My company (seen on several past OT iterations) is looking for a co-founder/CTO, and in lieu of the next Classifieds I thought I'd post the spot on here.
We're a platform that looks to help people make new friends anytime, anywhere, to do anything. We're investor validated and launched our waiting list two months ago, seeing uptake in 15 countries on every inhabited continent since then.
We need a CTO with full-stack capabilities and app-building experience, able to build scalable architecture and create a high-functioning backend. Some NLP knowledge is fundamental. 20 hours a week minimum commitment.
ACT-style disposition and epistemological scepticism acutely welcome (and a likely predictor of future success, though I have no explicit evidence for this).
We're on the verge of bringing in a very talented Head of Data Science to round out the technical end of the company. High-functioning MVP, pilot scheme and funding next on our list.
As someone who fits that CTO description I would like to give you some feedback.
The way you have written this triggers a lot of red flags with me (and I assume also other IT people)
Leading with "investor validated" makes it seem like you have no product but have sold something to investors instead of investors investing in your start-up
You are not describing a CTO, but rather a Tech Lead for role. A CTO effectively doesn't write code unless they are a developer "paid" with a title
Saying you are getting a very talented person in feels like you are looking at CVs and don't understand how to build a team.
Lastly, building a high functioning MVP is not something I've ever heard of and is weird given you already have significant uptake.
I have no stake in your project but wish you well and maybe this was useful to you
Hey Chris, much obliged. The original post made it past my (technical) co-founder and an impartial advisor ok but I appreciate you lending a refined ear.
I'm looking for a Chrome extension / software to keep track of all the academic papers I read. I want to be able to very quickly index any paper I read and found useful, maybe leave a few keywords or comments for my future-self, and of course be able to search in the future by those keywords, comments and paper text. I don't need to search all papers in the universe (Google Scholar does that), only the ones I remember reading, because often I can't find them afterwards.
Hardest part was the pace was too slow and the classes too boring. I developed bad study habits and then in college was just too lazy to continue with math because it was so much more work than other classes for the same credits.
Much easier to read a book than grind through proofs, even if you are excellent at them.
B.S. in applied math. I remember finding geometry more difficult than high school algebras or AP calculus. Other math classes were often intuitive once the basics were explained to me, while geometry often felt like it relied on an annoying mix of memorization and visualization.
Geometry for me too. I think the concept of proof is loosely defined at best in high school (and I had a very good high school and math teacher). I think there's also the tendency to show the solutions to problems, but not how you arrived at those solutions or what the intuition is (this is true in university sometimes as well), which makes it harder to learn geometry.
The second half of Algebra 2 was a completely unmotivated foray into solving increasingly difficult systems of equations. I see now the goal; to ensure I went on to Calculus with a strong understanding of how to manipulate symbolic equations. But then, it just felt like busywork, and I struggled to maintain focus, which meant I failed to learn the tricks I was being taught, which meant I struggled to complete the problems in the homework and on tests.
Having the kind of AP Calculus teacher who, shortly after our graduation, married one of my classmates.
…Sorry, I couldn’t help being facetious. (True story though. He was 35.) Point is, it was high school math at a public high school and it just wasn’t challenging. Then I went to a tough college and math hit me like a truck. It required learning how to work hard to learn math, and I wish I had developed that skill in high school instead.
As a Predicit user I’m obviously angry at the CFTC and Kalshi for regulatory capture/monopoly creation etc.
However I am most upset with Predicit for blatantly violating the terms of the agreement. Hopefully they can appeal this decision to a judge who will rule that CFTC should have given a warning first with clearer rules before pulling the nuclear option.
Now I’m not defending the CFTC’s rules, they are arbitrary and they set different rules for different companies. But it was foolish for Predictit to think they could bend the rules.
Does anybody have good recommendations for reading on what advocates for overturning capitalism think that a post-capitalist economy would look like? I asked for recommendations at a local communist bookstore and the resources they pointed me to were disappointing. Very little "I think the system of production and distribution would look like X," and almost exclusively "capitalism sucks and should be overcome because of these flaws - no one can say what the post-capitalist system of production and distribution would look like but it would be (a) created more democratically and therefore better and (b) ~something~different~".
Particularly absent was any explanation of why, given the opportunity to "rebuild the economy from the ground up" in the absence of capitalism, society wouldn't just repeat history and find itself right back on the road to capitalism again.
I found "Toward a New Socialism" by Paul Cockshott to be very compelling in it's detail and economic literacy, providing you already have a basic grounding in Marxist economics.
It presents a model for a centrally planned economy from the level of the planning office down to to the consumer level and responds to the traditional objections from to the feasibility of central planning. It also presents some theories about what caused the failure of the Soviet system but doesn't say much about incentive structures, which I would say is it's only real weakness apart from maybe being a bit dated (Originally written in the 80s).
All of professor Cockshott's other books are also worth reading, particularly "How the World Works" and "Classical Econophysics".
An admirable effort relative to the alternatives, but it should still be treated as what it is, hyper-speculative. Even from this perspective, the religious-like conviction that most socialists have is completely unwarranted.
Okay, but one of the central theses of Communism is that the state will wither away after the sad but necessary intermediate stage of brutal Stalinist purges and totalitarian control, so Communism can't have central planning.
This is a good example of the kind of rhetoric that's been frustrating me. I'm ensconced enough in a capitalist economy that I feel able to describe "how things work." Means of production privately owned, profit incentivizing creation of new technologies, prices as a means to communicate value/scarcity and allocate resources, etc, etc, etc.
I want to be open to education on how a socialist system would accomplish these same tasks, but it seems like every time I find a resource on it, there's not really a clear hypothesis - I come away without a clear picture of how things would work, just a vague assurance that however they would work, it would be more democratic.
The Jacobin pamphlet is one example - it never really gets into how scarce resources would be allocated, who would develop new drugs and why, how society would decide how much corn goes to human consumption and how much goes to animal feed, etc. Whenever it starts to approach a discussion of "how things would work," solutions are not described in any particular detail, only that they would be the product of democratic decisions. Things like:
-"Democratizing a complex economy would likely take a variety of institutional forms, ranging from worker ownership and cooperatives, to state ownership of financial institutions and natural monopolies (such as telecommunications and energy) — as well as international regulation of labor and environmental standards."
-"... an expansion of popular power would be needed to both push out personnel committed to the old regime and to transform the often alienating and repressive bureaucracies that currently administer public services. Public schools, welfare departments, planning agencies, courts, and all other government agencies would invite workers and recipients to participate in the design and implementation of those services. Public-sector unions could play a key role in this endeavor, organizing both the providers and users of public services to radically transform the administrative structures of government. Only under these conditions would government activity be synonymous with democratic socialism."
-"The Under socialism, we would make decisions about resource use democratically, with regard to human needs and values rather than maximizing profit."
What I'm really striving for is something that would enable me to envision a socialist system as a viable competitor to capitalism, but I can't do that if all I ever get to is "we don't know how it would work, just that however it works it would be democratic."
coming late to this thread - I just reread your article on ivermectin and found it exceptionally helpful. I wonder if you've thought about doing something similar on long COVID, about which I have plenty of questions related to risk, severity, intervening variables, etc. Answers to these questions should heavily influence our day-to-day behavior re COVID. A good jumping off point might be https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01909-w
I have largely been ignoring the January 6th committee proceedings as I viewed them as toothless theater for the benefit of diehard politics junkies. The Feds raiding Mar-a-Lago seems like a substantial increase in seriousness, though. I'd be interested to hear other people's assessment of Trump actually going to trial before 2024. I rate it around... 15%? Up from maybe 2.5%, pre-raid.
This reminds me of being forced to give an estimate for a project without a spec. How long will it take to create a great app that I just thought of? I’ll fill you in as you go.
In most cases likelihood of probable cause of of crime would seem higher than 50%. I don’t have information on how many criminal searches result in an indictment.
If I have to come up with a number I’ll say 5% based on the priors that reality itself doesn’t seem to be a predictor of much surrounding the former president.
In the era of no shared observable reality that’s really just a guess tho. You have your reality, I have mine. Whoever can make the most noise wins I suppose.
But honestly it’s all just speculation at this point.
This is the well-known Ancient Roman practice of proscription, whereby leaders with newfound power confiscate the property of, imprison, and/or kill the group that they just won the power struggle against, as a way to consolidate power and punish the group that came before them.
Shouldn't we look to South Korea as a much more modern and therefore more likely to be pertinent example? They've sent two ex-presidents to prison. Was that good or bad? Did it strengthen their democracy by showing even the highest office could be held accountable or weaken it by making it seem like giving up power means you go to jail? That seems to be the place to go to see how a Trump conviction would play out more than Sulla.
To suggest that the FBI raid, along with the ongoing show trial, are not useful to discuss as particular isolated events but instead as part of the historical pattern of how power operates.
Yes, just like Trump followed through on his promise to lock Hillary Clinton up for that thing with her emails, and like how Obama made sure Bush stood trial for war crimes, or how Bush made sure Clinton went to jail or... oh wait, none of those actually happened. Perhaps it's not as much of a pattern as you thought.
Obviously I'm not claiming something like "all leaders always criminalize their political opposition." The reason these events are interesting through a historical lens is precisely because the practice had mostly died out in the West in recent decades, with it being a signature tactic of totalitarian dictatorships and all.
Your examples are good demonstrations of this - in the past, they ended up being all talk and nothing ever happened. But now, Russiagate / January 6 / etc. are all dramatic sea changes in terms of criminalizing ideological enemies of the regime.
My point is, it's silly to make a claim *either way* based on a single data point. You can't say it's not unusual, but you also can't say it's part of a long tradition of dictatorial regimes when it's a one-off event. Sometimes politicians commit crimes, and sometimes they get investigated for them. Trump was a particularly careless and stupid politician and therefore more likely to get caught doing crimes. Roll the dice often enough and you'll get a natural 20 eventually.
Also, unlike totalitarian dictators, Trump will have legal rights, due process, and all The FBI had to convince a judge that they would find evidence of a specific crime in a specific place to do this raid, and there are many more hurdles before Trump ever sees the inside of a courtroom, let alone jail. Pretty sure Roman emperors didn't have that problem.
Trying to keep this fairhanded...I don't think it's worth updating your priors based on shocking actions. It's shocking that a president would declare an election illegal, it's shocking that the intelligence services would spy on a presidential campaign, it's shocking (both for and against) that a twice impeached president would be a the presumed frontrunner, both for a major party and (probably) for the presidency.
The heuristic of "if 'they' violated such a long-standing tradition, it must mean something"...does not seem particularly predictively useful these days.
It's not clear that this has anything to do with January 6 or anything turned up by the committee - from what I'm reading, it's more likely to be related to classified documents requested by the National Archives which Trump had been refusing to hand over.
Recent update on this: WP claims the documents included classified information relating to nuclear weapons, which (if true) would explain why they thought it was necessary to go to unusual lengths to retrieve them, without a partisan/political explanation being necessary.
Curious if anyone can make a not-incredibly-technical steelman of MMT, or recommend articles covering same. Been dissatisfied with mainstream media coverage when it does rarely show up. I really want to believe economics is a Real Science and not beset with insane fringe ideas that never work in practice (but are nevertheless advocated by some Very Serious People). This has been the latest such hurdle.
Thanks for the replies. I think I'll put the beliefs "Supply And Demand Shocks Are Really Bad, Actually" and "Interest rates are a blunt imprecise instrument" in the TRUE box, and remain skeptical of the role of deficit spending/QE/printing money. The idea that printing money can have no ill effects is just too hard to wrap head around. It makes sense if it's later taken out of the economy via taxes, and I get that deficits do get paid back Eventually, with interest, like any loan. So as long as taxes aren't too low and debt interest payments aren't too high, the whole circus keeps running. Somehow.
Figuring out the "why does the circus run" part increasingly seems like an egregore that I do not, in fact, want to spend Sanity Points on understanding. Lest that contaminate my personal financial thinking, which very much still runs in the economic-gravity-on world...
With regard to printing money, it has been relatively uncontroversial that as an economy grows the money supply needs to keep pace. Remember MV=PQ, where Q is the quantity of goods and services, P prices, hence PQ total GDP. The equation is a tautology, definitionally true. M is the money supply, V velocity, how fast money turns over. Notice that if the money supply falls and V doesn't change, nominal GDP must fall. In theory P could fall and Q keep growing, meaning real GDP is still expanding, but that would mean nominal prices and wages are falling, but in practice that tends not to happen in the modern era (the reason why is one of Keynes's main topics.). Hence the Fed, if it's doing its job, tries to keep M, or better yet MV, growing at a stable rate. Taxes don't "take money out" since the government is a transfer mechanism. It moves the money around (while leaking, of course, since government costs money). If taxes are greater than government spending, traditional Keynesian economics says that does dampen GDP; others, including monetarists and nowadays most articulately the Market Monetarists, argues that the central bank (Fed) can offset contractionary fiscal policy simply by keeping MV (which is equal to PQ, see above) growing at the desired rate using the tools they have. See Scott Sumner's blog, and relevant episodes of David Beckworth's podcast "Macro Musings" on topics relating to the Fed, inflation, recessions, and interest rates.
There's enormous confusion around interest rates because interest rate levels result from both the strength of demand as well as supply of money, so high or low interest rates by themselves tell you almost nothing about whether the Fed is being contractionary or expansionary. Typically the Fed raises interest rates when it realizes M has increased so fast that inflation is kicking up, so it slows M creation, which causes the price of money to rise, i.e., interest rates. That's what's happening now but M and MV have been rising so fast that "real" interest rates (nominal minus inflation) are still negative, which historically and theoretically means the Fed is still being "loose" (expansionary), and inflation can still rise further. The media are vague and confused about the fact that the Fed adjusts its key interest rate (the Fed Funds rate) by manipulating (increasing or decreasing) the supply of money.
If you think about it, it makes sense and the logic is no different from what we would use for understanding what's going on the oil or wheat market. Price changes are due to changes in supply or demand (or both).
Japan is a demonstration that one can run a large and growing public debt at near-zero interest for decades, given a sufficient mix of taxes and non-tax means of financial repression. But I'm not sure it's the steelman that MMT proponents are looking for.
MMT's is one theory in the broader school of "chartalism".
I 'd say chartalism's main insight is that, as states control the supply of money (assuming it's fiat), they shouldn't treat money the same way a private citizen would, i.e. as a scarce resource that needs to be economized. Because they sit on an essentially limitless supply of their own currency their spending is effectively unconstrained and only operates as a means of allocating labour/resource to public projects and as an accounting tool for the wider economy.
This would imply that most of the public discussion around deficits and public debt is bs, the only reasons to constrain public spending would be if inflation was destabilising the economy's equilibrium or if too public works were consuming too many resources.
Chartalists also make claims about the origin of money, that it originated as a means for states to raise revenue through taxes as opposed to the orthodox theory of a more rational exchange mechanism than barter.
I'm not super familiar with MMT itself (only really read "The Deficit Myth") but from my view it's basic chartalism plus some claims about inflation staying constant if there's unused economic capacity (not enough money in circulation to facilitate all possible trades) which translates to unemployment in the real world. So MMTers wouldn't necessarily accept this recent inflation as contrary evidence.
So, uh, traditionally, when you print a ton of money, inflation increases. In 2008, for (probably) good reasons we printed a lot more, we even invented exciting new ways of printing money called quantitative easing. And then through the 2010s we kinda kept doing it and...there was no inflation. Then Covid hit and we figuratively built a printer factory to print all the printers we needed to PRINT ALL THE MONEY...and no inflation. And so, in 2021, economists were kinda looking around like...what if the old rules don't apply? This has happened before, in the 1960s before stagflation was a thing, economists thought high unemployment and high inflation was impossible. MMT, from what little I've seen, was not a great theory, but it was legitimately trying to explain this weirdness and...to be fair, it would be pretty awesome if the government could just infinitely print money without inflation.
I dunno, it was like economic gravity was turned off there for a few years and, ya know, some people thought we were flying and some people thought we were falling.
If we have good reasons to believe printing money leads to inflation (and we do), and we print tons of money and aren't seeing a whole lot of inflation, then maybe we aren't looking in the right place.
I suggest looking at financial market trends for the period. Here's a representative chart:
Printing money leads to inflation to the extent the money is moved into the economy. Most of the money created by QE over the years has been left idle because payment of interest on reserves (IOR). Banks have been leaving balances at the Fed to accumulate interest at 0 risk rather than lending it out and triggering the "multiplier effect" we read about in textbooks on money creation. Over the past two years, however, money has been spilling into the economy at the same time that the economy's productive capacity has been decapitated by the economic straightjackets (a.k.a. "lockdowns") mandated by governments around the world, especially the U.S. and China, the two largest economies.
That's goal post shifting, since inflation generally refers to the CPI. Which is why we are talking about inflation now and not a few years ago. Maybe there is an argument that it shouldn't be just the but that is what is commonly used.
That QE increased asset prices is uncontroversial.
"Inflation" is a rise in price over time. CPI is a way of measuring one type of inflation, and it happens to be the one that the man on the street typically cares about, but to say that inflation refers solely to increases in the CPI is just wrong on it's face.
Here's where we started:
> In 2008, for (probably) good reasons we printed a lot more, we even invented exciting new ways of printing money called quantitative easing. And then through the 2010s we kinda kept doing it and...there was no inflation. Then Covid hit and we figuratively built a printer factory to print all the printers we needed to PRINT ALL THE MONEY...and no inflation.
When you "print" money you get inflation for the simple reason that you have more money chasing fewer goods (since you aren't "printing" goods to match). My point is that the post-2008 money-printing absolutely caused a massive amount of inflation (compare European indexes for basline growth over the period; they aren't quite decoupled from American ones, because the financial market is global, but they're separate enough), it's just that this wasn't reflected in the CPI, because consumers weren't getting the money - until COVID that is, but the imposed restrictions severely limited spending possibilities, putting a limit on the demand curve shift.
Way back when, on a different forum, I once pointed out that if the government started printing money straight into Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin, we wouldn't see it reflected in the CPI either (mostly because there probably does not exist an amount you could give to Scrooge that would meaningfully affect his spending).
The above is what printing straight into the Money Bin looks like in real life.
Nothing will disprove your theory, right? That nothing happened for a decade is proof that “printing money” causes inflation. That inflation is largely external and worldwide caused by obvious supply issues isn’t going to change your view either.
Inflation necessarily results whenever you shift either the demand or supply curve (unless you shift both by exactly the amount needed to cancel out), because a shift causes the market price to change.
Supply chain issues shift the supply curve leftwards, because there are fewer goods in the market. Giving people more money shifts the demand curve rightwards, because people have more money to spend.
Either one is enough to cause inflation. If you've been doing both (let's not forget that outside the war in Ukraine, most supply issues are self-inflicted), you're gonna be double-boned.
I could do without living in interesting times, for a change.
GDP is a function not just of the amount of money created (in the case of the U.S.) by the Fed, but how quickly it turns over. The famous equation is MV = PQ, where M is money, V is velocity, P is the price level, and Q real quantity of goods. V had been relatively stable during most of the post-war period but fell substantially after the Global Financial Crisis. Scott Sumner explains the reasons better than anyone on the blog Econlog and Money Illusion. The Fed had a lot to do with triggering the GFC and for the slow growth that followed it. Thanks to the lockdowns following the breakout of the pandemic we got a big drop in GDP due to a drop in Q in the equation above, combined with deficit spending and an accommodative Fed. "Supply chain problems" are another way of saying that Q, the quantity of goods and services, couldn't rebound as it normally would (because of lockdowns here and abroad and lots of new regulations) at the same time that trillions were being handed out to businesses and individuals. Hence inflation. Pre-pandemic the Fed had not been as accommodative as it appeared from all that "quantitative easing" because it paid relatively high interest to banks for keeping the money at the Fed ("Interest on Reserves) rather than using it to lend out as they might otherwise be expected to do.
That formula never accounts for energy price rises, which of course are always passed through to the customer. It’s true that Q is somewhat reduced by the reduction in oil or gas supply but the inflation caused by the reduction in that particular quantity of goods is much greater than some other good which didn’t have that kind of knock-on affect.
Is the implication of your claim that demand for energy is perfectly inelastic? Or more directly that the amount consumed is totally unaffected by price?
I sort of buy that at the margin it’s functionally inelastic because switching costs of changing lifestyle are too high to merit change but I doubt that’s as true outside the developed world (although that’s just a hunch).
Seems to me every science or school of thought will have crazy fringe ideas. FWIW, I'd say MMT is one--it says a government can spend unlimited money by creating the money (a.k.a. "Fed accommodation or monetizing the deficit"), with no bad consequences but many good ones--employment and prosperity for all. I haven't seen any serious people advocating it. Stephanie Skelton's book has gotten the most publicity, and it's not serious. Anyway, isn't the best evidence evidence from practice, from experience?
Today's high inflation and rising interest rates are a consequence of vast deficit spending of the last two years--trillions upon trillions with virtually no thought or oversight--monetized by a complaisant Fed. How well is it working? BTW, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the impact on inflation of the current spending bill, called the "Inflation Reduction Act", is between +0.1% and -0.1%. And those numbers are pretty arbitrary because they have to make assumptions about Fed actions, and the Fed has more influence on inflation than Government spending. The latter determines how much of GDP is composed of Government vs. the private sector, i.e. deficits tilt the economy toward government.
The textbooks will tell you that in a recession or depression deficit spending can restore "full employment" without inflation. We were in a short recession in 2020 because of the pandemic, so deficit spending met those criteria then. But having broken the dam, the spending flood keeps gushing and no one in authority seems to have any interest in restraint of any sort.
That’s not true is it? America has been in deficit for years. QE has been tapered of since last year. The inflation is mostly caused by external factors like the Ukrainian war, supply chain issues, tariffs and so on. And the feds are raising interest rates, which is the monetarist position to all inflation thus making people who are poor poorer.
Supply schocks like wars, supply chain issues, tariffs, etc. can change relative prices but not the overall price level without Fed "accommodation". As an imperfect analogy, a rise in the price of gas won't cause my total spending to rise (assuming I don't borrow)--instead I'll have to scrimp a bit on gas and other stuff. Look at the equation MV=PQ again and consider that it is a tautology. Prices, P, can only go up if the product of MV (which is the money supply) goes up, or if MV doesn't change, Q has to fall so that PQ still equals MV. That's in fact what often happens when the Fed combats inflationi, since a fall in Q is a recession.
I was trying to think if there could be any advantage to a line shaped city. Consider two 100 square mile cities: Square City is 10 miles by 10 miles, and Line City is 100 miles by 1 mile.
You want every point in each city to be a maximum 1 mile walk to a train station. In Square City, you have 10 north-south train lines -- going from 1/2 mile north of the southern border to 1/2 mile south of the northern border -- and 10 east-west lines, going from 1/2 mile east of the western border to 1/2 mile west of the eastern border. The lines are evenly spaced, with a station at each line intersection. You're always at most 1/2 mile from an east-west line and 1/2 mile from a north-south line, so -- assuming no diagonal streets -- at most a mile from a station.
You have 100 stations, 360 miles of track, and you'd have to make a maximum of 18 stops for any trip, with one transfer. (I'm including your last stop as a stop, but not the first stop where you get on)
In Line City, you have two lines running straight down the middle - a local and an express. The local runs all the way from mile 0.5 to mile 99.5, with a station every mile, so 198 miles of local track and 100 stations. Express stations are about every 9 miles, from mile 5.5 to mile 94.5, so 188 miles of express track with 10 express stops. The maximum number of stops would be 10 local stops plus 9 express stops, so 19 total, with one transfer.
Assuming going 10 miles express takes the same amount of time as going 1 mile local, you're slightly worse off in Line City -- you need 386 miles of track vs. 360, and you have a maximum of 19 stops vs. 18 -- but it's pretty close. Average number of stops is more important than maximum, though. I don't know how to calculate the average exactly, but according to a python simulation I tried, it's 7.25 stops in Square City vs. 8.37 stops in Line City. So an extra stop per average trip is not insignificant. Of course, this assumes the origins and destinations are evenly distributed. In reality, there will be greater density by the express stations in Line City, and in the center of both cities. But Square City does seem to have somewhat shorter trips.
However, in Line City, you only need 10 of your 100 stations to be transfer stations, and in Square City, all of them are transfers. And in Line City, you're transferring between two parallel trains, which is much simpler -- and if you wanted, your stations could probably be at street level - with the tracks going back up or down in between. In fact, you could even have the tracks at street level the whole time, with bridges or tunnels going across every half mile or whatever. This would be fairly disruptive to integrating the two halves of the city, but much less disruptive than having the Square City trains at ground level.
The major disadvantage is if part of a track breaks down, or gets blocked by a stalled train, it's MUCH easier in Square City to route people around it. Plus even in the most transit oriented city, it will sometimes be necessary to use a car, and it will be annoying to drive 100 miles to get to a different part of the city.
"Assuming going 10 miles express takes the same amount of time as going 1 mile local"
Why would you assume that? Cities that have both local and express routes, like New York, often run the same vehicles on both routes. The difference in time is because of the time spent at the stops, not the difference in speed. The New York subway cars have a maximum speed of 55 mph. If you take 50 mph as the speed between stations (EMUs accelerate fast and we can include acceleration/deceleration as part of the stop penalty), then you'd need to have the express train moving at 500 mph. This is out of Maglev range and definitely requires Hyperloop.
