will she learn more about financial responsibility if her learning is self directed? Are you going to teach her to that being disobedient to authority (you) is good?
So, classified ad in reverse: my wife has always loved an old style of jam/jelly jar that is almost perfectly cylindrical, has a snap-on lid, and has a sort of quilted pattern around the bottom couple inches. Image here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11jIsea-rp4LmJ5p0ZiPtICWZui58qcxa/view?usp=drivesdk
I have been unable to locate a source of such jars in almost a decade, and would like to increase our stash of them. Does anyone in here know of somewhere online that still sells jam/jelly in such jars? Failing that does anyone here have any empty jars of this type that they'd be willing to part with? If be willing to pay about $10 a piece plus shipping.
I believe that's a quilted canning jar. Or a quilted jelly jar. I say "I think" because it depends on the top. Normally you have a sealed top with a screw on top to secure it. But you might be looking for a snap on variety. There's a variety of tops but traditional simple snap ons have fallen out of favor because they're less secure than other varieties.
You might have trouble finding the specific quilting pattern or top. But if that's a sticking point you might need some kind of private run to get them made.
The snap-on is nicer to drink from, which is all we use them for. Our canning gets done in standard mason jars.
Why not just buy drinking jars?
Because my wife likes that particular pattern.
Fair enough. If the quilted pattern on the bottom few inches is a sticking point I'd look at eBay or somesuch. Or a private run if you've got the money.
Ebay has disappointed, as have a variety of similar sites. I'm here as a last stab in the dark. I'll look into private run but that might be a lot excessive.
I found a couple Etsy links... but none of them are currently available :( Maybe you've already found the same yourself.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/393572454929973525/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/vintage-anchor-hocking-tall-jam-jelly-drinking-glasses-quilted-diamond-design--505880970626462108/
You could try to contact the sellers that were previously selling these, and see if they have any leads? Also, one of the above links has the tag Anchor Hocking, have you tried contacting that company?
Yeah, dead links in abundance...
Interesting next steps. I'll work on them.
Many thanks for the Anchor Hocking tip. Found a few different listings with that in the search term.
I would call up places that jar products and ask if they have any lying around they'd be willing to part with. If those jars have fallen out of favor like Erusian says, then there are likely tons of them in some business's basement.
In 2017, the New Zealand Labour Party (standard center left party) formed a coalition with NZ First (a much more rightwing, anti-immigrant party)- a relatively unusual coalition in the West. Also, it was a minority coalition government. Why was this coalition formed? Here are the breakdowns in electoral seats won (combining district and party list seats):
National Party (center right) 46.6%
Labour 38.3%
NZ First 7.5%
Green Party (I'm assuming far left) 6.6%
NZ First could have easily formed a coalition with the National Party- the far right and the center right together. Plus, it wouldn't have been a minority government. Why didn't they do so/what were their motivations to get with the center left instead? Imagine Hillary Clinton and Marjorie Taylor Greene teaming up for a coalition. Also, why didn't Labour team up with the Green Party instead?
Basically, this dynamic is kind of scrambling what I understand about normal left/right divisions in the Western world, so I'm curious to learn more. What happened here?
To add another confounding factor, the coalition didn't go well for NZ First. In the 2020 election their vote share tanked and all their MPs (including party leader and deputy pm Winston Peters) lost their seats. Which, even though Covid was an intervening surprise, still seems like it should've been predictable back in 2017. For what it's worth, not the first time the party has been shut out, they're kind of boom and bust.
I don't have a super great answer for you (I'm no New Zealander, let alone an insider on their politics, but I followed the 2017 election and its aftermath back when it happened) but one thing I will point out is that NZ First isn't exactly 'far right' in all the ways that term might suggest in America. They're economically pretty populist, even leftist, it's just that they hate immigration (which is a higher salience issue than, like, the minimum wage, which NZ First secured a commitment to raise as a condition of support in 2017) and have other generally right-coded cultural messages.
Another factor to consider is that NZ First has only ever been led by Peters, who founded the party after angrily quitting the Nationals back in the early 90s. He went into coalition with the Nats in the late 90s, but also went into coalition with Labor 2005-2008. This was the last time NZ First was in government, but it was also the last time Labor was the government until 2017! So combine the fact that the party is basically the 'Stuff Winston Peters Likes' party, the fact that he doesn't especially like the Nats, and the fact that the most recent Labor government was a coalition with NZ First, and it starts looking pretty reasonable.
I don't know why the Greens weren't brought on as coalition partners
I think you've found an issue where these "low resolution" shorthands (centre left, rightwing, "Jacinda is Hilary, Geene is Peters") — and the US-centric assumptions they bring of policy and ideology — don't always map well to reality, and that what gets deemed "left and right" in countries 'across the western world' can wildly differ by county. Hilary Clinton and Ardern are not that much alike; Winston Peters is absolutely nowhere near Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
I've lived in NZ and I usually find American takes on NZ politics absolutely bizarre, I reckon for this reason.
In US terms, I think the Democrat party would be the closest match for all three leaders — Jacinta Ardern, Winston Peters and Bill English. NZ First aren't necessarily "rightwing anti-immigrant", or at least often don't carry the assumptions that phrase brings; they're hard one to categorise.
I'd deep-dive into long RNZ explainer news articles if you're interested in learning about NZ politics. .
NZ first is right on some cultural issues, but not so much on economic issues. Their leader also had a historical axe to grind with the centre right party, and there was a certain amount of spite in the decision. He has been their leader as long as the party existed and had the power to make the decision. Plus he got powerful foreign minister role and deputy prime ministership out of it. The greens were in that coalition too.
> NZ First could have easily formed a coalition with the National Party- the far right and the center right together. Plus, it wouldn't have been a minority government. Why didn't they do so/what were their motivations to get with the center left instead?
NZ First leader Winston 'Winnie' Peters has been bickering with his former party, National, for a few decades now and isn't going quietly into retirement:
> Peters says the “sex maniacs” within the National Party are proof he made the right choice in forming a coalition Government with Labour in 2017.
(https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/125506478/nz-first-leader-winston-peters-describes-national-party-as-sex-maniacs)
As other commenters have said, a left-right binary oversimplifies. And I predict that few people in NZ would call NZ First 'far right.' Relevant survey:
> Very few Kiwi Trumpers identified with arch-populist Winston Peters, however. Only 4.9 per cent of them said he is the party leader they felt closest to, perhaps because of his coalition with Labour after the 2017 election. They were more attached to National's Judith Collins (46.6 per cent) and Act Party leader David Seymour (30.2 per cent).
(https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/who-are-donald-trumps-supporters-in-nz-and-what-do-we-know-about-them/VFLSZUG5J6AQQZKP7M3P4OTYCA/)
One final point: NZ First has similarities with Europe's pensioner parties. Pensioner parties support policies that promote the welfare of retirees who are not wealthy.
I suspect it’s related to why the Lib Dems in the 2010 UK election went with the Conservatives rather than Labour. In order to maintain its identity as a distinct party, a smaller party has to credibly commit to at least sometimes making a different coalition choice than one would expect on grounds of pure ideological closeness. It probably shouldn’t happen often, but should happen sometimes (unless you’ve got a stable thing going like Australia's Liberals and Nationals, or Germany’s CDU and Bavaria’s CSU).
I have started working as a software engineer. Do ya'll have any suggestions about things I can do to be my best in this line of work? As in books I should read, concepts I should know (this can be things you don't learn in undergrad CS, or things you do learn that really are useful), best practices, methods for self-improvement, or really anything else. Thanks in advance!
Do you have any idea of what you specifically want to do with it? The best general advice I can give is to have a hobby project that challenges you, unless you have an unusually fulfilling job your work may start to become procedural and you won't learn much from just codemonkeying web UIs or database software. If you don't know what to do, just think of what software you use that you don't think is implemented very well, videogames are a low hanging fruit in that regard but it could be anything. I'd also recommend trying out different languages and paradigms that you aren't used to, I imagine you probably didn't use much other than C++/python/java/js in school. Learning how to work in something like rust or lisp can help you with other languages. For example, if you frequently get frustrated with memory management in C++, if you familiarize yourself with the borrow system in rust you can take the general principle of it over to C++.
Yes, but you might not like it: become more sociable, focus on good writing skills, use the writing skills to be more sociable in your work.
You're going to improve as an engineer almost whether you want to or not by working, asking questions from mentors, and getting code reviews.
It's *not* so natural that you'll improve as a communicator, and being a good communicator will have easily as much impact as anything else. It will help you learn from mentors. It will help you find great projects. It will help you drive projects *to* greatness. It will help you save projects from failing. It will help you get noticed. It will help you notice things. It might be *the* thing you need to become a principal engineer.
It might even make you some great friends!
I agree with this. Additionally, think at a slightly higher level than you may want to. Think about who is using your software and why. Don't just complete the work to spec, think about if the spec is complete and serves the users purpose. Maybe your company won't want you to do this, but you can still think about it and try to complete your work to take this into account.
Yes!
If the original question asker is still reading this, realize that you will often have wide freedom to complete your work how you want to complete it.
I don't advocate working too hard, and I really don't like being a perfectionist, but I think it's really healthy to have your own private quality standards and your own private practices that help you make your software in a way you personally can be proud of.
I have no idea what you learned at school, and what you learned outside of school, so no advice here. I don't even know which programming language you use. Perhaps, if you made your own small project and shared it on github, we could comment on that, and then the debate could perhaps expose some blind spots.
http://craftinginterpreters.com/
Learn how computers run code so you can write good code. Also just fun.
Effective Java helped when I started at Google.
Handmade Hero lets you watch a smart programmer make a game entirely "on camera".
Did anyone here read the Network State? Highly recommended if not. I thought it was extraordinary. Definitely something I’ll need to read a few times to digest. Only major quibble is rather minor on the grand scheme, on having a plan at inception for when Networks have to replace nations but overall, like I said, I found it incredible. Would love to hear other thoughts.
Currently reading it, Kindle says I'm 20% through. Couple takeaways so far.
#1 There's a lot of really good political philosophy here. The author can go from referencing Yarvin to Deboer to Drehrer to Scott in a couple pages. I'm not sure his interpretations are 100% on point but if you wanted to catch up on the past decade of cutting edge blogging/political thought from a grey/right wing perspective, this is probably the best book available.
#2 This is also a really good endorsement of decentralized finance but also, like, decentralized everything. I'm struggling to think of a good way to communicate this, because the examples of, like, crypto contracts and crypto history feel...off to me. But I think there's something real and important in the big, centralized "networks" we have now and their influence. Like, if you live primarily online, like many of us do, then which online networks you're part of are...kinda more important than your country. Like, if you work at home and then spend all your time on "woke" Reddit and "breadtube" and then go to bed, you probably have more in common with a "woke" Romanian than a "based" American. Like, we all know we consume a lot of media, see Netflix's valuation, and we're increasingly self-segregating into communities and the things that happen in that online community feel MUCH more important than things that happen in your local community. Like, I have much stronger opinions on the Scott/NYT thing than anything that happened in my local city politics in the past 5 years.
#3 There's nothing practical in here and that surprises me. Like, I'm in this situation. I have a "remote" job. And it's actually pretty remote, I can live anywhere in the US I want. But, and I've had this with numerous recruiters, ask if they're ok with you moving to Bangkok on a Thai Smart Visa (1) or something similar, and you'll quickly find out that remote doesn't mean that remote. And it makes sense, if you hire an American and he moves to Thailand, does the company pay taxes in Thailand now and to what extent, if any, is it now bound by Thai law? Like, there's a lot of legal liability and complexity there. And Srinivasan has had executive roles, he must know the legal liability/risks of letting workers be globally remote and he must have some ideas about it. Maybe that's later in the book. I dunno, but I picked this up as a US tech-ish worker who was actively looking to remotely work a US job overseas, am still interested in setting that up, and this book has nothing for me so far. So, like Balaji, if you're reading this, I'm here for the Network state, sign me up bro, but I should literally be the target audience for this and I haven't read any actionable advice and I'm kinda not expecting to.
(1) https://smart-visa.boi.go.th/smart/
Strange Loop by Rohit has a great review of it:
https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/book-review-the-network-state
Thanks! This was good too.
States not organized around geography aren't going to work. They will fundamentally be like clubs, or insurance, or pre-paid legal or something. The main thing a state provides is a monopoly of coercive force. It is not remotely clear how network states get into that world.
Pretty much this. An organization of crypto investors would have exactly as much sovereignty as an organization of Amazon investors.
That is to say, while they might in some sense have a lot of influence over some part of the economy, they have no way to actually separate themselves from the state they live in, or to compel the state to negotiate with them as an equal rather than as a special interest voting bloc. Amazon has a trillion dollars in market cap but it's still not a sovereign state.
Not trying to be accusatory in any manner, as at some level I even agree with you, so please do not be offended but want to confirm: did you read the full work? There was a lot of non trivial innovation in there, at least to my mind. I think Balaji was thinking an economic show of force in the form of the crypto census would replace some of the need for arms although he does not say so directly and I think his short term and mid term thinking was that the host nations would provide security. That’s me reading a bit between the lines, and while I disagree somewhat, I did have to cede him some credit there.
I mean, if we called them NGOs instead of network states, would that change your mind. Because, and this has been annoying me, sometimes when Srinivasan is talking about Networks he clearly means crypto and sometimes he means NGOs more generally and he silently switches between the two a lot.
Because if we talk about NGOs, I mean, the US is in a 2+ decade war against non-state terrorist groups, many of recruit and organize online. Or consider massive criminal organizations like the Mexican cartels, which can militarily fight and defeat federal forces. And criminal organizations were, like, the original and best use case for crypto. So, in the abstract, yeah, NGOs have a proven history of conflict, and occasional successful conflict, with state actors.
But in reality, no, the crypto-bros are not going to build an army of crypto drones and invade Grenada. But what's the real world case where the crypto bros NEED an army? I mean, it's not like Scientologists or Catholics or "the woke" have an army but they all have at least theoretical hierarchies that massively influence their followers lives and are able to collect tithes/subscriptions/etc.
Hope that makes sense.
Well I mean if someone wants to write a book saying that NGOs are possible, umm that seems silly. Yes crypto currency makes them slightly easier in some ways. They still are not states.
A state/NGO without enforcers, is like I said a "club", or service (insurance). What is my membership in a network state offering me? It is not exempting me from local taxes or harms. It is not protecting me from criminals.
Absolutely groups of people can and do tithe or have memberships in a variety of real world organizations. Almost none of these are ""state like".
It really comes down to the core feature of a state is the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. And if you don't have that, you don't have a state.
And yes that means insurgent areas the government does not control in places during civil wars are in some sense mini-states. I think that is exactly right. And the regular states generally go to great lengths to eliminate such areas all things being equal.
The thing that enforces speed limits (unless it's Germany) or gun control laws (unless it's Texas), is not going to be an NGO. And it's not going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other things-tha-enforces-speed-limits-and-gun-control-laws. The reason people want speed limits and gun control laws is not because they want to be constrained in their *own* ability to drive fast and carry big guns, or to constrain people like themselves (who are of course in the top 20% of drivers), it's because they are afraid of *other* people, people they don't trust to act responsibly, who are close enough to hurt them with their fast cars and big guns. And a thousand other things like that.
The thing that prevents an enemy army from abducting you and your entire family and packing them off to a forced-labor camp, or stealing or breaking your stuff, or just killing you to send a message to people like you, is not going to be an NGO. And it is not going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other mutual defensive organizations, because effective military defense works a *whole* lot better in a contiguous territory with defensible borders and interior lines.
So the thing that collects taxes or tax-like revenue streams to pay for these services, isn't going to be an NGO either, and it isn't going to be geographically dispersed and intermingled with other tax-collecting authorities. And it probably won't accept bitcoin for tax payments.
You're going to live in a geographic territory controlled by a government that will collect taxes from you and force you to abide by its laws. If, on top of that, you want to pay fees to some NGO that forces you to abide by other constraints, knock yourself out. But in a conflict between the two, the one with a real army is going to win and you're probably going to be ground into a fine paste between them, so probably best to pick an NGO that has a strict no-picking-fights-with-the-local-government policy.
Alright, and for Martin Blank as well,
In reality, the Thai government is updating their talent visa to try to bring in foreign workers and investors. One of the big changes is a flat 17% income tax rate. This is almost certainly because, while the Thai tax rate is a pretty normal progressive tax system, your average foreign worker is going to hit the 35% max rate in a month or two.
Now the core question Balaji seems to be posing is, imagining he could get 3,000 crypto/tech bros on the same page, could he then go to the Thai government and negotiate a 15% income tax rate, based on the credible offer of bringing in 3,000 rich tech workers? Could he negotiate, say, lower penalties for marijuana possession since, ya know, techies really like their weed and Thailand is famously harsh on drug offenses? I don't know but that seems pretty important, especially if Thailand turns them down and the crypto state can go make the same offer to, say, El Salvador.
If that works out, it's not hard to imagine tech workers working for cyrpto/DAO companies, being paid in bitcoin that partially gets converted into local currency (just like USD would be), and being primarily loyal to this crypto state.
None of this is guaranteed, it's very speculative, but it's all based on currently existing systems, just assuming they prove a lot more resilient, scalable, and popular than they currently are. Which is basically the bet you'd have been making on Bitcoin in 2011 and that would have paid out very well.
And in no part of this is anybody remotely interested in armies of crypto drones. You seem to have this mental model of what this book is arguing, and it does go off into some weird spaces, but I think you're arguing with your mental model of the book rather than it's reality. If we called this weird crypto network state idea a "Flimflamfoom" instead of a "Network State", I don't think any of your criticisms would make any sense. But "Flimflamfooms" would still be an interesting possibility worth exploring. And if the sum total of your criticism can be boiled down to terminological arguments...what's the value?
If you want to do this with one existing country, a la the Libertarian "free state project" but on a grander scale, that's certainly plausible. Whatever piece of land you end up on will certainly have a lot of people who would prefer the way things were (you're proposing to basically gentrify the place), but with numbers and money you can maybe persuade the existing legitimate government to go along with your plan and then as a legitimate government they can force the naysayers to shut up and go along with it.
If you want to do this on a geographically contiguous plot of land but without using its currently-legitimate government as your ultimate source of police power and military defense, you've got a harder sell because you'll basically be limited to mercenaries and militias to suppress local opposition, which makes you look bad and encourages further opposition. And the opposition will likely inherit a measure of legitimacy from their prior presence and status as part of an established nation-state, which will help them recruit an army and secure foreign support. But it's at least possible you can succeed within your new borders.
If you want to do this in a hundred tiny enclaves scattered around the globe, then every one of those enclaves will be surrounded by people who don't understand what you're trying to do, see you as a bunch of vaguely scary weirdos, and don't want scary weirdos living that close to them. Note that you are almost by definition doing things that they have decided should be illegal, and/or not paying what they have decided is everyone's fair share for being a part of the local community, or you'd not have bothered creating a new state. And they won't want their legitimate government, with its army, tolerating the existence of ungoverned freeloading scary weirdos within their traditional borders.