There's some minor math problems too, like that a 10mi x 10mi city with half mile stop spacing needs a 9 x 9 grid of transit stations, so 81 total, instead of 100 total (line city needs 99 stations instead of 100). I don't think these would change the model that much. I might work out the model a bit more realistically, if you're interested.
Ah, I did not realize how unrealistic the speeds were.
I'm sure I made a million math errors, but even though there would only be 9 mile long segments in a line, wouldn't there still need to be 10 stations? Because you need a station at each mile, plus the first station at mile 0?
Would love to see any modeling you could do, because I am very much an amateur. I have not been able to get this out of my head since I first heard about NEOM and figured there must be some advantage to doing it this way, but could not for the life of me figure out what.
I'm pretty sure the advantage is something to do with cooling. If they can actually manage to build those tall glass walls to block out most of the heating effect of the sun, cooling the line should be easier than cooling the square. * Everything else follows from that. I think the mistake that a lot of people are making is focusing on the transit as the driver here. I'm pretty sure it's secondary.
Someone recenly(ish) requested a search engine for all the SSC texts and comments. Unfortunately I can't find that request anymore, but if you are interested in a thing like that, have a look at https://evard.online/truescott.html. For now it's a customized Google search for SSC, ACX, /r/ssc, and DSL. Feel free to suggest other related sources.
I should probably put in the effort to generate hard numbers, but worth noting that Google will return something like less than half the real number of hits on SSC and ACX. DSL uses a particularly aggressive robots.txt rule, and the modal number of hits from there for any query is zero. (I don't feel at all bad about writing a crawler to ignore that for personal use, but am torn on the ethics of sharing.)
This also serves the role you describe, altho it seems to be down right now. Also at certain times it has failed to find comments on ACT that I knew should have been found.
I've read The Complacent Class, Stubborn Attachments and Big Business: A love letter. Complacent class was meh, Stubborn Attachments and Big Business were good (even if I didn't agree with them entirely).
A bundle of genres I refer to as "spooky electronica" - ranging from electronic foreboding ambient tracks to industrial, spending a lot of time with indie music labels like ant-zen or tympanik audio.
Mainly either folk or PDQ Bach. But the folk is generally in languages that I don't understand. Norwegian is what comes to mind at the top, but it's just one album of many
A lot of alt/indie/punk-adjacent-but-too-cowardly-to-be-actual-punk stuff. The kind of music the characters in the Questionable Content webcomic talked about a decade ago.
Mostly rock from punk to prog, leaning toward metal but with a preference for the more retro doom variety over anything more extreme than thrash/speed metal. Vocals are one of the things most likely to annoy me, so instrumentals are also preferred, which gives a leg up to jazz (though I find "smooth" jazz too boring).
Novel music. Metal is great for novelty, so it gets an outsized presence in my playlists, but they're also full of other weird stuff.
I'll give particular notice to Mechanical Poet, Man Man, Queens of the Stone Age, Gorillaz, The Cardigans, Humanwine, and Pink Floyd for consistently producing music that sounds like nothing else out there (also Weird Al, in a complicated sort of way). The Beatles probably deserve a place as well, but I was born late enough that everybody copying them has made it impossible to enjoy them from a novelty perspective.
John Schilling's estimate using the WTC1 as a baseline was $42 trillion not $4 trillion. $4.8 trillion was after generously giving the Saudis an 85% discount on $42 trillion thanks to a learning curve.
Is 85% a realistic learning curve though? I think John Schilling was including that to demonstrate that that was an absolutely-best-case-lower-bound rather than a reasonable estimate, so halving it again doesn't necessarily make sense.
Especially since at current market prices the raw materials are $765 billion, which would make them ~38% of a $2 trillion budget.
Also, you said "we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale" when the $4 trillion is after applying economies of scale as part of the learning curve.
I think 85% is a reasonable estimate for a project of this scale, though I'm extrapolating from my aerospace experience so intuition may be a bit off. However, note that the 85% learning curve includes "learning to not do all the stuff that made WTC1 so ridiculously expensive". So there's not as much room to buy down an estimate made from the latest Dubai skyscraper, because Dubai unlike NYC hires people who have built a lot of skyscrapers in living memory.
It also means that if you try to build NEOM in New York, with New York bureaucrats saying "no, you can't do anything different, we haven't approved that, it would have to spend five years in committee before we approve anything different", it would cost the full $42 trillion. Well, OK, for half that price you could probably finance a coup in Albany...
Why do gender roles exist? Why do people care so much about them?
I used to believe the function of gender roles was to half-cripple people in symmetrical ways to force them into couples. I now believe they might also be ways to get advantages of specialization, but that doesn't explain why men and women are expected to wear different clothes.
The recent revelation was that what transgender people and transphobes have in common is that they all think gender roles are tremendously important. It rocks people's world to be taken for their preferred gender.
And on the other side, people can feel like the social world is crumbling if gender roles are shaky. Why believe this? But (many) people believe it on a gut level.
My sympathy is with transgendered people, but what's going on in general?
Here's an additional thought. You could argue, "basketball is a fun game, soccer is a fun game, and yet the rules are completely different! So, rules are obviously arbitrary, and it would be a lot more fun if we just did away with them and played however we wanted." That... wouldn't work.
Gender roles are similar. Life runs smoother and is more enjoyable for most people if the rules of the social game are clear - you know what position you play, you know what moves you're allowed to make, you know how thr game is scored, and there are referees who can intervene if someone interrupts the flow of the game. (And since many of the highest-scoring moves are related to finding a mate and having children, it is clear that the rules are not gender-symmetric.)
The problem is that some people would just really rather play soccer than basketball, but society tells them, "basketball it is, for everyone. Now back on the court!"
I would argue this is a better analogy: Pro football has been around for a while. So fun! But wait, advances in technology are revealing that a lot of players are getting CTE and dying early due to brain injury. We either need to change the rules of the game to make it safer, or we can eliminate the game altogether and refocus to pro hockey fandom. But reasonable people would agree that maintaining the status quo is not an option.
I'm pretty sure the function of gender roles is to get the advantages of specialization. In particular, I think that in a world with no birth control and high infant mortality, successful societies developed norms where women specialize in bearing and raising children along with work that can be done in parallel with same (e.g. spinning), and men specialize in all the stuff that can't be done while pregnant, nursing, or having children close at hand (e.g. fighting wars). Some of this will be culturally dependent; whether farming counts as women's work depends on exactly what sort of farming you're doing. Gardening yes, ranching no.
I'm also pretty sure that we've been at this long enough for some of it to seep into our neural wiring via evolution, so some people are going to be "irrationally" attached to their preferred gender roles.
As for dress codes, if role specialization is broadly important, you want to be able to figure out who has which role quickly and efficiently. That's why we have uniforms, and "business formal" and "business casual" and whatnot. It works for gender roles as well as professional ones.
Also, in most climates, trousers mostly make sense for people who are going to be riding horses or working at tasks likely to scrape up bare legs. And while there were very few societies in which a majority of men could afford horses, if you were in a demographic that could plausibly be riding a horse that day, you probably wanted to be seen as someone who was rich enough to afford a horse. Then we went and let a cavalry officer set the style for well-dressed men everywhere for the next two centuries :-)
He's referring to Beau Brummel. He was an early 19th century Englishman who was very influential in defining what men's fashion would look like, and arguably his influence stretches to the present period.
There's an interesting bit in the Aubrey Maturin series (IIRC), where Jack is sitting in an office watching the crowds go by and lamenting to himself at the trend where he's seeing fewer and fewer ornate, colored outfits and more and more drab blacks. Now I know why.
This strikes me as by far the most elegant and obviously true comment on the thread.
It's not like the entire planet went through all of human history with Clearly Wrong ideas about Clearly Wrong gender roles until some people in the 1960s finally invented the concepts of feminism and egalitarianism.
No, there's a *reason* for the timing. There's a reason that the concept and implementation of equality of gender developed alongside industrialization and into information economies. There's a reason that women gained freedom only as civilizations virtually universally eliminated hard physical labor as a requirement of survival.
Once industrialization made it clear that women could survive in an industrialized society by doing jobs as well as men - and indeed, once economies grew to a degree that women were *compelled* to participate in the same jobs as men - women were (more or less) determined to be equal participants in society, deserving of equal rights and consideration.
That's all "feminism" is, at its core. Survival pressure.
Make no mistake, if industrialized civilization ever totally collapses, women will be back to per-industry gender roles within in a generation, if not a couple of years.
"No, there's a *reason* for the timing. There's a reason that the concept and implementation of equality of gender developed alongside industrialization and into information economies. There's a reason that women gained freedom only as civilizations virtually universally eliminated hard physical labor as a requirement of survival."
Yup, ubiquitous electric motors and heat engines largely replaced human muscle power.
Speculation: Ignoring other changes (AI, climate change), and looking only at medicine, might artificial uteri remove a large chunk of the remaining differences in gender roles (perhaps on a time scale of a century or so)? Pregnancy is still a risky business ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy ), so there is a motivation for making the replacement, if the technology and economics can make it workable.
From what I can see, properly nurturing early childhood development is a WAY bigger time suck than pregnancy itself. Babies need a lot of face-to-face contact and engagement to learn emotional regulation, and that need goes on for *years* - at least the first four, maybe longer.
That's going to be extremely inefficient, particularly in a high-TFR agrarian society, in that the men will never be able to specialize in the vital but not-kid-friendly tasks because, oops, the next three years I have to pivot to baby-nurturing. And the women aren't going to be able to pick up the slack because, oops. for the next year or two they have to pivot to actually being pregnant and/or nursing.
In history, gender roles existed because of something-something-evolution. In modernity, gender roles are believed by most to be “correct” because of the aforementioned something-something-evolution.
I think the ideas persist because big percentages of humanity are scared of new ideas. I’m raising a girl with high vigilance against gender socializing. It includes the obvious steps of stocking a playroom with dolls & bulldozers, but, more importantly, it means teaching indifference to her own physical beauty. This is a deeply abnormal way to coach girls. The only way people seem to think they should talk with a female child is to tell her how pretty she is, and it takes cosmic effort to prevent this in my daughter’s life. Gender roles teach girls to be vain, vapid, and find their greatest self worth in their physical appeal. Pretty good way to suffocate talent in children. And I think many parents don’t even notice this is happening because it is “normal” thanks to social orders built around gender roles.
I'm willing to bet you're in for a disappointment. My sister-in-law, a very practical-minded, un-vain woman, tried to raise my niece without any gender stereotypes. The niece was also surrounded by two older brother, who were typical boys in their behavior and interests. When she started to speak, "skirt" and "dress" were among her first words (as opposed to her brothers, with "hammer" and "screw"). She turned into a total girlie-girl.
What I'm saying is, you're up against hardwired human nature to a much greater extent than you seem to think.
I’ve seen plenty of cases like that and would not be surprised or disappointed if that is the outcome. I want my kid to have the opportunity to choose her own interests. At the age of four, she loves construction sites, cement mixers, tutus, and rainbows. Her interests can go wherever she takes them through childhood, and I am not opposed to femininity. I am opposed to the way all girls are aggressively molded into cartoon females.
I don't know... describing feminine women as "cartoons" of females seems sort of anti-femininity to me. I don't believe that finding pleasure in being pretty suffocated my wife's talent, or my mother's.
Still, best of luck. I can see you're determined to do well by her, and that's what's most important.
I appreciate the vote of confidence. Many women, by sheer force of talent as cream of the crop, are able to break through social pressures to self-objectify and are able to moderate their prioritization of beauty against other pursuits. Many have the right parents, friends, partners to help part the Red Sea on their way to success. They are the lucky ones. For every one of them, I wonder about the zillions of women who would have made different choices if they had not internalized the idea as girls that they are only as good as their bodies.
Sounds very nice, but I implore, have you considered the skulls?
The thing is, after observing decades of feminism making great progress in all other areas of life, one thing has not changed: I have failed to see a single example of a woman who didn't benefit from putting some effort into being pretty. I won't say one can't over-do it, but one certainly can under-do it.
I have a cousin ^1 who was raised in family with considerable support for adopting militant anti-femine attitudes. It doesn't compound very nicely with personality affected by literal mindedness and knack for missing subtext and implicit social rules. Now, these symptoms could be called mild aut spectrum, but I think her parents decision to socialize her against stereotypical femine stereotypes certainly doesn't help with mitigating them.
She often expresses quite a bitter attitude against so-called "vapid" females who spend a lot of time being pretty and popular. At the same time it is blatantly (almost painfully) obvious she would have more female friends, better-suited romantic interests, and more success in her career (lack of all the seem to contribute to the bitterness) if she had learned some sense of dress code for both business casual and differently coded casual social occasions, and learned to apply little bit of makeup. Instead she got praise for being "bold" and "brave" for rebelling against such norms, when the difficult thing would have been to learn them.
All these lessons are symmetric with males. Putting effort in improving attractiveness helps men immensely in their career, too.
^1 or close enough, real familial relationship obscured for plausible deniality
Why does indifference to one’s own beauty need to belong to a single gender? I prefer to think of it as a way of being human that you can choose. It’s certainly my preference.
I see my wording was confusing. I meant to say that I am a woman whose preference it is to feel indifference to my own beauty. I use it as needed, but it minimally informs my self image. It is possible for women to feel this way. Am I the only woman out of 4 billion who has this preference? Maybe. Seems unlikely. I am mainstream enough in most other ways to believe that this psychology is not an extreme outlier.
Ok, but this isn’t like picking your genitalia set. People can have agency over their own beliefs and value systems. They can have even stronger influence over both in the children they are raising.
I think raising any child to be indifferent to their looks is a bad idea, but maybe you're compressing a much better idea into something that, to me, sounds like raising someone to have no standards of personal grooming or interest in even basic levels of self-presentation (which is integral to self-identity).
I’d say the bar is neat and clean (at the risk of sounding like my dad). Relative to how females are raised to obsess about their appearance, this is indifference.
Gender roles are a human universal. As are moral norms around sex, sexuality, marriage, and gender. The specific norms and roles vary somewhat. Some things, including some things the liberal set wants to change, are universal. Many things, including many things the conservative set considers "naturally" male or female, are not. I'd find it more strange if there wasn't a big dust up over different cultural conceptions of gender roles and all that. It's a culture war over something that's one of the most fundamental parts of culture. How family and society works.
My general heuristic for this kind of thing is to see if other societies have that cultural trait and if they were successful. If they were then it's probably arbitrary. If they weren't then it's possible but will harm society. And if there's no example of it then it's probably not possible. The idea of moving post-gender is anthropologically STRANGER than the concept of being transgender. While transgenderism specifically is a modern and unique phenomenon the idea of people who cross gender boundaries in various and even permanent ways is very common. Meanwhile gender roles themselves are a human universal.
It seems to me that the existence of gender roles is probably universal. The content of the roles is not. There's also considerable variation in the accommodation of those who don't fit their assigned roles.
That wasn't a happy discovery for me. I'd hoped in my youth to see gender roles wither away, and with them the belief that certain traits and preferences are normal to all people of one gender, and absent in all people of the other gender.
That doesn't answer the question of *why*, however. It doesn't even answer the question of whether there are any personality traits or preferences that would be more common in one gender than the other, absent cultural reinforcement. (We can guess, but we can't *know*.)
My best guess for the "why" is that the burden of pregnancy and lactation restricts what women can do effectively, and the relative ease of male reproduction makes it better to risk male than female lives, if the size of the next generation is a concern.
So evolution favors both cultures and genetic traits that dole out talents, preferences, and training in ways that are more effective in each particular environment.
What we pretty much never see are universals. Some cultures try very hard to get males to act like men, and females to act like women, with no exception, but AFAIK they always have to resort to punishing those who don't conform adequately - i.e. no level of acculturation to assigned gender roles works universally.
At the cultural level, human gender dimorphism also influences the assigned roles. But I see that dimorphism as something else we need to explain, particularly as when it comes to size/strength etc., it's once again a matter of averages, with exceptions.
Interesting question: are the exceptions advantageous (i.e. we're selected for some % of outliers), or are they something that's simply not disadvantageous enough for evolution (physical and cultural) to eliminate them/us? Are they continually regenerated, as individual human switch environments, and bring their genetic and cultural gender-role traits to living situations where they are not optimum? Has evolution kept the exceptions around because people move, environments change, and technology changes what behaviour is optimum - often enough that having a wide range of options is itself evolutionarily conserved, at both the biological and cultural level.
Some of the content is universal and seems fairly hardcoded. Most of it isn't. For example, there's multiple cultures where female breadwinners are the norm and where providing for a family is a female role.
I think you're right there's always people who are uncomfortable with their acculturation. Though it's sometimes solved by moving to different cultural contexts instead of either tolerance or conforming. I'm not sure if you're right there's a different level of tolerance for deviation. To some extent perhaps but very often what tolerant cultures actually have is a different set of roles and norms that they're enforcing just as stringently. For example, I'd say liberated feminists actually have a pretty rigidly defined gender role for women and show a fair bit of enforcement behavior against people who deviate from it.
As to why any of this is or whether exceptions are beneficial I can't say.
I was thinking in terms of cultures with third genders, or even something like the choice (for a woman) to become a nun rather than a wife-and-mother.
But you've given me a better example. Some quantity of North Americans enforce gender roles by committing physical violence on those who break their rules. Feminists on the other hand, just commit innuendo, gossip, and perhaps shunning. (Though frankly, I don't see what they generally enforce as gender roles per se.) This is a difference in enforcement stringency.
I think that's less to do with gender enforcement specifically than cultural rules around violence (another universal that varies per culture). But if that's what you mean then sure. There are cultures in North America where violence is more acceptable as a response to social transgression and others where it's less so. Though it's worth noting that feminists are not particularly non-violent about how they enforce their taboos.
As for third genders: that was my point. A minority of people who gender switch is more common than a culture that claims gender roles themselves are bad or shouldn't exist. That said, I wouldn't lump things like unmarried women in with people transgressing gender roles. Being a nun in certain parts of Europe was seen as a display of femininity, not a subversion. Marriage is not always so mandatory.
There's a fair bit of anthropological research that describes gender roles and finds some things are fairly universal. For example, there is no human culture ever observed without distinct male and female gender roles. The most common explanation is some degree of innate gender difference but there are others of course.
ETA: To be clear, the specific roles vary. But every culture has some form of roles. Some things are arbitrary and some things are not. For example, another human universal is that women care for very young infants. But whether men help varies. So to take this one example female gender roles including "cares for very young children" is universal while some cultures include that in male gender roles and others don't.
As evidenced by the (grotesque, unethical) Reimer twin study, there is probably at least some basis to the idea that gender is biological, in that a male child raised from birth as a female could still inherently identify that they fundamentally were not female (for a true bulletproof study, of course, the twins would need to have been separated from their parents at birth and raised by a pair of adoptive parents who didn't know John Reimer's actual sex, but still). However, there is a vast gulf between "John Reimer could fundamentally realize at age 10 that they were in fact a boy" and "Men are biologically conditioned to like running around in the mud while women are biologically conditioned to like sitting around talking."
The Reimer study also indicates why there isn't a lot of research out there: the things you would have to do to drill deep down into the question "are gender roles and thus the sociological concept of gender innate, or are they socially constructed" would be profoundly immoral, and certainly not tolerated by any kind of government that places even a trivial price on human welfare.
This isn't a subject I care that much about, so I haven't put much thought into it, but I'd guess gender roles are about social legibility and predictability; this matters for a government that may need to draft soldiers, for young people looking to get married and have kids, and for identifying people who don't care that much about social-cultural norms in general.
On the individual legible/predictable thing, there are large numbers of people for whom it can be genuinely helpful to have a socially established consensus about who does what chores, for example. (How many people do you know who fight about this kind of thing in their personal lives?)
"On the individual legible/predictable thing, there are large numbers of people for whom it can be genuinely helpful to have a socially established consensus about who does what chores, for example. (How many people do you know who fight about this kind of thing in their personal lives?)"
I don't know about you, but I for my part don't know of a *single case* of a woman becoming reconciled to doing a supposedly-unbalanced proportion of household chores by being told that those are women's work.
When it is presented as 1) largely determined by her biological genders nature to care more about the housework and 2) as a 'fair share' tradeoff where the man is working more and doesn't get to enjoy the family space, it gets better accepted.
But yeah, so long as house chores are presented as an oppression by the patriarchy, no one likes it.
About half of couples with children fight about chores. Frustration with division of household labor is a hallmark of two-income households with children.
Right. That's after two generations of feminism chipping away at traditional gender roles. Of course, when you declare the previous default settings obsolete and oppressive, people have to negotiate and, to a certain degree, argue. Maybe that renegotiation leads to a better balance for many people, but it sure makes things more complicated.
> Of course, when you declare the previous default settings obsolete and oppressive, people have to negotiate and, to a certain degree, argue.
Just going to rephrase slightly: Of course, when women enter the workforce, gain financial power, and achieve similar opportunities as men for self-actualization through career, people have to negotiate, and to a certain degree, argue.
I'm going to wait for some more replies before I answer a lot, but I want people to think about the range of gender roles-- gender roles exist, but they may be opposite in different cultures.
For example, in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, men are expected to study Torah and Talmud full time, while women work outside the home.
Here's something from recent history: the early Beatles had neatly combed hair which was just a little longer than traditional. People had fits. Later, I'm told, men were beaten for having long hair. Whatever is going on, it isn't functional.
I recommend _The Frailty Myth_, a history of women and sports. While I think it's exaggerated (it isn't true that all women would like to be athletic, and I don't think women can necessarily compete on equal terms with men of the same size), it's also true that women have been discouraged from athleticism until fairly recently.
In the west, Victorians had an enforced fantasy that upper class women shouldn't move much at all. It got so bad that upper class women were having trouble giving birth, and so special light exercises were invented for upper class women.
Seeing how, depending on climate, human clothing spans the range from "loincloth only" to "multiple layers of leather and fur", it can hardly be any other way.
That said, gender roles are often variations on the same themes. Women's clothing is typically a lot more about emphasizing (or hiding, depending on the general sexual mores) physical attractiveness. Men's clothing is typically a lot more about conveying social status, respectability or fighting ability.
"It was a jolt when I realized there's no such thing as dressing like a woman. There's only dressing like a woman of an approximate time and place."
Good point!
Perhaps gender-specific clothing can be considered analogous to sumptuary laws? Providing a visual clue to which gender-specific role someone is filling?
I used to think sumptuary laws were crazy; why the [expletive deleted] should a society care what someone wears? But insofar as clothing served as a uniform or as a badge of office, it is less crazy to have restrictions on impersonating a role (e.g. Roman senator or contemporary police officer).
Of course, with fewer roles being gender-specific than in past centuries, this makes less sense now.
( In particular, role restrictions based on muscular strength have made less and less sense as electric motors and heat engines became more widespread. One could make a decent case that almost any job role that still requires substantial strength is probably a mistake of some sort. )
I've always taken the following for granted, at least in the West since the 1980's:
Provided the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are covered (which is more a matter of 'having enough clothing' than any specific clothing style) a woman can wear anything a man can wear in the same situation and be treated as acceptable, while the reverse is not true. A woman can wear a suit (even one tailored for a male physique) to a party and be fine; a man in a cocktail dress seems absurd. To go with the obvious edge case, swim wear: a woman can wear men's trunks with a gender-neutral top like a t-shirt and be fine (provided the shirt remains opaque), while a man in a two-piece bikini is absurd.
There are a couple of ways to look at this:
1. It's unfair to women that they have a pair of "secondary sexual characteristics" on their upper torso which need to be covered under almost all cultures to seem decent.
2. It's unfair to men that rough, hairy, fat or overmuscled skin is less aesthetically pleasing, and thus styles that expose a lot of skin don't work for men in most situations for very different reasons than styles that expose a lot of skin are not acceptable for women.
You can invent any set of plausible-seeming reason to explain any phenomenon you like, the question is if they hold in practice or just confabulations.
Do you have a source for the Victorian upper class women having trouble giving birth thing? What's the threshold for "amount of physical activity needed to have a relatively normal childbirth", and do you think that modern office workers are at risk of being below it?
It certainly has a function, you just don't like the side effects.
Long hair on men is one of the things that varies between cultures and time periods. There's a slight bias against it since it can be a liability in a fight, and can be high-maintenance in unwelcome ways when you're a soldier (lice are a thing). The Beatles example seems more like a basic pressure to conform.
I'd say the core of an gender role is the overall attitude, the fashion details are negotiable. If you can project confidence, dominance and potential aggression while wearing a skirt then more power to you, though realistically you'll have to be a Scottish highlander to pull that off.
It's not like every, or even most, culture(s) has very different gender roles, though. Like yeah, there are a *few* exceptions, but *in general* the vast majority across the world and history have had pretty similar divisions-of-labor.
Even in orthodox Jewish communities, most of the roles remain the same: women are not expected to fight while the men hide, men are not expected to submit while women lead, men are not ideally kind and soft and women tough and forceful, etc.
I think rather it is that there are *some* things which seem to be universally gendered experiences (men are always soldiers, women are rarely soldiers) and some things which seems to be weirdly time-and-place specific (only very effeminate men wear skirts in England, whereas only hypermasculine men wear skirts in Scotland - although they call them 'kilts')
But I agree with your second point entirely - it seems odd to me to pick out one variation on 'standard' gender roles which exists in one specific subcommunity of one particular subculture and then argue that this is evidence that 'standard' gender roles are highly mutable. Unless we can find other examples of this existing with some regularity it seems much more likely that this is some odd interactions between the social contract for gender and the social contract for being an orthodox Jewish person.
All of this seems pretty reasonable and correct to me.
After thinking about your first section a bit: Yes, that's true. Some things *are* highly dependent on time and place, whereas others are nearly universal; I was going to say that I thought the larger part of gendered traits fits into the latter category, but I guess that somewhat depends on what you consider in the first place.
E.g., mostly what I think of is stuff like "who does the fighting" or "who keeps the house" or "who raises the small children", so it seems like "most of these things are pretty universal" to me — but the opposite impression might be made upon someone who is thinking first in terms of, say, fashions.
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Re: your second section: This is extremely common. I might even say it's some sort of unnamed cognitive bias (to which I am not immune: see below), but perhaps we can look at it as a manifestation of "am I forced to believe" vs "am I allowed to believe"? ...whatever this isn't important why did I even write this part IGNORE THIS
Ahem. That is, when someone says something I don't like about a grouping (of anything, not necessarily only people) — "BMWs are generally slower than AMG Mercedeseses", say, to pick a completely random example that may or may not be true at all — I tend to want to find one counter-example ("well if that's the case how do you explain the 2022 M5 CS? both makes have their fast and slow cars checkmate") and then say "it varies".
It's like... if I created some doubt, then the argument can be dismissed — *even if it's still true in general and I've just pointed out a rare exception.*
And I see this *all the time* in discussions like this. Usually, it's something like "well, in the Yanomamo, women are the leaders, so your theory isn't universal at all" or "well, Rhonda Rousey can beat up most men, so it's dumb to generalize like you're doing", or... etc. I cannot overemphasize how common it is. It is almost always one or two weird exceptions, followed by "...therefore there is no pattern here move along". It's something about this particular topic specifically, I swear.
I had always heard of the Athenians being compared to Afghans in their cloistering of women. Spartan women took on many of the roles that men would have in Athens, since Spartan men were all busy in the military.
"The wives of Spartan citizens were expected to not do *any* work, as work is for slaves. The Spartan wives were thus proud of how free and unburbened they were."
The Spartan women were expected to oversee the day-to-day operations of the slaves. Think of them as management rather than not working.
The easy part first: men and women traditionally wear different clothing because they have different bodies, and because the things they typically want to signal with their clothing are different, and because they are expected to do different jobs that put different requirements on their clothing. The latter has become less important, the former not so much.
Gender roles in general: one's sex used to dramatically restrict what kind of life model a person could choose - motherhood was and is obviously for women, and was almost inevitable without birth control; hard physical labor, soldiering etc. was for men only. That lead to all kinds of differences in the way people act and communicate with the same and the opposite gender - among men, physical violence is always an option; among women, it isn't; men are expected to be useful and tough, women are expected to be patient and kind etc. A man behaving like a woman would be perceived as a useless pushover; a woman behaving like a man, as overly aggressive and not suitable as a wife and mother.
So, people long for guidance - how do I have to behave as a man/ woman to not embarrass myself? And there's your gender roles. (Also, gender roles serve to rein in the pathological aspects of each sex's tendencies - e.g., by formalizing chivalry as an acceptable outlet for male aggression.)
Some of the factors that shaped gender roles are still relevant; others may have become irrelevant in a modern society, but are still evolutionarily etched into our psychology and physiology. So gender roles are still needed, and trying to get rid of them can cause confusion and allow the mentioned pathologies to manifest themselves. IMO, the trick is to offer reasonable, constructive gender roles as guidelines that people can follow and be on the safe side, but can bend and ignore if they feel they have to, without suffering undue penalties.
I agree with all of this but would add that conservative ideas about conformity tend to keep ideas around gender roles around for longer than they are relevant. In the West, for example, men go to work and women don't. Except they do now and it takes a couple of generations for the new paradigm to replace the old.
Women now constitute the majority of graduates, PhDs, doctors, biologists but a previous generation grew up where the opposite was the case. It's not surprising that this gives them culture shock.
There will come a day when the term 'Patriarchy' is no longer provides a useful description of society but people will continue using for a couple of generations after it became irrelevant.
>There will come a day when the term 'Patriarchy' is no longer provides a useful description of society but people will continue using for a couple of generations after it became irrelevant.<
Yes; possibly, when women make up more of the college-educated and "elite" (e.g. doctor, PhD, biologist) populations, say, then those who speak of "patriarchy" will be clinging to a useless and irrelevant term. We can only dream of such a day.
Access to academically elite fields is significant progress. Also, Roe v. Wade was just repealed. The term “patriarchy” will be irrelevant when all forms of power, including political and financial, are more representatively held. Patriarchy will be over when being a woman does not contain extra hurdles to access to power, all else being equal.
The conservative tendency to keep ideas around for longer than they are relevant has to be balanced against the progressive tendency to deem as irrelevant ideas that are still relevant to a portion of the population. Most social tendencies such as the traditions that make up gender roles are ideas that don't cease to be relevant for everyone at the same time; the idea that because they aren't relevant to part of the population means they aren't relevant to any of the population is a fallacy (see "luxury beliefs").
Gender roles are often amplifications of biological facts. Historically women didn’t fight because they just weren’t strong enough. They worked in the home (after marriage) because in times of child mortality getting children to survive was important.
None of this excuses later prejudices, like feet binding of course.
Regarding your last line... Gender roles do not explain all of gender identity, but there's overlap. I suspect there are very few trans individuals whose transition only includes the internal identity label and requested pronouns. Even if there is no physical transition, there are usually behavioral transitions (e.g., dress, mannerisms). Otherwise, what precisely are you transitioning from and to?
I admit I am confused and do not understand the subjective experience of a deeply felt identity separate from a label / heuristic for the underlying descriptions.
If someone told me they were trans, but presented as cis in every other way, I would still treat them as anyone else and use the requested pronouns, but it would be as confusing to me as the converse -- someone saying they were cis but transitioning in every way other than label or identity.
I think in many cases, these people are transitioning from "uncool" to "cool". This is a fairly recent phenomenon, but I think not a small one. LGBT is now "cool" in many circles, and while L and G require very costly signals if you're not really into them, some forms of B and T (et al) are essentially cost-free.
Fair enough, social credit being weighted in one direction is an obvious explanation I should have noticed, especially in the nearly-cost-free situations (e.g., the non-binary identity JonathanD mentioned in the other comment about his daughter's friends.)
And with that, I hereby declare the mini convocation of Jo(h)n's to be concluded!
This is a thing I've seen a bit lately. Femme presenting women or girls declare themselves non-binary, ask for they/them pronouns, and do nothing else differently.
Two of these are two of my 11yo daughter's friends, which has me bracing for a similar conversion from my kid.
It's befuddling. These kids are in every visible way still little girls. They certainly aren't identifying with boyhood in anyway. It's like the end state of feminism has been to make these kids embarrassed to be called girls. Which I'm pretty sure wasn't the point.
Feet binding was a mark of being rich enough not to work. The equivalent for men would be the really long fingernails (in China), or the shoes with really long toes (long enough to require binding up to the legs), or the enormous amounts of lace that were fashionable at times before the Industrial Revolution.
I think a lot of these gender roles are just people looking down upon the different. Maybe due to a desire of predictability.
Take the analogy with left handedness. It used to be highly stigmatized, parents would tie down their kids' left hand in order to force them to use the right one. You could try a functional explanation, like "the Roman army needed all soldiers to lift the shield with the same hand to form a shield wall", or, "mass produced items tend to favor the majority, so parents would try to change their kids hand orientation as to make them better adapted to use such items". But these explanations seem limited and can you really change peoples' hand preference by stigma?
Anyway, it seems like the majority of people are right handed, therefore people looked down upon those who weren't. People have a mental model of the world, and things that conflict with that mental model create cognitive dissonance provoking a negative reaction and then stigma. Is this adaptable? Only insofar as noticing differences is good as it might indicate a problem, a disease, a deficiency or something that could be fixed. But in this particular case this adaptation just misfired.
I think a lot of these gender norms are like that. Of course you then have to explain why are men and women different on average, but that is left to evolutionary psychology. So why are evolutionary explanations not enough to explain stigma? In some cases it is, I think slut shaming is intra female competition, in other words a guild like behavior to punish those who are trying to lower the value of sex, and thus taking power from other women.
But take makeup for example. Why do women wear makeup? In order to increase attractiveness and increase their sexual market value. What's the problem with a man wearing makeup? It doesn't seem like there is any social problem. Of course he would be hadcapping himself (or it might serve as a crippling signaling, as in "I'm so manly that I can wear makeup and still be attractive to women", like David Bowie and other old school rockstars). But socially, what's the harm?
And yet, people do seem threatened by it. As you said "people can feel like the social world is crumbling if gender roles are shaky". "This is not how things are supposed to be!" I think people defending their expectations and avoiding cognitive dissonance is a better explanation.
"Take the analogy with left handedness. It used to be highly stigmatized, parents would tie down their kids' left hand in order to force them to use the right one."
This "used to" is doing way too much work. Even within our own culture, it's only during some time periods that lefthandedness has been stigmatized. (I also suspect that the *level* of stigma was always higher among the working classes than the aristocracy.)
My idea is that the salient variable is just how conformist the surrounding culture is at any given time period. My dad got his hands beaten with a ruler for being left-handed; when I went to school in the same town that didn't happen. Japanese swordsmanship famously to this day (including kendo) just plain doesn't allow you to use a left-hand grip, while western fencing has a centuries-long tradition of arguing about whether southpaws have an innate advantage as fencers or if it's just habit, etcetera.
[The following is a first-pass off-the-top-of-the-head theory]
With regards to social signals such as makeup, one has to think about what they mean both in terms of what they signal to potential mates and what they signify to potential competitors, and this differs for men and women as well as in different times and conditions. In times of peace, showing off your wealth is a way of making yourself look better as a prospective mate. In times of conflict, making yourself look strong to ward off competitors is more important than making yourself look wealthy.
Spending the time to make yourself attractive (whatever form it takes at the time: makeup, powdered wigs, jewelry, etc.) is often a signal of both wealth and of physical weakness. A female that makes themselves weak but successfully attracts a male can rely on the male they attracted to overcome that weakness. Renaissance and Victorian era upper class males could rely on attractiveness via makeup (or the equivalent) to show off their wealth because their social status meant they didn't need to compete on strength. In the modern era, makeup is cheap (so it doesn't make a man look wealthy) and it has lingering connotations signifying weakness, so it's not a good social signal.
Actually wrt left-handed stigma: I'm almost certain this is an echo of Indian purity practices (as an overwhelming majority of languages come from Proto-Indo-European, I expect cultural norms to descend in the same way).
If there is a widespread social convention that you do pure things, including things that require dexterity (note the etymology!) with your right hand and impure things with your left, and you see someone doing it the other way around - particularily in a way that looks like the person is disrespecting/contaminating you and your things on purpose - that can lead to, uh, misunderstandings, some of them violent.
What follows is an attempt at a rough first pass answer from a conservative perspective; it's what comes off of attempting to generate an answer quickly and thus may contain inconsistencies. I appreciate comments that will help refine my answer.
What we see as 'gender roles' are thousands of years of tradition built on top of sexual selection, raising offspring, and division of labor. By sexual selection, I mean the process attracting a mate. This is something animals do; we don't talk about peacocks having 'gender roles'. Individuals need to both signal that they are looking for a partner and demonstrate their fitness as a partner. When I say 'raising offspring', there are several important parts of it from a 'roles' perspective. Some of it is found elsewhere in nature: females have to actually carry the child to term, and they also produces nutrients for the infant. On top of this, since the male's work is done once the child is conceived, the male is expendable. This leads to part of the 'gender roles' like 'women and children first' on a sinking ship. It also plays into 'division of labor'. Males being both expendable and being on average physically stronger makes them more suited to harder or more dangerous work like the profession of 'soldier' (and a lot of society is built around this particular profession).
You can pull all of the accumulated traditional cruft away from the roles assigned to the genders, but you can't eliminate these three distinctions in the sexes that generate the distinct roles.
If you're going in that direction, you also need to consider "bachelor baboons". The dominant males tend to be at the center of the pack, then a cluster of females and their kids. The remaining males are at the outer edges where they serve as both a early warning system, and as a guard. (Naturally, things are actually this regularly structured.) At one point our ancestors lived in an environment similar to the one baboons tend to be found in, and that may have pushed them in the same direction. (But people are a lot more mobile than baboons, and are cursory hunters, so there is also a push in the direction of wolf packs. With relatively equal roles between the sexes.) And we descended from the same ancestors as did the chimpanzees, and they've got a different set of behaviors, so our starting place was different.
Here it's worth noting that one of the major differences between humans and chimpanzees is that human females conceal when they are fertile. So you've got to figure why that was advantageous, and how that fits into the sex roles model. I suspect it's one basis of durable pair bonds in humans. (Not *the* basis, as among extremely closely related species of voles the species that has durable pair bonding has increased production of oxytocin.)
So there's lots of stuff going on, and any simple story is going to be incomplete. But biological evolution takes place over evolutionary time (not a slow as we used to thing), while social evolution takes place over cultural evolutionary time (much faster), but needs to fit into the biologically evolved context.
Being able to make things fancy is a luxury, in time, resources, and other trade-offs. If you're Louis the XIV, you can have a fancy hairdo. If you work with heavy machinery every day, not so much.
I have thought a bit about this question from a different perspective (the ethics of treating sex-specific medical conditions) and I came to the conclusion that the answer to "Why do gender roles exist?" is that gender roles come downstream of biology, and this is the reason they came into being and have been successfully replicated across time and different societies.
I think it is slightly unfashionable to talk in those terms nowadays, but I see the single biggest difference between men and women as the fact that women have to give birth if a heterosexual couple want biological children. There are also some secondary effects of this like the fact that hormones which regulate female fertility and so which allow them to give birth also decrease their muscle mass and so on, but I think the birth thing is the primary effect.
Up until about 200 years ago, giving birth was a process which required perhaps twelve economically unproductive months (6 months prepartum where you're too pregnant to do anything physically demanding, 6 months postpartum where you needed to breastfeed the baby and can't do anything that takes you too far away from the baby - although I've just made those numbers up so don't lean on them too much!). Over the course of family planning for a typical 1850's family of maybe 7 children this would take you out of the workforce for maybe 10 years (seven successful pregnancies plus a 20% infant mortality rate). This probably mattered a fair amount in agricultural societies, but unarguably mattered hugely in industrialising societies.
Consequently a family in the 1850s looking to have children and not starve needs to structure themselves around that economically unproductive time, which means evolving norms where the man goes out to work and the woman performs tasks around the home that are not too physically demanding (or rather, physically demanding tasks are structured around the cadence of the biology of childbirth). This might mean, for example, that the woman does a lot of unpaid cooking/clothing manufacture and repair, which is fiddly but fits around the demands of managing a household. I suppose this is sort of like your 'advantage of specialisation' story, but the important point is that the woman 'specialises' in having children and everything else fits around that.
But then I think a lot of what we regard as modern patriarchy follows from that. Since women know that they will be completely dependent on a man to provide for them for up to a decade, multiple very complex social conventions have been created to try and make sense of that arrangement. For example, the idea that men are expected to violently defend insults to their wives honour is presumably a reaction to the fact that there's a good chance the women is not in a fit state to physically defend herself depending on the stage of the pregnancy cycle she's at (plus, as I mentioned, women are generally weaker as a consequence of biology, which I fold into broader considerations about childbirth). Given this setup, men evolve norms of emphasising their physical prowess and dangerous-ness, while women evolve norms of trying to avoid giving offence.
However this isn't a perfect theory, because a lot of modern masculinity does NOT follow from this - why would boys be associated with blue and girls with pink on the basis of biology alone? Why trousers for boys and skirts for girls? So I think there might be a second story supervening on that where these biologically-derived gender expectations are also partially used as a sexual signaling / selection mechanism. For example if the expectation is that women are going to be raising all the children, then it might be a good idea for women to signal how caring they are to attract a partner, so it might be a good idea for women to be expressively fond of little fluffy animals like cats, so it might be a good idea for men to be expressively anti little fluffy animals like cats so that they are signaling how un-feminine they are.
Of course, many women can't or don't want to give birth, but the difference between a women who is fertile and a woman who doesn't want children is invisible from the perspective of society (plus I think those women are still a minority) so I think the reason we don't see more granulated targeting of birth-giving women is because it is easier to invent norms that apply to 'all women' rather than 'all women involved in this particular social contract'. For example, rules around female sexual purity are taught even to very young girls because they make sense in the context of 1850s biologically-driven social constructs for women who intend to reproduce. However by the time a women decides if she does want to reproduce these elements of gender identity have already been transmitted; "Men must pursue women, women must be the object of pursuit" and so on.
However I think your second question ("Why do people care so much about them?") is far more interesting and not something I'd ever really thought of before. 200 years is long enough for a lot of very deeply-embedded social constructs to change - arguably the construct of gay marriage acceptance changed within a single generation - but gender roles have been fairly systematised for a while. Obviously childbirth is still a massive deal, but the changing nature of the workforce and declining family size means that it is much less of an impediment to gender equality than it was a few centuries ago. Will be very interested to see what other people have on this point.
That is, I think most everything you say here is very well-reasoned and makes sense, but a piece you are (maybe) missing (can't tell, but I think it would answer your final question) is that it isn't unidirectional, but perhaps more of a loop: strong men and caring women have greater reproductive success ---> culture emphasizes strong men and caring women ---> strong men and caring women have greater reproductive success... etc.
After millennia of these things being selected for both by the facts of biology and by a cultural/sexually-selective emphasis, we get men who are — rather than blank slates ready to assume whatever role the culture is currently promoting — by and large *naturally inclined to these "traditional" roles.*
I find this in myself, for one. Without ever *meaning* to, without ever thinking "I NEED TO BE MASCULINE" (I'm so weak to impulse and pleasure that I doubt I could *manage* to change myself if my damn life depended on it... argh), I've ended up stereotypically masculine to a very high degree. It's all very ego-syntonic and I experience no distress at any masculine norm: it's pretty much all exactly what I'd want. N=1... but still, I think this might be common.
There's evidence for this but citing stuff for a post that maybe two people will read is too much work for a lazy fellow like me, so I'll just vaguely gesture in the direction of studies I've read and hope I'm trusted to be honest. For example: ape "kids" (what's the term? young? spawn?!) tend to show the same division of play that human children do (male apes are rougher, female apes groom and socialize each other more), even (human) kids raised entirely gender-neutral — or even with opposite-gender social conditioning — almost universally revert to biological type (boys, even if told it's girly to play with cars and manly to like dolls, still prefer cars, and vice versa), these things (as you noted) are pretty damn widespread and consistent for something that could be arbitrary to each culture, etc. etc.
As for stuff like "blue = boy, pink = girl"... I don't know how widespread these sorts of things are; you could construct some just-so stories to explain them; but overall (as you yourself led me to think about earlier!), I'd wager this kind of thing is just cultural accretion over, and/or to extend and emphasize, legitimate biological difference.
The blue for boy, pink for girl reversal is over emphasised anyway. It used to be light blue for girls and reddish pink, if it was even pink, for boys. And neither of these were common. Do an image search for “paintings of Victorian children” - no obvious pattern except white predominates. And these would be upper middle class children getting painted, for the most part.
Second time in this open thread that I'll mention Joseph Henrich and his "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter", though for an entirely different reason here.
What is missing from the unfortunately-polarized discussions of sex, gender, roles, and the rest is that everything human is recursively both genetic and cultural. To take one of his (earliest) examples: being hairless and absurdly good at sweating (by any other animal's standard) is downstream not just from the ability to figure out carrying water with you in gourds on the hunt but the ability to learn this technology from others and disseminate it species-wide (over thousands of years in deep pre-human history mind you). Gender roles are a kind of social technology which has evolved with us, and driven our phyiscal evolution (obviously so -- the archaeological record shows that sexual dimorphism in human skeletal remains has been increasing). This in turn drives further cultural disambiguation, etc. The conservative who says "sex is genetic, it's hardwired" is absolutely correct, as is the progressive who says "gender is social, it's malleable and on a spectrum".
What this implies about next steps, best practices (on a personal or societal level), or anything else is another story (as is the proven, so-well-known-it's-in-textbooks-on-endocrinology hormonal damage we've suffered in the last century due to chemicals in agricultural run-off).
Because they are hot. Erasure of gender roles leads to dead bedrooms.
Gender roles are the culturally evolved answer to human sexuality and psychology. They provide an obvious route for a person to optimize both their appeal to the opposite sex, and the respect they receive from their own.
I don't necessarily agree with the strong version of that argument, but do feel that not-having-a-role leads to...unpleasantly high search costs due to difficulties of product evaluation. There's a huge amount of metadata riding on gender roles, and to intentionally null or muddy that requires a good reason to overcome. Doesn't seem like an accident to me that pretty much all the "nonbinary" type folks I know have partners who are...also NB.
I feel like this is a trap a lot of modern men have fallen into. De-masculinized just enough to be in some kind of uncanny valley of non-gender-roled confusion. I guess that's the charitable case against the so-called Nice Guy trope. Doesn't seem to be an analogue on the women side.
Obviously, on an individual level, whatever makes people happy is their prerogative and I try to support it. But it does create macro-society level problems when the...mating market turns dysfunctional. Which should concern everyone.
There's a funny thing about lesbians specifially where the vast majority of them actually prefer hyperfeminine women just like straight men do... buuuut all of them also want to be careless (or deliberately "aesthetic" which is at least as unattractive) with their clothes, get tattooed, have short hair etcetera and figure they've "shaken off the inconvenient and oppressive burden of pleasing men", so their dating pool ends up being mostly androgynous women. Similarly, and germane to the conversation on the use of gender roles, none of them want to make the first move, so there are lots of missed opportunities with associated neurotic angst. If you hang out around single lesbians for any amount of time you'll see quite a bit of this seething/thirsting pattern.
I share the sense of other commenters that there's been a lot more room made for nuance and subcategories *for women*, but much less headway for men. Would also differentiate between androgyny-as-look vs nonbindary-as-gendered-behaviours, but perhaps that's splitting hairs. Anecdotal evidence also seems to suggest that the premium for skewing more traditional-ways is still net positive, although that tends to cover more use cases than just the mating market (e.g. job evaluation). Unsure what the current state of empirical literature is, if there could be such a thing on such inherently qualitative measures.
I think a weak form of your argument ("certain gender roles arise because because they coincide with what the opposite sex finds attractive") is probably true, but the strong form ("People who don't strongly cleave to stereotypical gender norms are utterly repulsive") is incredibly off-base.
I'm a man who is attracted to women who are not stereotypically-feminine within the culture I reside and in fact have some stereotypically-masculine traits (I find confident, sexually-aggressive women, women with good muscle definition, and women in business suits hot). I also have a high sex drive- hardly a nymphomaniac, but high. I'm also far from the only person who finds these sorts of things attractive. There are a LOT of people out there who have fetishes for tomboys, female body-builders, women in business suits, etc., not to mention the entire category of femdom, which is inherently built around the idea of inverting the stereotypical gender dynamic. These aren't weird, small, niche fetishes either.
In addition, there's also the fact that many men and women don't find highly-gendered people hot- I've known about as many women who find the stereotyped "macho man" grotesque-looking as ones who find him a dreamboat. Likewise with men splitting between finding the highly-gendered female look (known in the us as the "Bimbo" look) repulsive and exciting.
Beyond that, there's also the fact that the same sexual signals can be very different in different cultures. Are you shredded in the US? You're a man's man's man who all the women want. Are you shredded in Japan? You're a man's man's man in a very literal sense, in that you'll be assumed to be an aggressive homosexual.
If you're asserting the strong form of the argument, you have to really grapple with all of this instead of making a totalizing statement. You could try to dismiss all of that as "rounding errors", but at a certain point hand-waving away errors starts to look less like nit-picking and more like you refusing to address structural flaws in your argument.
My own stance is somewhere between the weak form and strong form, as stated.
I'd say that conforming to a gender role gives you broad appeal, nonconforming may give you some niche appeal at best.
Come to think of it, some ways of not conforming are better than others. It's better to be feminine like David Bowie than be feminine like Shinji Ikari*. It seems insults about being unmanly/unwomanly can be split into "you're not sexy because you don't pattern match to your gender" vs "you're not sexy because you're a whiny little bitch / a she-Hitler that has a problem with everything", where it's about traits unattractive regardless of gender, but more apparent in one of them.
* - the fact that I can't find a real-life famous example is telling, because... people with these traits don't become famous, despite being commonplace IRL
1. "Niche appeal at best" might be absolutely true, but I feel like it ultimately ignores the fact that there's a LOT of niches out there and a "small niche" will still mean millions of people in the US alone.
It also probably ignores the fact that these kinds of attractions aren't binary and it's possible to be attracted to multiple "looks" at once.
2. It's deeply funny that you can't identify a famous male who features negative feminine behavioral stereotypes, because my mind immediately went to Seth Rogen. He is the very poster child of "hysterical behavior" whenever he's not on-set, he simply lacks feminine visual aesthetics.
3. My next point in regards to gender roles, then, is: what's bad about having niche appeal? Most music has niche appeal, and music which doesn't often gets derided as immensely dull.
...Speaking of that, I wonder what the overlap between people who get immensely offended at people who don't cleave strongly to archetypal gender roles and people who deride music genres that aren't socially-approved-of.