That's not going to go well for you.
You might be interested in what Vitalik Buterin had to say about it:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html
This was interesting! I think he found some of the same things I did, and curious how he pushed a bit at the religion piece which is where I think I was most strongly aligned with Balaji.
I read a review. Was it here? It’s clear that the writer doesn’t really explain the ability of an online state to raise taxes or do really anything that government does. Eventually he wants all the networked people to move to and take over a state, but a functioning polity needs normies to police, teach, soldier, taxi, build, repair, fix the electrics and so on. Silicon Valley already has the maximum ratio of nerds to normies, and as a state California isn’t that successful.
The weirdo thing about books like this, is that 99% the first "new vision for state entity organization" is for sure going to be based on physical distance.
It is either going to be some sort of sea colony in international waters. Or it is going to be some sort of space colony. Maybe I guess you could see some group trying to buy/take over some portion of some failing country, though I doubt most of the rest of the world would recognize it and would deal with it through the host country failed or not.
The other big problem is most of the things people hate most about society...are things a new society would immediately reinvent but be less efficient at, society has a lot of problems, but it is at some "equilibrium". So that is really going cut down on how attractive/successful the whole enterprise is. "Wait you mean there is still going to be ZONING?" Yes Mr. "freedom uber alles" zoning is even more important in societies with small footprints because the efficient use of space becomes extremely important.
People have really distorted and poor understanding of what they pay, and what all they get for their money in a modern society. You will have a rural county in the US where a standard 2BD 1BA house is paying $600/year in property taxes. For that you get: Plowed streets, police show up when you call, fire show up when you call, a court system, a school to send any children too, rudimentary public transit (dial-a-ride), the city ensuring no one sets up a tannery or machine shop next door to your house, animal control, traffic lights on roads, street lights to reduce crime, libraries, parks, public services and minor public events.
Now is that all super efficiently done? No. Could there be improvements? Sure. How much would individually pricing all that out cost? Ten times as much... More? You get the savings because the state can coercive require everyone participate, and gets some big economies of scale that way.
But that coercion is often the exact thing the people looking for new states are trying to flee. That isn't even getting into the issue of the fact a new state is going to attract a bunch of weirdos with different non-standard views about how the world should operate, and so is going to have big problems getting alignment between its members.
Has anyone here ever heard of a "pain auction?"
I've been wondering about this recently, because I remember reading about them as a particular type of auction in game theory, which tends to result in negative sum outcomes for all participants including the winner. I think I can remember how they were supposed to work, except that when I tried to google them recently to check whether I'm remembering it right, I wasn't able to find any evidence that there's any recognized type of auction by this name at all, nor could I find any type of auction by any other name which works in quite the way that I remember a pain auction working.
As best I remember, a pain auction is a type of all-pay auction where participants "bid" simultaneously (although the bids may not be in money, and I think I remember reading about the concept being applied to an auction where the "bids" are made in actual suffering,) and have the option to either add to their bid each round, increasing their sunk costs, or drop out. The last participant remaining wins the prize, but like a dollar auction, the format will tend to lead to participants paying more than it's worth, even to the winner, because they compete to recoup some portion of their sunk costs. I vaguely remember it being called a pain auction specifically because it was a format designed to produce even more perverse outcomes than a dollar auction, where not just the winner and runner up, but every participant, ends up worse off than if they hadn't participated. But, I can't find any confirmation that the concept even exists, and might just be making it up.
That idea of an auction where *everyone* is worse off no matter what doesn't make too much sense to me because then why would anyone at all participate? Penny auctions and the dollar auctions work because there's a winner, at least if you don't carry out the induction far enough to realize that the winning outcome is possible but won't happen, even if they are negative-sum overall.
You might be misremembering some of Scott's posts about game theory like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A2Qam9Bd9xpbb2wLQ/game-theory-as-a-dark-art Or, are you sure you aren't thinking of fiction, maybe some anime scenario, like _Kaiba_ or _Akagi_ or the eating contest in _Night Is Short, Walk On Girl _ (highly recommended, BTW)?
I might be, but I feel like I'm remembering more specific details about pain auctions than I'd expect to if I'd made them up based on that.
In theory, you could end up better off by participating in a pain auction, operating as I remember them, but it's like a dollar auction; at the start, winning offers better outcomes than not participating, but by the end, winning will probably only allow you to partially recoup your losses.
I have a feeling that I might be remembering this in relation to something Eliezer wrote many years back, but I might be completely mistaken about that. But I think I remember it from the time when I was following and participating at Less Wrong, or maybe even Overcoming Bias.
Yes, I think I know what you're referring to, although my memory is also fuzzy. I'll try to summarize it as best I can from what I remember.
Let's say your teacher has a $20 he wants to auction to you and a friend. He starts the bidding price at $1 but there's a catch: whether you win or lose the auction, you have to pay your bid. Since the starting price is $1, naturally you bid $2 since you would make a profit of $18 if you won. However, you're friend is also being greedy and bids $2. Now if you lose the auction at this stage, you're down a dollar since you lose your bid no matter what (due to your teacher's special rules). So you bid again at $3 and your friend ups the bid to $4 and so on.
This continues until the bid reaches $20. At this point in the game, neither you nor your friend can make any profit. However, this doesn't stop you two from bidding since if you win the auction, you can at least recuperate $20. So you bid $21 hoping that you win the auction and lose only 1$. The bidding continues in this way and NEVER stops since both you and you're friend are following the same greedy algorithm of "by betting one more dollar I stand to win (recuperate) twenty". At the end of the day, your teacher walks away a rich man, one of you gets a twenty dollar bill and the other gets nothing.
There are of course solutions to this problem. One is to not bid against you're friend at all and just agree to split the winnings after the auction.
I'm not sure why a "winner and runner-up pay" auction would be fundamentally different to an "all bidders pay" auction. Both can easily wind up in an everybody-loses-including-the-winner situation, neither necessarily does.
Here's an all-pay pain auction where it nonetheless winds up worthwhile for the winner (fifty hours of standing around to get a $300K car sounds worthwhile to me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsgdOVGA04
That's an interesting point. If the cost of the auction comes in actual suffering, and the prize has some lasting value greater than the amount of suffering that the participants are capable of forcing themselves to endure, the expected value of participating could be highly positive despite most participants being worse off for participating.
It doesn't seem like a sort of auction people would normally have much incentive to arrange though.
I spent too long trying to find this, but here you go: https://archive.ph/IwcgF
It's from Scott's LiveJournal from 2012 - he's the first (and basically only) person to use the term.
Thanks, I appreciate it. That does seem to be what I was thinking of, although it seems like in my memory I abstracted it out more than he originally described it, so the same format he described with pain could also be applied to money.
As I expected, I didn't remember exactly how the idea was originally presented, but it's nice to know that I do seem to have retained the actual format of how it was supposed to work. It's reassuring, because if nobody had been able to find it, I would probably have to conclude that it was a heavily distorted recollection of the idea of a dollar auction, and I'd made up many of the details I thought I remembered.
That post reminds me of Sartre's application to love of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The partner who loves the other one less becomes the more powerful in the relationship.
Not ringing a bell for me (and I immodestly think I'm about the most likely to know!) but if it's a thing then I definitely want to know about it!
PS: Ha, just as I was about to hit submit I saw @atgabara's answer and oh my goodness that post is amazing! Of course it has me itching to defend the honor of (non-pain) auctions in relationships.
PPS: My favorite quote:
> I want to note that as far as I know, I am the first person to call relationship drama "basically an auction" *and* the first person to use the term "pain auction".
(I'm pretty sure I can claim the first conjunct there though.)
I've seen such kinds of auctions in charity events, where people bid for something of symbolic value, like a signed athlete's jersey.
On an individual level, it it taken for granted that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But at the level of entire countries, it is taken for granted that the rich countries can't maintain their advantage forever and that poor countries will eventually catch up.
Why is it so?
The former is valid on aggregate. Some rich people and/or their descendants end up poor and vice versa, others will continue in the bracket where they started off. There aren't enough countries in the world to apply the same statistical analysis, but it's clear that some formerly poor countries are catching up, and some formerly rich countries are flagging badly, but also that many rich countries keep increasing their economic advantage and vie versa. I don't think there is a dichotomy of the type you describe. Are there any academic articles you base your statement on?
I think he’s correct in saying that most developing countries are in catch up.
By what aggregate are the poor getting poorer?
Every measure I have ever seen shows that the poor are getting richer in an absolute sense. This is true within countries and also overall across the world.
I think when people say this, they purely mean in a relative sense, and relative specifically to the very richest people. To me, whether I die of a preventable disease or most of my children die before age five verses that not happening is a bigger consideration than whether Elon Musk gained another $20 billion and outpaced my gains.
I used to take this line, but I don't think it's obviously true anymore. (Hinging on how one defines "Wealth")
Poor people have more access to food, water, transportation and medical care; but they have less access to housing and land to live on. Fancier widgets do not replace having a place to live.
I don't think that's true - poor people have more access to housing than in the past. The percent of income that goes to housing is a little larger than it was 100+ years ago, but is offset by significantly lower costs elsewhere (especially food). Prices for housing are going up slowly, with the bulk of the difference in urban areas. There are still plenty of cheap places to live outside of NYC/SF and other expensive cities.
This article goes from 1900 to 2003, but the trend lines towards cheaper overall cost of living outpaces increases in housing so much that I doubt the increased recent housing costs can in any way compare. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-america-spends-money-100-years-in-the-life-of-the-family-budget/255475/
In 1903 you could get land for free in my country by showing up and building a house...
I don’t think it’s taken for granted that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. All the measures of within-country inequality that I’m aware of are stationary (albeit with long memories), i.e. in the very long run, inequality is constant over time.
I find that rather hard to believe. A long time ago, the poorest members of society were slaves, and the richest were people who owned large amounts of those slaves. The differences between rich and poor in today's Western societies don't seem, to me, to be anywhere near that.
Slavery wasn’t common in Europe from the medieval period. And that’s a low bar. When people talk about the poor getting poorer they mean both relative to the rich and often in real terms.
Yeah sorry I should clarify that I mean in today’s Western societies. There’s definitely structural breaks for the big liberalizing reforms.
If you don't already know it, Walter Scheidel's book "The Great Leveller" goes into this question is some detail. His broad conclusion is that, absent plagues, wars, famines etc. the rich do get richer and the poor do get poorer over a historically-significant period of time. It's not hard to see why. If you are a wealthy stockbroker owning three houses and I am your gardener whose wife works as a nanny, then you start with a massive series of advantages over me, and almost every imaginable economic or even political change works in your favour. You can influence politicians, for example to reduce certain taxes: I can't. You aren't worried about increases in fuel prices for your four cars, I am for my one that I can't afford to repair. You can take massive share and property price benefits: I have to pay more every year to rent, and so on. I'm sure mathematicians among you will recognise this: as you start with advantages you accrue more.
This is why "everybody's better off" is not an adequate reply. Fuel prices in Europe are already rising, and many private sector tenants are going to have to choose between heating and eating. An acquaintance who works for a social landlord was saying she's had a string of people in her office in tears over a likely increase of €100 per month in their fuel bills. A pensioner or a supermarket checkout operator may not lose any gross income this year, and may even get a tiny increase, but their standard of living is being wrecked, and that money is increasingly going to those who already have too much. And don't forget, that if we limit our discussions to income, and not wealth, incomes of ordinary people have been static over the last couple of generations in most western countries. Growth has been at the top end.
This is a Marxists perspective so take it or leave it.
The rich within a country are rich because of their claims on assets and the returns on those assets, this provides them with a surplus thy can use to acquire more claims on more assets in a positive feedback loop.
Since they only accumulate claims and aren't necessarily creating new real assets, the process is zero sum, any gains they make only come at the expense of non-asset holders i.e. workers. That's why market economies always tend towards growing inequality, and inequality would grow even if the economy as a whole wasn't.
Inequality between countries is caused by a difference in real assets within the countries, i.e. wealthy ones have more assets, called the capital stock, not a difference in claims on assets (although quite often capitalist from wealthy countries do have claims on capital in poorer ones).
Capital stock usually grows exponentially, because more machines can create more machines more quickly etc... , unless an economy has reached the limit on how much capital stock can be employed profitably, in which case they need to push the technological frontier to create new kinds of capital, a much slower than exponential process.
Wealthy countries are usually in the second scenario and so grow slowly, poor countries are usually in the first so grow quickly. So obviously the gap between the two will close over time.
Thank you for writing this, as it has helped me identify what has long been my core problem with Marxist perspectives, but I have had trouble articulating.
If economic conditions were truly zero sum, then I would agree with this take on asset distribution. There's in fact great reason to think that a few people (or even one) would eventually own everything, absent some outside force preventing it. (Being wasteful and losing the wealth is also a strong possibility, seen plenty of times).
Real history involves constant growth and expansion, such that new wealth greatly outpaces old wealth. There are about 20 million millionaires in the US, with total combined assets above $24 trillion. I would rather own 1% of the top 1% of the US economy than 100% of Ancient Athens (or all of Greece, or even the entire Roman Empire at its height ~$43 billion). In terms of absolute wealth, pretty much everyone in the middle class in a Western nation is richer than almost all kings in history. Zero sum is so clearly incorrect that someone bringing it up in earnest should be laughed out of the discussion.
Well if I hadn't been laughed out the discussion I'd respond that the Marxist model only entails zero sum inequality growth in a steady state economy. In a growing economy capitalist can appropriate the gains from growth without negatively affecting workers, like the ~40 year period of stagnant wages we've lived through during the neoliberal period. That's still probably undesirable because it leads to much lower median standing of living than had the gains from growth been distributed more equally.
The reason modern workers are better off than Athenian peasants is because there have been previous periods of redistribution significant enough to reverse the general tendency to inequality, mostly during the post war period. During periods of economic history with high growth but insufficient redistribution, like the early industrial revolution, the bulk of the population did live at subsistence level. If modern neoliberal states stopped the small amount of redistribution/labour regulation they do (enough to wages steady but not rising) you would expect median incomes to start declining.
There have been declining economies and economies growing very slowly, but has there ever been a truly steady state economy? It's another economic assumption that hasn't passed the test of time.
Had Marx's theories won the day, we could have tried to lock in the economy in an egalitarian way back in the late 1800s. Do you think that would have been a good idea? Is there a time since then where we should have locked in the economy and willingly stymied growth? Obviously I answer both questions with a resounding no, but I would be interested if you had a different opinion.
I get that you would prefer a society that's *more* egalitarian, even if not a steady state or perfectly egalitarian. There's certainly room for discussion on that. What I see from countries that attempted Marxist planning is ruination and falling well behind the capitalist world. To me, that's good reason to look elsewhere for ideas and to prefer a system shown to create fantastic wealth over a system more often known for misery and lower standards of living - especially for the poor.
The steady state is just a hypothetical to illustrate that capital gains can be zero sum and, to the extent that they are, capital will erode labour's purchasing power. And even a growing economy is no guarantee of raising wages. The historical norm seems to be somewhere between the two and wages usually only rise in times of redistribution, the exceptions are sudden drops in population like after the black death.
In terms locking in the economy, yeah I'd say if you could lock in the inequality level from the 1970s but slow growth that would be an improvement over reality, at least workers would see some gains in their living standards as opposed to complete stagnation. Ideally you'd have a situation like the post war period where growth was strong and inequality was steady or declining. Realistically though there probably is a trade off between growth and inequality and it would difficult to achieve the ideal, but it seems like we've been on the extreme growth end of the trade off for far too long.
"Real history involves constant growth and expansion, such that new wealth greatly outpaces old wealth."
It's not constant, certainly not to the extent of new wealth consistently outpacing old wealth. There have been numerous cases in history of collapse and decay, and if climate pessimists are right we'll see another in our lifetimes. Most wealthy people in the UK today are the direct descendants of people who were already wealthy a hundred years ago (and at that point they were already shopping around for rich, vulgar American women to refill the coffers). However, *in the 16th-19th centuries* new wealth almost certainly outpaced old wealth in the UK many times over; they were the boom empire of that time. This is the niche that the US occupies now, and indeed has occupied since the mid-19th century or so. Notably the case is the same for a few of the more or less post-Soviet European dependents of the US, e.g. the Nordics, West Germany, Poland, the Baltics. In the case of the literally post-Soviet nations this is clearly just because they were artificially depressed before due to being forcibly attached to the shittiest, losingest empire of all time, but the Nordics and West Germany can also date explosive growth to the aftermath of WWII in a way that's pretty correlated with American success, broadly.
That doesn't work, I don't think. Even if the process is zero-sum, there's still a steady-state level of inequality when you actually do the math--Piketty has an explicit equation, but the intuition is that unless every generation saves exactly the same amount of money as the last one, there's a point where regression to the mean pulls you back down (because occasionally you get rich kids squandering their inheritance). Nonstationary processes for anything meaningful are *ridiculously* rare.
From memory Piketty's equation is: inequality will grow if returns of investment are larger than overall economic growth, which seems the same or very similar to the model implicit in my comment.
You're right it will reach an equilibrium eventually, civilisation would collapse other wise, historically that limit seems to be that wages can't be suppressed below subsistence level (all the workers would die). In the modern world, with it's large surplus, the limit is probably determined by the profitability of new investments, which will decline as capital accumulates, increasing capitalists propensity to consume rather than invest. rich kids squandering the built up wealth would act as limit theoretically, I guess (dividing estates through inheritance seems like it would be more significant), doesn't seem to shift the equilibrium much though irl.
The point is market economies will tend towards a high inequality equilibrium for social reasons, and inequalities between national economies will tend to shrink because of the real material properties of industrialising economies.
Because the first part isn't actually true, it's just something people say to sound hip and cynical. They probably believe it, but they haven't put a lot of thought into it and can't back it up except by pointing vaguely at the unread copy of Piketty on their coffee table.
A _God Emperor of Dune_ review, eh? That should be interesting, especially if the author has taken the time to read the recently-scanned _Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare_ (https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1950-walter-thesexualcycleofhumanwarfare.pdf) which is the major source for Herbert in GEoD.
Thanks for linking that! I'm actually about halfway through God Emperor of Dune right now and have been curious about where Herbert got his ideas and/or how he developed them.
this blog post references SSC, but I am not entirely sure what he is trying to say. Could someone translate for me?
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/07/27/nft-news-salesforce-nfts-latvian-nft-money-laundering-gamers-still-hate-nfts/
(repost due to posting on previous OT with only 2 hrs left)
The only connection to SSC, as far as I can tell, is an implied claim that Vitalik Buterin has permanent brain damage from reading rationalist blogs.
In general I can't recommend reading David Gerard. His schtick is finding things to hate, and then writing a lot about how much he hates them. He hates blockchains, and he hates rationalists, so he threw in a dig at rationalists in his ranting about blockchains.
(Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency industry. I obviously therefore disagree with his hate for blockchains in full generality. I also quibble with people who hate NFTs in full generality, but in practice the vast majority of NFT projects are awful or scams, especially the high-profile ones, so I probably wouldn't dispute most if any specific NFT projects he's hating on in the post.)
thanks. his phrasing was very confusing, other than sounding vaguely negative.
Surely rationalists would be sceptical about blockchain.
If I had bought a bitcoin every time one of David Gerard's "don't buy bitcoins, only an idiot would do that" articles was displayed at the front page of Hacker News, I would be a very rich person now.
But from his perspective, I guess it is okay, because he is also selling a *book* about "why nobody should ever buy bitcoins" and promoting it in those articles, so even if he happens to be wrong about everything, he can still get rich from the book sales.
*
I still have no idea how NFTs could be useful. I mean, if I understand it correctly, the NTF basically means that you "own" a certain string in a certain database. Like, you could own a string "Astral Codex Ten" in my database -- that still does not give you any rights with regards to the *actual* Astral Codex Ten.
I could imagine e.g. making a game, like a MMORPG, where some precious objects would have a unique identifier, and whoever "owns" that identifier in the NFT database, also owns the object in the game -- because the game itself says so! The only advantage would be that you could trade those objects outside of the game. But this still seems like too little benefit of a complex technical solution.
I’m sure people made money from tulips back in the day.
Yeah, as long as you change it to "only an idiot or an asshole" it checks out. Lots of people make money from scams. Some of them are even among the idiots who earnestly believe in the whole setup.
I'm a professional game designer (narrative and systems design focus) looking for a technical partner to help me make a single-player computer RPG in the vein of Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with a dash of Napoleonic War-era technology and politics, and a soupçon of Dungeon Meshi. This would be paid work.
I've been in the field for about a decade and am conversant with programming concepts and fundamentals, but learning to program well enough to make the game I want, entirely on my own, seems like a doubtful approach compared to other options.
I'm keeping it short and sweet here on purpose--if you're interested and have some demonstrable experience, please respond here *and* send a note to CSLewin at gmail dot com with whatever info you think would be relevant.
I'm down. Will email you soonish.
There is an article "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence" in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 .
From the abstract:
> The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.
Scott had a few similarly skeptical posts on the topic, it is interesting to see that this view is slowly becoming more mainstream, and maybe some day might result in reduction of overprescribing psych meds, and potentially more focus on therapeutic rather than psychiatric approaches where warranted.
Is this really that surprising? Not an expert, but I’ve been on the patient side of things for a few years and nobody has ever told me depression is a simple serotonin deficiency — I was generally told the chemical/biological part of depression wasn’t well understood, but that we use ssri’s because they work empirically even if we don’t know why. When this paper first came out I felt like it was attacking a straw man by misinterpreting “chemical imbalance” (which people use as a shorthand for “something is up physically”) to mean “literally just low serotonin”, which I didn’t think people had believed for a long time.
+1
+2
As I saw someone put it elsewhere, it's like taking an aspirin to cure a headache. You weren't "aspirin-deficient", but the aspirin still helps. We don't know exactly why SSRIs work, but the fact that depression is not "seratonin-deficiency" doesn't mean that SSRIs don't help.
I think people have been aware for a long time that the "chemical imbalance" picture of how depression works is just silly. On the other hand, serotonin comes into it somehow, because SSRI's do work better than sugar pills (though not all that much better).
I wouldn't really describe myself as skeptical; see https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/ for more position.
> Depression is complicated, but it seems to involve disruptions to the levels of brain chemicals in some important way
I guess one has to add "and some SSRI/SNRI/antihistamines/... seem to work better than placebo for some people, so serotonin is most likely involved in some way somewhere"? Which is a bit of a vacuous statement, since serotonin is almost always involved one way or another, as far as I understand it.
I guess my hope was that therapy, where appropriate, would be the first-line approach even for psychiatrists. In my limited and anecdotal experience they are quite eager to spin the psych meds rolodex in the hope that one of the drugs does the trick.
Therapy rarely messes up your brain and body permanently and irreversibly, like psych meds tend to do.
Did the rationalist community at large profit off the January 2021 Gamestop short squeeze? I know similar data has been collected with regard to crypto and I'm curious to see if there's any difference now, since both represented uniquely asymmetrical low risk/high reward investment opportunities.
Next time there is a ACX reader survey, it would be interesting to add this question there.
Probably depends on where you draw the boundary lines. I made some money in general in 2021 playing around with Gamestop timing, but not very much, and I lost more money on tech overall from the crash this year.
Has anyone read any good blog posts or books about relationship attachment styles? Please share them. Additionally, what are your thoughts on attachment styles?
I was once referred to attachmentquiz.com and its related resources. It struck me as similar to personality-type surveys, although with a different focus. Good for becoming aware that the concepts exist, less-good if taken as a complete model of reality.
Change My Mind,Change My Brain isn’t all about attachment style, but a good chunk of it is. I recommend it.
I found _Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment_ by Levine and Heller to be useful in understanding the framework and applying it to my experiences, especially but not only in the context of romantic relationships. While it discusses science and studies, I have no idea if it's accurately representing the science.
This site has taught me a lot about Randomized Controlled Trials, required for having evidence taken seriously in the medical world. However, they are so difficult and costly that often only large institutions can do them. I am wondering what factors drive the cost?
And, what happens to the cost of an RCT if there's a standing army of 10,000+ volunteers eager to participate in it, whose demographic info is all already on file?
Scenario: various outfits have name-recognition from studying Amish communities. Amish are experts at group co-ordination, and have very legible and extensive family-history records. I understand their groups and Iceland are often the two favorite places for genetics researchers to work.
Here is a recent example in media, quoting an Amish man as saying "I like to do every study that comes along."
wgal.com/article/genetic-researchers-make-groundbreaking-discoveries-with-help-of-amish-community/40476024
Amish are also quite interested in health. However, I have the impression that the health-related things they would be most interested in having studied via RCT might not overlap very much with the interests of those doing most RCTs today. If there was a group that could grassroots / crowdsource this within their communities, saying "nominate and then vote for the thing you'd like to see studied this year," and then bringing in the PhD-class people as needed... would it still cost as much as it does for a pharma company to find out if a substance is medically effective or not?
Basically good - using the NHS we did a bunch of Covid treatment trials in the UK in the pandemic. And Zoe app is used to test all sorts of things now.
As to what drives the cost, anything that involves having a large number of people interacting with an army of people is expensive. In many cases, you have to get that army of people to show up to be seen by a nurse at least once (imagine doing that for 1000 people!), you need someone to enter all of their information in the system, you need someone to do the distribution of that drug you're testing plus the placebo, you need someone to follow up with all the people who don't reply to their e-mail... This all takes a lot of human hours, and since you can't hire just anyone to do many of these things, the people you hire are going to be expensive.
Speaking of bannable comments I think promoting a podcast is close to the line. But I am dressing it up as a suggestion that Scott reviews Edward Shawcross’s brilliant The Last Emperor of Mexico so it will be fine!
Mencius Moldbug’s ideas about the superiority of a monarchy have been discussed here and in fact Mexico was unique I think among the Latin American countries in becoming independent as a monarchy but that didn’t last long. Following Moldbug’s logic the Mexican conservatives felt the problem was that the old monarch wasn’t conservative enough and wanted a heavy hitter from Europe. And a Hapsburg Prince seemed ideal.
Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Less well known is who he said it about and that was Napoleon I and Napoleon III. But Napoleon III was for a long time very far from a joke and his willingness to lend the French army to the scheme made it a practical possibility.
Not least of the benefits for Mexico was that being ruled by a European monarch under the benevolent eye of European states would have provided some protection against the USA and made it a more comfortable neighbour. See Canada for example. As it was ‘Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States!’
How it all turned out you can find out in this excellent podcast. Edward Shawcross is a fantastic speaker - very droll and very wise.
(Incidentally I am also a big fan of the rock group Cake and I was always intrigued by their lyric ‘I don’t know much about Cinco de Mayo, I’m never sure what its all about’. If you are in the same boat the podcast will sort you out.)
And regardless of the podcast I really, really recommend Edwards book, The Last Emperor of Mexico for anyone interested in history, European or American or who just enjoys a story with jaw dropping twists and turns. I genuinely think it would be a great candidate for review by Scott.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000571016318
Is there any experimental evidence for how tools affect the outcome of remote meetings? I imagine an experiment in which groups of collage students are tasked to solve a cognitive task that requires teamwork during a remote meeting (e.g. solving the SAT together). Groups are randomly assigned communication technologies, e.g. text chat, voice chat and video chat. Preferably we could also compare low-quality voice/video with high-quality dito.
This has obvious implications for us doing work from home.
I'd be interested in this as well. From my personal experience at work, the technology can help but having a good leader/proctor/host of the meeting is the most import predictor of success for the task.
How does a computer actively do anything?
I've tried to research this question. I've narrowed it down to "The CPU does stuff" -> "the control unit is the only part of the CPU that's not passive" -> "the instruction cycle (or fetch/decode/execute cycle) is doing stuff". But there I've gotten stuck.
(To clarify: the ALU inside the CPU, for example, is entirely passive. It essentially implements a mathematical function, something like "ALU : (input1, input2, command_code) -> (output)", and you can build that entirely out of logical gates made out of transistors. But it doesn't *initiate* any computations. I want to know what's doing the active thing, the first part of the causal chain after the user presses the ON button on the computer.)
Unfortunately, every source on the instruction cycle I've found leaves it at statements like "the processor fetches the instruction from the memory". Yes, I know. What I want to know is, *how*? What actual physical mechanism is implementing this? It has to bottom out at something like a mechanical thing turning a transistor on or off. Is there any source that explains this aspect?
The control unit has a bit of memory (the program counter, or PC) that holds the next address from which to read an instruction. On the start of running an instruction, the control unit reads that <instruction length> from memory (by activating the address lines of the memory bus and setting it to read from it), separates out the parts of the parts of the instruction that encode the opcode and the operands, and increments the PC by <instruction length>. The opcode chooses the operation to do, and the operands choose what to do them to.
I don't really remember exactly how memory is implemented or instruction decoding exactly works, but most of what I know about the basic functioning of a CPU is from nandgame https://www.nandgame.com/, a game in which you create all the components needed for a CPU, then a CPU, starting from nand gates (apparently now you actually start from relays).
This doesn't answer your question, but I'm reminded of Dan Luu's great essay "What happens when you load a URL?" https://danluu.com/navigate-url/
Ben Eater's Youtube channel includes some pretty detailed dives into how everything works. The playlists "Building an 8-bit breadboard computer" (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU) and "Build a 65c02 based computer from scratch" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnzuMJLZRdU&list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXNR0z1mu7dp7eH) will walk you through in a structured fashion. There's of course much, much more to say, but these should get you to a place where you will know the true inside workings.
I think the second video already answers the question. It explains how the clock works, and once you have the clock, that's the only active component you need. I mean I don't know if it works like that, but I presume it does; given the alternating clock signal, all you need to do is build the control unit as a function that iterates through the instruction cycle based on the clock command. It's not exactly a mathematical function since it includes memory, but memory is straight-forward with flip-flops.
That's exactly how it works yes. Details abound, but that's the core principle.
Remember that kid's game Mouse Trap? You've got a bunch of gadgets that knock one thing into another and in the end a ball gets from point A to point B. The same sort of thing is going on at a low level with a microprocessor.
When you press the "on" button, a bunch of dominoes land into a certain pattern. This causes the first instruction's contents to fall out of their container. Several of them, the ones that represent the command (ADD, let's say) knock into the ALU and put it into whatever mode. Several others, the ones that represent the operands wind up inside the ALU. The ALU spins them around and they fall back out, landing in a destination register. The action of spinning just so happens to flip the dominoes back up, causing the next set of instructions to fall into a container and then fall back down so the cycle can repeat.
Designing a simple CPU is like setting up a fixed set of little Mouse Trap courses. Most of the work is making the control unit open and close certain gates in a certain sequence. You're thinking at this level rather than at the level of transistors, which are of course the actual substrate.
For answering your question, I highly recommend this two-part online course: https://www.nand2tetris.org/
It takes you from transistors to high level programming languages (Java-ish) one layer at a time.
Try the SecurityNow! podcast with Steve Gibson, episode 233 and following. Audio, video, and transcripts should be available.
https://www.grc.com/sn/past/2010.htm
Here's how it goes:
"
Imagine in this visual slate that there's a wire running along the top which carries a voltage, and another wire running along the bottom which is the ground. And this is the way most of these logic diagram schematics are drawn, is you'll have sort of a bus running across the top that has a voltage, which is just a pressure, essentially, created by a power supply. And anchored at the bottom is another wire, sort of a bus running horizontally that is the ground. You then - you interconnect things in between this positive power supply potential at the top and the ground at the bottom.
If we had two resistors - a resistor is a component with two wires coming out of each end which, as the name sounds, resists the flow of current through it. Essentially what it does is you run current through it, and it gets hot. It dissipates current in the form of heat. So imagine in this circuit diagram that we have two resistors connected, the first one at the top, coming down to the second one, which then connects to the ground at the bottom. So that we have a circuit formed just with two resistors in series. And for the sake of simplicity we'll assume that they have the same amount of resistance. Well, this forms something called a "voltage divider" because essentially, when we make this circuit with just two resistors in a series, voltage will flow through this circuit...
...if we put a positive voltage on the base of the transistor, that is, the input of the transistor, some current will flow through the base, which turns the transistor on. But remember that when the transistor is on, it pulls the lower end of that resistor that's coming down from the supply voltage, it pulls it down to ground, that is, down to zero. So what we have is an inverter because, when we put a positive voltage on the input of the transistor, it turns on, which pulls that junction between the resistor and the transistor down to zero. So a one goes in, and a zero comes out. And if we move the voltage on the base of this transistor, the input of the transistor down to ground, then the transistor turns off. And with the transistor off, then that junction between the resistor and the transistor goes up to the power supply voltage. In other words, a one.
So what we have is this, with just two components, this resistor that goes up to the positive power supply with a transistor hooked to it going down to ground. We have an input into the transistor, and the output is that junction between the resistor and the transistor. And that creates an inverter. So we have with these two components probably the most basic logic system that you can have.
So that's an inverter. It doesn't, I mean, it's certainly useful by itself. But we can do something, make one additional change to it to begin to create some logic gates. And that is, we take another transistor and hook it to the same place. That is, we put these two transistors in parallel with each other. Another transistor hooked to the same place so that either of them are able to be turned on and pull this output down to ground, that is, hook the bottom of the resistor down to ground. So now look what we have. If we turn either transistor on by putting a one, binary one into either of the inputs, then that transistor will turn on and pull the output down to ground. And they can both be turned on. We get the same result. So what we have is a, in logical terms, is called a NOR gate. Which NOR stands for "not or." So if either input is a one, the output is a zero. So we have the beginning of logic...
"
In general, the key insight is that while the computer does indeed read its next instruction from memory; it can also modify its own memory to change what the next instruction would be. You don't even need a modern computer to do this. Consider a simple cart on wheels , with an electric motor that controls its steering. If the voltage on the motor is positive, it turns to the right. If it's negative, it turns to the left. If it's zero, it goes straight.
Now, consider that we equip this cart with two little light sensors, looking down at the floor. The brighter the light that the sensor can "see", the more voltage it applies to the steering motor. The right sensor is hooked up in reverse, so that it applies negative voltage. The left sensor applies positive voltage.
If you paint a bright white line on the floor, and put the robot cart on top of it, the cart will follow the line unerringly, all by itself. If it starts drifting right or left, one of the light sensors will start applying more voltage to the steering, thus moving the cart back toward the center of the line.
This simple device is not even a computer, it has no memory (as such) and no CPU; and yet, it can execute an apparently complex behaviour (following a complicated-looking white line), just by using a combination of simple rules. That's how modern computers work, too (only much more so).
I think you might like "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.
It starts with mechanical relay switches and builds up all the way to an x86 CPU and assembly language.
I don't know if this will tell you anything that isn't covered in all the youtube videos that people linked already, but anyway.
The active component is the clock and the flip-flops. A flip-flop is storing a bit of information and outputting it on its output line. It also has an input line which is being ignored most of the time. When a clock pulse arrives on the clock input, the value on the input line gets remembered and asserted on the output line until the next clock cycle. In between the clock cycles, the new outputs from flip-flops propagate through the "passive" circuits.
What happens at the start. Complex stateful integrated circuits generally have reset inputs. When a signal is asserted on the reset input this causes the IC's internal registers to take on some predefined values putting it in a known state. For a CPU this will likely involve configuring the instruction fetch logic so that it starts fetching and executing from some fixed physical memory address. It's up to the system designer to ensure that the memory contains meaningful code at this address.
Whence the code? The ROM (or EEPROM or whatever). A memory IC that upon getting an address asserted on its address pins will output the word stored on its output pins.
CPU isn't wired directly to memory modules, but to another IC called the memory controller. The memory controller can be connected to multiple memory modules and keeps track of how physical memory address space is mapped to them. It translates memory read/write requests from the CPU to signals that can be understood by the memory modules. It's also connected to the ROM and maps some part of the memory address space to the contents of the ROM.
So what happens when you press the button is: reset signal goes to the CPU and memory controller for a while, and puts them in an initial state in which the CPU will start fetching instructions from some address in memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_vector) and the memory controller will translate these fetches into fetches from the ROM. The rest is a matter of software.
Obviously everything above is super oversimplified. The memory controller isn't wired directly to the ROM and isn't actually a separate chip in modern computers. And CPUs fetch data from memory in big chunks rather than single words, because they have caches, etc.
I am curious if anyone else has experience with ameliorating trypanophobia (needle phobia). This didn't used to be much of a Life Problem, cause one only gets so many routine medical shots in life, and I can Grin And Bear It when *someone else* does the inject/draw. But ever since I switched one of my regular medications to at-home self-administered injections...oof. Every week there's that one day when I get this creeping sense of Doom, cause I know I gotta shoot up sooner or later. Putting it off just leads to feeling worse in the long run: not just from lack of meds, but the whole, you know..."I'm a failure for obeying a cognitive fallacy, should be rational enough to argue myself out of phobias!" thing. There's something specific about the self-inflicted nature that makes a semi-tolerable level of Squick into "oh shit oh fuck oh god I can't do this" x[several times], possibly followed by downing a shot. You know, to steady the nerves. (This *never* works. Don't try to self-inject while tipsy, or you're gonna have a bad time, mmkay.)