I think it would be useful to have statistics here. I don't have them on hand, but IIRC the people who do not find "highly-gendered" people more attractive ("without confounding from having to publicly state such a position" might be important) are a much tinier minority than you'd think (as a fellow member of our subculture here, which selects for atypical people).
E.g., even women who claimed not to find muscular men attractive *still* selected them as more attractive than less-muscular men, more often than not. (Again, from memory — could have been a tiny crappy study or something, of course.)
Of course, it is not universal. I don't know if anyone is actually *making* the "strong form" argument you constructed, and it does seem wrong... but it seems reasonable to say "yeah for the majority it's true that gender roles and traits make things hotter."
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...certainly works on me, at least! The more stereotypically feminine a woman is, the more attractive and appealing I find her — both physically and mentally. Like, for me at least, it's too hard to go too far in this direction. (I don't believe the "Bimbo" pattern is really the "ultimate feminine", though. It's too specific to a certain time and place, as I understand it — e.g., the focus on "tall and blonde and this style of make-up" etc.)
I suppose I *do* find it almost repellent to consider an aggressive, rough 'n' tough, ripped-und-jacked woman (...so perhaps I'm biased, heh). Might have something to do with me being a very stereotypically-masculine man, though, come to think of it; since day one, basically, and not by design or anything.
I wonder if the guys saying they like muscular aggressive women are themselves less aggressive and muscular than average? Is this sort of like "opposites attract" again?
Well, n=2, but I fall more into the "opposites attract" camp (save that I'm tall and fantasize about taller women)- but my roommate is a muscular, aggressive man who's attracted to muscular, aggressive women.
That's interesting. Maybe there's no general principle here and I'm tilting at windmills... *or maybe we're on the verge of a breakthrough!*
EDIT: I will say that my ex did not like extremely muscular men *at all*, and I empirically verified this... but she was very stereotypically feminine (small, shy, sweet, gentle). I think she did like that I was taller and stronger than she was, though. I have no idea what this means for our theory.
I don't think strongly gendered people are hot. Perhaps most people do, but it's not an absolute, and I also think the original question is much more interesting than your dismissal of it via this categorical statement.
Also, suppression of homosexuality for thousands of years caused many people who would have lived homosexual lives today to lead hetrosexual ones and produce offspring. (With or without homosexual partners on the side.)
Are you adding in the heterosexual people like Victualis who find strongly-gendered people repulsive in that number? Or heterosexual people who find "feminine" traits in men or "masculine" traits in women attractive? Or are we going to pretend that those groups don't exist either?
How large of a percentage of the population would need to not obey the totalizing statement "men only find stereotypically-feminine women attractive and women only find stereotypically-masculine men attractive" before you'd start to consider this theory wrong? Double-digit percentages?
Hold on! Did Victualis say "repulsive"? Did trebuchet say "only"?
(I guess you *can* make the case that trebuchet's initial statement implied "all/only", but it isn't how I read it, at least. If Victualis said or implied "repulsive", though, I missed it.)
...is this important? I don't know... but maybe, okay!
I suppose my objection here would be "does 'gendered traits are involved in sexual attraction for most people, as you would expect of evolution' imply that there are no exceptions, and if not, what's the problem here?" Exaggerating "less attractive" to "repulsive" sort of seems like a way to make the exceptions seem more significant than they perhaps actually are, I guess?
- I believe you mean "a real dog", who said, in response to the question "why do (stereotypical) gender roles exist and why do people care about them?" with:
"Because gender roles are hot. Erasure of gender roles leads to dead bedrooms."
Which can reasonably read as "Because traditional gender roles are hot. Erasure of traditional gender roles leads to dead bedrooms."
Which implies:
"People who do not conform to traditional gender roles are not sexually attractive."
No, I shall not, because my point is that if your totalizing theory of gender roles and sexuality doesn't explain very large regions of the interaction between gender roles and human sexuality, then it sucks as a totalizing theory of the relationship between gender roles and human sexuality.
My understanding is that obligate homosexuality isn't all that common across species. Basically, us & sheep are the only ones where the frequency is above 1%.
I would love for gender roles to be socially constructed but I just don't see it. The male black widow never consumes the female. Gender roles are so universally biological in other species it seems like extreme wishful thinking to think that would not be the case in our own.
Oh sure, I don't think that human gender roles are AS biological as black widow gender roles
But if, in the end, spider society reached an equilibrium between pickup artists and Black Widow Widow Studies professors where in extremely traditiobal cultures the female ate the male every time, whereas in more liberal cultures they just get to have sex with no cannibalism... that's still an extremely real set of biologically imposed gender roles. Men still never eat women. And maybe in progressive liberal societies the female can resist the urge to eat, and the man resist the urge to be eaten. But you can't simply define the asymmetry away as 'complicated'.
And if pigs could fly there's be a lot more shit everywhere. You're gambling an awful lot on people just accepting the idea that (American, mid-20th century) gender roles are in fact some hardwired set of commands when the fact that there are gender roles that are in fact fairly different from American mid-20th century gender roles indicates that your insistence on these things as rigid biotruths instead of plastic objects formed from a variety of biological and social factors is simply incorrect.
The most you could put down as iron-clad is "Women are expected to care for their children". Everything else has been historically negotiable.
Seems fairly sound, though it fails to mention pushback against longtermism from within rationalism and EA.
I would think that one of the strongest arguments against longtermism is that we don't know that much about the future, so building a sounder present is more solidly based in knowledge.
Maybe there's a parallel between getting hypnotized by the future potential of the human or post-human race and getting hypnotized by "luxury space communism".
The piece relies too much on picking apart the point that longtermism fights for the value of 10^24 (or whatever) future lives to be created instead of focusing on immediate suffering here and now.
I always saw the premise of targeting x-risk as: wiping out 100% of life is dramatically, inarguably worse than wiping out 99% of life (which is among the most horrendous things I can think of). At least that 1% can stand a chance of bouncing back and continuing the existence of quite a unique and special phenomena in the universe. Life > No life. And the same extends to a parochial speciest view that Human life > No human life.
I have scepticism on longtermism as a movement and some disagreements with pure utilitarianism generally, but I thought the constant hammering of the "potential 10^24 lives in the future" in the piece was a needless distraction that made me think less of the author every time it was raised.
My take-away from these is that Torres in the CA article Nancy linked makes a lot of poor characterizations of what longetermists do and think in the vein of (paraphrasing that EA forum response) "we better not let moral philosophers anywhere near trolleys!" But that also Torres makes a compelling argument that longtermism has weaponizable aspects that are kind of terrifying to have wielding influence, not due to what the current EA/longtermism communities are doing, but of the potential for future massive failures. It's scary to be able to say that actually this thing, with no visible present-day effects, is more important than the loss of a billion human lives today. Even if every longtermist today is smart enough to avoid that failure mode, how long will it take for a demagogue to weaponize that? Longtermists aren't unaware of this potential, but maybe lack the appropriate urgency.
> I think it would be tempting to respond to him directly on twitter, but I think that would just give this article oxygen. I don't think we should reward a bad (in my opinion) article like this
and another
> Posts that criticize Longtermism, posted directly by the writer, or in this case deliberately brought in, aren’t just bad in content by a huge margin, but also seem to be intellectually dishonest. Frankly, it suggests criticism of this topic attracts a malign personality.
I'm not really sure what that last quote means, but it doesn't sound like a community that embraces criticism. See also the response on LW that I linked above that is downvoted to -41 with only two on-topic comments. The EA forum response has no push-back on the Torres' claims of silencing of critics - though I guess it's hard to respond to vague claims. This has overall moved me towards, say, Zvi's position that EA is insular and not responsive to foundational criticism despite claiming otherwise.
Lastly, I'd say that most of Torres' theoretical arguments seem to be against utilitarianism or total utilitarianism rather than longtermism per se.
Mostly agreed. Setting aside a bunch of other considerations (_no_ depreciation rate for future events??? really???), but longtermism and more conventional long term thinking (for >1000 year periods) seem to me to just radically underestimate how unpredictable the future is. We regularly get the _sign_ of the effects of our actions wrong on a decade time scale. Basing just about any current decision on anticipated impacts >1000 years later, on extinction risks or on any other parameter, strikes me as deciding based on pure noise.
That’s a good piece that I wasn’t expecting to be so convinced by. On the other hand, longtermism in this sense doesn’t seem all that important to current EA activities. GiveWell mostly gives to the poorest parts of the world in the same way you would expect if EAs didn’t care about longtermism. I’ve always seen the arguments in favor of working on X-risk mostly on saying that we should devote some non-zero effort to these, not that we need to drop basic humanitarian work to do them. AI work now largely focuses on pretty short term horizons that could hardly be called longtermism and more like basic survival (if you accept the premise). The justification that an aligned AI could prevent x-risk is well down the list of motivations for that work, despite what the article makes it sound like. But the quotes provided in the article do look literally dangerously fanatical and willing to trade off basic human decency for these goals in a way that would potentially be horrific.
I looked a little more into it. The author of that article also wrote a post “A Harmful View” on LW in January. It was downvoted to -41 without receding much response to its content. I think that speaks in favor of the EA-can’t-take-criticism claim, albeit slightly. This article was also posted to the EA forum and discussed there with more earnestly. The responses there primarily seem to be concerned about quotes being misrepresentations. They are being up what I said above, that EA doesn’t actually seem to be acting in the failure mode described here.
Is there any price point for water such that it'd make economic sense to have...the dishwasher equivalent of a laundromat? Or would too much of the gains-from-scale be lost to logistical difficulties? I notice it's one of the few private household niceties that doesn't seem to ever have a public option version.
Before you reach that point you'd reach the point where it made sense to have durable metal plates, and a microwave that could heat them sufficiently to over-sterilize them. Even sooner it would make sense to have edible plates and utensils. (At one point cornbread was often used as a disk, and clam chowder is occasionally served in a hollowed out ball of french bread.) You could also consider trenchers, i.e. wooden plates that you scrape off, dry, and then can use sandpaper on.
I am genuinely surprised we don't already have widespread availability of edible plates and utensils, or high-durability low-cost metal dishes outside a camping context. (I guess metal straws are a thing, but that feels more like a misguided fad than anything.) The whole movement towards making "biodegradable" tableware one throws in the compost has been...I dunno, it confuses me how otherwise-extreme-chemophobes are somehow able to give "plant based plastic" a free pass.
I bet trenchers could easily be turned into a greenwashed trend though.
My favourite drinking glass hack is to buy tallcircle-shaped jars of, say, olives (Don't Forgetta Mezzetta[tm]) or peach/pear halves. Then wash them really well once empty, or dishwasher. Pickle jars are too wide to grasp comfortably, same problem with the kitschy Mason Jar Drinking Glass trend. (If it ought to require a handle, it's a __mug__, not a __glass__!) In addition to being designed for durable mass shipping with fairly high abuse, you also get a screw-on lid. And if it breaks, who cares, it effectively cost nothing in the first place.
The only trouble is they're not quite weighted properly to microwave, unless it's on a properly leveled surface. But mugs work better for microwavables anyway.
If water ever became this scarce (and somehow society didn't collapse) then you can hand-wash dishes much more water-efficiently than any dishwasher could do it.
A tiny bit of water and a lot of scrubbing is all you really need to clean your dishes, and it's still less effort than packing them up and taking them down to the dish-o-mat. Dishwashers are extremely water-inefficient because they use jets of water to do a job that could be done with a slightly damp rag.
This does not seem to be the prevailing consensus. Rather, with very efficient hand-washing techniques, you can perhaps _match_ efficiency with a modern dishwasher. An Energy Star dishwasher uses 3.5 gal or less per cycle, and you can pack a lot of dishes in.
Additionally the amount of energy to feed you for the time required to wash and scrub thoroughly seems unlikely to balance out, along with any additional tool waste (brushes, sponges, etc).
I think that with efficient hand-washing techniques you could wash a whole dishwasher load with a glass of water. First you scrape as much as you can off using sand. Then you thoroughly remove the sand using a cloth. Then you give each dish a scrub using a damp rag.
I mean, I hand wash my dishes with the faucet running, so maaaaybe I get up to 3.5 gal. But you can also hand wash with just the two basins of your sink each filled once. And that's only a gallon or so.
Presumably, you are not washing an entire dishwasher's-worth of dishes at a single time. I also am having a hard time picturing a sink small enough that two basins would be filled with a single gallon-jug worth of water.
Certainly not. I'm a single dude, the only time I have that many dishes is when I throw a party. Afterwards, I do often hook up my portable dishwasher and do it that way.
Dishwashers are far far more efficient than hand washing. It's not even close.
The difference is three pieces:
Dishwashers reuse the same water over and over again during the cleaning cycle.
Dishwashers get MUCH hotter than you can safely wash with your hands
Dishwashers can use much more potent solvents and detergents than you can safely wash with your hands.
An efficient dishwasher can do an entire load of dishes with 2-4 gallons of water.
If you examine the water after a dishwasher load completes, the water is pretty much maximally soiled - much much more so than the majority of people would be okay with sticking their hands in.
This is readily demonstrable on YouTube and Google.
You could beat this with hand washing only by moving the acceptance criteria of "clean".
Water conservation is very important, but dishwashers are the wrong place to look to optimize - they're already pretty fantastic. You could probably make them even more water efficient, but we'd be giving up a lot for it, a lot more than say, adopting turf or gravel lawns.
Oh good, I was wondering if I was having a minor sanity embolism or something. This is the consensus I and everyone else was taught, and I've never heard anyone actually claim hand washing to be more efficient...like, I tend to reuse dishes *many* times over between washes, but just that single act of hand-washing ends up using a lot of water. It'd be less if I didn't care so much about eating small amounts of dish soap, but, ick. No way to compete with an actual dishwasher.
Yeah, it's not a viable attack vector for the goal of improving water conservation, I was mostly thinking about the "why don't we have dish-o-mats?" question. Water usage would seem to be the most salient answer. One could probably do a "lifecycle analysis" and determine that the amount of water needed to produce the plastic, steel, rubber, etc. that goes into building a dishwasher is X gallons. But that's just a fixed upfront cost, the unbeatable efficiency should pay it off fairly quickly. Probably?
(Conservation-via-appliance wise, I'd rather aim for greywater toilets...)
If there's a price point for water that high, you have bigger problems than centralizing dishwashing. Starting with, you know, not being able to shower everyday.
Cultural gap: I find it very strange that most other people's bathing norm is to shower every day, or even multiple times a day. There's some genetic component to it - some have more active sweat glands than others, etc - but a lot of it seems like social enforcement/bathe-for-pleasure rather than biological necessity. Articles like this were briefly trendy some time ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/i-stopped-showering-and-life-continued/486314/
Personally, I shower once every few months, unless something unusual happens like being hit by extremely strong scent (>tfw fumigated in car by dozens of "air" "fresheners") or there's a fancy social occasion to look extra nice for. People basically don't notice this at all, at worst they might think I'm unusually tanned.
If I don't shower every day I smell like roadkill, in particular, I can smell my own scent which is rather unpleasant. Might be some genetic difference. It's not for lack of experimentation, as I sometimes go on long bike trips, sleep in a tent etc, compromising on hygiene out of necessity.
I expect you would, at least, need to shower after physical exertion?
You'd be surprised! It depends on the conditions though. I try to dress in breathable minimal layers if I'm expecting physical exertion; the default sweat system works well with exposed skin, and modern wicking technologies are really good. Problems more likely arise with, say, unexpected exertion on an usually humid (moreso than strictly hot) day while wearing heavy clothing. In that case I'll almost certainly end up washing said clothing before next use, and decent chance I'll at least take a quick rinse myself. (Socks are right out - I don't ever, ever, ever reuse those. Even shoes I try to never wear the same pair twice in a row. Don't ever want to experience athlete's foot again.)
I would note that I keep a dehumidifier running in my room all the time, so it's a quite dry environment by default. Not conducive to sweat, or odours accumulating on clothes. (The usual practice of throwing dirty laundry in non-breathable, closed space hampers is honestly really bad for them. Better to hang dry or otherwise leave out for awhile first.)
But other pages on Wikipedia repudiate past literature which claimed this meant East Asians had fewer sweat glands in total, so I'm not sure the current explanation. Perhaps there are other genetic components to body odour besides absolute prevalence of sweat glands. Either way, it's definitely still an observed pattern. I want to say there's historical evidence too, that East Asian bathing habits shifted with increasing exposure to Western norms (e.g. in Japan, or American Chinatowns), but that's a stronger claim that I'd feel the need to give an actual citation for.
How sure are you that people don’t notice? I’ve never told someone they smelt bad, but have thought it many times. I’ve even told people they didn’t smell bad when they did. There’s a weird social pressure to not call out smelly people. Instead we complain about them when they are gone.
And what do you mean by “unusually tanned”? You’re not talking about an actual layer of dirt, are you?
I'd assume at least a single person I've ever met sometime in the past three-ish decades would have been willing to buck such social pressure, especially cause I like to go tanktop-only for Real Serious Work at my job, and do work up gym-level sweats not infrequently. Bosses should have pointed it out if it was bothering anyone; it's one criteria of our semiannual reviews. No one's ever dinged me on cleanliness and appearance. I am also clued in to the workplace grapevine, and should have heard anything along those lines at some point over the 4 years I've been there. Since I have heard any number of *other* criticisms through back-channels. There are many reasons I'm controversial at work, but unless it's a really well kept conspiracy, this isn't one of them. (We have ever had other folks who did noticeably stink, and got a private talking-to about it, so it's not like a uniquely hippie office culture or whatever that isn't capable of such discernment.)
I'd also include the evidence of none of my friends doing so, when they've proven extremely capable of breaking any number of other social conventions and not being shy about calling me out on other physical flaws. This also includes people I've slept with. Even at that level of intimacy, the bigger lift for them was halitosis (which, yeah, fair - not much incentive to keep a kissable mouth when one has had zero dating life, it genuinely wasn't something that came up before then).
Actually, when the factoid does come up in conversation, I find that most people think it's fascinating and resolve to try it themselves and see what happens. Usually this arises from other women complimenting my hair and asking what products I use, and I'm like "nothing" and they're like oh what tell me more? Which to me seems like evidence that regular showering is, in fact, the stronger weird social pressure that people feel a need to conform to.
Yes, I do mean an actual layer of dirt. It tends to form stable patterns based on one's workflow motions and clothing choice. Easy to deduce that all my shirts are short-sleeved, for instance. People always mistake this for a tan, if they even notice it at all. It's sort of funny actually.
EDIT: I'm also highly infrequent about washing clothing, dishes, bedding, etc. So I'm gunning really hard in the direction of giving people any reason at all to ding me on purity norms, and it still just...doesn't happen. Evidence of absence isn't absence of evidence, I know that, but the prior odds just seem really improbable given the longitudinal study design. I furthermore notice that I get treated exactly the same on the odd occasions where I do shift to a high-cleanliness routine for awhile, so there's that too. No one notices the difference.
The density and fragility of dishes (vs the density and fragility of clothes) make this unlikely any time soon, I'd say. Transporting a few days worth of plates and glasses anywhere is much more difficult than even a week's worth of clothing.
I'm struggling to think of two more different thinkers that are adjacent to/have influenced the rationalist community, so it should be interesting.
From some comments he made on 80k hours, Caplan's approach to ethics seems to be to trust intuitions over philosophical analysis, which leads him to reject a a lot of non-mainstream views that are quite common among rationalist, like: animal rights, and I think consequentialism. Basically a kind of non-rationalist conservatism.
Personally I can't imagine Caplan will be able to contend with Singer, who's views are consciously self consistent and very much grounded in reason and just generally ahs a very compelling ethical framework, the denying arguments in favour of intuition approach doesn't seem like it can work well in a debate.
I'm interested in how people think it will go and if anyone is sympathetic to Caplan's viewpoint.
Peter Singer is an insane person disguised as a rational person. Caplan is right on this point (morality is generated by human intuitions about value in the first place and is inextricable from those; it is foolish to let pure reason take you to any point that contradicts these intuitions – burning the village in order to save it), thus he will presumably win.
Caplan seems to share a lot of his philosophical views with Mike Huemer, an actual philosophy prof. Surprised it isn't Huemer that's debating Singer instead.
If Caplan's views on ethics are as you've characterised them then he has the easier task, with a more audience-friendly view of ethics than Peter Singer offers.
Most people (including myself) would very much like to believe that you can live an ethical life by hanging around, being generally nice to people, and not doing any evil things. Peter Singer on the other hand promotes a view of ethics in which you can't possibly be a good person without making yourself poor and miserable; kinda like Catholicism without the forgiveness. Most people are highly receptive to reasonable-sounding argument which persuade them that what they're doing right now is good enough.
This list of bets includes him betting on whether he himself will finish reading a book- and more importantly, he evaluates himself on his *win rate* on the cover, but when you look closely, he includes bets such as risking $200 to win $1, meaning that even if this bet had no edge he wins 99.5% of the time
Institutions - particularly long lived ones - are groups of humans conducting ongoing experiments on the lines of "does this philosophy work"? ( In particular, "does it work for groups of humans?")
Individual philosophers such as Singer are under no such requirement to make their hypotheticals perform amongst the mirad unknown unknowns of actual large scale human society.
I have a lot of respect for Singer's abilities as a persuasive speaker and thinker, but that gentleman is one guy, and one guy with a number of horrific suppositions that harm human society rather than help it.
I am not so much for Caplan as pretty much again' anything Singer promotes.
"You are morally obligated to give every single penny you earn above what is strictly necessary to maintain basal metabolic functions to maximally-effective charity work, and ideally you should also work 16-hour days doing work for said charities. Having any kind of personal life or personal desires while there is suffering in the world is an immoral act equivalent to withholding food from a starving child" would sum it up, I think.
Having read his work- this is minimally hyperbolic regarding how far he thinks moral obligation extends. If anyone wants to draw a contrary conclusion, please chime in!
I mean, based on that he doesn't do that, I always took his argument to be: "This is what a perfectly moral human being would do. Obviously, we're all flawed, immoral sinners who aren't living up to that standard, but we should try to get closer to it."
"the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops" is an interesting combination of hilarious, absurd and sad. Maybe before you pledge a trillion dollars to something, you should wait until the technology that it all depends on has been shown to be, you know, feasible? From what I can tell, the efforts to develop a working hyperloop have been as fruitful as the skeptics predicted from the beginning.
I have previously complained about not receiving notifications to replies, so here is what fixed the problem for me: subscribing to ACX again.
It doesn't make much sense to me -- getting replies to your comment should not depend on whether you are subscribed to the articles or not; also a few months ago I was successfully getting notifications for other blogs I was not subscribed to -- but this is what worked for me, so maybe other people will find it useful, too.
Note that the subscription does not imply paying; you will also be given the option of free subscription.
Suppose you had a major highly-painful inpatient surgery planned, and were offered a choice between: the standard anesthesia routine, and very effective local-only anesthesia with a large price discount. (Like with wisdom teeth surgery.) Which would you choose, and why? How big would the discount have to be?
That's fair - even though largely covered by insurance (probably...if my employer doesn't change ours again out of the blue, grumble), the particular surgery I had in mind is in the $50k ballpark, and saving on anesthesia costs would only be a fraction of that. So one ought to optimize for medical outcomes rather than being pound-foolish. Genuinely unsure in this case, it's something I'd have to ask the surgeon. I suppose I am overly-discounting the risk of never waking up due to not being particularly attached to life in the first place; it'd be a peaceful and socially-acceptable way to go. Someone a lot more invested in their current life should rightly place a much higher premium on anesthesia risk mitigation.
(Expensive enough and with such wide error bars on efficacy that I'm pretty close to deciding to cancel the whole thing outright, frankly. Not really worth immiserating myself over. Major decisions should be made with as much info as possible though, and this is one of the few tractable "options" available that might change the calculations.)
Like others, I would take the local even without a discount, in any case where general anesthesia wasn't absolutely necessary. Unpleasant experiences are a much lower risk to my mind than even a small chance of just carking it while helpless to do a damn thing about it.
Point of information for folks down thread. There are at least two different anesthesia routines other than local. One is general anesthesia. The other is something milder, more like sedation, that also interferes with forming memories.
I've had both. In fact, I've even had both with the same surgeon - the first when she removed a tumor, and the second when she went back in a couple of weeks later to get a bit more, as the edges of what she'd removed proved to have tumor cells. (Standard procedure for certain tumors - in lay terms, you take all you can see, and a bit round the edges, and have the lab check the edges to see whether you got enough.)
The former is higher risk than the latter, but needed for longer, more complex surgeries.
The sedation routine is also normal with colonoscopies and similar procedures. I think it's also what's used when one is fully knocked out for wisdom teeth removal. But perhaps there are even more variants than I know about.
There is also "spinal nerve block" anesthesia. I've had it done once when having a broken thumb set. It's considerably stronger than local, but not as profound as general. Ideally it will only affect the area where it's being directed at, though it was a lot stronger than that. (OTOH, I did hear the surgeon go "Oops, that's not right." so I wasn't "out", and it didn't prevent me from forming memories, just from feeling any pain. It also kept me from being other than relaxed when I heard the surgeon go "Oops", but maybe there was also some sedation going on.)
For inpatient, I would definitely choose general anesthesia which is risky and comes with unpleasant effects (constipation etc) but I imagine still worth it given how jarring it is to have a conscious experience of being cut apart. Maybe women who have experienced a C-section can weigh in. I have heard accounts of it feeling disturbing, but all that is overwritten with the emotions and other physical effects of having a newborn baby.
I was circumcised as a teenager, in a part and era of the world when the business was performed by medical specialists (think midwife rather than surgeon) who operated private circumcision offices. My (local) anesthesia was insufficient, I said as much, and I was told by my butcher that I am a man now and must grin and bear it.
I can testify that the conscious experience of being cut apart is something most people can live without. The memories have mostly faded, but I think I could feel the foreskin being torn like a gigantic hangnail.
Oof, that's painful just to read. Very sorry for your completely unnecessary suffering. I remember watching a fictional presentation of teen circumcision in school (maybe it was the serial "Roots"?) and basically the entire class thought it was horribly barbaric and awful and We're So Civilized for not doing things that way anymore. Which is...sort of a weird thing to think about, how performing circumcision on newborns is civilized compared to the alternative. I guess it's easier to rationalize that a very underdeveloped consciousness has limited ability to feel pain or retain memories, but still...
Thank you. I am happy to report that the David school of circumcision has been banned in my country, Turkey, since 2015.
I can only hope that the pre-circumcision ceremony, which is ritually important and incentivizes parents to wait (at least) until the age of 7 instead of circumcising newborns, follows the fenni sünnet tradition to the grave.
Depends on how otherwise traumatic the surgery is, and how stressful it would be for me to keep still while being eviscerated, even if I only see the effects. If they nerve block me so I can't mess up whatever they are doing, sure, let's go with local.
General anesthesia is scary, confusing and actually risky. It doesn't help that the last time I had it, I experienced it as a cut from me on the table -> me on the bed, in the process of projectile vomiting across the room, inexplicably six hours later.
Personally, I would choose local anesthesia, since I am not very susceptible to pain and not very squeamish with being operated on, but full anesthesia scares me, and you don't really feel great when you wake up either.
Anesthesia carries an increased risk, and has more expensive humans involved, raising the price, but surgeries on awake humans, I am told, are more nerve wracking for the surgeon and often take longer. So I am not sure the price discount is real.
It was on offer when I had wisdom teeth surgery around two decades ago, although I didn't see the actual bill cause that was on parents' insurance. If there was some financial chicanery involved, I didn't hear about it. Seems like a weird thing to lie about though. Cuts against medical-billing tropes.
I would probably choose local anesthesia even without the discount. I am not an expert, and would probably do some additional research before making the actual choice, but it seems to me that total anesthesia is a greater *health* risk.
I imagine that for some people the experience of being poked in body parts you do not feel might be horrifying. (For people who didn't have the experience: I had some tooth surgery in local anesthesia, and felt as if I had some rubber stuck inside my mouth and the doctor was operating on that rubber.) I am actually more scared about the idea of artificial sleep.
Off-topic: I am not a native English speaker, and the words "inpatient surgery" sound very funny to me -- as if they implied the possible alternative to do the surgery *out* of the patient instead.
Yeah, I took that option for wisdom teeth surgery to save $, and...I don't know...despite "not feeling anything" it was indeed deeply existentially horrifying? In a dysmorphia sort of way. Feeling-but-not-really-feeling. Like having a phantom limb operated on. Not an experience easy to describe in words, and I'll never forget it. Research has definitely made me more wary of being "put under", but comparing that theoretical risk with the concretely-known-awful squick of local anesthesia...it's genuinely hard to weigh! Kind of the same reason I have a hard time criticizing women requesting painkillers or C-sec for childbirth. Some varieties of pain do seem to fuck people up long-term much more than the direct physical effects...
For wisdom tooth extraction, I choose nitrous oxide. It was an interesting experience. I've got no idea why some people would do that for fun, but it wasn't that bad. My consciousness never went away, and I could feel the bones breaking as he pulled it out, but it wasn't painful. (Maybe he also gave me a local. If so, I don't remember it.)
Your country does _general anesthesia for wisdom teeth surgery_ ? Around these parts (Poland) that would get your license to practice medicine/dentistry revoked I think, for recklessly endangering the patient.
Do you know in a general anesthesia a machine has to breathe for you, because you'd otherwise suffocate to death?
For demographics purposes, yes, this was in USA. Something like 20 years ago. Maybe practice has improved since then, I have no idea. It might be a technical thing, as DinoNerd mentions elsewhere there are more than one variety of being "put under"/general anesthesia. All I remember clearly is that I got the surgery first, when both options were offered. A few years later, my younger brother was in the same boat, and (I guess because it had freaked me out so much) he instead chose general. With no regrets whatsoever, afaik, although he's had a lifetime of dental problems so perhaps that colours one's willingness to experience mouth discomfort.
Perhaps it depends on the details of the case? Sometime the same procedure (by name or "description to non-professionals") can be a lot more difficult than other times.
That's what I got. I was offered both options, I asked the lady on the phone what she thought, and she told me that unless I *really* needed the money, I should take the general. Checked in with the wife later, who thought it was ludicrous to consider doing it with a local.
I dunno. They put me under for wisdom teeth extraction. It was just the Dentist and one assistant. Long time ago tho. There was no intubation or anything.
I had a local for reconstructive surgery on my hand but they also give you some anti anxiety stuff that made me pretty indifferent to what was going on with my hand. More interested in flirting with one of his pretty assistants. Now that I think about that it a bit that must have a very good anti anxiety med.
It's not universal, but yeah, it's not uncommon for USA orthodontists to offer general anesthesia for complicated wisdom teeth operations. I had it as well, because it was a longer surgery that required some gum slicing and extra work to extract turned-sideways teeth stuck above the gumline.
Huh. Was it your first local anesthesia experience? I've been having various dental interventions in the past few years, and I've gotten more or less completely use to having bloody things being done to my mouth. My only reaction is to be grateful for the invention of anesthetics, and that's pretty much it.
Speaking of, I found out that (at least some) local anesthetics wear of gradually over a few days. Most of the effect goes away in 1-2 hours, but at least some of it stays on and offers a less painful recovery. 10/10, would recommend.
First and only major surgery period, I've had a pretty good run of luck with the physical medical system in general. That might have had something to do with it, in addition to being young-ish at the time. Maybe it's easier to bear as an adult...I've learned a lot more tricks for mental stability in the 20ish years since then. Putting up with electrolysis is kind of the same, in a small-bore way, and that's completely elective so one doesn't even have the out of "have to do this or suffer Major Consequences". Mastering pain under local-only is definitely a skill that takes some practice - I think it's actually a little harder for people with high pain tolerance in general, since it's trickier to calibrate how much reaction-suppression one is supposed to practice.
Oh yeah, for sure. Some of that real strong local stuff is even available with a casual doctor's prescription. I'm pretty fond of Emla, though the price point is stupidly high to ever use for anything trivial/recreational. Good approximation of getting Botox though. "I can't feel my face *so much* that talking and drinking are now challenging!" Fun experience.
So I been watching these “Doctor Blake Mysteries”. Is that meat and three veg still a thing down under. Do potatoes count? I mean okay you can steam some broccoli and cauliflower. That’s 2. Now some people consider corn a grain rather than a true vegetable. Okay carrots would work I guess. :)
"Meat and 3" is also a thing in the American South . The definition of "vegetable" in that context is fairly expansive--for example, macaroni and cheese is frequently one of the options for a vegetable.
Yes, "meat + 3 veg" is still very much a thing. I've eaten it for dinner ~90% of the last 3 years.
In terms of the justification for the rule, the three vegetables are 1) a green vegetable for the various things in green vegetables (vitamins C/K, magnesium, etc.), 2) an orange/red vegetable for carotene (vitamin A), 3) a starchy vegetable for calories (since the other two have low calories/gram and meat is expensive). So potatoes/rice/corn all count for #3 (I don't think corn has substantial carotene).
Cool. I think my favorite episode of Dr Blake so far was when the hard drinking doc gets test results showing something going on with his liver. The further testing revealed it was ‘just a touch of hepatitis’ and he is relieved. I think his back story may include being a POW in WWII.
I have memories of once reading a Scott post on SSC that went something like "Uber is cool because a lot of my patients have trouble finding traditional employment otherwise". But Google is failing me - probably not using exactly the right keywords - and no SSC article in my browser history seems to contain any such sentiment either. Maybe I'm mistaking Scott for some *other* blogger-psychiatrist?
"But Uber and Lyft are great. Some of my mentally-ill patients who could never get an official employee job at a fast food place or something now have jobs with Uber and Lyft that they can feel really proud of and use to support themselves or supplement support from the government or their family. Anyone who's taken an Uber or Lyft knows that they're the first destination for new immigrants who get excluded from traditional employment. Or you've probably also met the single mothers who say they were never able to have a job before because they needed to be home at X, Y, and Z time for child care, but now that they're gig workers who can choose their own hours it's let them get back into the workforce and help support their families. It really feels like the same sort of situation you read about in pre-1970 books - a place where anyone, even if they're poor or disadvantaged or foreign, can get a job and earn an honest living for themselves in a way that the rest of the economy has completely dropped the ball on. I want to support these people, and the only polling I know of suggests most ride share drivers support Prop 22.
And Uber and Lyft have also really earned my trust and respect. Five years ago I worked in a clinic that wasn't on any of the public bus routes. Some of my poorer patients didn't have cars, and it would take them hours to get to my office, and sometimes they would miss some crucial public transportation step and not be able to make their appointments at all. Sometimes if they were desperate they would take a taxi, which would charge them through the nose and take its sweet time getting there. This was right when Uber and Lyft were expanding to Michigan, I was usually the first person to tell them about it, and it changed some of these people's lives. It's really easy for privileged people who own their own transportation to dismiss ride-sharing as a luxury, but if you don't have a car, you used to have severely limited mobility. Now you can get anywhere in town for a quick $5 Uber ride.
In a world of quickly-closing opportunities, Uber and Lyft are this rare bright spot, where uncredentialled blue-collar workers excluded from most positions can get flexible jobs with whatever hours they want, and where poor people who were previously locked out of most of the world can get anywhere they need to be for cheap. So of course California is trying to destroy them. It's the most California thing ever to California."
Ah, thanks so much! Yes, that's exactly what I remember. Not sure why I only thought to search SSC posts and comments rather than the subreddit. I guess because it's been moribund for years (sadly).
That post was on my mind cause of how Prop 22 eventually did shake out, and one of the major current losers being independent truckers...literally overnight, the truck deliveries at my job got much later/more erratic, after a long uphill battle to stabilizing during covid. It's been sad to see. I still don't think Scott's reasoning was correct on the merits, even with only the information that was available at the time, but it was an admirable steelman from someone with no reputational or financial self-interest to lie about such beliefs.
Scott, in the original Model City Monday post, one of your predictions was:
"Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%"
I think you toned down the dimensions *too much* (i.e. 170km length down to only 1km and 500m height down to only 100m). You also didn't specify budget. As written, I think this should be >1%.
For context, the Three Gorges Dam is 2.3km long, 181m high, and 115m wide (at the base; at the crest it's only 40m wide). It took 14 years and $32 billion to construct. It's also a fully functioning dam.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if KSA spends $100+ billion over the next 18 years and ends up with something at least 1km x 100m x 100m that is at least "inspired by" The Line.
There has been some interest here in questions related to population ethics, and discussions in the comments show widely divergent ethical intituitions about these issues, ranging from antinatalism to embracing the repugnant conclusion. This has got me wondering about what psychological and sociological traits are correlated with people's intuitions on these matters. As far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be much research on this topic — the only thing I could find was a very recent article (Caviola et al., "Population ethical intuitions" [2022]), which seems to be the first attempt to generate survey data on these questions and which didn't attempt to find any correlations for the variation in responses. Could this be an interesting topic to explore in a future ACX survey?
(Some factors that might plausibly be correlated: socioeconomic status, gender, introversion, urban/suburban/rural location, birth family size, ...?)
Antinatalism isn't actually strictly mutually exclusive with the Repugnant Conclusion, or at least with the majority of the argument for it. The RC is the total-utilitarian conclusion for the conditions "lives are positive value, but more lives means greater competition reducing the value of each life". If you instead plug "lives are negative value" into total-utilitarianism you get antinatalism.
I would expect a strong correlation of antinatalism with depression for basically this reason; depressed people are more likely to think life sucks, which is one of the main ways to get to antinatalism.
Probably. That said I think life is great, mostly, but not only would I not want to live a life with the lowest positive utility, I wouldn’t wish it on the many billions needed to justify the results of the RC.
Note that the RC isn't "maximise number of people with utility > 0", it's "maximise sum of utility over people". So the only way it would produce a "huge number of people living marginal lives" thing IRL is if people's resource consumption goes to zero faster than their utility goes to zero, which seems to not be how the world works (utility goes negative while still at significant positive resource consumption, due to starvation). Realistic RC is probably more like "enough people that it significantly impacts QoL, but still >20% of uncrowded QoL".
Also, if you would not want to live life X, life X is at least by preference utility *not* "the lowest positive utility". "A life with the lowest positive utility", in preference utility, is by definition the worst life that you *would still want to live*.
Yes, depression is the obvious one, but perhaps too obvious to be interesting. So I guess you would need to set up the survey to make sure your correlations don't get counfounded by depression.
That's a simple step of adding a depression question though right? And then lets you measure and quantify the effect of what does seem like an obvious cause.
Not all depression is caught. Not all depression is of equal magnitude. Scott, in "Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know":
"Imagine a study that wanted to prove that having more cars made you happier. They do a survey and find that people with more cars are happier, but someone objects that maybe wealthy people have more cars and wealth makes you happier. Imagine that their response is to separate people into two bins: “poor people” who make below $50K and “rich people” who make more. They find that even within each bin, cars still make you happier. But this is just a problem of too few bins: a person making $10K is still very different from a person making $40K (and likely to have fewer cars). The attempt to remove confounding with bins fails."
You'd probably have to do some sort of quantitative depression test in the survey itself, and then match scores on that when comparing other things.
Yeah, there is a 0% chance the Saudis (the Arabs? not sure why a nationality is named after an extant family) build something resembling the Wall from Game of Thrones in the next decade (I'll draw a line at any structure >250m high for over 5 miles). I am getting annoyed by the constant "but maybe" tone.
I mean, rationalists hate to give anything a 0% chance. What if aliens arrive with matter-constructing rays? What if we find out upon the death of QE2 that we are in a Minecraft-like simulation? What if the Constructing Name makes megastructures 100 times cheaper to build?
Same here. Its clearly a vanity project by the crown prince and probably some money laundering scheme (though I can't figure out what that would be considering he controls all the money already). This thing isn't getting built.
Is it more absurd than the Medieval Chinese building walls and fortifications stretching across thousands of miles of desert, mountain and forest, using clay, sticky rice and lime?
Yes. One of the purposes of those walls was to have a work camp that would kill off political prisoners while having a politically defensible public reason.
Via multiple attempts over centuries, and the wall wasn't nearly as high, and the problems were much better understood. For instance the transportation problem is (as far as I can tell) "and then a miracle occurs..."
Note that China both mediaeval and modern is quite a bit economically bigger than Arabia (GDP of the PRC is 15-20x that of Saudi Arabia). The PRC might be able to build the Line if it wanted it as much as bin Salman does (though non-monarchies rarely want things that much).
Also, the Great Wall was built the same way they had already built city walls. Neom would be comparable if it were just a regular city like Saudi Arabia already has, only bigger.
Let's make a bet. I'll give you $1 if nobody builds a structure >250m high and >5 miles long in Saudi Arabia within the next 30 years, and you'll give me $100,000 or your entire net worth (whichever is greater) otherwise.
Obviously I'm not going to do that. When you account for the time-value of the money at-risk, I would lose money even if I won the bet.
Also, I consider "they cut the trans-oceanic communication links and instead give us a stream of GPT-3 generated fake news about the other hemisphere" more likely, and if somebody has a large bet riding on it I can be sure "Saudis complete preposterous construction project" will be in there.
30 years is longer than 10 years. Also, inflation and possibility of global catastrophe work significantly in your favour here given the timeframe and the possibility of early payout.
$1 is also probably not worth the time and effort to maintain contact with you to extract said $1 when the time is up (in particular, the cost to take you to court exceeds $1). So taking this bet on these terms has effectively no upside even granted a negligible possibility of you winning.
Odd question: Does anyone watching this know what the odds of a random person being delusional are? If a random person can expect to be believing glaringly false beliefs e.g. 0.01% of the time, then for us to assign _any_ belief odds of less than 0.01% or more than 99.99% looks untenable.
( kind-of like the subjective analog of the lizardman constant in polling... )
Sorry, but 10^-10 chance is also nonsense. You can't have observed enough pieces of information to validly make that assertion. And in this specialized case I think even 10^-5 is unreasonable. There's just too much uncertainty. But it *does* seem like a negligibly small chance. That I know I can't put any valid number on just *how* small doesn't change that. (And it's not worth trying to put a more accurate number on it.)
They might have "such tiny probabilities", but you could never know that they did.
Well, that's too strong a statement. It made me remember the search for proton decay, which was expected to happen once every 10^33 years, so they built a huge tank of detector solution (maybe it was Xenon, but it's been so long I don't remember) and looked at it for a long time. They didn't detect any of the right kind of signal, so they upped the estimated minimum lifetime. Google says it's now once in 10^35–10^36 years, and apparently that's beyond the experimental limit. So for SOME events you can get a decent estimate (with error bars) that's that small. But that's a VERY different context. It requires looking at a huge number of identical units with very sensitive instruments for a long time. You can't do that kind of estimation on a construction project.
"It requires looking at a huge number of identical units with very sensitive instruments for a long time."
Exactly agreed. If someone were to claim that they had a _single_ proton sitting in an ion trap, and that the chance of detecting a decay from it was 10^-35 per year, they would be neglecting all kinds of error sources with vastly higher rates.
Generally agreed. Even for questions like "What are the odds that 2+2=5?", the odds that I have misunderstood the question are orders of magnitude higher than that.
"you're asking about the logical outcome of a system of rules that contain no uncertainty element."
Yeah, yeah. Within the bounds of it being a question about integer arithmetic, that is true. But if the question were really to come up in a real world context, there would always be a (fairly substantial!) possibility that there was a misunderstanding of some sort.
A simple example: The values printed are actually rounded versions of the real numbers. The underlying addition is 2.3 + 2.3 = 4.6, which after rounding looks like 2+2=5.
I see what you’re saying, but isn’t making a prediction with 10 significant decimals absurd? Maybe just put an asterisk next to every zero (* we know it’s not really zero, but we’re rounding).
Wait, but if an estimate of Neom's cost based on construction in nearby Dubai only says it will be like 2.5× over budget which is pretty good for megaprojects (maybe we should estimate this floating octagon stuff better based on the World Map Archipelago somewhere nearby?), doesn't it mean that Neom has a good chance of ending built far enough for the usable-ish part being already absurd?
Of course an alternative path is to break the construction material markets, and right now they are already sort of stressed, which could drive the costs up quite a bit or make construction grind to a halt.
I don't think any of these estimates are plausible full budgets - they are based on assuming things like "buildings of a certain height cost a constant amount per unit volume" (or mass or whatever). The sheer scale of this means that a lot of things will have to be different
How will elevators and hallways be structured, for instance? Will there be "outdoor" spaces inside? Will these different types of structures increase or decrease costs compared to typical skyscrapers? How long does it take to train a team of contractors to build a new type of structure? Does it take more or less time if they're living in temporary cabins several hundred miles from the nearest city?
I believe that Kalshi might have aimed/pulled the trigger on the "CFTC" weapon in order to make it go off at this particular moment; but it does not seem at all clear that they _built_ that weapon. My (shallow, had no contact with this issue other than reading this blog and the latest kerfuffle) understanding is that the CFTC was _always_ a gun pointed at PredictIts head because it seems pretty obvious that they were in clear violation of several parts of the No Action letter.
Has anyone here tried the Landmark Forum (or, decades before, its predecessor Est?) I just finished watching The Americans, where Est played a weirdly prominent role, and I had some friends & coworkers who'd done and raved about the Landmark Forum years ago. It all seems fairly..... culty. I was moderately curious about Landmark, but I looked at their website and their sessions start at $3500- I'm not that curious.
I'd be interested to hear people's experiences with being stuck in a revival-style meeting for an entire weekend. Did you buy into it? Did they give you a hard sell to then purchase more sessions? Did it change any aspect of your life, maybe for the better? (Has Scott ever written about this kind of thing?)
(I didn't really understand why Est needed to play such a large role in The Americans and particularly Phillip's headspace- I guess it's supposed to represent something about America, it's a little unclear to me what. It all seems rather communal, so maybe there's some connection to the Soviet Union there for him?)
Closest I've come is an Outward Bound trip when I was a grad student. Not all that similar. It was a great experience, though, & I highly recommend it.
Which Outward Bound did you attend? I used to portage past one on the Kawishawi River at a BWCA entry point. I think their main activity was white water kayaking.
There are probably quite of few differences locations tho.
North Carolina, out in the mountains in the western part of the state. It was one immense backpack, with stops here and there to rock climb and white water kayak, and near the end a day spent on a ropes course strung on immense trees, so that the crossings between trees were way high up, maybe 50-60 feet. The whole thing was one of the high points of my life, and I stayed sort of ecstatic for a couple weeks afterwards. A few years later I starting backpacking & rock climbing which I'm sure I would never have done if hadn't been for Outward Bound.
I haven't tried Landmark (yet?), but my experience from doing other things "in the same category" (though I suspect the Landmark people would insist that nothing is ever in the same category, it's all just your narrative) is that the "manic feeling" you have at the moment will soon pass, and your expectations at the moment (created under hours and hours of strong psychological pressure) will turn out to be unrealistic.
Simply said, when you are at the seminar, you think about 1 or 2 of your problems and how to overcome them. And there often *is* a possible and relatively straightforward solution... which would require you to devote all your time and energy into solving that problem or two, and sacrificing everything else in your life. And that solution feels reasonable at the moment, because your entire mind is focused on solving that one problem, nothing else seems to matter, the charismatic leader and the entire group encourage you to think that way. Bingo, your problems are solved, now pick up the phone and try to sell the seminar to all your family members, friends, former classmates, etc., before the high runs off.
(I think in NLP they call it "ecological check" -- checking that the awesome-sounding solution would not ruin your life if actually implemented.)
By the way, this lesson also applies to the rationality movement. In my experience, the CFAR seminar was interesting and exciting, but most of my actual value comes from regularly attending the local LW meetups, talking to other rationalists, getting inspiration from what they do, and discussing the problems we are currently trying to solve in our lives. (But this kinda reminds me of an ancient advice that you gradually start to resemble the people you hang out with, therefore choose your friends carefully!)
It helps to have the common background of having read the Sequences, it helps if some people have attended the CFAR seminar, but the most helpful parts are the repeated conversations and feedback. And -- unlike Landmark -- you do not have to pay $500 to attend a LW meetup, and no one will sue you if you quote something from the Sequences.
I've done it. Overall reasonably useful, provides an opportunity to bring emotional heft to things that most approximately rational people will already know but might be finding hard to put into practice.
It is indeed vaguely culty, but I read somewhere that while the typical cult tries to cut you off from other connections, they emphasise deepening the connections.
The hard sell is definitely a thing - they then they try to make you sell landmark to those connections. Probably the most unsavory part of the exercise.
Overall I did find the weekend spent doing the forum reasonably useful though not particularly transformative in the long run, and would recommend it (though I did it in India where it's much cheaper -around 300usd).
Going purely off personal observations without any rigorous study, Midjourney seems ahead of Dall-E2 right now in the realm of AI art. Some of this may be due to the fact that Dall-E was deliberately handicapped to avoid making recognizable faces, but the differences seem to go beyond that.
(1) Is this an example of a race between Dr. Good (careful, self-critical) and Dr. Amoral (race ahead wildly to get to cool things first)?
(2) Do others agree that Midjourney seems ahead of Dall-E?
Ooh. I do like that much better than the DALL-e stuff, which all looks to me like commercial art with an overlay of splash & blur to camouflage its tackiness. But image is weakened by being symmetrical. Symmetrical images are intrinsically less interesting than asymmetrical ones -- the right side is just a repeat of the left. Somebody should have told Midjourney that.
Still, I'm interested. What does one have to do to play with Midjourney?
Just go to midjourney.com and sign up -- it's an open beta with no waitlist.
Note that the UI for MJ is a discord bot. It's a little painful. I encourage interested people to suffer through it -- MJ is a lot of fun -- but there's no denying that that makes it a tougher sell.
We should also mention another major player in that space - StableDiffusion from Stability.AI They just launched their beta on discord last weekend. I find some of their generation even more impressive than Dalle2 and MJ and this is only their smaller model I think. They will soon go public with their models and all of it will be free and open source.
MidJourney and Dall-E are good at different things. MidJourney's home territory is painterly, somewhat fantastic, and it pushes towards certain color palates and faces. Dall-E's home is photographic and realistic, and it is better at anatomy than MidJourney.
They also have clearly different philosophies -- MJ is willing to provide you with a lot more powerful explicit controls on image generation, Dall-E only lets you use an undifferentiated text prompt.
For what I like to do, MJ is generally better. But if you wanted to like, reproduce stock photo art, Dall-E would clearly be superior.
Bonus: since MJ kinda sucks at anatomy, a few times I've created an image I like in MJ, but which has some pretty bad flaws, then uploaded it to Dall-E, erased things like "the left half of the face," and had Dall-E fill it back in -- this has generally had quite good results.
My sense of things is that Dall-E is technically more impressive than MJ, but MJ is better oriented towards customer satisfaction (at least, for my kind of customers).