There are certain large practical payoffs to taking this particular medication in injectable form rather than oral or dermal...specifically it bypasses liver metabolism, which is something I've gotta be careful about (family history of cirrhosis, hep B, liver cancer, etc). So the motivation is definitely there, and it passes long-term cost-benefit easily. At the same time, if there's any more tractable One Weird Trick than just trying __really hard__ to not think about a <s>pink elephant</s> needle, I would be very grateful! This singular voluntary event comprises at least 10% of any given week's Stress Budget, so I'm looking for any efficiencies I can get. (Note that I don't consider this quite worthy of a therapist's time, it's not so horrific yet that I wanna spend big Units Of Caring to ameliorate it.)
If it's relevant, I normally have a masochistically high pain tolerance and don't even notice/enjoy most everyday injuries, even bleeding ones...so it's not the hurt itself that bothers me. Sharp objects in general don't trigger me either, knives are Super Cool. Just needles specifically are NOPE. Real shame that aerosol injection technology dead-ended...
I think it does for most people, but if someone has done this for a while and not gotten better, it suggests something different. (I took part in a longitudinal study of COVID antibodies and had to do a finger stick a few times. The first time was very difficult and took a while to psyche myself up for, but the second and third were no trouble.)
Oddly enough the finger-prick types don't bother me, I think because it's over so fast? Instantaneous mild pain with immediate cessation, and usually the needle isn't even visible cause the mechanical housing obscures it. I used to have to do those during clinical trials of Truvada(tm), and I honestly think the *lab tech* had a worse time of it than I did.
(Still confuses me that Gilead was willing to hand out gobs of STD study money to lifelong virgins. I guess we'd be the Extreme Control Group?)
A group called Gilead recruited a group of virgins for a study on STDs?
(Does sound like a very good control group though)
Gilead Sciences, the patent holder until 2020 of Truvada(tm)*, the non-generic HIV prophylactic medication that's been pretty much the single biggest Big Deal in the fight against AIDS in decades. I haven't checked recent prices, but a prescription used to go for hundreds of dollars, and they made millions or possibly billions on that investment. Yet the pharmaceutical company used to sponsor a ton of research studies to prove its safe use and potential contraindications, mostly within LGBT populations (obviously), all of which hand the drug out like candy and often include significant cash compensation as well. These studies could often be lied to about one's "qualifications" (level of sexual promiscuity). I didn't do that, but the researchers who did the screening (many themselves LGBT) hinted that they wouldn't complain if I did, nudge nudge wink wink, cause better us to have money than Some Big Pharma Company. Doubt there are any official records of such shoddy practices, so I only have my n = a few to go by here.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emtricitabine/tenofovir
It has a contested legal history patent-wise, and despite legally being generic now, accessibility to non-brand-name remains spotty: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-administration-sues-drugmaker-gilead-sciences-over-patent-on-truvada-for-hiv-prevention/2019/11/06/68b1cc52-010c-11ea-8501-2a7123a38c58_story.html
Maybe for some folks, but I had a normal level fear of needle sticks until my college days when I volunteered for a diet study that involved blood draws every 5 days for several months, and since then I have trypanophobia. (Thanks for teaching me a new word.)
This may be dumb, but... Can you find someone else to do it for you? Even if you don't have anyone in mind, it might be possible to get a pharmacist to do it. I know that they provide this service for some kinds of injections in my part of the world, although I don't know if it's restricted to the types that actually require skill, which actually I don't even know if it's your case. Anyway, you might try to shop around in the pharmacies around you to see if some nice person there does it for you.
Oh, it used to be offered by the friendly nurses at my doctor's office! I always had that fallback option in case the Heebie Jeebies from jabbing got too janky. Did use it a few times.
But then, you know, covid happened and Hospital Capacity and...all that. Haven't had any doctor visits since Jan 2020. It's not like they'd turn me away at this point (probably?), I guess it's more like...it now feels like a much bigger ask than merely risking some Minor Social Awkwardness? I'd really prefer both to: not go through all the tedious prevention Sacrifices to the Gods one is expected to perform to visit a medical facility, and not lie about having done such things (e.g. "oh yeah I totally had a negative test both before and after"). Such Trivial Inconveniences continue to constitute a sort of "soft lockdown" here, still...I may be legally allowed to do most things, but the cost of potential or actual Dirty Looks still effectively keeps me at home basically always.
No clue whether a typical retail pharmacist could do that, I wasn't aware that was a service offered at all! I wonder if insurance would cover that. I guess I could ask a friend, it's sort of...uncomfortably personal though? This particular med is intramuscular injection, so it's gotta go in either the thigh, or, uh...the ass. I dunno about Median Peoples' Median Friends, but that's definitely beyond the pale of what I'd consider asking any of mine, outside a real emergency! (like if I needed an EpiPen or something, that's cool)
Well, good luck! I think it might be worth the cost to actually ask someone to do this for you, be that a pharmacist or a friend. They can say no, and then you lost something in the process, sure, I get that asking this kind of thing is hard. I would also feel awkward asking this of my friends. But if they say yes, that's your problem solved more or less forever. So it's a fixed cost for a possibly very large benefit. Getting over your fear of doing it yourself would be better, sure, but I have no idea how to do so. Specially since my best guest would be to get through it enough times that it stops being scary, but if you were doing this before covid started, I guess that didn't work.
Also, in my opinion not being able to stop feeling scared about this does not constitute a failure of rationality or whatever. Sticking sharp things in our skin is usually very much *not* recommended. I'm not sure it's possible to train my instinctive brain to make such a fine distinction between sharp-things-that-are-good-for-me and the other kind. Maybe it would be, maybe I have low expectations for myself in this regard. I don't want to discourage anyone from trying to improve themselves. I just wanted to say, well, there are alternatives, and no shame in taking the easy path (or the socially and logistically hard but otherwise easier path, in this case). In fact, it could be argued that taking the easy path to solving a problem is the rational thing to do.
Self administering intramuscular injections doesn't sound like a good idea to me. If it can't be given subcutaneously, maybe there is a possibilty of a depot preparation injected every few weeks? By the way, suppositories also bypass the vena porta and have no first pass effect, which you probably mean by "liver metabolism".
Eh, it's safe enough as far as at-home procedures go? Doctors won't let you take any of the drugs or equipment[1] home until you've demonstrated adequate technique to their satisfaction at the medical facility, which of course they'll demonstrate as many times as needed[2]. It's only the vastus lateralis thigh muscle, hard to fuck up in any really significant way without trying...the worst I've ever gotten was accidentally hitting a superficial vein (mine are really prominent, you'd think this would make it easy to avoid them but alas), which bleeds decently. But even then, the z-track method is pretty good at minimizing "backwash".
It's already a depot injection, standard dosing slow-releases over around a week, and dosage can be scaled linearly to have effects last longer. Although at too-high doses the meds get metabolized into...whatever the drug equivalent of anti-nutrient is. Anti-drug. So it cancels out and is therefore wasteful. If I knew my optimal maximum dosage, I suppose I could try and get an extra-extended-release formulation that lasts like a month? That'd be infrequent enough to not be bothered much phobia-wise. Just pair it with Rent Is Due Day, get all the pain over at once! (Sadly dosing is an inexact science for this med; there are substantial error bars due to measurement error, so standard practice is to aim for safe median dosages rather than maximizing.)
Yes, first pass effect, thank you for the proper terminology. Didn't know to look that up on my first pass of writing this comment. As far as I'm aware, no one's ever formulated this med into a suppository; it's almost always given orally via sublingual pills, with a minority doing intramuscular injections like me, and even fewer using dermal patches. Which mostly don't work, other than being very convenient to administer.
[1] Worth a whole separate rant-comment sometime: it's really silly that the War On Drugs(tm) effectively made regular size medical grade needles illegal for individual consumers without medical licensure to buy online. Everyone's happy to sell syringes...with no needles. Or needles useful for tattoo artists. This really should not require a prescription. The one time I managed to snag a 1000ct box of needles off Amazon, the seller was immediately banned for Purveying Ill-Advised Consumer Goods. Kind of funny really...
[2] Or at least, that's how it worked for me. But I guess I was using a clinic that specializes in such things and knowledge, so it might be different with a GP or hospital.
Thanks for all the info. I had no doubts about your competence concerning the injection. Intramuscular to me meant bigger needle (not in your case, I see), more pain and the need to relax the targeted muscle. I'd expect a lot of people to get a little tight where they are about to push something spiky, which would lead to worse experience and probably more aversion to it next time. Best luck with your efforts, anyway.
1.5" 22 gauge needle, yep. Not a horse tranq or anything. The relaxation part is weird, to me: when getting shots/blood draws in the deltoid muscle, standard practice is indeed to relax and not get all tightened up. They only ask me to flex if it's hard to find a good vein that day. But for at-home thigh poking, making sure the muscle is fully flexed and tight is part of what makes the z-track method work. It definitely doesn't help with lessening the tension load. I am not actually squicked out by blood, but medication loss is concerning, due to all the trouble involved in shoving it in there in the first place...
I'm a psychologist who treats phobias, and I have a couple suggestions: I think the reason you're not getting over your fear is that the shots are too infrequent. Most people who are phobic of something have occasional encounters with the thing that scares them, but those infrequent encounters do nothing to reduce the fear -- they just give the person a nasty shock, and afterwards the person says,"thank god that's over." On the other hand, it seems a bit much to ask you to stick the needle in yourself over and over one day. So here is a suggested hierarchy -- it's a way to do some desensitization using things that are miniature, less challenging versions of the shot you fear:
(1) Leave an old needle from a previous shot out someplace where you can see it all the time. Have the cap off the needle. You need to desensitive to that damn needle. Play with it some. Suck water up with it and squirt it around, that kind of thing.
(2) Stuff one leg of a pair of your jeans or leggings with a towel of something so that it looks like your leg's in it. Give that leg shot after shot with the needle you use for your real shot. Do it for at least 5 mins straight, and if it still creeps you out keep doing it until it does not bother you. You can make get some extra mileage out of this by stabbing really violently, yelling ow!, anything to summon up some version of the creeped -out feeling. Maybe do this a few days in a row.
(3) Next step: figure out a way to sit in front of a mirror so that you can see yourself, & it looks like the stuffed leg is your leg. Like maybe hang a towel in front of your real leg, and hold the stuffed one in front of the towel. Have a stab fest, as above.
4) set 2 mirrors at right angles. When you sit in front of them, you'll see a left-right reversed version of youself. Hide one of your real legs and put the fake one on top as before. Let's say the fake one is your right leg. In the mirror, it will look like your left leg. Now give yourself shots in the fake leg while looking on the mirror. It will look like you're giving youself shots in your left leg, which you know is the real one, so should be creepier.
(5) Get a pack of the little syringes they sell on drugstores, I think for diabetics. The needle on them is maybe 1/4" long, & the needles are so thin they hardly hurt at all. Wash your hands and arms well & wipe them with rubbing alcohol, then stick yourself a bunch of times with that needle. You can start by just pricking your finger tip lightly, just enough to get a little drop of blood. If the blood creeps you out, put some on a piece of paper towel or something & leave it in view until it doesn't bother you any more. (By the way, I'm reasonably sure giving yourself multiple jabs with this tiny needly is safe and very unlikely to give you an infection, but maybe double-check with a medical professional before you do it).
After climbing this hierarchy, do not let any days elapse before you give your real shot, because the fear will start to come back. Keep doing these exercises up until the day of your next shot.
(6) On shot day, get up, have some coffee or whatever you like to start the day with, and give yourself the shot. Don't wait until you "feel ready," because you that time won't come, & waiting will just give you an opportunity to creep yourself out. Just do it immediately and smoothly.
I hope this does the trick. Wishing you well.
Gosh, that's a lot more specific and authoritative help than I was expecting to get! Thank you so much! I might not end up bootstrapping that entire sequence - suspect things will get better enough before reaching (6) - but just knowing I'm going in the wrong direction by spacing shots out rather than increasing frequency helps a lot. (I went from dose x weekly to dose 2x biweekly cause of the fear, but as you say, that's just doubling down on unproductive "feel ready".) I bet I can get a lot of mileage out of just doing shots first thing in the day rather than before bed; procrastination is fertile soil for fear and anxiety.
ACX subscription: not just self-recommending, but the investment pays for itself too. Such grateful, much appreciate, wow.
I'm glad to hear you feel optimistic about some version of this solving your problem. That in itself is quite a good sign.
As for ACX help: I asked here for help on a project of mine that requires some kinds of expertise I utterly lack, and got help from a medical professional and someone who understands how to publicize things.
Sometimes I daydream about having a help exchange on here in one of the threads with sections for people to talk up their blogs, look for people to date, etc. I often can give people helpful general information people about psychological issues. (But rarely anything specific like what I gave you. I felt safe giving you a desensitization protocol for injections only because it's a simple localized problem, & the worst plausible outcome of your following it would be that it didn't work, & then you'd be no worse off than before.)
I don't have any reason to act on this phobia myself, but I think it's worth saying that avalancheGenesis won't be the only one who benefitted from your post - it makes sense, and looks most useful.
Now I'm going to try to brainstorm ways to desensitize myself to other annoying microphobias I have, like falling 3-4 feet, or jumping narrow but deep gaps while hiking.
I'm glad to hear it's useful to others. Process is always the same -- start with miniature versions of the thing you fear, work up. For some fears there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of repetitively looking at images and videos online of the thing that creeps you out.
Interesting. That's might be a unique challenge for me, then, and now I'm wondering if you've run into this: given that my phobia of interest is falling from great heights, I *enjoy* watching videos of people doing high-up things like rock climbing, parkour on skyscraper roofs, radio antenna repairpeople, etc. I like the thrill. If I get used to it, well, thrill's gone, and I can watch a lot more thrilling videos than I'll have occasion to hike clifftops. So I might have to trade one mental feature for another!
Ever had patients with that decision to make?
Huh -- I replied from inside my email app when your comment came in, and it's not showing up here. Let me know if it didn't & I'll re-write it. Freakin Substack reply feature is buggy. Sometimes it cuts me off halfway thru a long reply & I lose everything I wrote.
Not sure what you mean. I don't know what comment I'm not seeing. :-) But I'm fairly sure that if you're not seeing it here, then it's not here for anyone else either.
I self-inject a monthly migraine prevention medication. My best "one weird trick" is to shout a "battle cry" just before the needle stick. My current one (inspired by me being in the process of listening to a bunch of political histories and royal biographies about Medieval/Renaissance England) is "FOR ENGLAND AND SAINT GEORGE!"
There was a period of about a year where I was often self-injecting daily into my thigh, & the needle was not short. At first I did it fast & powerfully, the way you do, though without the battle cry. Then I discovered that if I slid the needle in slowly the amount of pain was still small, & somehow the whole experience was calmer & less traumatic. For some reason I'd started out with the idea that you had to jab it in fast -- otherwise it wouldn't penetrate, or would hurt more, or -- or something. But that turns out to be totally untrue. However, I'm all for whatever works for somebody with things of this sort.
My med unfortunately is only available as an autoinjector these days, which only gives me the option of a rapid spring-loaded jab. It used to be available as a pre-loaded manual syringe, which I greatly preferred: both because I had better control over the injection with the syringe and because ironically I find the supposedly easier-to-use autoinjector more persnickety.
Oh, yeah, those auto-injector things. Used one a few times for a migraine rescue med. They always made me think of Russian roulette. You press the give-me-the-jab button & sometimes they go SNAP! & do it & sometimes they don't and sometimes you're not sure.
Hello,
If you know statistics, I have a maybe obvious question for you about the multiple testing problem.
I am reading a scientific paper in which the authors want to test a fairly large number of predictor combinations (about 100) with a data set of n=1000. The authors do a first step of selecting the predictors with a Lasso procedure ( Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). I understand (vaguely...) the procedure but basically, I don't see how it solves the problem of multiple testing: it seems to me that when you test a large number of predictors with a relatively small dataset, there is a high risk of false positives, even if you have done a predictor selection step. What is your opinion?
I do not see an obvious difference between testing 100 predictor within one model, getting 10 "significant" results with probably a large proportion of them being false positive, and selecting through a procedure (LASSO, stepwise regression, etc) before doing the analysis. Why wouldn't the LASSO procedure select exactly the same false positive?
I think the resolution is that the multiple testing problem isn't actually a problem. If you test more hypotheses, you should expect to get more false positives (and more false negatives, and more true positives, and more true negatives).
No I'm saying that such corrections weren't necessary in the first place - it's normal that the more science you do, the more false positives you will accumulate.
But you probably want to end up finding some way to distinguish the false positives from the true positives, since you eventually were hoping to learn something from the study instead of merely remarking on the fact that you ran 1000 comparisons and got 22 that seemed significant at 0.05.
Right - using multiplicity correction increases the stringency of your significance threshold which reduces your false positive rate at the cost of increasing your false negative rate. There is no reason why you should be happier to accept that tradeoff when testing more hypotheses than when testing fewer hypotheses.
Multiplicity correction defenders seem to say that if I pick a hypothesis X at random from among the 10 hypotheses I am interested in and test it and get a p value of 0.04, then that counts as a significant result... but if I then go on to test the other 9 hypotheses, then the first result stops being significant, regardless of the results of the other 9 tests. This is absurd.
The best I can say for multiplicity correction is that if researchers feel they have to do it, they will be disincentivized from wasting time by testing many dodgy hypotheses to increase their probability of lucking into a significant result. But it doesn't solve the underlying problem, because it doesn't stop 20 researchers each testing 1 dodgy hypothesis and coming up with on average 1 false positive between them. The more philosophically justified solution is to require stronger evidence to accept dodgier hypotheses on a case by case basis, regardless of whether those hypotheses happen to be tested by the same researcher or different researchers.
Could you just split the data into training and test datasets, do your exploration on the training data, and then validate it against the test dataset? Maybe show that you get the same result for many randomizations of the original data into test vs training?
I do not understand what you mean. Indeed, if you test more hypotheses, you should expect to get more false positives. How is that not a problem?
Analogously, if you play ten games of football, you can expect to lose more than if you play one game. But most people wouldn't see this as a problem.
I do think there's potentially an issue with the study you describe if it is using the same data set to decide which predictors to test as to actually perform the test, as that sounds like it risks double counting evidence. But I wouldn't agree with framing this as a multiplicity testing issue, since it isn't the multiplicity which causes the problem. Suppose that a second researcher looked at the same data and picked a single predictor at random without lassoing. I claim that if that second researcher performs the same test on that predictor and gets a positive result, then this positive result is no more reliable than a randomly selected one of the positive results that the original researchers got, even though the multiplicity problem has been fully eliminated.
I think that's true, but I suppose if your whole paper is only allowed to test 1 hypothesis, you'll pick something vaguely reasonable, while if you can test 100 you're probably throwing spaghetti against the wall (e.g., "this drug works but only in elderly Hispanic women"). Hence the expected fraction of true hypotheses is smaller.
I agree, but I think that's more of a self-discipline issue than a philosophy of mathematics issue.
Are the coefficients of interest the ones on the variables being selected via LASSO? If so, I agree that that seems very problematic for exactly the reasons you describe, although I also could be missing something obvious.
But e.g. if you ran an RCT and used LASSO to select covariates to control for, or if you were trying to do a predictive model and used LASSO to select the covariates that go into it, it would feel different to me -- in the latter case because you'd presumably have a hold-out testing set to see how you did, and in the former case because you're just using covariates to lower the variance of the treatment effects estimator (and LASSO gives you a data-driven way to pick covariates, so it limits your p-hacking!) rather than trying to interpret the coefficients on the covariates themselves. (The hypothesis tests on these covariates will still be "wrong" -- it's just that you shouldn't care about the results of those hypothesis tests.)
Thank you very much for your input. In the paper that I am reading, it is the first case: the coefficients of interest are the ones on the variables being selected via LASSO.
I ran a quick simulation in R, and it looks like the problem you're worried is definitely real -- with 1000 observations and 100 variables that didn't actually affect my dependent variable (everything was a standard normal), LASSO selected 7 to stay in the model. Of these, 1 was significant at the .1 level, three more at the .05 level, one more at the .01 level, and two more at the .001 level.
There's a discussion here that makes it seem like people are working on how to get correct LASSO errors (and maybe things are okay if you do Bayesian LASSO?), but it definitely seems like the standard errors from running OLS on the variables you select is wrong: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/91462/standard-errors-for-lasso-prediction-using-r
Wow, thank you so much for doing a simulation! I am really glad to have an answer to my question and very gratetful that you took the time to test the question. Many thanks :-)))
Any time!
Are they really testing 100 (combinations of many predictors, or 100 individual predictors - I didn't find this clear from your question) for 'statistical' significance? That's (IMHO) a dubiously useful thing to be doing at lot of the time, but in any case it's certainly not the only thing you might be doing. (You might, for instance, want to find a combination of predictors that together make good predictions.)
If they are testing, are they just testing the single result from the Lasso? They I don't know how easy that is to answer, though it looks like there's a bit of literature on the subject. If I run the following preliminary procedure "choose one predictor (or set of multiple predictors) at random", then do a test of that choice, I clearly have no multiple-comparisons problem. But if I run the procedure "choose the predictor (or set of predictors) with the largest empirical correlation", then run a final hypothesis test on the choice, then (roughly speaking) I've essentially just buried the full multiple-comparisons problem. But If I run some _other_ procedure to preselect variables, which isn't fully dumb but on the other hand is not purpose built specifically to select for statistical significance, isn't the answer going to be "somewhere [probably messily so] in between"?
(N.b. edited for clarification.)
I've developed a fear of flying. In particular I get stressed (adrenaline, sweaty hands) during minor turbulence. A year ago I had a 1/500ish bad flight. Recently found a life partner, may have 'more to live for'. What are some mental tactics to try? The two minor helpful I've found so far is repeating a Buddhist mantra and reminding myself if I ever chose to go to war I'd need to be calmer under larger uncertainty.
This sounds like a very promising thing to try, will check it out thank you!
I don't have a fear of flying, but I also recommend this youtuber. Very interesting channel and cool stories.
Yeah have been binging him last two days. Really good stuff
See if you can find a pilot to talk to about flying? I find my fears often get better if I learn more about something. Ask a pilot about what makes them want to fly, see if you can get a look in the cockpit etc. It's hard on a large jet, but on smaller regional flights I've found that pilots often enjoy talking about their profession. There are some great YouTube channels by pilots too.
What mantra do you use?
om tare tuttare ture soha
Any random collection of sounds would have worked equally (somewhat) well for me, this is just the first one I learned
https://www.yowangdu.com/tibetan-buddhism/green-tara-mantra.html
You might want to meditate, journal or do some other culturally equivalent practice to try to find out what's behind this fear. Does it happen especially at takeoff and landing, during turbulence, or is it the idea of flying that worries you? And what kind of person are you? Does more knowledge make you feel better? Do you trust statistics? Are you technically inclined? Are you afraid of dying in general? Are you comforted by the experiences of others? Do you accept the opinions of people in authority?
In my experience (forty years of flying), I find that this kind of fear falls into one of a number of different types.
First, is the person for whom the whole idea of flying doesn't make sense? Aluminium tube? Eight hundred km hour? How does it even stay up? You won't get me in one of those. Such people can be comforted by knowledge and flight simulators, by having aerodynamics explained and suchlike. In the old days you could even sit in the cabin.
There's another kind of person who just finds the whole thing frighteningly complex. All these things have to work properly. Look at how narrow the runway is and the airport is surrounded by buildings. Even a tiny error. All those aircraft coming and going. here, reading or watching videos about flight procedures can be very helpful, as can simple experience. Ok, it looks forbidding but it's possible.
There are people who feel vulnerable in anything they cannot control. You can't even see the pilot, you hear noises but don't know what they refer to. That's a case where you could reasonably work on *why* you fear the loss of control, and don't, by extension, trust others.
Then there are purely physical things. Turbulence upsets me, for example, because I have poor balance, and inner ear problems. I don't think we're going to crash, it just makes me feel bad.
And so on and so on. I really would encourage you to try to pin down a bit more exactly what it is you are afraid of. It's rarely the same thing in all cases.
Maybe getting one of those apps that plots your phone's accelerometer data would help with physical discomfort during turbulence. Give you an objective reference against which to interpret what your inner ear is telling you.
When I was a kid I was on a plane that hit such bad turbulence *while already angled downward on the landing approach* that a lot of people onboard started screaming and I thought I was about to die. I've been scared of flying ever since and now that I'm an independent adult will go to somewhat extreme lengths (long bus rides to make an amtrak connection, etc.) to avoid it. I sympathize and I hope you find something that works.
If I get anxious about turbulence, I usually just look at the flight attendants. For two reasons, really. One, they usually completely ignore turbulence. There is absolutely zero concern on their faces. Two, most of the ones I've seen seem pretty old. The fact that they've flown daily for 30-40 years and are still happy to do it suggests flying is pretty darn safe.
@turingelect
2 comments,
1- Bayes without intuition and awareness cannot be improved. (we need world class leaders)
2- We cannot forecast anything if we cannot prove that people are telling the truth and know/understand what they are voting for.
Physix solves this
https://physix.world/mainers/
ALASKA MEETUP?
Anyone interested in an impromptu ACT meetup on Saturday, August 13 in downtown Anchorage? I don't actually live there but will be visiting. Or, if you already run a meetup in Alaska, can I help you?
(I am coming from the meetup organizers' retreat and very enthused...)
I haven't seen this book ("Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks") ever quoted or referenced in the rationalist-sphere and I was wondering if it is worth to read considering that my goal is to improve forecasting and decision making skills. I am a completely novice in Bayesian networks and decision theory, so I am not sure if it is even the right book to start with. The authors of the book also sell a pretty expensive software, called AgenaRisk, which also I have never heard before.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh it's interesting that civilization and widening understanding is associated with difficulty running. See Enkidu's reaction to 2 weeks of mind-expanding love-making.
>But when he turned his attention to his animals,the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.Enkidu ... his utterly depleted(?) body,his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had broadened.Turning around, he sat down at the harlot's feet,gazing into her face, his ears attentive as the harlot spoke.The harlot said to Enkidu:"You are beautiful," Enkidu, you are become like a god.Why do you gallop around the wilderness with the wild beasts?"
Seems to be a problem to this day. "Inner voice while running" returns many hits on google about how to quiet our narrative. I wonder if increased inner narratization was a boon for civilization but a fitness hit for activities like running.
I've read that the harlot brings him out of the wilderness and civilizes him. Maybe becoming civilized has made him worse at doing animal stuff, like chasing prey.
Yeah, Adam has the same complaint. He was in Eden maxxing his Special Interest, naming animals. Big break once civilization and rumination hit.
I never quite got why sex was supposed to civilize him, though. All animals have sex, after all.
But do they MAKE LOVE?
hmm, maybe the concept of non-procreative sex does end up othering animals, you might be on to something!
I assume they were having fancy, big-city sex.
He didn't just have sex, he settled down.
This is one of those things that rings psychologically true from 3000BC to today; a man who settles down with a woman is happier but loses some of his power and energy.
It's not the sex, it's the whore. In Mesopotamian literature generally, whores are seen as an obvious fruit of civilization. Apparently, prostitution did not exist among semi-nomadic cattle drovers or whatever they were doing there before agriculture. And since they didn't have modern Western sexual morals basically at all, the prostitutes were apparently seen as an unalloyed positive of urbanism, maybe the way we would think of hospitals now. So the whore in this episode is a real serious Symbol of Civilization and Enkidu sleeping with her symbolically takes him into the city/human/artifice realm and away from his previous animal/wild/nature realm, which comes at the expense of his former wild-man powers.
interesting! Anything I can read on this?
About the Mesopotamian view of prostitution specifically? I have no idea, sorry. This is accumulated knowledge from reading commentaries to Mesopotamian texts (and the Bible, actually), layman's histories of Mesopotamia and stuff like that. If there's a Wikipedia page on Shamhat that's probably a good place to start looking for specifics.
A question for old farts like me. I'm getting near to taking Social Security (SS). When I read online all I see is that if you wait longer you get more per month.... about 8% more. However I see no discussion of how long you expect to live. Which seems wrong. At 8% it takes about 12 years for you to make up the money you missed by waiting a year. And if you only expect to live 10 more years, then you should take SS as soon as you can. I think the only cavet in this, is if you expect to keep working, and if you don't wait till 'full retirement age' then you lose some of your benefits if you make over some amount... though I'm not at all sure about this point. Any tax, SS experts here?
The problem with death is that it screws up the utilitarian calculations. On the one hand, you can't take it with you - but on the other hand, you don't want to under-estimate your longevity and wind up with less in your later years. I think the saner way to approach it is to ask what you really want & expect out of those years, then come up with a plan that maximizes your happiness in the normal scenarios while not immiserating you in the tail scenarios. Sometimes, like with buying insurance, it's worth taking a small expected loss in order to protect against the extremes.
The other problem is that most people aren't relying solely on SS, and so you have to look at how you want to manage your other resources & time. For example, if you have some money you might like to leave to your heirs, that might mean starting SS sooner rather than later.
I think it's probably a no-brainer to at least wait until you're no longer working (or waiting as long as possible). From what I understand, you don't exactly lose SS benefits themselves when you have other income, but your SS gets taxed at a higher rate so it winds up being similar.
Once you stop working, then, you should evaluate whether it makes sense to start taking SS now to save your other assets, or to wait until 70 to 'insure' against longevity, or something in-between. Your medical history can certainly inform that, if you think normal life expectancy doesn't apply.
Oh I'm totally happy and have enough money (AFAICT). I mostly plan to keep working as long as I enjoy it. And yeah if I thought I was going to live to 100 it would make sense to delay till I was 70. My dad died of a massive heart attach, asleep one night at age 72. Which TBH seems like a nice way to go... though I haven't experienced dying of a massive heart attack yet so I don't really know. Hey if I live longer than expected it's a win win for everyone. I take less money from the government and I live longer. I should say that the point of getting more money is to pass it on to my heirs (kids).
I read somewhere, though I can't find it now, that you (or this might just be me) will lose $1 of SS for every $2 of income I make over ~$20k. (So if my SS is $20k and I make $60k, I get no SS...) but don't quote me on that I could be totally wrong.
Random but a podcast called “Words and Numbers” had a episode on SS recently that was short and I enjoyed. Wasn’t directly related to your question but more about how we would fix it if people knew/cared and politicians cared about longterm health of SS.
OK, Can't we just roll back the minimum and 'full' ages of retirement?
Min is now 62 and full 67
And if I don't spend the SS money, but invest it at say 5% return, then waiting a year only gives me a 3% advantage and it takes ~30 years to catch up.
If Alex Jones had voiced his Sandy Hook conspiracy theory during only one episode of his show and then never mentioned it again, would he still be facing the massive lawsuit and having to declare his company bankrupt?
I'd guess not since the lawsuit started from the families being harassed. It would be much harder to claim that the source was one specific instance if the harassment was continuous.
I believe the current cases started after the statute of limitations passed for the original statements. I've heard about other lawsuits, but allegedly InfoWars got out of most because the families had no or inadequate representation, so they made missteps.
If you live in the Seattle area, there's going to be an ACX meetup this Wednesday (August 3rd). Free pizza for all participants (until supplies run out).
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
LW link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-ea-seattle-summer-meetup
"Reminder: if someone here asks a question, it’s a bannable offense to comment something like “the answer to this is obvious” or “I can’t believe anyone could not know the answer” without providing the answer."
Bless you. Seriously, I wish every public comment section or social-media type platform enforced that rule.
> 3: Reminder: if someone here asks a question, it’s a bannable offense to comment something like “the answer to this is obvious” or “I can’t believe anyone could not know the answer” without providing the answer.
I am normally not in favor of bans, but I am in favor of this. Though I'd make it a short-term ban to start with...
Any advice and/or resources regarding inpatient mental healthcare? Without going into too many details, a close family member of mine is having some severe mental health problems right now, to the point where we as family are afraid of self-harm. Money is not an issue, but I don't even know how to start evaluating options. Any advice? Thanks!
Where are you located?
I'm in Minnesota, but open to travel more-or-less anywhere (in the US).
Anyone have an argument for why a right to privacy is important? I have an emotional preference for it, but I get the feeling that the justifications I’ve given in the past were kinda post hoc.
Depends on what you mean by right to privacy, and what details you cover as keeping private.
Take something simple like your home address. If someone knows it, they can do anything from mail you glitter bombs to send SWAT after you. This is especially bad if you're some kind of public figure. For a lesser example, if a company has your address on file and gets hacked, it's that much easier for your identity to be stolen.
Something vague like web browsing habits are a little harder. You could theoretically get blackmailed for both bad things (cheating on partner) or arguably innocuous things (looking up LGBT stuff if you're in a deeply anti-LGBT family). I can't think of a hard reason why your 17 searches for homemade mayo has the same right to privacy other than that it's harder to make detailed rules about what should or shouldn't be protected.
Additionally, the more information you have on a person, the easier it is to identify them. For some examples, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification#Re-identification_efforts
Thanks! This came up in the context of data mining. Do you think data mining significantly contributes to our echo chambers? I was thinking we self select to such an extent that surveillance would have no effect. What do you think?
I don't think data mining for data mining's sake does. However, I do think data mining is part of it. A company such as Facebook has the goal of making money. Their model is entirely advertising driven, so a user spending more time on the site means more money for them. How can you get people to spend more time? By collecting lots of information on them to give them the "best" stuff to look at. Additionally, having more characteristics to use when targeting advertising is a plus for advertisers so they are more inclined to buy ad space.
I think the echo chambers arise from the "giving people the best stuff to look at part" and a flaw in how "engagement" is measured. A positive comment and a negative comment both look like engagement/time-on-site, but people are more likely to post negative things than positive ones. Eventually that turns into an us-vs-them scenario where more debated posts get pushed forward. Places like Reddit counter this with an actual upvote/downvote system, but places like Twitter only have the upvote/like part so any engagement is positive.
I'm not an expert on this, but that's my pet theory.
The fact that you have an emotional preference for it is enough to make it important, as you are not alone in feeling that way.
I can't prove that privacy has some innate objective importance, but I believe if you accept that intimacy (physical, emotional, or otherwise) is important, then I think you can conclude that privacy is important. To the extent that intimacy is sharing yourself with someone else in a special way you don't share with just anyone, we need privacy to be intimate with others.
Imagine if you had a screen on your forehead that broadcasted your innermost thoughts and emotions 24/7. Then sharing them with your lover wouldn't seem very intimate. You wouldn't be giving him/her privileged access to you in any way.
If you take self-determination as a cornerstone of all rights - which is my preference, but the reasons why are beyond scope - then the right to privacy emerges quite naturally.
Self-determination implies that nobody but the agent may choose how the agent is to act or not act. Therefore, the agent's actions - insofar as they do not impact another - are nobody's business.
This gives us the private/public distinction: the sphere of actions where other agents are directly impacted (one may always derive any number of epicycles necessary to show indirect impact, to the point of rendering self-determination moot) is the public sphere, where the various agents must coordinate in order to avoid conflict between their differing desires, and individual self-determination is constrained somewhat to leave room for everyone else; while the private sphere (where other agents are not directly impacted) remains the sole domain of the individual.
In practice, there tends a hierarchy of private/public wherein household matters are private with regards to wider society, whilst within the household different matters may be public or private with regards to its members (e.g. the kids should not ask about what sometimes happens in their parents' bedroom), etc.
Now, granted "privacy" is often taken to mean information rather than direct influence (indeed, this is also a meaning I use here), but if we take it as a given that (some of) my actions are none of your business (self-determination), then it follows that you have no business knowing about them either (generic you throughout, of course).
As a practical matter, how would we construct a world without privacy? As a super-panopticon where everyone watches everyone else all the time? It might provide an answer to who watches the watchmen, but what beyond that?
Either everyone watches, but nobody ever says or does anything - in which case: what's the point? Or - if they actually start to act on what they're seeing - we're back to the conflict of opposing teleologies wherein the right to self-determination is preserved by the last man standing.
In reality, of course, people calling for no right to privacy overwhelmingly mean "no privacy for *you*". "Privacy for *me*" remains as important as ever. This sort of asymmetry is incompatible with other basic rights such as that to equal treatment (itself a derivative of self-determination, incidentally), and ultimately results in the same sort of conflicts that we're trying to avoid through constructing a rights framework.
To sum up: if we take it as a given that people have no right to tell others what to do when the matter doesn't concern them, they *ipso facto* lack justified interest in knowing what the others *are* doing, unless it concerns them directly.
Moreover, privacy - like the entire framework of rights - is social grease to minimise conflict between agents possessing opposing teleologies, through minimising the exposed conflict surface (what you don't know, you can't get mad about).
EDIT: Proofreading.
Hypothetical question: There are two major social platforms you're considering joining with equal user bases, communities, and features. They only differ in two ways:
- Platform A will let you sign up with just an email address and password. You can use whatever display name you like. However, it has a rather strict policy about conduct on the site similar to ACX's but requiring all three pillars (kind, true, necessary). Passes are made for lighthearted jokes. Assume that the technology and logistical issues of knowing what's true or kind are somehow solved.
- Platform B has almost no conduct policy. As long as it isn't illegal, you are free to say what you will. However, you must fill out a form and have your identity verified before posting. Your profile picture must be a clear picture of you. Your full name and relative location (perhaps the 0.02 by 0.02 square block of coordinates you live in) are public on any post you make. You're not in danger of getting SWATted, but if someone knew you offline and read your post, they'd know for sure it was you who posted it. Posts are automatically deleted after 2 years. Assume that you cannot somehow fake your identity to get onto the website.
In other words, would you rather have stricter rules for posting but have more privacy, or would you rather be free to speak but must own your words publicly?
> Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches
(from: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/)
Unquestionable A. A's content moderation policy does sound stricter than I would prefer, but still better than having no moderation at all. And I definitely prefer the privacy - I barely post on Facebook as it is; for anything except the most innocuous topics, I would much rather post under a pseudonym.
A. I like some privacy, and I try to behave in an alright way anyway, so it doesn't seem like something that would feel too restrictive.
But of course which one to choose depends on what my specific needs and intentions around joining one of them at that time. What's freedom in one situation can be something that just gets in the way in another.
It would also be interesting to join both, intend to behave the same way, and see if there were any unexpected chafing from either, or how they affected what I chose to post. That assumes my intention in joining was not too specific, or it would probably not work.
Both/either.
The internet needs all sorts of sites. The day it becomes a monoculture is the day it dies.
That said, for me personally, the threshold for joining would certainly be much higher for platform B. But I have been known to post personally identifiable information online without too much hesitation.
Since realistically it's just *begging for trouble in loud capital neon letters* to join Platform B(luecheck), I'm forced to go with Platform A(nonymous). I imagine that there'd be significantly less content there than here, though; Scott postulates a hypothetically ideal three-legged stool of moderation, yet in practice it's allowed to fall over on the regular, since enforcement costs are too high otherwise. A place that actually took all three really seriously, all the time, and had no enforcement costs...well. I'd be a hell of a lot more reticent to post *pretty much anything*, honestly. (Necessary seems the hardest criterion to consistently meet.)
But I would prefer to inhabit a counterfactual world where Platform Bluecheck was the norm, and societal trust levels were high enough that all the dangers and harassments below SWATting were equally unlikely. If dath ilan ever allowed social media, it'd probably look something like that.
I didn't realize I'd aligned the letters that way! Hah!
I think I worded my choices poorly in a way that favored A for too many people. Assuming that random people wouldn't be finding and harassing you, but many of your friends/family/coworkers were on the site, would that change your answer? How strict would the moderation policy need to be for you to pick B over A?
Friends mostly all know I'm a <s>raging racist bigot who spouts nothing but conservative talking points</s> center-right libertarian, so whatever; family wouldn't like it, but I don't have a great relationship with any of them anyway. Coworkers are where I do start to worry, since At-Will Employment means I can be fired at the drop of a hat for no reason...and saying critical things about work is an unwisely large percentage of what I post on Substacks. Only thinly disguised by never directly naming the company or location, but it's super easy to figure out. I worry somewhat less about other grunts at my same hierarchy level, since I'm kind of an outlier pariah already, and those that do come to know my conservative views usually don't care overly much. (It's funny how being an unequivocally exceptionally talented worker earns bipartisan respect. Big Fish Small Pond effect.)
I suppose it'd also complicate dating somewhat, but...still a dateless virgin at age <mumbles>, so it's not like I'm sabotaging a bright future or curtailing current prospects. Can't lose anything if you already start at zero.
In terms of strict moderation...I think if those subjective three criteria got to the point of being *quantified*, especially by some blackbox algorithmic bullshit, then I'd B(ounce). It's very rare for me to find a community's Laws that are enforced in spirit more than in letter. Online rules are anti-inductive though; making them extra-legible frequently seems counterproductive, or at least it's a correlation I've noticed. One of those Internet Rules. Same thing happens with exacting "X strikes" policies. The inevitable consequence of gamifying systems is that people will try to game them.
Or more concretely: I can do Kind, and usually claim at least locally valid Truth, but am bad at Necessary. Possibly up to 50% of all my comments are running-my-mouth typing-from-the-hip, just me going around vaguely trying to build Niceness, Community, and Civilization by seeding hopefully fruitful conversations. They're not really *necessary* though. I'm rarely the most qualified person to answer others' questions on this blog. (Or even qualified period, honestly. I try to keep up with the class, but definitely still reach exceeding my intellectual grasp in obvious embarrassing ways too often. Guess the Teacher's Password, and all that...)
I think Necessary is a place where scrupulous minds get excessively hung-up- personally, I don't think that there has actually been a single "Necessary" post in the history of the internet, just like there's never been a "necessary" book, song, film, etc. I generally take it as an invitation to think twice and go "Yes, calling this guy a bellend is probably TRUE, and if I was being a bellend I'd want someone to call me out so it's KIND, but is it going to help construct a conversation or just mire it in name-calling?"
Helping other people learn new words to add to their ad hominem arsenal seems True and Necessary to me. Discourse is improved by using more creative insults, I feel. "Elegance is required in all things, even bellicosity"
But, yes, fair enough - if one feels Unworthy To Post in the first place, that's gonna make Necessary a big personal hang-up. I think if hypothetical Platform Anonymous had a...um...more...typical social media userbase compared to ACX...then probably I'd feel less Unworthy. That effect is a particular artifact of the SSC/ACX demographics being such strong outliers in directions where I'm mostly not. If a commentariat includes a lot more Jo Everyperson, then I'm more at home, and the average standard for Necessary is probably graded on a gentler curve. Otherwise there'd be no users and Network Effects would kick in. "how can it be social media if I'm not allowed to post cat pics?"
A, not for the witches, but for the pseudonimity. There is plenty of things that I want to say/write (and can be deemed true & necessary, if not kind), are not illegal (outside of the UK, I guess), but still don't care to see tied to my name for every hostile agent to see.
IUD (copper coil in uterus) vs IUS (progesterone-releasing thing in uterus): which is better?
Uninformed or informed opinions both welcome; preferably labelled.
Fairly uninformed opinion (passing on anecdotal experiences from friends, no personal experience nor have I done a deep research dive):
The copper one makes some people's periods way worse. If this happens to you, it is very unpleasant and keeping it is pretty much intolerable. If this doesn't happen to you, it generally has less overall side effects.
The progesterone one is quite likely to cause the same sorts of relatively minor side effects as hormonal birth control (weight gain, breast sensitivity, mood changes, etc.). This is generally more annoying than the good outcome with the copper one, but less annoying than the bad outcome.
I don't know anything about how predictable reactions to the copper one are (i.e., whether there's any way to tell if you'll react badly other than getting it implanted and finding out).
Seconding this entirely, this is my understanding also. If you can handle the non-hormonal IUD it's better because it doesn't fill your shit up with exogenous hormones, one of few forms of birth control which don't. Some women can't deal, however.
(EDIT to add source: had an ex-girlfriend who was brutalized by the pill and opted to switch for this reason)
Thirding. My wife didn't well tolerate the IUD and went back to the pill. A few years and an unplanned pregnancy later, she forcefully suggested I take care of things surgically.
I'm not sure if my opinion qualifies as informed; I'm not a doctor. But I've seen studies, and I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence.
If I had a daughter, I'd do my best to convince her not to use a hormonal contraceptive, unless she absolutely must. Here's why.
1. Many women on hormonal contraceptives are made miserable by headaches, depression, and other problems. If you look at studies, you'll see also that many women drop out before the end of the study.
2. There's research showing that hormonal contraceptives mess with brain structure. (Other hormones also affect the brain structure, so it's not really a surprise.) I don't know enough about this, but it sounds like something to be wary of.
3. If you're unlucky, you might get one of the serious side effects, and you might even die. (I knew someone who nearly died.)
4. Hormonal contraceptives have been very widely promoted by people whose motivations are suspect. This suggests that everyone's perceptions of them are likely to be wildly skewed and a lot more favorable than they should be, due to negative information likely not being widely publicized or being glossed over. As if points 1-3 above weren't enough already, I'd say this should also make you suspicious.
I know some women can't tolerate copper IUDs. But for those who can, they look like a much safer bet.
When you say, "by people whose motivations are suspect," whom are you referring to?
I'm doing my best not to get a flame war started here, so lets not.
I mean people who use women's health as political football, e.g. (but by far not only) a certain recent president one of whose major achievements was passing a law giving all women free oral contraceptives. I don't object to the coverage itself (especially compared to the rest of the law), but I object to the shameless promotion, as I'm pretty sure this skews media's coverage and people's perceptions of not only benefit, but also safety. I object to normalizing something that people should really understand the risks of and problems with before using it.
Fair enough! I have no desire to argue anything political or culture war-ish. I just wanted clarification on an ambiguous phrase.
They both suck in different ways, as does all birth control, haha. I've had both but do not currently have either. I'm also not medically trained, and my experience is anecdotal but somewhat informed by general interest in the reproductive system.
I had a hormonal IUD first and I had it removed after less than a year because it triggered chronic migraines. (It also gave me periods that were very light but twice as long, which I would have put up with were it not for the headaches.) I'm also sensitive to other hormonal BC and I already got occasional migraines, so although the headaches are the worst BC side effects I've had, they weren't exactly a surprise. I tell you all this because I think a person who has been on other types of hormonal BC could probably estimate their likelihood of having issues based on their experiences with other methods. If you tolerate hormonal BC well but want a long term invisible option, it would probably be fine.
I had the copper IUD put in when I had the hormonal IUD taken out. After about 6 months my body rejected it and I had it yanked out in an ER (edited to add: it didn't perforate my uterus or anything, but my body started to push it out through my cervix). I didn't get another one because I concluded (somewhat superstitiously) that my body just didn't want an IUD. If my body hadn't rejected it, I would have put up with the slightly-heavier periods because I liked being on a long-term non-hormonal BC.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html#comments
Charles Stross and his commenters look at what might be a crime against uploaded people.
I'm inclined to think it might be a crime to create an AI which doesn't have knowledge of the material world.
Last one of these for a while, for the sake of not polluting the threads - many thanks to the community for all its engagement so far, and to Scott for his indulgence of us.
My partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf, for anyone who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages.
You can check it out here https://www.imsurf.in/
Great requests from 11 countries, and from ACX users and beyond, on there already!
What's your favourite crackpot theory (regardless of whether you believe it or not)?
Mine is that Morgan Freeman is actually Jimi Hendrix who faked his death and took on a new identity.
Astral projection always seemed cool to me. I'm 99.7% sure it's fake and/or a form of lucid dreaming, though.
Nukes are fake. Ok, not "fake" fake, but am I supposed to believe the stuff made of radioactive material, left unused for decades, untested for the last 30 years outside of computer simulations, would still be working as intended? Even more for the arsenals of countries that underwent financial hardships, such as Pakistan or Russia, or those that underfunded their military for decades, such as France.
But nobody is going to admit it, of course.
The half life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years, and of uranium-235 is 700 *million* years.
I do find most of your comment plausible, just not because of the "made of radioactive material" part.
The suspect radioactive material is tritium, which is used in "boosted fission" designs where a relatively small amount of deuterium-tritium fusion is used as a neutron source to increase the efficiency of turning plutonium into boom. Tritium decays into Helium 3 with a half-life of 12.3 years, and while He3 is also a potential fusion fuel, D-He3 fusion throws off protons instead of the desired neutrons. The net result is that unless the He3 is regularly filtered out and replaced with fresh tritium, the bomb will fizzle and go off with only a small fraction of its designed yield.
My understanding is that boosted fission designs are ubiquitous in modern nuclear arsenals, both for efficiency of nuclear material production and because a boosted fission design can be made much more compactly (fitting better in a MIRV warhead or other delivery mechanism) than pure-fission weapons of similar yield. Even full-on Teller-Ullman H-Bomb designs that get most of their yields from a fusion secondary stage (which produces its own tritium from stable lithium as part of the explosion process) will typically use a boosted fission design for the "fission" primary that sets off the secondary.
Yeah, I was thinking of fission bombs and had completely forgotten that fusion bombs existed.
Right, but this is something everybody understands, that can be trivially measured and corrected for. And everybody who maintains nuclear weapons, has a nuclear-weapons budget that can easily afford enough tritium to top up the reservoirs.
I suppose it's possible that corruption in the Russian military has left someone out in the cold, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons they're responsible for maintaining but barely enough money to afford the colonel's dacha and mistress, so they just deliver fake readiness reports for actually-useless nukes. But those would almost certainly be the weapons in the reserve stockpile, not the warheads of operational missiles.
True. I seem to recall carping in the lmid-90s that the Clinton Administration had skimped on tritium replacement and other nuclear arsenal servicing costs, but I'd guess that was more in the nature of postponing servicing a year or two past optimal rather than letting the weapons become nearly useless.
Also, my memories of highly technical defense policy issues from 25ish years ago when I was in high school may be a little fuzzy.
My favorite is definitely this theory of how antiquity was faked, and everything ascribed to antiquity actually happened in the Middle Ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
Related to that, I've found the Phantom Type Hypothesis intriguing since I first heard of it. The short version is that the reason there's so little archaeological and documentary evidence of the 7th through 9th centuries AD in Europe and the Near East is that most of that time period didn't actually happen. Specifically, everyone lost track of what year it was around 614 AD (the height of the last great Byzantine-Sassanian war and a bit of a nadir for the Gothic and Frankish successor states to the Western Roman Empire), and then a few generations latter when things had come back together, the HREmperor Otto III, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, and Pope Sylvester II cahooted together to standardize the calendar to make the then-present year the auspicious round number 1000 AD that they could use to propaganda advantage by tying in the things they were trying to do at the time with millennial prophecies. This was off by almost 300 years from the "real" calendar, causing a bunch of "mythical" history (most notably the entire Carolingian period) to get promoted (augmented by forgery as needed) to fill in the gaps. This can even be made to work with British, Viking, and Muslim sources if you don't look too closely, since there are big gaps in the historical record in those places as well at around the same time period, and modern scholars have had to expend considerable effort sifting out actual history from myth and legend: one could suppose that these areas also lost track of what year it was and contemporary chroniclers and later historians used Byzantine and European sources
Where this conclusively falls apart, besides being wildly implausible and a lot of the details not quite lining up, is that there's no proposed explanation for Chinese and Indian sources being in on the scam, and there are several anchor points both inside the proposed phantom time period (most notably the Battle of Talas between Abbasid Persia and Tang China) and outside it (several plagues that ran along the silk road and various comets, eclipses, novae, and other celestial events that are attested in both European and Asian records) that fail to show a ~300 year discrepancy.
Beautiful. Thank you for the detailed summary!
Is it known why there are gaps in the historical records just around that time, as compared to before? Is it wars, migration, societal collapses, natural disasters, destruction of sources?
In other words, why did the Dark Ages happen?
Scott made a whole post about the fact that they did happen, as opposed to not happening:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
But why? Why were there Dark Ages?
Well, that is the million dollar question of European history.
I'm no historian or expert or history buff, so I can't explain anything, but I would like to mention (not argue for, not lay out, not detail, just *mention*) the most interesting explanations I've heard. More than one can apply.
Explanation one: the rise of Islam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_and_Charlemagne
Explanation two: a chain of events triggered by climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age
Explanation three: a chain of events triggered by Roman conquests. The Romans conquered a Mediterranean that was already prosperous and sophisticated, and then everything started to go south very slowly, because Roman rule was destructive, and the eventual effect of this were the dark ages.
That last one isn't something you usually hear, but I remember that 15 or 20 years ago I came across a page that laid it out in a beautiful, detailed and convincing way. I've always regretted not bookmarking it.
Substack won't show me the end of your comment for some reason, but to respond to the part I can see:
The original meaning of the Dark Ages was that, in the early middle ages, the region that had been the Western Roman Empire was poorly documented and therefore "dark", meaning it's hard for historians to see.
It can't be because of Islam, because the Dark Ages were well underway when Islam started. Also Islam hit the eastern empire earlier and harder than they hit what had been the west.
I don't buy your explanation #3 either; it was the eastern Mediterranean that was prosperous and sophisticated before the Romans, but it was the west that went dark. The west benefited hugely from Roman rule, and suffered hugely from the loss of Roman rule. The big question is why the western empire fell, which might well be your explanation #2.
The Greek East during the early Middle Ages (aka the dark ages) was much less sophisticated than it had been during classical antiquity. So I don't think that the notion that "it didn't go dark" refutes those theories. It did go a little dark.
It makes sense that, at the lowest point, the West would be worse off than the East, because the West had always been economically and culturally inferior to the East, and much of the prosperity of Italy was a "fake" one derived from forcibly diverting the resources of other regions.
People tend to think that from the fall of Rome follow the Dark Ages. But the fact that the East also declined suggests that there's more to the onset of the Dark Ages than that. I'm no historian but I suspect it's more helpful to frame it the other way around: from the gradual onset of the dark ages follow the "fall" of the West and the decline of the East. This is compatible with the explanations 2 and 3, while 1 alone does not explain the fall of Rome but can help explain the stagnation of both East and West.
My understanding is that it was probably a combination of factors leading to a general remission (not quite collapse, but definitely well in that direction) of the kind of complex, urbanized, literate civilization that leaves decent historical records.
At the super-macro level, the Dark Ages were the nadir of a multi-century decline from a peak around the second century AD (the late Principate phase of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, particularly the Five Good Emperors period). Things had gone rather to pot during the Crisis of the Third Century, got patched back together somewhat by Diocletian, Constantine, and Julian, and then fell apart again with the Vandal, Hun, Gothic, and Frankish invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries. Some degree of Romanesque urban culture and long-distance trade networks persisted under the "Barbarian" kingdoms and especially in the surviving Eastern Empire, but the overall trend was downwards for a combination of political/military and demographic reasons.
There was another round of big shocks in the 6th century, with the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain (which went almost completely dark at this point, to the point where modern historians are like "we're pretty sure this guy was a King because he got buried with a bunch of cool stuff, and that's pretty much all we know about him" and "Beowulf has many shortcomings as a historical source because it's almost completely made up, the monsters and the dragon being a bit of a give-away, but it's what we've got so here goes..."), the Justinian/Belisarius/Narses wars of Roman reconquest in Italy and North Africa (which pretty much wrecked the Vandal and Ostrogoth successor kingdoms to the Western Roman Empire, at ruinous cost in blood and to the Eastern Roman Empire), and the Plague of Justinian which killed something like 20-40% of the urban populations of the affected areas.
Then in the seventh century, we get several more waves of bubonic plague (often lumped together with the Plague of Justinian and its immediate aftershocks as the "First Plague Pandemic") along with stuff like the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628 where both of the Middle Eastern superpowers (the Byzantine [or Eastern Roman] Empire and the Sassanian Persian Empire) spent almost 30 years completely wrecking one another with the odd internal throne war here and there for a change of pace.
And then a bunch of mostly-illiterate desert nomads decided to unite under the banner of a charismatic prophet and invade the weakened Byzantine and Sassanian Empires not long after that war ended. These desert nomads wound up conquering big chunks of the Byzantines, pretty much all of the Sassanian, and went on to also conquer most of the Visigoth kingdom and also launch a massive raid into Frankish territory. The Muslim conquests also completely disrupted what was left of the Roman trade system in the Mediterranean, which indirectly drove further de-urbanization in places like
Francia.