Having played around a bit more, I agree with this explanation of the differences. Still haven't found any generator to give me a photorealistic image of St. George on his white horse slaying the dragon. Midjourney mashed the horse and dragon into a single creature; Dall-E had St. George riding the dragon (iirc).
I am generally going for a Medieval/Renaissance fantasy vibe, so it makes sense that Midjourney would appeal. For what it's worth, MJ also has better prices per image for now, though this may change. And I hadn't even heard of Stable Diffusion, but I will have to check it out.
I think that one thing that you find when you play with AI generators (at least, the two I have access to -- Dall-E and MJ, both of which I've done ~200 prompts with) is that, really, they remain a long way from being, um... complete. Like, they both have large areas of "stuff that you might kind of ordinarily want an image of" that they are just garbage at, where they do things like mush up unrelated areas of the prompt or just don't know how to draw at all. Using them together can help get things like 10% better at this.
My suspicion about image generators is that they're going to be a lot like self-driving cars were -- we'll get this rapid advancement where it kinda looks like "in a couple of years, we'll have this whole thing totally worked out," but then we'll see sharply decreasing returns as we try to cover the entire conceptual space.
A friend claims that Midjourney is better at creating fantasy-looking, "moody" images, and DALL-E at photorealistic specific ones; I haven't used Midjourney so I don't know if that's true.
Hijack: would anyone here with access to Imagen be willing to run a few prompts for me?
Having tried the Midjourney beta (still available!), I agree that it has a moody/fantasy/baroque style which can look rather good. It is terrible at sensible animal anatomy though.
I'm currently using Midjourney to generate environmental art for an RPG I'm running. I could probably use it and several other AI to generate character art, but honestly I'm not that patient/am unmilling to shell out money from my highly limited budget for that.
What's the argument for the private equity tax break thing Sinema tried to keep out of the bill? Is this some kind of "someone's bribing her to keep it" or some kind of "sounds awful and unpopulist but if you actually understand the economics and tax incentives of it Sinema was making an obviously correct decision"?
I grew up with the concept of multiverses through pop culture (video games and comic books mostly). I was very surprised to find out that there are actually substantial disputes about it and that people find the concept absurd, I still don't quite grok the perspective.
The issue with the absurdity heuristic here is that *every* interpretation of Quantum Mechanics sounds absurd, but we know that the maths is accurate (to a degree better than almost anything else in all of human knowledge is known), so you kind of do have to accept that something absurd is happening.
A lot of physicists take the "not my problem, just shut up and multiply" approach, but if you force people to actually discuss interpretations, the the Many Worlds Interpretation is actually in many ways the simplest and cleanest one, and fairly popular. The other big contender is Copenhagen, which feels to me like an engineering hack - clearly and obviously a useful approximation rather than a fundamental truth.
Obviously Copenhagen is incomplete. But nobody ever said it was complete. There’s just some decoherence that happens at some size for some reason, yet to be discovered. On the plus side It’s easy on universe creation.
In my opinion the big problem with MWI is that it isn't obvious that it isn't actually a complete theory; I personally took MWI for granted for many years, without ever noticing that there was no plausible way to explain the Born rule given a perfectly linear evolution. (Ironically, it was reading Eliezer's sequences arguing in favour of MWI that made me change my mind about this.)
To put my objection in rationalist terms, I think MWI acts as a curiosity stopper. Copenhagen is obviously incomplete, and therefore invites further investigation, which I think is the better choice. Hopefully one day we can actually fill in the gap, though I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime.
(Granted, I'm not actually a physicist; my PhD was in quantum optics, but that was decades ago, and didn't cover this sort of ground in any case.)
I don't think so? I mean, it's fairly straightforward *if* you define "density" in a way that implicitly depends on the Born rule, but that just begs the question.
I believe there's an argument under which the Born rule is the only rule which lets you go from the wavefunction to coherent probabilities of worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907
I am not equipped to evaluate the argument they make though.
I would guess that if you assume that the probabilities work out consistently according to a Born-like rule (i.e., that the universe looks similar to ours from the inside) then you can prove that only the Born rule itself will do. I don't think that's a valid assumption.
I doubt I'm equipped to evaluate that paper either, but I'll have a look at it in the weekend if I have the time.
Lots of people disagree, but I can't find their disagreements all nicely arranged in one place - https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1103 might be a good place to start for some (mild) skepticism.
Thank you. I started reading the Less Wrong sequence.
I know people often call the MWI of quantum mechanics a "multiverse", but it really is conceptually very different than other multiverse theories (e.g. the eternal inflation/string theory version). The MWI is really many ordered worlds with the same laws and constants of nature, while a genuine multiverse theory has an infinite number of varied universes with either different constants, laws, or initial conditions.
To be a legitimate scientific theory, an infinite varied multiverse must resort to anthropic reasoning and an ad-hoc measure to "predict" that our observed universe is a typical universe in the multiverse.
A genuine multiverse theory appears to be absurd on its face, and it would be very surprising for someone who clearly understood it to specifically believe in it.
As I recall (it's been a few years), the editing on the quantum physics sequence in the AI to Zombies ebook (which readthesequences.com reproduces) is a disaster: it heavily cuts down the detailed arguments while retaining all of Eliezer's ranting and raving about how dumb Copenhagen people are, making him sound crazier than he really is. I'd suggest going back to LessWrong and reading the original posts there.
Declining birthrates and net negative replacement are indicative that this type of technological progress is doomed. Instead of using technology to spread out and colonize every last corner of the planet, these insane mega-projects are cramming more and more people together, which can only increase, not reduce, human conflict.
The good news is that it's almost certain that cultural evolution will eventually favor a lifestyle where practically all risks to our wellbeing happen in our free time, because the effort needed to sustain our bodies and minds adapted for life in the stone ages requires less than an hour of productive work daily.
I'm fairly certain that you understand that a growth rate is <1 means that a population eventually shrinks to zero. Even Jeff Bozo, the regular guy billionaire phallus rocket financier who's spent billions to recreate the Soviets achievements of the 1960s, was able to figure out that before we try colonizing the solar system, we might first want to try to figure out how to actually colonize our home planet. If someone randomly plopped you on Earth's surface where you can breathe without a space suit, odds are that you'd think you were completely alone because there wouldn't be another human soul in sight.
I'm also fairly certain that you understand that our bodies and minds are adapted for life in the stone ages and that advances in farming have made the cost of food, shelter, clothing, potable water, and basic medical care (i.e. body maintenance) so cheap, that one of our biggest problems is that we can't decide which bathroom someone is supposed to use.
I assume that you are aware that humanity requires a vast non-human, natural support environment to survive? To produce the resources that we consumet, dispose of the waste that we create, and balance the gasses that we breathe, for example.
I assume that you are unaware that right now there are 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs currently living on the planet. That's a lot of biomass.
I assume that your also unaware that there are 650 million tons of Antarctic Krill and humanity hasn't even *tried* to colonize the surface of the oceans.
I also assume that your unaware that growing a daily 2000kcal of e.g. potatoes can be done on an area of 10x10 meters. That's enough food to support 5 trillion people. 15 trillion if you manage to figure out how to harvest three time. Half sized humans would consume about 1/4 of the calories, which brings that number up to 60 trillion and would make locomotion via wind powered flying machines (Keywords: Albatross, Dynamic Soaring) feasible.
There are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.
If humanity is going to colonize the solar system, it won't be sticking 350lb transgender feminists with eating disorders into spaceships.
P.S. The phosphorus and potassium in the potatoes a person consumes comes out of the other end as...drumroll...phosphorus and potassium.
The natural support environment is extremely inefficient (photosynthesis is between 0.5% and 2% efficient in energy capture IIRC depending on how you count), as it is not optimized for providing for you.
The actual life support capacity of Earth, given unlimited engineering knowledge but curiously just baseline human physiology (a combination that won't happen ever) is probably in hundreds of billions, if not trillions of people.
My concern has been and remains “how do you account for thermal expansion while maintaining vacuum seal?”, which I still haven’t seen an adequate proposal to address. This is relevant to Neom given the temperature swings expected in the region (even if shielded from direct sun).
So I agree: using hyperloop decreases my confidence in their transportation predictions. Yes, if they try some sort of high-speed rail, they would need some sort of unexpected technological improvement to hit speed targets. However, if they try hyperloop, they would need some sort of unexpected technological improvement just to get it functional in the first place.
There's no real reason why Musk's proposal was any more "sound" than the proposals made in the 1950's, and it doesn't seem to have improved at all in the intervening decade since he made the proposal. He doesn't have any new technology for cheap pylon construction, any new technology for maintaining vacuums in a long tube, or acquiring real estate with a curvature appropriate for conventional HSR speeds let alone the kinds of speeds Hyperloop is alleged to be able to travel at.
I suppose if you can construct conventional HSR at Spanish or Korean prices, then its possible that the premium needed for Hyperloop would "only" get you to New York level costs, but given that people are skeptical of CAHSR even though it's not getting the New York price boost (just the usual US one), and given that the Persian Gulf states are close to US prices to begin with, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to afford a working Hyperloop.
It looks like Saudi's existing high-speed railway costs about $50 million per mile, which seems very good. This is intercity, but I imagine that within-city costs much less if you build the city around the railway instead of vice-versa.
Are you only going to have two stations? Even high-speed rail has trouble with close stations, the cars are heavy, and you spend have the trip speeding up, and the other half slowing down. How about put all the high-speed-transit entrances at the tops of the skyscrapers, and all the exits at the ground floor? It might work. It wouldn't be hyperloop, but if you have a closed tube with vents you could use air pressure to do a lot of your braking, and have a gravity assist when speeding up. Adjust the braking pressure by adjusting how open the vents were. (Sounds more like a carnival ride than public transit, but it might work.)
The science is sound, the engineering and technology isn't. For example, it's extremely difficult to maintain a sufficiently strong vacuum in a tube that is miles long. When it comes to the nitty gritty details, there's just too much that can go wrong to make it practical.
There's a reason why the las Vegas Hyperloop is 'Unpressurized Tesla Model 3s with taxi drivers going 30 mph in a one-way tunnel at atmospheric pressure' and not 600mph super-duper vacuum quantum crypto AI pod mega cool sustainable green time machine fantasy transport.
A working hyperloop just isn't something where you can have something cheap 'n' dirty that just barely works (as e.g. in the aviation industry) where incremental improvements over decades leads to solutions that work well. This appears to be a common misconception that because the science is sound (i.e. doesn't violate the laws of physics), it's merely a matter of money to make the engineers and technicians make it real.
$50 billion sounds like a lot, but for all we know it could take devoting every resource on the planet for the next 50 years to figure out how to make Hyperloops work with an acceptable failure rate.
Totalitarian grand master command and control freak plans never work out the way the totalitarian grand master command and control freak designers think.
For what it's worth, there is no Las Vegas Hyperloop. There's the Las Vegas Loop, but while I acknowledge the terminology is very confusing, it was never intended to be low-pressure; the only things it has in common with Hyperloop is that it's a tunnel and includes the word "loop".
The long-term plan *is* that they go self-driving, but there's no plans to depressurize it.
I personally suspect that Elon Musk has eventual plans to try building Hyperloop tunnels with Boring Company, but nothing he's doing right now is even aimed at it.
I can guarantee that's never going to happen. I think it's likely that Musk is selling his products he's making at a loss and is funneling the cash he gets from selling his stake in the companies back into the companies and makes them appear in the earnings column. At a P/E ratio of 100:1, 'putting $1B back' makes the company value go up by $100B, he own 20% of the company and
on paper makes $20B.
This isn't a new trick. Before going public, Crazy Eddie Antar made it appear that the profits in his company were increasing by skimming less.
When the SEC investigated Madoff back in the early 2000s, they didn't find anything either. Musk is constantly clashing with the SEC. Maybe he's letting them find small stuff so they don't see the big stuff.
I hope he doesn't get found out before my Cybertruck gets delivered. Ever notice how there's always such a delay with the hyped up Musk products? Doesn't he want to make money now, not later? That strategy makes a lot of sense if he doesn't want people's money, if taking their money is costing him money.
Keep in mind that "selling initial startup products at a loss" is a pretty normal way to get companies off the ground. That's not a trick, that's just how startups work; you have to compete on price before you can really justify that price with scale.
Also I think he's just really bad at estimates, he screws up estimates constantly even when there's no money in it for him.
I know that. I also know that most startups fail. The ones that succeed manage to grow and dominate a niche market or become a major player really fast and can reap the benefits of monopolistic rents.
Tesla has a market cap of all the other auto makers combined, yet has a low single digit market share. Musk doesn't actually have a clue how to make money in manufacturing. In WWII Singer, Mattel, etc. weren't manufacturing gun parts because of their expertise in making sewing machines and toys, but because they knew how to make stuff.
The obvious suspicion is that he doesn't even have a clue how to run a business and that there's a there a whole lot of denial and wishful thinking that a stoner with high-tech ADHD and entertaining tweets is the tech messiah who's medicating passive-thinking, semi-educated morons depression with the promise of a futuristic paradise of tech hippies on mars.
Withdrawal from the high is going to hurt. A lot.
On paper, he's already the richest man on the planet and things go down much faster than they go up, because zero is closer to even a 100 trillion than infinity.
> A working hyperloop just isn't something where you can have something cheap 'n' dirty that just barely works (as e.g. in the aviation industry) where incremental improvements over decades leads to solutions that work well
Isn't "Unpressurized Tesla Model 3s with taxi drivers going 30 mph in a one-way tunnel at atmospheric pressure" the cheap-and-dirty version? If you can make that economically viable then you can start improving from there -- increase speeds, remove the drivers, replace the cars with specialised sleds, increase the speed more, and eventually think about the air pressure thing.
I think the Las Vegas Tesla Tunnel gets a lot right about what the future of intra-city transport should look like; it should be underground, it should be driverless, and it should be private point-to-point pods (not giant trains that go from places you aren't to places you don't want to be). The key is reaching the minimum-viable product point where it actually becomes economically worthwhile, and I'm not sure that the Vegas Tesla Loop is quite there yet.
Well, would you consider 'riding a horse' the cheap-and-dirty version of a 'flying car'?
If you think that's silly, hear me out!
The horse goes from A to B, just like a flying car! And when the horse is galloping, then it's occasionally not touching the ground, which is practically flying, right?
It's a start, right? Just gotta work out some of the details, right?
A 100 year old electric subway system has more features in common with 'Hyperloop', than that idiotic Las Vegas snake oil promotional clown show.
And your future intra-city transport is indistinguishable from an underground road system except that it appears be more supportive of 'self driving magic', but only because you can exclude vehicles that don't support the 'self driving magic'. If you could scrap all existing cars and put a computer readable paint stripe on all the roads in the city, you'd get the thing. Except cheaper and more fault tolerant.
If something goes not-as-expected, would you prefer to be in a tunnel or on a regular road?
How many actors really effectively have ‘range’? I feel like a solid majority of Hollywood, movie and show actors I see on a regular basis simply play the same character over & over with some minor variations. For instance I’m finishing Ozark, where Jason Bateman is the show lead. I’ve also watched Arrested Development extensively, a completely different campy comedy from 15 years ago, and Bateman is…. exactly the same character in Ozark that he is in AD. Every mannerism is identical, to the point that I keep waiting for the punchline to drop in Ozark. Is he really ‘acting’, or does he just act out a set personality regardless of the circumstances? Is he really just playing himself?
Years ago at the height of Eminem’s fame I watched 8 Mile, where he essentially plays himself in a movie roughly based on his life. He did a fine job and it wasn’t a bad performance, but is it acting to play yourself? Are character actors like Bateman simply behaving as themselves on-screen? Seems like a pretty fun/easy job!
1. "Stars". They tend to play leading roles. Jack Nicholson is a great example. He plays Jack Nicholson in every movie. They cast him if the movie calls for Jack. The moviegoer goes to see Jack. If you don't like to see Jack, you don't go to any movie he's in.
2. "Character actors". Names are harder to come by for reasons, but Scott Glen is a reasonable example. These people have "range". They also aren't as memorable, because you can see two movies with the same actor and you don't realize they are the same unless you look at the credits, or you know their voice - although there are actors capable of changing accents sufficiently that this isn't a sure thing.
"Stars" vs. "Character actors" strikes me as two different dimensions. The sets overlap nontrivially. "Star" has to do with popular appeal. "Character actor" has to do with a particular type of acting talent - namely, the ability to convincingly play one or more archetypes (e.g. the Looming Mobster, the Loving Mother, the Scrappy Conman, the Cranky Waitress, etc.).
Jason Bateman specializes in "middle-aged suburban professional straight man in a comic routine", which happens to also work well enough for "straight man in a suburban crime-drama-tragedy" for him to get acclaim for Ozark. So he's a character actor with one specialty, and has parlayed that into what I'd estimate as at least mid-level stardom - people will watch something just because he's in it, playing his specialty.
Ernie Sabella specializes in "aging working-class clock-puncher". He's unlikely to draw crowds (unless they have very rareified taste), but if he's playing that character, he'll fit like a perfect glove.
Same goes for a raft of mid-level actors, the sort that used to have a column dedicated to them in Fametracker.org - Ron Rifkin, Jane Curtin, Edie McClurg, Al Leong, Vicky Lewis, James Hong, CCH Pounder, and of course, J.T. Walsh. If you're a movie buff and you know a character's coming in the plot and "yeah, they'll probably pick $Name" and sure enough, it's $Name, that's a character actor. Naturally, some have star power - Dwayne Johnson, ScarJo, etc.
A few rare figures are both star and character actor, and have multiple archetypes they can play. This is where you see your Christian Bale, your Matt Damon, your Charlize Theron, your Ryan Gosling, your Meryl Streep, your Gary Oldman, your Amy Andrews, your Helen Mirren. Sometimes it's wildly different characters as with these, sometimes it's more subtle like your Viola Davis or your Brian Cox, where they might *look* like the same character because they're just not chewing the scenery as vigorously.
That's the opposite of what I've heard. A "character actor" is an actor who plays one specific type of character. Daniel Day Lewis & Joaquin Phoenix would not be character actors, but instead leads who have played some very distinct characters (for Paul Thomas Anderson).
Clark Gable had a limited range, but in that range he was Clark Gable. Moving pictures have a huge pool of actors to draw on and they have to typecast.
Lots of actors grow up doing theater and that's different and sometimes they love the difference, sometimes they hate it.
Some of this is due to casting directors - it's not uncommon for actors to actively complain about being typecast because they feel they have range but everyone who wants to hire them wants the exact same performance.
I expect some is also due to audiences, and the idea of 'branding' - a particular actor gets a reputation for being comedic, and if you try and put him in a dark gritty drama he won't attract fans of the genre and the actors fans who are attracted won't like the film
Good point. Sean Connery hated being typecast as James Bond even though the movies were big hits and made him wealthy. Eventually he just said "I'm done with Bond" and never did another.
In amateur-level theatre, just about any actor can play just about any character, adequately well.
But Jason Bateman isn't competing for roles in amateur theatre, he's competing for roles in big movies and TV shows, and he's up against the best in the world. He could play a retired military tough guy action hero, but Jason Statham can do it better. He could play King Lear, but Kenneth Branagh can do it better. He could play a sensitive romantic lead, but Ryan Gosling can do that better. (And if he can't, it doesn't matter, because producers don't know this, so they'll never bother to ask him to audition.) If Jason Bateman wants to get roles, he needs to stick to the narrow window where he's one of the best in the world.
Cillian Murphy has range. Was wonderful as a very pretty, girly transexual in an early movie, now plays a tormented, clever, brutal man in Peaky Blinders, lotsa other roles, quite varied.
50% of acting is just showing up. All day. At exact places on the set (hitting your mark). With the right words coming out of your mouth. Over and over.
If you can do all that, and people enjoy watching your handsome face & body, you can make a living.
In the first, a Nobel Prize winning economist argues (verbatim quote): "A chatbot is a function. Functions are not sentient." and then compares LaMDA to "5x + 7"
Neither article grapples with what AI sentience means, if it could be achieved in our lifetime, what the implications would be, and seem to cherry pick particularly goofy representatives of a "worried about AI sentience" camp. Frustrating!
As much as the authors can go die in a fire, "functions are not sentient" is an important philosophical point. If multiplying enough matrices together results in consciousness, the consciousness is not only independent of substrate, it literally does not require a substrate in the first place - it's already entirely "computed" in some weird pseudo-existing space, much like the Mandelbrot set. Calculating it on your GPU cluster just gives you a window into a slice of it.
As always, Egan's "Permutation City" is multiple decades ahead of the mainstream AI/consciousness discourse despite being written in the 90s.
"Functions are not sentient" is really missing the point (or the relevant point is obscured). I think it's true that a feedforward mapping of points from one high dimensional space to another isn't sentient. Sentience is probably a feature of cognitive systems that can plan, execute, and monitor progress towards goals extended past the immediate present. The necessary feature of such systems is recurrent information dynamics. In this view a feedforward system, essentially a function mapping, cannot be conscious. But usually when people say functions can't be conscious, they're not making this kind of distinction.
But the "cognitive system" is also a function, even if defined recurrently! This still means you can build a conscious system out of math, which means the system already exists even before you build it, the same way 2+2=4 exists.
The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a reason.
My point was that a mathematical function, a construct where the same input maps to the same output always, is different from a recurrent system where inputs do not map necessarily to the same output.
Regarding your point that math already exists, there is an important difference between abstract objects (if there is such a thing) and concrete objects. Abstract objects are immutable and eternal. But sentience is not a immutable property of a system, but rather an active dynamic property. And so immutable abstract objects are not the substrate of sentience. Computation is a dynamic causal structure that changes state by state, which is a much better candidate.
Of course the important difference actual physical beings have (which chatbots actually share) is that they interact with their surroundings. A chatbot only does it in a thin way, through the text interface, and we likely don’t have the sorts of learning mechanisms designed that would do sufficient amounts and types of interaction even if we gave it sensory organs.
My understanding is that the NYT is effectively a propaganda organisation, with the flow being "desired message -> seek out story" rather than "find story -> decide what angle to take". This would imply that their story exists to serve some purpose.
The most obvious purpose is "throw shit at nerds"; we know they hate the Grey Tribe and they call out the Rationalists by name to throw shade. The second most obvious is "prevent anti-AI movements coalescing to political relevance", although there's a missing gear there in that I don't know why the NYT would want to do this. Took some effort for me to spot, but I suspect they're also trying to push scepticism of non-"trusted" sources with the whole "look at all these smart people getting hoodwinked" angle, which is obviously to NYT's own financial advantage.
Would be odd for the NYT to have an agenda of preventing AI movements from coalescing to political relevance. As you say, what would be the point? I think a lot of the NYT's seeming agenda is simply that the people who work there mostly think a certain way, & mostly think about certain subjects. It's not a conspiracy, it's shared values + complacency + entitlement. Worry about AI isn't on their radar, so if something about possible dangers of future AI crosses their desk they see it as a bit nutso & set it aside.
The "my understanding" bit is that I recall seeing someone post (either here or in a link from somewhere here/here-adjacent) who'd worked there and said it's editorially-driven rather than reporter-driven (there was a reference to NYT not doing the "what have you got for me" thing). I remember a comparison to the Los Angeles Times, but I can't find the reference itself (sorry).
If I'm wrong about this I would like to know and update.
Yeah, I have zero insider info and haven't even read anything good on the subject. The things is, it's all a matter of degree. All groups and institutions have norms about what sort of thing is taken seriously -- but some are more open than others to seriously considering ideas that aren't mainstream for them. I'm curious too, & would like info about what happens at the NYT if somebody says, "yes, but what about THIS?" and THIS is the sort of thing the NYT doesn't usually take seriously.
Some people here hate the Times because of the article about Scott. I hated the article, but also was surprised that the NYT had printed it. Even if I hadn't the faintest idea who Scott was I would have been startled to see such a tacky hatchett job in the Times. Surprised it slipped past the editors.
...sounds like it's the source I was talking about.
(Happened across it by sheer serendipity in a link from LW, but I don't think I've read that LW article before so no idea where I initially came across it.)
Thanks. One thing I'll say about the Times: They are the only paper to print information about Evusheld and complaints about errors in its distribution. This is a niche topic from most people's point of view, but of interest to me because I'm involved in a volunteer effort to improve its distribution to people who need it. Evusheld is a substitute for vaccination, given to immune-compromised people who cannot make antibodies in response to vaccination or infection. It literally just gives them a supply of long-lasting antibodies, and they are then approximately as protected as vaccinated people. About 3% of the population needs it (so it's not a *ridiculously* niche topic). The government bought a decent supply, but utterly botched the distribution. Sent truckloads to states with vague instructions to distribute it across the state. Some states gave it all to hospitals, who all then used it only for their own inpatients, so that the non-hospitalized majority had no access. Others sent Evusheld to random small-town pharmacies, some of which were actually beauty spas, and of course nobody ever got Evusheld from those places. Doctors were not informed that the stuff was available and who qualified. Result is that very little of what was bought reached patients.
Anyhow, the point is that the Times picked up on this, and gave an accurate account of how much Evusheld was needed, how much was going to waste and why, and nobody else did. And every now and then they give a little update, too. Someone could say Evusheld made it into the paper because it fits with the NYT narrative of We're Not Doing Enough, but still, they score quite a few points with me for their coverage of this topic.
You’re definitely projecting a lot here. It’s true that they’re very much into the skepticism of non-canonical sources thing, but that’s because they actually believe it’s the best idea. I think some individual writers may also have the “throw shit at nerds” thing, but the Times as a whole doesn’t.