The Muslims did develop into a highly sophisticated and learned culture, of course, but this didn't happen right away, so there was a century or two of very sparse historical records while stuff came back together. Byzantine civilization bounced back as well under the Macedonian Dynasty, as did the Franks under Charlemagne, but Phantom Time theorists dismiss these as historicized legend.
"The Muslim conquests also completely disrupted what was left of the Roman trade system in the Mediterranean, which indirectly drove further de-urbanization in places like Francia."
Can you please explain in what way Muslim expansion disrupted trade and caused people far away to leave cities? It's interesting but in my ignorance I don't get it. You wouldn't expect conquest to disrupt trade over a scale of multiple generations. When the Romans were conquering the world, trade was still going on across Europe and the Mediterranean, right?
"At the super-macro level, the Dark Ages were the nadir of a multi-century decline"
That a prosperous ancient world would just decline and almost collapse goes against all intuition of what should happen. So, ultimately, why did it happen? Pointing to specific waves of invasions and civil wars just describes *how* it happened. There must be a greater reason, one, in your words, at the super-macro level.
Most of the remaining big cities in the former Western Roman Empire were dependent on the surviving portions of the Roman Mediterranean trade system for their reasons for being: i.e. they were hubs for trade, industry (artisanship), and commerce on that network. They'd buy and make local goods for export to elsewhere in the network, and they'd act as distribution hubs for import. If the trade network goes away, so does most of the reason for those cities' continued existence.
The network at that time was heavily weighted towards the Eastern Roman Empire, which had survived the 4th and 5th centuries much more intact than the West and which had been richer than the West for some time before that, and in addition there was significant amount of trade through the ERE to places further East: particularly Persia, India, and China.
Now, the ERE got gutted by the Muslim conquests and the trade routes that pass through Muslim territory were largely cut off for some time. The devastation of war played a major role, since the conquests took the form of several multi-year waves of sieges and harrying over the course of a century or two. And while these wars were going on, trade through the active war zones tended to be rather limited. Furthermore, it took some time for the conquerors to settle down and rule in a way that's conducive to the recovery of trade networks: early on, the new Bedouin overlords' idea of taxation of conquered peoples was little more than giving receipts after pillaging. They started trying to resurrect something like the Byzantine and Sassanian systems of Poll and Land Taxes within the first generation, but it took quite a bit longer to get the details workable as a lot of institutional knowledge and state capacity hadn't survived the conquest. And the pump of Imperial taxation turning administrative centers (especially Constantinople) into major markets for imported goods got turned down quite a bit as the ERE lost most of its territory outside Greece and Anatolia: without that sweet, sweet tax money from Egypt and Syria, Constantinople can't afford to import anywhere near as much goodies from Marseilles and Barcelona.
>There must be a greater reason, one, in your words, at the super-macro level.
That's a huge open research area, with several credible proposals being debated. The big ones I know of:
1. Climate cycles: the early Roman Empire happened under particularly favorable climactic conditions for high crop yields in the Mediterranean with Classical agricultural tech, termed the "Roman Warm Period". This reversed around the 5th century AD, followed by a couple centuries of unusually unfavorable climate, termed the "Late Antique Ice Age".
2a. The Classical world was largely a victim of its own success, with trade routes growing to span Eurasia. The former lead to an exchange of diseases between Rome, Persia, India, and China, kicking off cycles of recurring pandemics of diseases like smallpox, measles, and eventually bubonic plague. These weren't quite as devastating to Europe as the same diseases were when Europeans introduced them to the Americas a millennium or so later, but they weren't great for Europeans either.
2b. The growth of strong Classical empires lead to destructive military competition where they butted up against one another, particularly between Rome and Persia. Rome in particular didn't have the resources long-term to defend Hadrian's Wall, the Rhine-Danube frontier, and the Persian frontier, so they eventually abandoned the former two to secure the latter. But this was in the longer-term counterproductive since it moved the centers of gravity of the two Empires closer together so they beat one another up more intensely than ever.
3. My personal favorite: Rome in particular never really recovered from the Crisis of the Third Century. The institutions that had made the Principate and the Late Republic pretty much collapsed, and the ham-fisted centralized replacements instituted by Diocletian and Constantine largely served to sacrifice long-term growth and posterity in order to restore medium-term stability.
Thank you so much for the history lesson. I really appreciate it.
I feel bad taking so much of your time over this. I am going to read up on some of the events you mentioned. (If anything immediately comes to mind on what I should read or what not, I'd appreciate it, but I don't want to take more of your time on this.)
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
As to sources to seek out, I heartily recommend Philip Daileader's "Great Courses" lecture series on the Early Middle Ages. It's excellent in both style and content, and his account starts with the Crisis of the Third Century in order to fully set the stage.
As for sources to avoid, Tom Holland's "Shadow of the Sword" about the origins and rise of Islam should be read very critically if at all. It's well-written, and has a lot of good stuff about the early Muslim conquests of Byzantine and Persian territory and their aftermaths, but his thesis on the origin of Islam (that Mohammed is best understood as a mythical figure and most of the story of his life and teachings was invented retrospectively by Muslim theologians a couple centuries later to explain myths and doctrines that had developed organically from late Roman-era Jewish and Christian heresies) is very far outside the mainstream and Holland severely overstates his arguments for it.
And now that Moldbug reminded me of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, my *second* favorite crackpot theory is the Crollalanza theory of Shakespeare authorship.
Remote viewing. The fact that it would be so world transforming if it existed, coupled with the "recently revealed secret government program" nature of its history, makes it fun.
Just found out one which blows all others out of the water:
Jesus fled to Japan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_bloodline#Jesus_bloodline_claims_in_South_and_East_Asia
Is there a simple way to see who replied to my comments on Substack?
There is https://substack.com/activity which is a mix of "liked your comment", "replied to your comment" and "also commented", but for some reason it only shows the things that happened 2-4 months ago, but doesn't show the things that happened e.g. last week.
"for some reason it only shows the things that happened 2-4 months ago, but doesn't show the things that happened e.g. last week."
I think this is either a plain bug or some setting which counterintuitively exists and which you toggled. I just looked at that page (hitherto unknown to me) and it shows a list of my activity in reverse chronological order from my most recent comment on down.
Just my luck I guess. :(
I have the same problem!
"The Hard Problem of Conscientiousness"
So there are pros and cons to all of the Big 5 personality factors. I notice that a recurring theme at my job is a serial deficit of Conscientiousness. This manifests as widespread poor time management, inattention to detail, shoddy maintenance of communal areas/property, noncompliance with "ought to know" basic rules (e.g. keeping cold stuff refrigerated), etc. As a Lawful person who scores high on this factor, I find the Chaotic environment deeply distressing, even if the individual people making it up are usually pleasant. It's fairly common that I end up in a sort of disorganizational paralysis, where the annoyance is so high that I can't get any real work done until I've sorted, cleaned, tidied, etc. to make a Sane Work Area. Sometimes swearing is involved. (Yes, I'm Neurotic, Disagreeable, and low-Openness too. Thanks autism.)
On the one hand, this tendency runs all the way through to the top level of management at the store I work (other branches necessarily aren't like this). So it is a sort of trickle-down of what I'd consider bad unproductive habits, as no one important is setting a good example. I realize these are stiff headwinds to act against. On the other hand - this is a hill I feel compelled to die on? One of the major unifying factors in us continually setting huge piles of Value on fire. I try to be the change I wish to see, every day, but no one takes me for a role model. It just doesn't feel like too many people are motivated to Make Things Run Well, unless it coincidentally involves avoiding punishment. The incentives aren't aligned to work efficaceously, either, since there's minimal accountability anyway.
I guess I am just wondering if this is part of Growing Up that I'm refusing to grok. Especially living in a very liberal area, where Conscientiousness in general isn't highly prevalent or in demand. It feels wrong not to aim for efficiency and maximal profit...let no Value be destroyed that doesn't have to be, and all that. But the world keeps on turning each day anyway. So maybe in the big picture, we are so wealthy that it doesn't make much difference about not capturing/destroying Value. "I get paid by the hour" mindset. That feels wrong...but maybe it's the only sane way to live? (Or just a poor environment fit for me.)
This may not be terribly helpful, but it sounds like you are simply a poor fit for your workplace (yes, there are times where "poor fit" is actually meaningful). There's nothing inevitable about how your workplace functions, but - to be fair - there's nothing fundamentally Good, True and Beautiful about your approach either. Instead, you and your co-workers have arrived at different normative judgements starting from the same brute facts.
I do want to focus on one thing you wrote:
> One of the major unifying factors in us continually setting huge piles of Value on fire.
(I assume you meant o say "is us continually etc.", because you don't mention any factors, hence it seems like the Value-burning *is* the factor. The following applies in any case.)
You can't, in a very real sense, set huge piles of Value on fire because "value" is a normative judgement. That something is offhandedly discarded/destroyed itself demonstrates it to be held of little value.
In other words, your co-workers have a different concept of what is valuable than you do, and so long as that persists you will remain unhappy. It is generally difficult to persuade someone that something is valuable (unless you can demonstrate it to be exchangable for something they already hold valuable at a good rate), so don't expect to persuade them by example.
You'd probably be best off finding a job with a workplace culture that's more compatible with your preferences.
I think that's probably accurate. It's the workplace I have (first real job ever, to be honest), and is super convenient in many ways (e.g. under 15 minute commute, even if walking, from a <$750/mo room), so I'm willing to do a lot to make myself fit in the round hole...at a certain point it's way too much sanding the edges off though. Maybe I just can't fit ever, and shouldn't try.
The factor would be lack of conscientousness, according to the Big 5 Personality Factors model. So yes, "in us".
By Value, I mean...well, it's a for-profit company in a capitalist economy, so mostly money. Not always directly money, because people will put up with a lot of abuse to buy necessities like groceries. But it's entirely possible to assign a monetary cost to alienating customers, demoralizing employees, harming company reputation, and so on. Sales foregone one day aren't really made up for on following days...the people who couldn't buy an out of stock product don't come tomorrow and then buy twice as much. They only buy once, or they find a substitute at some other business. So really, every single day is a recurring string of limited-time opportunities that one ought to capitalize on as often as possible.
Whether it's neglecting to sell product cause it wasn't available, or having to pull expired product cause one didn't properly rotate the stock first, there is always some money left on the table at the end of each close of business. I just feel like minimizing that is really important, cause in a competitive industry, no company can ever get so comfortable as to coast along on inertia. We've already been bought out once before by private capital, and I have no illusions about being sold off again if our fundamentals slip too much. There is a real danger in not seeing the forest for the trees - that covid-related demand shifts mask an underlying rot and malaise. At some point, there won't be any more political capital to take for granite about being an Essential Business selling Necessities; customers are gonna hold us to the same standards they did in 2019. If we are still bumbling about Chaotically at that point, well, God help us.
I don't feel like this was at all an inevitable outcome...it's something I've seen coming at each turn, but have been largely powerless to do anything about. It takes someone able to see, to be able to point out that the blind leading the blind leading the blind is maybe a bad idea. (One doesn't recognize brain drain without having a drainable brain in the first place. Most of our employee exodus has been skilled veterans like me, who tried to Care and got similarly smacked down.)
Anyway...point taken. Maybe *I'm* the asshole, to use an Internet turn of phrase. Although I do notice even my non-conscientious coworkers are not, in fact, happy. They too think the job sucks bigly and are not that pleased with the constant dysfunction, despite contributing to it majorly (in my view). It's a bad Nash equilibrium all around, where no one has quite enough incentive to shift their own behaviour for the better net good. Maybe I can find somewhere else that hasn't fallen into such a trap in the first place.
When I leave a job, I often wish I had some "spy" left in place who would tell me, 5 or 10 years later, what happened afterwards, and which of my predictions were correct. I usually don't have such information source, because the former colleagues I stayed in contact with usually also quit in a few years. In the few situations where I had such source, the results were various. For example:
a) The problem I predicted turned out to be real, but not damaging for the company as a whole. Yes, a few smart people got frustrated and quit, but more equally smart people were hired. A project or two failed predictably, but more projects were started. As a whole, the company seems very successful and growing.
b) A few decades later the company exists almost unchanged: still has the same problems, the employees who stayed are still frustrated, but the company keeps generating money, so... from the perspective of the owner, everything is okay, I guess.
c) After a few people quit, the company woke up and fixed the stupid problems. Now everything seems okay.
d) The disaster I predicted and couldn't avoid happened 100% as I expected. The entire project was a failure, the company lost a lot of money and had to sell a fraction of ownership to survive. Since then, the company seems doing great.
Note that missing from this list is "the company went out of business". In my experience, no matter what degree of dysfunctionality, this never happens. Which is weird, considering how competition is supposed to work.
My current best guess is this: most companies fail at the beginning. If they somehow manage to survive a few years, the best bet is that they will keep existing, no matter how horrible they may seem to people such as me and you. Because they are doing something right that happens to outweigh all the things they are doing wrong. (Could any economist please confirm or disconfirm my guess?) In worst case, someone else buys a company or its part, and fixes some of the worst aspects of it, but not necessarily all of them.
So... my advice is to move elsewhere if you are dissatisfied, but not worry about the company. Companies can survive surprising amounts of apparent dysfunction. I think there is a 80-90% chance your company will still be in business 10 years later (possibly with a new owner).
Yeah...I don't think the company will fold, or even that particular location (supposedly #3 top grossing in the country, there are also rumours of building a new 3k unit apartment complex right next door, which would ensure basically permanent prosperity). Probably most of what I and others criticize doesn't even affect the bottom line that much. But I'd still maintain there's a lot not captured in official accounting figures, assuming they even are kept totally honestly...there are so many things we don't put an official price on, with employment, cause they're externalities.
Being a major job-creating magnet/anchor store. Giving people positive, resume-reinforcing employment vs spirit-crushing "wasted my time, embarrassed to have worked here". Maintaining the community character, a sense of regularity and anchoring steadiness (we have a lot of regulars where shopping here is the highlight of their day/week). Pipelining future generations towards or away from the labour movement (we're right next to a noteworthy college that attracts young impressionables from across the globe, they're the bulk of our hires and often customers). And so on.
I guess that's a roundabout way to say that, my workplace used to be a Shining Store On A Hill to me and many others, the one bright spot in our otherwise shitty dysfunctional life that was like a second home. But it's slid so far downhill since then. Covid shifts couldn't be helped, we muddled through that like every other company in the world...but even beyond the forced-hand changes, upper management's continued ratcheting-up of making the place hospitable has been deeply disturbing. Maybe the profits keep coming, but I've seen the human cost over and over and over...watched literally hundreds of people leave in just 4 years. They weren't all Dear Comrades, some I don't miss whatsoever, but so many of them really were unapologetically just...fucked over. It hurts and I wish it would stop.
10 years later: Meet the New Company, same as the Old Company. At least on paper. But what's actually inside is completely different. I worry that recapturing "the magic" is at this point simply impossible, and that too many either can't see that or simply don't care. This would be my main motivation to unionize - not because I'm particularly anti-capitalist or pro-labour, but because I want management to stop digging the hole deeper. To stop chasing out my friends and, yes, loved ones. I want to be proud of where I work again.
(fuck, writing that made me tear up irl. I guess it does bother me a lot more at the emotional level no matter how much I try to rationalize away the pain. maybe the best move really is not to play anymore, to leave.)
I've been thinking about how good social environments are *fragile*. They're unlikely to last, and it would probably be worth studying the ones that do.
This is true in general. But specifically in context of a job, your social environment is just something that your next manager can choose to sacrifice in return for a temporary increase of profit, which would bring him a bonus and a promotion.
The company is there to make a profit, not to make you happy. Sometimes, making employees happy is a side effect of trying to be profitable -- happy employees are less likely to quit, willing to stay even if they could get a higher salary elsewhere, you don't have to hire and train the new ones -- but sometimes you can increase the profit by taking their happiness away.
I try to keep my hopes outside of my job. Like, if the job is nice, that is great, but if I allow it to become a pillar of my emotional balance, I am very likely setting myself up for an unpleasant surprise.
For example, I try to avoid teambuilding and similar stuff, and instead socialize with my friends who *aren't* my colleagues. Because those friends will remain an emotional support in my life even after I quit my current job. Some of my friends are my former colleagues... but most of my former colleagues I have never seen again after changing my job.
> This would be my main motivation to unionize - not because I'm particularly anti-capitalist or pro-labour, but because I want management to stop digging the hole deeper.
That is a very good reason to unionize, IMHO.
It sounds like you would be happier in operations management at an organization that values it, perhaps in logistics or supply chain management.
Whether people like their jobs is a big quality of life issue, so it might make sense for you to look for work in an environment that suits you better, maybe even a transfer to another store at the same company.
I'm a little surprised at identifying lack of conscientiousness with liberalism, but I suppose It Depends. My bet is that it's more about personalities at the top than about political orientation.
>I'm a little surprised at identifying lack of conscientiousness with liberalism
Liberals and Tories get conscientious about really different things usually. If you don't take the time to think about examples of your own side being unconscientious, then you'll automatically assume the other one is correlated with unconscientious behaviour.
I started writing this comment thinking "Obviously it's true!" but then was able to think up enough counter examples that liberals would think were unconscientious.
For instance; Liberal voters will think nothing of piling another X hundred billions of dollars of debt onto unborn children so that they can spend more on old people today.
I consider this extremely unconscientious.
But as a counter example, Liberal voters probably think the same thing of Tory voters unwilling to pay $10 a gallon for gasoline to help slow sea level rise.
I would expect a progressive company to be conscientious about water and energy and such.
I don't know what sorts of waste/destruction avalancheGenesis is angry about, though there's certainly enough incompetence in businesses to go around.
Gosh, I'd be so much happier to work at a counterfactual company that cares about water and energy. We super don't. One of the baffling things about living in bluetopia SF, home of frivolous CEQA environmental review lawsuits, is...how sloppy people are in everyday actual practice of environmentalism. Leaving fridge and freezer doors open, wasting food (Everyone Knows CA agriculture uses up 90% of the water supply, why do we not better shepherd its hard-won treasures), leaving sinks running while washing dishes and hands, buying bottled water at all, leaving lights on 24/7...nobody knows the composting and recycling rules (yes I know this has practically zero impact on actual climate metrics, but if even leftists can't get it right, why are we even collectively bothering as a society to try at all). Don't get me started on rent control and historical preservation norms ensuring the building supply is stuck with ancient architecture that no one wants to pay to upgrade with modern insulation, double pane windows, low-flush toilets, etc.
CA is basically permanently in a drought, but you sure never see anyone acting like it. Other than complaining that the Water Bill Is Too Damn High, so then governments subsidize it for qualified low-income worthies. Water Tax Holiday. It makes me sad every night I get out of work and the automated mall lawn sprinklers are spewing everywhere (about 25% ends up on the pavement, not the grass), even though it's often foggy and/or raining. Nobody cares. Go to a restaurant anywhere here, they'll have those placards stating that We're In A Drought, Water Only Served On Request...what's the first thing a server does anyway? Bring you a glass of water. And so on, and so on...
Whew! That's a lot. For what little it's worth, when Philadelphia had a drought some years ago, the no water until you ask your waiter for it rule was actually obeyed.
I don't know whether it would be obeyed now. It might be an indicator that I'm seeing restaurants which only take cash. More of them than I used to, and I wonder whether they're paying sales tax. One of them even has a no-charge-for-customers ATM.
You're reminding me of an account of a business which failed, and when the place was being cleaned out, multiple tool kits turned up-- the boss would just order another tool kit when they couldn't find one.
Haha, don't get me started on our utility closet situation...no one knows where any of the equipment is or what we own. Half the time people bring in their own toolsets or make ad hoc trips to the hardware/office supply store rather than look. It wasn't even under lock and key until recently, when a customer literally walked in, stole our hacksaw, and also appropriated the laptop-cable-locked utility room computer. I kinda don't blame him, that's just shoddy practices and now we do slightly better...
Curious about the posited correlation between cash-only and the voluntary water thing. One of those "confounder for SES/class" things? Sales tax I figure a gov't audit would catch eventually, though of course that's easier to launder with just cash receipts...the ATM is baffling, not sure how the bank would agree to that. Or did you mean they just reimburse any fees/charge non-customers to access it? Sounds kinda sketchy either way...though I am reminded that my banking situation is unusually generous. I didn't know until adulthood that most banks charged "out-of-network" ATM fees just like doctors. Seemed like a totally absurd concept meant to punish the poor and immobile.
Regarding liberalism and conscientiousness, when I googled 'big 5 personality traits by politics', this was the third hit (and the first study):
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=tdr
It references another study [Gerber et al., 2011] suggesting a fairly strong (for social science) anti-correlation between conscientiousness and liberal identification.
This matches what I'd heard in the past, but I haven't dove deeply into the literature.
Same, that's what I was gesturing at. One of those commonly held Everybody Knows. It's social science though, so large grains of flavour mineral obviously...but I figure that if the MSM is onboard with advertising this (in one sense) flaw of liberal/left mindset, then it's probably relatively aboveboard? Or in other words, it's not a random factoid I picked up from The Federalist or whatever...it's something that would perennially come up in WaPo, Vox, etc. (Usually used in a reverse-stupidity-is-not-intelligence way, though: tying "conscientiousness" to conservatives via a dig at purity culture. To explain them being anti-immigration or homophobic or idk. Or just going all the way nuts with Punctuality As White Supremacy nonsense...)
I don't necessarily agree with conscientiousness being clearly good or bad (nor am I very interested in arguing about it).
But yes, I do agree with the existence of the anti-correlation between liberalism in the US and conscientiousness as a Big-5 personality trait.
Obviously, I do not know you and thus anything I say is nonsense and without any real value, so my apologies:
I personally used to feel a great deal of guilt whenever I wasn't being productive with something at basically every moment of the day, to the point where I'd neglect my own physical health and welfare in the name of "working harder" (I mean things like refusing to eat for entire days so I could work more, even as the quality of my work degraded, because when I was not-working I felt a crushing sense of guilt that I was wasting my abilities, or fantasizing about being an automaton because then I could do nothing but work). I eventually realized this desire wasn't me, but instead the result of me internalizing the ideas of Catholic Guilt and my mother's work-ethic and allowing them to become toxic and life-hating, and that, while I thought of myself as a normal person, I was in fact much happier once I gave myself permission to be a human being.
Once again, I don't know you at all, but it sounds like you might have a less severe form of my own scrupulosity problem. Of course, you might be perfectly happy with the way you are, but I would suggest, as others have, that the issue may be with you and not with everyone else. So by all means for now I'd recommend trying to find another position that fits you better, but if you find that no matter where you go you feel a simmering anger at the wastefulness you see everywhere you look, I would advise looking inward.
"Scrupulosity" has religious overtones that don't quite ring true to me...unless you had a more particular formulation in mind than the generic Wikipedia article tells me? I inherited my work ethic from immigrant culture rather than a faith-based upbringing...the mindset and practices that helped my family bootstrap themselves into modest success upon moving to the Land of Opportunity. Perhaps there's more than one way to arrive at scruples though.
>guilt that I was wasting my abilities, or fantasizing about being an automaton
This is very relatable though. Some abilities I consciously choose not to engage much, because they are high-cost or otherwise painful...but it feels wrong not to push myself towards the Pareto frontier of efficient ability deployment. There's almost always more work than hands to go around...when the odds start stacking up to impossible, though, my instinct is to then __work impossibly hard__. It's within my ability to do so, and I feel some desire to pick up the slack left by others working less hard/with less ability. That's "customer service", to my mind...not having an adversarial relationship with customers. I'm there to serve them, and my own needs should come second to that. Everyone we fail to help in a timely manner, fail to provide a fun and easy shopping experience to, fail to stock a product when we have it available...well, okay, I guess maybe that does approach a religious level of guilt. Hmm.
Needles to say, I do frequently find physical needs like sleep or food irritating. The mind is firing on all cylinders and still wanting to carry on the Good Fight; my internal radio is set to aggressive metal or other high-energy anthems by default. Sucks not being able to reliably turn that off after work, but it does contribute to the time-magic effect of me appearing to move much faster than everyone else. I don't know if it's just a perception hack or I am actually reinventing Time-Motion Studies practices. An economy of action for ideal results...there's beauty in both that form and function.
Thank you for the thoughts. Something to reflect on. I think pattern-matched advice to strangers is still of value, in that "you can't help others, they have to help themselves" and it just might shake up an internal inadequate equilibrium.
By "scrupulosity", I refer to a mental attitude best characterized as "self-destructive conscientiousness", characterized by what I would characterize as a "life-hating" attitude (a resentment of completely ordinary qualities possessed by the overwhelming majority of humanity, both in oneself and in others, as defective or flawed, a sense that one's efforts are never good enough no matter how much one works, constantly setting oneself goals only to despise them upon being reached, telling oneself even as one goes above and beyond all of one's peers "I'm not even meeting the bare minimum", etc.)
I will venture beyond giving an opinion there: becoming irritated by one's physical limitations that cannot be overcome is a deeply unhealthy mindset to cultivate. This is a simple fact. Yes, maybe some future generation will be beyond sleep or eating, but it isn't going to be ours. If I am wrong, I am wrong, but given that no miracle science seems evident- adjust your expectations of yourself. I would suggest meditation, melatonin, exercise, and listening to documentaries. That is what helps me when my mind is racing.
Perfectionism is a known character flaw, although I'd maintain the incremental pursuit of perfection is a worthy endeavor. Tsuyoku naritai and all that. I don't inside-view feel like it spills over into more-general "life-hating", but, point taken...if it comes off that way to a random Internet stranger, at least some people irl probably get that impression from me too. Sort of a social fox pass to explicitly say "no, I don't hate you as a person, I hold myself to extremely high work standards and unintentionally project those onto others, please don't be intimidated/alienated by me, I am actually very lonely and want more friends". Much more tractable to just change my underlying behaviour...
Life isn't an anime and I can't, actually, surpass hard physical limits just by Believing In Myself. Even if my hard limits are harder than many peoples'. This has been a hard lesson to unlearn. More (consistent, spread out) exercise would definitely help...the way I throw myself at work 110% by default, and then crash vegetatively upon getting home/days off...isn't ideal, at all.
>telling oneself even as one goes above and beyond all of one's peers "I'm not even meeting the bare minimum"
That does hit home. The problem with performing really high to start with, and still gaining skill and expertise like anyone else, means...my Bare Minimum is now above some people's Absolute Maximum. I should therefore be less harsh in my self-assessment, because official grading always happens on a curve here. Thank you for another perennially-needed reminder that "actually, no really, no one likes a martyr". Not like I get paid more either - therefore it's irrational behaviour...
(Flow states are really incredibly addicting though. Racking up enough combos at work to the point where every single action feels like a perfectly executed QTE move and I'm in Bullet Time - I think that's when I'm maximally happy work-wise. Not sustainable, but it did grant me enough skill XP to take the Ambidexterity feat, which has been objectively useful in all the rest of life too.)
Would anyone else be interested in a Thread specifically to discuss the Book Review finalists so far? I realize I can just comment here, but it might be nice to have a centralized spot for discussion. There are strong contenders this year!
I enjoy watching people do high-up things too, & not only am I not phobic, I'm a former climber myself. Anything intrinsically dangerous is going to stay thrilling even if you do exposures to get over your actual phobia. Fear is the hot sauce of climbing.
As for the fact that you enjoy videos of parkour, etc.: Images & videos don't work for everybody, they're just an easy option that works for some. You probably would need to do something that involves safely hanging out on the side of a big drop if you wanted to get over the phobia (if indeed it's a phobia. Most people are uneasy right next to a big drop, even if they are secure and cannot fall).
small groups of people with shared jobs living in a single building must be very common. it would be beneficial to the residents to learn from each other and a great germination ground for developing new technologies.
is there a repository of such spaces around the world?
Does anyone have experience with using ML to assist in language learning? It seems like it should be possible to use something like GPT3 to automatically parse foreign language texts, recognize different conjugations or colloquial spellings of words, figure out which words are related or easily confused and build a customized study order for vocab, automatically pull up example sentences which demonstrate different meanings, etc. But I'm not sure if this is possible and have no idea where to start even if it was, other than step 1 "buy a multimillion dollar compute cluster", which is a bit out of my budget :(.
For mining sentences like that you could probably do okay with a masked language model which runs on a single GPU.
Thanks, I'll have to look into that.
I've actually been idly thinking about doing something like this for a while. Specifically, there are a bunch of words which it's really hard to learn the differences between from just the definitions, such as 然后 and 后来 which mean something like "afterwards." I was thinking about doing searches such as finding a pair which the model judges to be maximally similar, conditional on one containing 然后 and the other containing 后来. That way I can see some sentences which are similar, but which require one word or the other.
Examples of overhyped technologies which are not going to deliver on their promises in your opinion?
Self-driving cars aren't looking great in the short-term (see Tesla layoffs for example). That being said, maybe that's already the conventional wisdom and they're therefore appropriately hyped.
anything crypto-currency related
hypersonic missiles
hyperloops
In the '90s, the stereotype for receiving email was that it would generate warm fuzzy feelings: AOL used "You've got mail!" as part of its advertisements. Today, the stereotype of email is that it's a many-headed monster which is out to get you. Clearly, some of it is that the composition of inboxes changed: "You've got mail!" isn't going to generate warm fuzzies when the mail is your boss asking for a report due yesterday. However, my impression is that even personal emails (which used to be personal letters, and are presumably what the AOL advertisements were actually referencing) are currently regarded as part of the many-headed hydra to be slain, not as small electronic bundles of joy.
1. Are my impressions even accurate? Maybe people still enjoy receiving personal emails as much as they enjoyed receiving letters. Or maybe people didn't actually like receiving letters all that much.
(Also, maybe people were bad at responding to personal letters in exactly the same way that they're now bad at responding to emails.)
2. If yes, what changed? Is it that letter ("one-on-one communication consisting of one or more paragraphs") is just not a particularly good communication format, and now that alternatives exist, it get outcompeted by either blogs (multiple paragraphs but broadcast) or by chat (one-on-one but in regular conversational format, at most a few phrases at a time)? Or is it something else?
The spam-to-content ratio went through the roof as our tolerance for inconvenience became non-existent. This is the sum total of it. Most old people I know still enjoy receiving emails and just plain mail.
Can you elaborate on the "spam-to-content ratio"? I use gmail outside of work, and its spam filter seems to be decently successful at keeping things I might read in my inbox, and things I really won't out of it. (Every once in a while it'll file a thing I genuinely wanted under "promotions," but not often.) I do get a number of hard-to-classify newsletters that I may or may not skim depending on how bored I am that week, but it's questionable whether those are spam.
"Spam"= anything that's basically a fill-in-the-blank form instead of a personalized message.
Hm. So things like newsletters qualify? Then why is substack's model of sending blog posts to email popular??
I don't think it is. I don't ever use the email aspect of the service.
Rather, I think they have popular writers and people like visiting their blogs.
OK, on reflection I'm puzzled. I imagine the spam-to-content ratio to be roughly age-invariant, after conditioning on using email at all. Yet you suggest (in seeming agreement with my claim that something has changed) that only the old people still enjoy receiving emails and mail. Why? Is it because they started out enjoying it, and their preferences haven't shifted as much under the onslaught of spam? (Also: what, if anything, do young people use for that purpose for which the older people used letters and emails -- is it something like Discord?)
Yes and yes.
Interesting, thanks! Are discord private messages (ever/sometimes/often) places for long asynchronous conversations (i.e. letters) rather than real-time chats? Or is it a consequence of the modern intolerance for inconvenience that conversation happens in short real-time bursts or not at all? (I don't know how I expect you to know the answer to this question.)
My personal opinion is that it is both and neither. Discord and similar services have as their great strength an incredible degree of elasticity. They can be (almost) all things to (almost) all people and thus might be used as one wishes.
Yes, I realize the platform is flexible.
I'm trying to figure out whether writing letters on discord instead of on email (or snail mail) will suddenly make them popular with the recipients, so the question is "what does one wish.". My guess is that it's not just a platform thing, and that there's also a preference for a different format, but maybe I'm wrong.
> If yes, what changed?
We stopped receiving mail. We get notified of creating an account, of recovering a password, we receive bills, we get newsletter we haven't already signed off of, we get asked for feedback from various services we used, but we don't receive mail anymore.
I just checked, out of my entire first page of gmail, there's ONE thing that was remotely conceivable as mail, and it was from my university, asking me if I wanted to give a testimony of my post-graduation career to current students. All the rest was automatized paperwork.
I think this is too easy of an answer, or at least that it's answering a slightly different question. My impression is that even on the rare occasions when we *do* receive mail, it's no longer considered to be a pleasant experience, and I'm wondering why *that* happened.
Then I'd go for "mail has lost it's comparative advantage".
I'm guessing you were happy to receive mail when the alternative ways of communication were "receive a letter" or "receive a phone call". It was asynchronous & written like the first, but immediate like the second. Then first came SMS, then smartphone and direct messaging services, and whatever you may send by mail, you may now send via messenger, whatsapp, discord or god knows what else.
I, for one, am still very happy to receive such a message from my close friends (at least the ones I don't see all the time).
Some shameless self promotion. I wrote about "Teens and the impact of social media, a deep dive into recent work from Haidt." https://www.williamrinehart.com/2022/teens-and-the-impact-of-social-media/
Here are the key grafs: "In my little circle of the world, the debate between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave on the impact of social media has been making the rounds. The overall event was fascinating, but towards the end, a statistician pushes back against Haidt in a heated way, which can be found here...
After a little digging, I found the paper that Haidt was referencing in the video with Soave. It is a team effort, co-authored by Jean M. Twenge , Jonathan Haidt, Thomas E. Joiner, and W. Keith Campbell, titled “Underestimating digital media harm.”
As I started reading, I was quickly pulled back.
The Haidt paper was yet another piece that this group had written in reaction to parallel work from researchers in the United Kingdom, Amy Orben and Andy Przybylski. I’ve written about work from Orben and Przybylski before. There is a long history between these two groups, and I tend to be more persuaded by the work of Orben and Przybylski rather than by the arguments of Twenge and Haidt.
To understand what Haidt is arguing, you need to know a bit of the backstory, which I have tried to lay out below. But to understand the importance of what is being said, it is important to know a bit of theory."
Under Mount Rushmore, there's a large pile of rock leftover from when the mountain was carved. It's visible in most photos of the monument, like this one:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wildfires-force-evacuations-shut-mount-rushmore-memorial-national/story
I think the National Parks Service should make money by selling those rocks in its gift shop. One guy would be in charge of bringing a rock to the back room of the shop, shattering it into smaller pieces with a hammer, and then selling them for, say, $5 apiece.
"Own part of Mt. Rushmore" the sign over the basket of rocks would say.
I also like this idea because the pile of rocks looks messy, so it would be good to get rid of them.
Let's say the rocks prove to be very popular, and all of the scrap rocks are removed from beneath the monument. Would there be any downside to that? Is the pile of rocks preventing erosion, or stabilizing the cliff, or doing something else useful?
The rocks are part of the aesthetic of the monument. I guarantee you many people would object to drastically changing the visual appearance of the sculpture in any way, including via your idea.
Has anyone else noticed the demise of the word "take" in the sense of transporting something from one place to another?
To me, you take something from here to there, and brings something from there to here; one does not bring a thing from here to there.
Typical context: "In the next decade or so, Elon Musk's spacecraft will bring humans to Mars."
My inside voice: "Wow, how did you get to Mars so soon to tell us this? Did Elon take you to Mars first?"
This falls into the same category, for me, as the demise of the word "lend" - e. g. "Jimmy is going to borrow me his trailer on the weekend."
And of course I'm reminded of the Pearls Before Swine comic where they hold a funeral for the word "said". One of the animals questions this, but then two young women walk by in conversation, saying some thing like: "Oh yeah, so then he's like let's go to the beach", and she's like "It's way too hot", and I'm like ..."
I know, it's a living language, and I'm an old fossil. Even so, it bugs me. Anyone else?
Using "bring" instead of "take" (in this context) sounds completely fine to me. I'm 41.
Using "borrow instead of "lend" strikes me as a redneck thing.
Using "is like" instead of "say", and also using the present tense for things that clearly happened in the past, is just slang. I wouldn't say it in a formal context, but otherwise it doesn't bother me.
Predictit is apparently getting killed. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8567-22
> CFTC Staff Withdraws No-Action Letter to Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Regarding a Not-For-Profit Market for Certain Event Contracts
(info from https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-real-money-prediction-markets#7dzKmsNuFbmpoPaDH01S )
I just saw this on Marginal Revolution. Too bad the press release has no explanation of what Victoria University was doing wrong.
The regime does not want us to have sources of information about the likelihood of future events that exist independent of its influence and control.
I think prediction markets are more likely to be harmful than helpful and am happy to see it go.
Perverse incentives for people with the ability to manipulate outcomes. Great opportunity for money laundering. For those and other reasons the information/value supposedly present is likely useless or at best severely flawed/compromised.
So you have big likely or at least potential downsides with real world implications, and no actual upsides or useful value.
Watching people like Scott and many commenters here treat these prediction markets like the Oracle has been...off-putting to say the least.
Hi Scott, this comment should really be a direct message but I wasn't sure how to send you one.
I intended to reshare a short story from your old old blog (from the LiveJournal era), partially to rescue it from oblivion since it is no longer available there, and was not sure how best to go about it. Since the original is deleted, my first impulse would be to rehost it in full and give you attribution, but given that you presumably deleted it on purpose I'm not sure you would actually want it attributed to you or might prefer that it not be reshared at all. (This is specifically the "Whispering Earring" story.) How would you prefer a person go about sharing your very old content like this?