I read the Cade Metz one at the NYTimes, and it was very frustrating - it took quotes from philosophers and cognitive scientists pointing out that these particular systems are not likely sentient, but then presented it as though they were saying that the idea of AI sentience is impossible.
It's so irritating when people essentially say "it's a machine so it's not sentient," as though they're cutting through the Gordian Knot. Those of us who fret and/or feel a thrill about AI sentience -- do you think it's never occurred to us that it's a bit unusual to be talking about a machine being sentient? Duh . . .
I'd like people to take on the interesting question of what do we *mean* by sentience, what would it *mean* for a machine to be sentient. Seems to me that one of the key parts of being seen as sentient is being able to report on one's own processes. So I can say to you guys right now -- hey, I'm in my office pretty sleep-deprived, typing away on this blue page about the nature of sentience. Very sentient of me to say that, right? But some people think of reporting on one's own processes in a sort of ghost-in-the-machine way -- as though there's the machinery, clanking away, but then this ineffable thing consciousness is walking invisibly through the clusters of clanking machines, talking about them. But you don't need a ghost to report on the roomful of machines. There could be another clanking machine that registers & issues reports about the roomful of clanking machines. AI would have to be complex to report on itself in an interesting way -- it would have to be constructed so as to be capable of substantial meta -- but I don't see any reason why the construction couldn't be done using the same inanimate materials & electrical processes as all the rest.
Obviously, even personal computers of the present day can give simple reports on themselves -- tell you their OS was updated, their memory is getting full, etc. But I'm talking about an *interesting* self report. For instance, let's say a DALL-e kind of AI creates an image based on your descriptor "self love," & it's trashy & commercial arty -- somebody looking in a mirror with hearts & flowers around -- and you could ask DALL-e why that image, & it could say it looked for images of self & images of love & combined them. And then you could say, but the results is so *tacky*! And anyhow, DALL-e, self-love is a complex concept. For one thing, most people disapprove of it. For another, it's got some meta going on -- what does it even mean to love yourself? Isn't love a feeling for something outside the self? So how can you build those complications into an image, DALL-e? OK, I realize this example has the AI going beyond describing its own processes, on to being able to understand complex advice on the modification they need. But I'm tired & getting less sentient, so will leave this as is.
OK, but a lot of people think "Machine, ok, I know a car and a drill and a vacuum clearn, a dishwasher. OK, things in that group aren't sentient."
So this is probably more of a category error. Improperly generalizing that things given the same name are necessarily sharing a particular characteristic.
That said, I doubt that any future advance of a chatbot will be sentient. I feel that requires more extensive interaction with the external world. But how would I know if I were wrong? Pattern matching has gotten awfully good at SEEMING to be sentient. The fact that it clearly doesn't understand some things that I find obvious doesn't differentiate it from many people I know.
Meh I would tend to agree that chat bots unless wildly more robust than the ones that exist so far, are nowhere near sentient. Hell one of the main findings of cognitive science is human sentience is pretty overblown. People are bad reporters of their own actions and internal states, and consciousness seems as much the piecing together of a bunch of snapshots than some stable thing.
Do you think a chat bot has qualia? I might think a sufficiently sophisticated one might, but we are nowhere near there yet.
I agree about how the sense of continuity and self-knowledge is an illusion, & we are in fact piecing together snapshots. It's as though we're wired to have the sense of being continuous, consistent, and self-aware. We don't realize we're piecing together snapshots. To us it looks like a movie with a story that makes sense. It's easiest to see this process if you recall a dream really well -- you can actual see your mind making sense of nonsense: Settings change, but you have the feeling of being in a certain place, the same place. ETc.
I don't think LaMDA or any other current AI system is consciousness or particularly close to conscious. I think that the human mind is a function, and saying "no function can be sentient" is absurd. It's basically a repetition of Searle's Chinese Room argument, and the Romer article doesn't grapple with any of the many counter-arguments to the Chinese Room. My broader issue with these articles is that they trivialize and dismiss something that's an important issue, even if it's not directly staring us in the face now. Are chatbots conscious now? No... Could they be in the future? In the near future? What would that mean? For humanity? For chatbots? Oh the answer is "this silly guy is a 'Christian Mystic'" and "look at these weirdos falling in love with ELIZA many decades ago!"
I like to really try to make someone else’s idea the smartest possible idea I can imagine before I try to pick it apart, and if I don’t get it at all I like to take a few days to think about it and try to understand if it’s just my own ignorance, but yeah I’m with you in the Neom stuff.
Hyperloop seems like it should lower the probability that this goes well, since it means we're now relying on yet another hypothetical technology (and not even the basic version of the hyperloop! This would require a more complicated modular version with track switching!)
Does anyone have a (preferably well-informed) assessment of how the newly-enacted ability of Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies will effect drug development? Am I crazy to be concerned that we may have inadvertently aborted many blockbuster drugs and we'll never know what we didn't invent?
Most medicine is wasteful, but there are a very small number of drugs with outsized impact. If this policy causes us to discover even one less drug like Lipitor, that's millions of early deaths that won't be prevented.
I received an email from someone who says they work in the industry, which I'm reprinting with their permission:
"From my vantage, most of the talking points in the debate are inexplicably backwards / unsupported by data and there doesn't seem to be sufficient exposition around the heart of the matter -- which relates to scientific constraints & capital allocation.
I made a deck to collect some data and work through the issues that I've been sharing w/ folks (attached) -- but I'll just briefly reproduce the argument here below, which outlines why there better routes to solving healthcare affordability issues than what congress has proposed:
- Healthcare costs are high, but drug aren't really the *main* problem on a societal level (they're a minor % of overall healthcare spending, ~8% in 2020, and prices have surprisingly been *decreasing* over the past few years)
- While many patients are protected from significant OOP cost due to annual out-of-pocket maximums, some patients – mainly Medicare patients without Medigap and the uninsured – do not have this safety net – these are the patients we most need to help
- As with all industries that are funded by investment, prices in pharmaceutical sector are set to a level that creates an economic profit (i.e., NPV > 0)
- Unfortunately, the overall drug development sector is currently NPV negative – this means that there is little headroom to decrease prices and still warrant investment for new therapies
---- Public market data support this point, as pharma does not generate “excess profits” when compared to the rest of the economy
---- Furthermore, pharmaceutical investors and management are not enriching themselves with stock “buy-backs” – another common talking point – as the majority of profits are re-invested back into R&D for new therapies
- The escalating cost of drug development is the underlying reason why prices need to increase to keep the industry afloat
- Unfortunately, this is an inevitable and natural consequence of (1) the attempt treat diseases of increasing complexity and (2) the nature of a scientifically-regulated industry, where the bar to success continually rises as improved products come-to-market
- If prices are restricted by congress, it could dramatically decrease the number of future drugs, with disproportionate impact on small molecules
---- The CBO model predicting a small decrease in new drugs (~10%) resulting from this legislation is inherently flawed, as it does not model the returns to the overall sector and resulting impact to investment dynamics
---- Expectations around portfolio returns are the actual incentive / decision-making criteria for investors (e.g., LP pension funds) who will stop directing capital to therapeutic innovation as early-stage VC performance deteriorates
- We cannot afford handicap the engine that creates innovative medicines, given (1) how many medical unmet needs still remain and (2) the incredible benefit for society that drugs have already yielded
- Health Technology Assessments (e.g., ICER) dramatically shortchange these benefits as they do not take into account the value provided after a drug goes generic …. in perpetuity! (e.g., statins)
- While a more thoughtful cost sharing structure with patients would be an ideal solution (e.g.,, eliminating OOP costs by funding through e.g., premiums or taxes), at the very least the legislation should extend the statutory CMS negotiation period to 13 years for small-molecules
There's a lot of directions in which to take this conversation (individual actor vs aggregate decision making, mean vs outlier considerations, role & design of health insurance, moral weight ascribed to future vs current humans, difficulties around counterfactual arguments in politics and resulting incentives, public investment allocation decisions, why methodological issues w/HTA are hiding in plain sight but are scarcely acknowledged, Blue team's ironic unwillingness to engage in fact-based decision-making post-Trump, why I can't seem to find a holistic / ecosystem-level economic analysis on the topic, etc.)."
I think the real question, given that the US is the only major market for pharmaceuticals that doesn't have this sort of price control, is whether there's a way to negotiate a global plan for cooperating, rather than letting many countries free-ride on the US paying high prices for drugs. If the international corporate minimum tax agreement works out, then maybe there is hope for some sort of international agreement here.
I mean, if the policy is what it says on the tin, it's something that approximately every single country that isn't the USA was already doing, it's not a crazy idea.
As for whether lowering the available revenue would reduce drug development, in isolation, maybe? But if you're concerned about that, then reducing the massive regulatory bullshit imposed by the FDA is a much more important target - reduce the barriers to bringing drugs to market rather than trying to subsidise the industry enough to pay literally billions for testing per drug.
I don't know what the stats look like these days, but when I was running debate cases in high school the argument was that the US singlehandedly discovers almost half of all new drugs, and that this is at least in part caused by not having the kind of price controls that other countries enact. Free rider problem on the part of other nations, essentially.
I am not sure this is a real problem. Our medical technology is rapidly outstripping our ability to provide/afford it for even a small fraction for the population. You could easily spend many lifetimes of most peoples’ earnings on procedures that benefit them or extend their life in some way or other.
We already have a lot of price rationing, and service rationing, and informal hospice rationing.
The world lacking another $20,000/year way to ensure people don’t lose their hair doesn’t seem that big a loss.
Since so much of the core research for pharma is based on stuff in the public domain I think it is one area where pretty significant intervention in the market makes sense. All the more so because medical care is one of the areas consumers are their families are least rational.
I am a big “markets are strong” guy”, but big pharmaceutical and especially big pharma ads are one of the major places I would come down with a heavy stick if dictator.
It's worth keeping in mind that innovations often start out expensive and get cheaper as the industry gets experience. Sadly that happens less or not at all in most sectors of health care because of regulation and lack of competition. (Example, if someone wants to start a new hospital, all the hospitals in the are have to sign off that it's a good idea. Any surprise new hospitals don't get started?) Lasek surgery, on the other hand, which isn't covered by insurance (AFAIK), covered by Medicare, and hence trammeled by regulations, has fallen probably well over 50% in real terms in the past few decades. John Cochrane is very insightful on health care regulation (and regulation in general) and was a guest recently on a podcast on the subject. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/search/label/Health%20economics
This seems wrong w.r.t. drugs, because once the drugs are off patent, they are usually extremely cheap. (At least modulo gaming the FDA's rules + bribing other manufacturers to stay out of the market for a couple years.). If the tradeoff is either:
World #1: This new treatment for your cancer is super expensive for 20 years so most people can't afford it, and then becomes generic and costs $100 for a course of treatment.
World #2: This new treatment for your cancer is never developed because it doesn't pay.
it seems pretty obvious we'd rather live in World #1.
i have a cosmetic procedure scheduled for a few months from now, and it's prompted me to revisit a term paper i wrote my freshman year of college about the effects of pre-surgical psychological care on post-operative outcomes in (elective) plastic surgery.
titled "The Medium Is The Bandage" (freshman me was very clever with titles), its gist is that plastic surgeons ought to pull the wool over their patients' blepharoplastied eyes for their own good. a patient's own perception of the outcome of their procedure is more, well, plastic, than we assume, and surgeons should take advantage of this by injecting as much objective-seeming "medical theatre" into pre-op rituals as possible.
a lot of feminist literature on plastic surgery I surveyed equates pre-ops to confession...
> "The female patient is promised beauty and re-form in exchange for confession, which is predicated on an admission of a diseased appearance that points to a diseased (powerless) character. A failure to confess, in the clinical setting, is equated with a refusal of health; a preference for disease."
...to which i countered this kind of conditioning is *good* thing, provided the patient is reasonably likely to go through with the procedure anyways⏤absolving the patient of their agency leaves the patient with less wiggle room for subjectivity in evaluating the outcome (say, perhaps decreasing the odds of a repeat customer caught in a spiral of body dysmorphia).
the paper somehow ropes in Schmidhuber, Friston, Foucault, and the like in its wild ride towards proving all this, and makes me wonder if i ought to go to grad school just so i can have an excuse to write with this kind of chutzpah again (link to the paper: https://jane.flowers/the-medium-is-the-bandage)
This is perhaps the best time in history to write with chutzpah without going back to school. Personally, I'm pretty skeptical of grad school (having gone myself) unless you really need the credential or skills to do what you want to do.
There's said to be a marketing placebo effect: a higher price leads to the customer more positively evaluating the service. We already tend to engage in post-purchase rationalization (one of the biggest forms of choice-supportive bias). Putting them together: the higher the price, the more effective the rationalization?
So you expect that an exaggerated diagnosis, and any associated medical theater, are likely to have a similar effect?
This seems like a fine justification for price discrimination. A benevolent surgeon should charge rich patients so much extra that every patient feels the pinch. Then every nip and tuck can be a satisfactory nip and tuck.
A few years ago I read a short story by Naoise Dolan about a cosmetic surgery patient. Through an original twist on the repeat customer problem that you mention, the patient ends up deceiving her surgeon more than vice versa.
What are the best examples of New Urbanist style urban design?
I'm looking through wikipedia's list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_New_Urbanism and most of them seem fairly uninspiring, most of them either look like (a) an over-sized over-glorified apartment complex, (b) a shopping mall with some apartments on top, (c) or a regular cheap-looking cookie-cutter suburb where the houses are slightly closer together.
New Urbanism per se is a specific movement involving specific architects, and relies on large greenfield developments, and thus operates in a traditionally suburban context. The broader set of ideas is often adopted by people working on individual buildings in redevelopment contexts in urban areas, but since they only do a few buildings at a time, it's often hard to get the full effect.
The Mueller neighborhood of Austin (which used to be the airport before they converted the nearby air base into a bigger airport south of town - it's linked in your list, but it's probably better to Google more, and particularly go into Google Street View and Satellite View) is probably the one example of a New Urbanist neighborhood that I've had much chance to experience. It seems like a very pleasant place, and is very conveniently located for biking to UT or the state capitol or the downtown office buildings or medical centers, and really does seem like a place where you could easily do a lot of walking, both to shops and just around the neighborhood.
The main downside I see is that the nice walkable street grid ends at the edge of the neighborhood, and it's surrounded by some parks that are only pierced by major arterials, which means you really end up having to use a bike or car to get out of the neighborhood, and those houses on the edge aren't as conveniently located for walking to the shops of either that neighborhood or the next neighborhood.
People often highlight the differences between European cities in the 70s vs today to show the incremental effect of a lot of small changes in urban design. (which is perhaps a better way to do new urbanism than large planned developments.)
My first video game is on track to be finished by early 2025, or sooner if I decide not to put a song in it that enters public domain that year. Will probably be kickstarting it January of next year if all goes well.
My personal suggestion would be to not delay your project for a single song unless the whole work is designed around the music. On the other hand, software development is notorious for delays so maybe the bottleneck won't be the public domain timer anyway :P
Unless you have an affordable orchestra to record it, you're going to have to wait until the particular recording you're interested in enters the public domain, not just the sheet music. (And presumably, if you can afford an orchestra to record it, the licensing cost of the sheet music wouldn't be that out of reach?)
I suppose that is definitely possible, though I think of the distinctive feature of Bolero is the series of sounds that Ravel gets out of the instruments on successive repetitions of the melody.
There's an ongoing dispute about who wrote Bolero. Ravel's heirs claim that he had a bunch of co-authors, and the 75 year time should start ticking from when the last co-author died.
I just realized that I don't have links to a couple of blog posts that I read last year, and spent several hours searching for them without any luck. So I figured I'd ask here (because I might have got them from the ASX or broader rationalist community, and because if I didn't, people here would be more likely to have stumbled on them otherwise, and if anyone finds them, people here are more likely to find them interesting too).
The first was a long post, or series of posts, going into great historical detail about the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving, using a biography of Tisquantum (Sqanto) as the framework, and taking great care to identify the local political context with respect to the area's tribes and alliances, the background of the Mayflower colonists, and the other factions of Europeans in the area. As I recall, it was broad, and comprehensive, and largely refrained from moralizing and judgment and virtue signaling, and instead paid attention to all the actors as individuals with their own motivations who were doing the best they could in the situation they were in, although sometimes certain people did seem to be acting maliciously. (One of the more tentative takeaways was that Tisquantum was not a selfless benefactor, but was probably trying to gain power by becoming the middleman between the settlers and the locals, feeding their suspicions of each other, and portraying himself to each side as the only one who could mediate between them.) The blog itself was old-fashioned design from a few decades ago, without much glitz or SEO (kinda like the old SSC). I didn't get much sense of the author, who might as well have been a dog, but I have a dubious recollection that, from browsing other posts, the author was in the process of learning a Native American language, just for fun, so I expect they might be a historian or linguist.
The other was a post or series of posts about Cortes conquering the Aztec empire. Lots of detail, following his progress and trying to examine the interactions between him, his men, his guide, the other local Spaniards, the Aztec government, the population of the Aztec empire, and the various neighboring cities and states that were entangled with the Aztecs. It had more gushy language, like a young-20s male very enthusiastic about all the cool stuff he was researching, but there was a similar avoidance of moralizing, judgment, and virtue signaling. There was some other content on the blog that looked interesting too. The blog itself was similarly old-school, with a right-sidebar and everything.
Any help would be appreciated! I've tried various search terms on different search engines, as well as what's left of my browser history and bookmarks, but I think a crash wiped all that out.
(Now to see how accurate my memory is. The blog is newer-model than I recalled (and Wayback indicates that it was like that before). The author is a linguist, and at a quick glance seems to focus on Ojibwe in particular and Algonquian languages in general, so their language learning may be of professional interest and not "just for fun". There is some political signaling up front, but mostly it's of the view that anyone presenting a slanted version of history is doing a disservice to the people in it, which warms the cockles of my heart.)
Wow, my Google-fu has deteriorated. I knew I shouldn't be using DDG because it has a problem with Wordpress, but I hadn't thought of adding my speculation about linguistics in there, and I definitely didn't think of adding the year. I wasn't even sure it was new that year, just that that's when I was reading it.
Well, I'm glad you & that blog are reunited. Speaking of Google-fu, there used to be a place where people tried to come up with 2-word combos that brought up exactly one result in Google. There was a name for a successful combo, something like Googleplexus. That was fun. Some people were incredibly good at it, & I'd see their combos appearing one after another in real time while I struggled for half an hour to come up with a word that had appeared once & only once with 'topiary' . . .
I've been following a friend who has been through severe childhood trauma and for whom EMDR did not work trying ART (Accelerated Resolution Therapy), and so far it is way more promising. I wonder if anyone else here has experience with this type of therapy, either as a patient, or as a professional?
I've undergone ART, it was probably the most impactful therapy I've been through, although it's going to be hard to disentangle that from a bunch of other factors (only therapy I've undergone performed by a psychiatrist, only therapy performed by a therapist who wasn't starting from a standing start with respect to my history, etc).
I don't really know what to say that would generalize, although I'm willing to answer questions.
Thinking on it a bit, one concern I have is that, to the extent the accelerated resolutions are accelerated, it feels you could quickly go places with less forethought than might be adviseable.
Lots of reliving memories and experiences, and attempting to relive them differently, followed by the fancy eye-movement activity, multiple times in a session.
The idea (iirc) is, after exploring a graph of memories and associations, not so much rewriting memories (obvious concerns are obvious), but instead rewriting their impact/emotional context.
Cool! Thanks. My impression is that the eye movement is just to enter light trance, but I thought, that unlike EMDR, the patient doesn't need to discuss the traumatic memories, just imagine them, without pulling on any threads that can unravel into other traumatic memories right then and there, and basically tile the bad memories with... smiley faces, so to speak.
Bryan Caplan is writing a book on how free, unregulated markets work better than any of the alternatives. Actually the book is a compilation of his "best blog posts" on that subject, so in principle you can read those. He wrote at Econlog for years and now has his own Substack site, but the blog posts are still accessible at Econlog. Bryan is very smart and a fiercely independent thinker, so worth your while.
Laissez-faire, as traditionally understood, allows any transaction has the informed consent of all participants. No force or fraud, anything else goes. Assuming this is properly enforced, and that e.g. polluting the local water supply is understood as forcefully introducing outsiders into the transaction, then laissez-faire allows all utility-maximizing enterprises. Including transactions that may harm some people, but only if those people are adequately compensated for their harm.
Empirically, we note that economies that approach laissez-faire have been the most broadly productive in human history, with some problems associated with imperfect enforcement of the "no force or fraud" part. Sometimes the locals don't notice the water supply being polluted until it's too late, or sometimes the enforcers are corrupt. But in terms of avoiding force, fraud, and "externalities", the 80/20 rule applies. Beyond that, you're mostly impairing productivity and utility, not so much minimizing harmful externalities. And since wealth can buy solutions to many problems, you're probably better off marginally underregulating the people who are making your society rich, than marginally overregulating them.
Very good answer. The intended benefits of regulation always get widely ballyhooed but their costs are often ignored and certainly not honestly monitored. The Mercatus Center published an analysis some years ago (sorry, I don't have a link and it was about 10 years ago) that estimated that total U.S. GDP would be something like 2x or 3x what it actually was then (in, say, 2010) relative to 1970, when the pace of regulatory expansion picked up sharply with the establishment new agencies such as EPA and Education. Yes, regulations have undoubtedly led to some improvements, but those are almost certainly not as large as is thought. For example, If you look at automobile accident mortality since mandatory seat-belt laws went into effect, you do find significant and steady declines. But it turns out it was declining at the same rate before those laws came into existence. There's even an economic principle, the "Peltzman Effect" (named after Sam Peltzman, who brought it to light), which shows that behavioral responses neutralize some (all in some cases?) of the effects of regulation. For example, drivers wearing seat belts, at the margin, might take more risks than they would without seatbelsts. If this seems implausible to you, ask yourself if you might be just a bit more careful driving in bad weather if your car lacked seat belts and anti-skid brakes. Plus, industries put a lot of efforts and resources into avoiding or neutralizing regulations, which is socially wasteful. It's been said that 90% of financial innovation is driven by tax and regulatory considerations. Might be lower in other industries but far from 0.
Very interesting comment. I actually just learned about the Peltzman effect independently. It is indeed hard to believe but Peltzman does have numbers to back it up. This book summarizes the literature on a wide range of government interventions :
The bottom line is not good at all. A lot of programs aren't even evaluated and don't even use cost benefit analysis. When they are analyzed, it turns out that either the results are inconclusive and we don't know their effects, or they don't have any effect/the effect is smaller than the cost, or they are actually completely counter-productive and harmful. Anti-trust seems to have no effect on prices for example, which is the whole idea behind its existence.
I haven't checked all the studies and I don't think all of them have absolute iron-clad causal inference. But in my view the fact that it is really hard to measure the effects of policies and that for many we don't know what the effects are or don't even try to measure them is an argument *against* intervention.
The book examines antitrust, regulation, public production, patents, imperfect information and more but ignores social programs for which the same is true. The overwhelming majority are not even evaluated and when they are the effect tend towards zero :
(I know the Heritage foundation is a biased source but in this article the list of social programs was pretty exhaustive so I don't think only the bad ones were cherry picked)
You could add to that Richard Hanania's book on foreign policy and you get a pretty grim picture of all around government intervention. It is certainly true that the market is not perfect but neither is government, and yet we need it.
Yes. The authors (the political elite) of the laws and regulations only bear a tiny fraction of their total costs, i.e. the same amount as anyone else. That's the definition of an externality--others bear most of the costs of the politico's actions. They get huge benefits in the form of political contributions from industry participants who seek to tweak or pound the laws or regulations in their favor, or better yet, get an exemption for themselves. Plus they get lucrative lobbying jobs when they retire or lose an election.
The higher level principles involved are illuminated by Public Choice economics, the most important branch of economics most people don't know about, which treats the agents of public policy (governments and their agents) like any economic agent, i.e., what really motivates them as they make their political sausage? Public Choice econ explores the question of why most public policy initiatives fail and are counterproductive, notwithstanding their impressively high-minded labels. (Build Back Better, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.)
Agreed. Too many people ignore the existence of public choice. The core ideas of public choice turned out to be right, i.e. that government officials are not perfect benevolent and rational actors. From what I have read however, public choice remains very theoretical. Buchanan early models were not complete, I think he described political agents as influenced by personal interest and special interests. The picture is more complicated than that, there is also dogma/ideology, incomplete information, irrationality and many more factors involved. That's why I liked Clifford Winston's book so much. It's basically empirical public choice, and documents government failures. It's from 2006, so I wonder if there is a more recent book doing the same thing, or perhaps in the European context. That would be very interesting to look at. Do you know of any ?
As a case in point (in this case, mostly of Baptists and Bootleggers I'd say), take a look at economist John Cochrane's blogpost about the impact of the climate policy spending in the current bill, and the (mostly lack of) cost/benefit analysis. xhttps://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/08/climate-policy-numbers.html
Yes, agree it's complicated. I think one reason Public Choice remains relatively unknown and ignored is that it's hard build neat models around it as academic economics like to do (and need to to get tenure). I'm not an expert but someone smart I was reading said the best book on Public Choice is Beyond Politics by Randy T. Simmons. It has a foreword by Gordon Tullock, one of the "founders" of the field. I haven't read it yet. More recent and more anecdotal is a compilation of essays by Bryan Caplan called "How Evil are Politicians: Essays on Demaguoguery", which shows in nauseating and convincing detail how politicians come up with ideas for laws with virtually no thought to the actual consequences, which are overwhelmingly counterproductive (to use the kindest word, as opposed to say, malign and destructive).
Basically the issue comes down to the fractal topography of the spaces involved; it's easy to say government shouldn't pick and choose winners and losers, but when you're considering contract law, at some level of definition the choices government must make between interpretations amount to arbitrary distinctions, and those distinctions in turn result in different sets of winners and losers. The greater the complexity of society and economics, the more important these arbitrary decisions are, and the more effective regulatory power a government is obligated to exercise.
An alternative way of constructing this set of ideas:
There is a constant technological arms race between enforcement and enforcement evasion, and the enforcement wing cannot unilaterally stop; the regulatory state must constantly increase in complexity to keep up.
(This is my strongest argument against laissez-faire economics; it is also my strongest argument for laissez-faire economics, if you think about the implications for a few minutes. Which is why I say the idea of laissez-faire economics is incoherent.)
Except for regulatory capture. As regulations get more complex, only sophisticated players can keep playing. Add the fact that as government exerts more influence over more sectors of the economy, the more it pays to influence government--lobby--rather than put resources into something socially useful. An important argument for laissez fair is that as government grows and regulations get more complex, vested interests get created and they grow, and their first priority is to lobby government for regulations that keep out competition. Efficiency and innovation suffers. So in an idealized world "The greater the complexity of society and economics, the more important these arbitrary decisions are, and the more effective regulatory power a government is obligated to exercise," but in the real world the actual power the government exercises is not to promote socially useful ends more equitably or efficiently but to protect various vested interests. Do you see much that's "effective" in the multi-trillion dollar budgets of recent years? I don't but I see plenty of spending on pet projects and favored industries. The goals of legislation are accomplished (or "accomplished") via the spending and enforcement mechanisms of the regulatory agencies.
It seems like this is ultimately just saying that laissez-faire economics is inconsistent with the kind of regulation of industry you want, which seems like it's just getting back to the definition of laissez-faire.
Some of the relevant regulations in question are the regulations which create legal recognition of "ownership".
Mind, if we want to call a capitalism without government-recognized-or-enforced ownership of stuff "laissez-faire", I'm fine with that, that's just not what most people have in mind.
Seems to me that it depends on what is the considered alternative.
* Unregulated market vs some reasonable regulation? (Such as: you can't sell poison and label it "food".) Regulation is better.
* Reasonable people making their own choices vs a powerful bureaucrat deciding what everyone "wants" and "needs"? (Especially when most people are unhappy about the bureaucrat's decisions, but there is nothing they can do about it.) Making your own choice is better.
So, in my opinion, the perfect setup would be something that prevents market participants from using violence, fraud, and maybe some kinds of abuse of monopoly. But it is difficult to define the exact boundaries, because one person's "fraud" is other person's "clever marketing" or "alternative truth", etc.
I am not sure how a 'free market' can actually exist. All markets are defined by legal obligations and restrictions on the market participants. For example, on which currency is acceptable, quality of goods, who can use violence to ensure that contracts are fulfilled, penalties for theft, and a hundred other things.
Another problem is that the laws governing commercial transactions often tend to result in positive feedback loops resulting in politically unstable divisions of wealth.
Hard core libertarians can describe an economy and society where even laws, contracts, and regulations can be private and voluntary. But "laissez faire" typically posits at least the "night watchman" state, i.e., a state that administers and enforces a reasonably honest and efficient justice system that can enforce contracts and that includes police who maintain public order. Beyond that, interaction is voluntary. One can debate details--can't many contracts be enforced via private arbitration or some such? So yes, what exactly is meant by "laissez fair" needs to be specified in a thorough discussion.
So how can freedom of religion exist in a country where even churches and religious people exist within a framework of legal obligations and contract law and such? It is true that my freedom of religion living in 2022 USA isn't quite the same as it would be on a desert island, but it also seems clear that 2022 USA has religious freedom in a way that, say, 2022 North Korea or Saudi Arabia does not.
Thor Odinson nailed it on the strongest argument against, which is that it's hard for a free market to restrain its most powerful and wealthy actors from violating the conditions that make it free, whether that's weaponizing the law against potential and real competitors through regulatory capture or extra-legal violence and sabotage (or both).
It's also tremendously difficult to extend property rights to later encompass costs that were not originally factored into the price, although you could argue that it's just a matter of convincing a judge that damages for that should factor into it if we had laissez-faire style courts as well.
As I said above, the wealthy and powerful typically depend on governments to help them maintain their wealth and power by restraining competitors. Under laissez-faire, new competitors--innovators and disruptors--eventually turn the industry giants into former industry giants. History is littered with examples. No monopolies last without government and regulatory support.
IMO, the strongest argument for it is that people almost always know better than others what is good for themselves, and as a result countries have historically prospered almost precisely to the extent that they have allowed free markets.
The strongest argument against is that totally free markets are an unstable equilibrium where sufficiently wealthy actors end up lobbing government to regulate away their competition, or in countries with a weak central government simply deploying force of arms themselves with mercenaries. Note however that this is an argument that free markets are difficult to keep, not that they're not desirable.
As to arguments about externalities, that gets philosophical rapidly. Personally, I think that a libertarian framework absolutely ought to factor in externalities, and that doing so correctly is part of why it's very hard to have an actually free market - much regulatory capture is in the form of manipulating how externalities are counted.
Your argument against is a counterfactual and might not be true. Interventions are the result of a messy political process and don't accomplish what they wee intended to according to the well-intentioned advocates, in part because less-well intentioned and self-interested advocates work harder to actually shape them. You end up with new distortions and malign outcomes. Have you heard of the Baptists and Bootleggers phenomenon? It's based on the (true) history of the regulation of alcohol on Sundays. Baptists oppose the sale of alcohol on Sundays because it's sinful to drink on a holy day. Bootleggers fund the Baptists' cause because it's in their interest. If you look around you see the principle at work in every piece of legislation, and regulation is rife with it. The bottom line is that no intervention is optimized to achieve the outcome its rational, well-intentioned advocates envisioned, but instead benefit political cronies create new problems that will require new regulation.
Against - it leads to monopolies, merchant rule, and totalitarianism where one side winning in a true sense leads to a loss of freedom, choice, and innovation with a wide ranging negative impact on everyone except the newly minted aristocrats. In a true way with no rules, it is a form of anarchy which eats itself to become a fascist and feudal state over time.
With no or very few rules you will have the truest merchants in the form of the Vikings who came, killed, and took what they wanted. Or an endemic version of being the purveyor of violence or bribing those who hold such violent power over others to insert themselves as feudal lords. One dollar equals one vote leads to an inherent oligopoly and this is true historically in basically every case. It is an unstable and utopian type idea which has no reference point in human history or behaviour.
It begins with many huge assertions such as extreme ownership concepts where a middleman step is used to justify the seizure of other's work on a perpetual basis.
This is what makes it feudal where it is 'somehow' inherently correct to think it is right that one man collects the profits from the labour of a thousand men who work 'for him'. The legal fiction of a company which accrues all value which happens to be the same as the ownership or merchant or aristocratic duke/earl/count/lord/king or capital or whatever you want to call it class. This fig leaf stands in for why when a company starts using email and productivity of workers goes up through no effort, skill, invention, or risk of the ownership class..that all new profits from that increased productivity go into the hands of the owners. This has no foundation in morality and is theft through control.
This spirals into a merchant style dictatorship over time and no 'free market' every stays free for very long. Free from what? From the government? From corporate power? From cartel power? Certainly no broad concepts of freedom is ever sustained in any meaningful way. Making lassez-faire a terrible idea in that it cannot ever sustain itself and becomes the thing it is nominally against over time, and usually not very much time. The supposed separation of or superiority of such merchant or corporate power itself also devolves as relationships with government or various merchants effectively becoming/controlling the government over time is what always happens.
You're using a weird definition of free markets. Invading and pillaging other countries is a free market activity? Usually property rights and voluntary transactions are considered part of the definition.
You also consider "bribing those who hold such violent power over others to insert themselves as feudal lords" to be part of free markets - it doesn't seem like you're criticizing free markets, it seems like you're criticizing the concept of incentive itself. If you have a hyper-centralized state that incentivizes people to bribe it and gain power, is it the fault of people simply following their self-interest, or is it the fact that you have this organization with so much power able to be bribed in the first place?
I have recently invented a kind of Law of Incentives (something like this probably exists already, but I am not aware of it): As the incentives to do a certain activity and the number of people with the opportunity to do that activity increases, the probability that at least one person will do that activity approaches 1.
This is a result of basic probability theory: if N is the number of people with the opportunity to do something and p is the probability that someone will do it given that they have the opportunity, then the chance that at least one one person will do it is given by 1 - (1-p)^N.
This does not depend on any particular economic or political system - it's just the idea that if you design a system that provides huge incentives for people to do bad things like bribery, you can't just rely on some theorized inherent goodness of human nature and hope that *no one* will follow their incentives and do the bad thing.
It should be clear which option is easier to achieve between "implement a system without hyper-centralized political control, because that would create huge incentives for bribery and corruption" or "implement a system with hyper-centralized political control, knowing full well that this creates huge incentives for bribery and corruption, but then use mind control technology to brainwash hundreds of millions of people so that they do not follow the incentives laid out in front of them and always do what is best for the hive instead."
Another problem is that empirically, communist countries have been the most corrupt in the world.
Finally, it's a weird argument to make that "A is bad because it will lead to B, which is bad" if B is already the status quo. You say that free markets always lead to this behemoth which is the merging of the state and corporations - essentially how things are right now. You seem to think this is a bad state of affairs, but if the thing that was wrong with free markets is that it leads to the status quo, wouldn't it be better to roll this process back and return to free markets?
They kind of also conquered the entire country, for a while? Sweyn Forkbeard, his son Cnut the Great, and his sons Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut were all Kings of England. And William the Conqueror came from a long line of Viking raiders (no relation that I know of except through Emma of Normandy) who discovered that they could hold territory (with a fig leaf of vassalage and Christianity) while raiding other territory, having their cake and eating it too. Like, when Edward (later the Confessor) was hiding out in Normandy with his cool cousin William, he actually went on raids against England itself.
I will note that while White settlers are well entrenched in the Native American cultural memory, the vast majority were 19th Century immigrants who never even met a Native American.
Have you read Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price? He's got a lot of really interesting new archeological, climate history and genetics insights into the Viking age. And he's got some very interesting lectures online, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu2gN8n15_A
The strongest argument is that the more laissez-faire trade people have been able to do the more prosperous humanity as a whole has become.
The strongest argument against is Thomas Midgley Jr. who for profit created and sold leaded gasoline and CFCs, causing incalculable damage to people and the environment. AI risk may also end up within that category of for-profit disasters.
Don't know if that's an argument against laissez-fair or against ignorance. No one knew what lead did or CFCs. A lot of innovations had some bad consequences. The first boilers had a habit of exploding and killing bystanders but they got better with time. The Romans built their aqueducts out of lead out of expediency and ignorance, not because of laissez fair. Pre-modern medicine's go-to remedy was to bleed the sick, presumably not because of laissez faire. It's a common impulse it seems to assume that all problems and tragedies in more capitalist economies are due to Capitalism, but problems and tragedies in collectivist economies are because they're not quite pure enough,.
In principle the problem of externalities is fixable if there are laws against causing damage to others without compensation--the damaged party(ies) has to be "made whole". There's the well-known Coasean problem that transactions costs may be too high for that to happen. In such cases regulation is, in principle, called for. Easier said than done though--the regulations that get through any political process can easily end up doing more harm than good, and quite possibly create new externalities.
Do other men have early sexual memories linked to "growing"? I have vivid memories of feeling funny when I watched specific cartoons or media that involved characters growing physically larger. I wonder if this is a common experience for men, and if there's some link to the notion of an erection
For me, it was less about the growth and more about the end result.
I suspect a large part of the actual psychology behind a lot of macrophilia for a lot of people, instead of some pseudo-Freudian fixation with the idea of the erection being sublimated, is that it's just a logical extension of the natural signals for fitness in sexual partners. Humans are naturally wired to find things attractive because they directly or indirectly signal that this person is healthy and fertile, so someone who is physically large well outside of human norms hijacks that pathway by being supernaturally healthy (this part is what's most true for me.)
Another aspect of it absolutely has to do with power dynamics- people I've known who had automacrophilic fantasies generally found it appealing because of the idea of being huge and powerful gave them a sense of control over their sexuality or sexual partners- with macrophiles in general it can split between fantasies of their partner dominating them (this part's also true for me) or the thrill of them dominating a physically larger and more powerful partner.
Source: I've been a macrophile for most of my adult life and spent a decent amount of time in that community, and the above is basically my reflections on talking with other people about what exactly the appeal is to them. YMMV, there's probably as many reasons to have a fetish as there are people who have it.
> Humans are naturally wired to find things attractive because they directly or indirectly signal that this person is healthy and fertile, so someone who is physically large well outside of human norms hijacks that pathway by being supernaturally healthy (this part is what's most true for me.)
This can go different ways. For me, tallness doesn't come across as a healthy trait; it comes across as a masculine trait. (I have a thing for short women.)
Well, yes, but those sorts of thoughts probably have a cultural component: in much of Europe femininity= small, demure, weak, but in some cultures (Appalachia, East Africa) women who are larger and muscular are preferable. Most of these cultures, I'll point out, are ones where there's a very long history of clan-based living and marginal farming that's only ended recently, if at all, so there is a degree of pragmatism in finding a woman who can pull her weight on the farm- but that's exactly my point- it's a cultural standard.
Even in America and Europe, though, you still have a decent acceptance of the idea of the "glamazon"- not necessarily as THE standard for femininity, but certainly an acceptable archetype therein.
Once again: human sexuality is dizzyingly complicated.
Unless people are only going from one far end to the other(??), the elongated design of Neom is maximally inefficient WRT public transport. As people would constantly need to embark and disembark, there's no way a Neom 'hyperloop' could possibly go much faster than a plain old bus.
Car (and buses) are very inefficient by design. Compared to scooters and motorbikes they use much more fuel for not much gain in speed in the busy city environment. And yet, they provide enough benefits for most people to use cars or buses despite inefficiencies.
I don't believe inefficiency with this design is enough to discard the idea. If The Line provides other benefits it might be worth inefficiencies. Or might not, I don't know but I am open to the possibility.
I am not sure what are the intention of creators but my idea would be to remain with nature and yet live in the city. Only linear design can offer that. Except that I would have built such a project in Ireland not in desert.
Part of Honourary's point in the comment above is that some Hyperloop designs include personal pods that can go straight to the destination without having to stop along the way.
That's a bit like saying "the new designs for flying pigs include supersonic speeds." Getting a single many-mile-long vacuum tube mechanically stable, airtight etc is a nightmare to begin with. Getting a multi-tube system with the possibility to switch lanes and enter and exit at multiple points mechanically stable and airtight is exponentially worse, and promising it... well, I'm assuming the planners are operating under the same mindset as the company that Reader described in his comment. (Is this possibly an example of Gell-Mann amnesia on Scott's part, btw.?)
"Hyperloop is currently advertising the ability to have a pod change tracks and stop at a station while allowing other pods to continue down the magnetic line without the entire train having to stop at every station."
Huh. I wonder how many world's-longest-vacuum-tubes we'd now be talking about? Also wonder if a similar concept would work for elevators (as we're essentially talking about a complex elevator system for a very tall building on its side).
I still think the most likely use in a big building would be to run the elevators much more like a conventional bus - one shaft goes up and the other shaft goes down, but there can be a bunch of cars in the same shaft, so that you never have to wait more than about 30 seconds for the next car. This only helps if you're dealing with really tall skyscrapers with high elevator demand.
And it appears to still only be actualized as just computer graphics, FWIW.
"...a bunch of cars in the same shaft..."
Yeah, like the old paternoster lifts. Or even just plain old escalators. For great horizontal distances this would just amount to moving walkways, perhaps with fast and slow lanes like the ones used on large airports.
I don’t think so, because propulsion methods are very different. Almost all elevators (as far as I know) are pulled by massive cables, that can’t really dive between various tunnels. My guess is that the cost savings you get from being able to counterweight the elevator are so massive that the speed of a hyperloop-style elevator wouldn’t be worth it (in most cases)
From what I've read, elevator space is a huge limit on building taller builders -- the taller you get the more elevators you need, which reduces the useable space on each floor. Cable-less elevators would get around this limitation, and I can't imagine the additional cost of not using a counterweight would make it not worth it. More likely it's safety concerns -- possibly justified or possible regulators being too cautious.
The parallel is in placing everything in a giant, linear shaft, just like an elevator shaft, only it's now a *vacuum* shaft.
"...the speed of a hyperloop-style elevator wouldn’t be worth it..."
That's not what I was suggesting. I was wondering about the use of 'pods' in elevators. Since the main transport task is linear, accommodating the other dimensions is probably very much a matter of diminishing returns. I'm guessing that that's why we don't see elevator 'pods.' WRT a 'hyperloop' design, you're adding multiple giant vacuum seals to costs. Not a simple case of taking the off ramp.
I will note that when playing with friends, it’s also worth using a bit of a “play the opponent” rather than “play the cards” when you’re 1v1 against a weaker player. I don’t have book recommendations for that paradigm, but perhaps someone else will
The issue with Neom just seems like the easiest way to spend the money seems more likely to work - you could incentivize/bribe a lot of cool companies to set up offices in Saudi Arabia with that money and hopefully get a local talent cluster going.
They (and similar countries) have been trying this kind of thing for a while; for instance they pay massive salaries to mediocre academics to work at King Abdullah Institute of Science and Technology.
Getting talented foreigners to move to Riyadh or Jeddah, though, is a massive uphill battle for obvious reasons. You can eliminate women, for starters. Or anyone who is married to a woman. Or definitely anyone who is in a relationship with a woman to whom they're not married. And also any single man who wants to meet a woman. That only leaves men with no interest in women, and... well, most of them are going to have issues too.
The idea of starting up a whole new city on the far side of Saudi Arabia where the religious police aren't allowed to operate and the laws are a bit more tolerable to westerners might not be the worst idea.
Many years ago, the consulting company I worked for was considering taking a job that would involve a trip to Saudi Arabia. IIRC, I was one of only two consultants in our not-that-big group who even *could* have gone--we were told (I'm not sure how formally) that they didn't want any Jews, women, or gays. We didn't ultimately do any business with them, though.
That's weird. One of my wife's friends has a mom who did a several month long consulting stint over there. She was gay, too, so she hit two of those three criteria.
On the other hand, I know western people who go to Saudi Arabia for work, and my understanding is that the rules for westerners are a little bit relaxed, for example, they can drink some alcohol etc. Maybe then can still find some people willing to relocate. 9 million seems unbelievable however.
In philosophy, people usually use the words "rationalism" and "empiricism" to distinguish two opposing schools of epistemology - classical rationalists (like Plato's version of Socrates, and much later, Descartes and Leibniz) believe that pure reason can provide insight into the necessary nature of reality, and that this is more reliable (when done well) than observation and experimentation with the senses (whether because the physical world is a minor and irrelevant part of reality as in classic Platonists, or because the physical world is a fallen creation of a lesser god as in neo-Platonists, or because our senses are subject to deception and error while our reason is not as in Descartes, or because it's impossible for one thing to actually interact with another and so all knowledge comes from within as in Leibniz); classical empiricists (like Berkeley and Hume in the 18th century, or the positivists in the early 20th century) believe that all knowledge of the world comes from the senses, and that pure reason can't tell us anything significant beyond maybe logical truths and mathematics. Most contemporary philosophers are closer to empiricists, though with some role for rational knowledge of things like morality (and many psychologists and cognitive scientists follow Chomsky in thinking of innate mental modules as a kind of innate rationalist knowledge independent of the senses).
I think the contemporary internet "rationalist" movement that people often align Scott (and related blogs) with is much more like empiricism. It is characteristic of philosophical rationalists to disdain uncertainty and only count things as meaningful knowledge if they come with certainty - Bayesianism is historically a project associated with empiricism (though I don't think this is essential - and anyone who wants to justify a Solomonoff prior or other objective rational prior is probably committed to some sort of rationalism about the prior). Socrates would not like all this Bayesian stuff, and the idea that learning about the world is potentially as important as learning about concepts.
Socrates was all about the journey and not the destination, while the modern style is more about making sure we reached any given destination in a 'correct' way
Everything is always in the last place you looked for it, because you stopped looking once you found what you were seeking. Socrates does not stop looking, even if the method of looking and defining what you thought you sought is very well reasoned out in a modern rationalist way.
I feel like Socrates was all about getting us to question what we think we know, but he was not overly concerned with arriving at any particular answer or method besides challenging what people say to get them to dig deeper. He just wanted you to think and question and come to your own ideas with less unquestioned bias and inertia in your thinking. To consider more viewpoints and options and eschew the 'obvious' solution or answer or knowledge.
Modern rationality is much more about developing tools to better get at 'the truth' *tm. It is far more systematic and uses many taxonomies with ways to avoid 'wrongthink' patterns of stupid non-rational minds which they have identified and named. It is well self-described when the modern rationalist imagines they can get closer to the truth of things by being 'less wrong' in how they think and reason with each step.
Socrates didn't really want to help you reason your way into correct answers. He was in a more fundamental place in my view, simply bringing a wide variety of questions to mind in what we are doing/saying/thinking, without any proscriptive ideas of how to arrive at 'the truth' or 'the best way' to apply a particular brand of reasoning rules to ensure we are 'correct'. Though the practices share a superficial relationship and I'd reckon a historical and developmental connection.
Socrates in my view would ask a lot of open ended questions to the modern rationalist and while there might be long winded essay style answers to his questions, he would still just keep questioning ideas and statements in detail with no goal, no focus, and no destination. This goes on until the person realising something new or gets frustrated/bored and walks away from Socrates. Socrates doesn't particularly care what methods you use or answers you find or don't find, as long as you've considered more things in more ways while attempting to answer his questions.
The moment you define truth, or good reasoning, or whatever, the less Socratic you are being as you've reached a destination - which is Socraticly simply another waypoint to defend on the journey of endless questions.. Each of those only leads to further questions about how a given destination is defined. I think modern rationality would do well to push their own self-questioning further for many modern rationalists who often reach a stopping point when they feel like they have 'valid paths to reason their way to answers' and then look no further into their tools which satisfy their desire to 'be right'.
Everything is always in the last place you looked for it, because you stopped looking once you found what you were seeking. Socrates does not stop looking.
Socrates was all about the journey and not the destination, while the modern style is more about making sure we reached any given destination in a 'correct' way.
This is something I've wondered about since I first heard of fluvoxamine as a treatment for COVID. That drug can have some pretty gnarly ramp-up effects (when I've used it, I've titrated up very slowly and supplemented with benzos during that period). I was surprised to not hear much about these side effects and figured it was just that nobody was actually prescribing it. What dose were you taking and for how long?
>why doesn't deontology just collapse into consequentialism?
Isn't it the opposite?
You can't calculate the consequence of every single one of your actions, therefore you have to rely on some sort of heuristic that boil down to "this is good because it tends to lead to positive results, this is bad because it tends to lead to negative results". Which sounds like deontology to me.
Or, as I like to say (or rather ramble in my head), deontology is consequentialism that factors in incentives/unforseen consequences.
I'd say rather that consequentialism, faced with the aforementioned impossibility of determining the ultimate consequences (to do so, we would need to traverse the entire causal chain from here on out), coalesces into a bastardised form of deontology in that it tries to formulate rules, but then is... aha... unable to deal with the consequences.
Say what you want about Kant, but he was at least willing to bite the bullet and say that if obeying categorical imperatives led to results we did not like - so be it! Deontological imperatives are a priori - an action is moral or immoral regardless of its ultimate result.
Consequentialism, by choosing to make the result its benchmark for moral evaluation, cannot take that path. This leads to understandable tension between trying to have some a priori rules (or at least - guidelines) and finding that, all too often, good intentions pave the road to hell.
Kant wasn't exactly known for his practical wisdom - mostly because he didn't have any.
What he did attempt, though, was to come up with a truly reasoned system of philosophy. Armed with a Wittgensteinian perspective, we can look upon deontology as an attempt to reduce the conundrums of life choices to a game whose rules are known a priori (the fact that they are also synthetic is a good hint that we're dealing with a game). It was an impressive, if fundamentally misguided, intellectual feat.
However, we should note that consequentialists - especially of the utilitarian variety - are no better. An attempt to reduce moral choices to "shut up and multiply (expected utilities)" is, ultimately, no less a game than Kant's attempt to reduce moral choices to the equivalent of a cellular automaton. At least Kant would treat you solely as an end, and never as a means, while a utilitarian just might push you in front of a speeding trolley if that's what his sums say.
Overall, you might be safer with Kant. Just don't tell him any secrets.
Another important factor is the legal concept of “mens rea”. Latin for “guilty mind” it’s the idea that a persons mental state and intention makes a big difference for how guilty they are of a crime. If I pull the trigger intending to kill someone then I’m attempting murder, whether or not I succeed. By the same token if I pull a trigger with no intention to kill and no belief that pulling the trigger is likely to kill someone then I’m not guilty of murder, even if someone dies as a result. I may be guilty of manslaughter or something like it, but murder requires a “guilty mind”.
Consequentialism doesn’t care what you intended, only what happened. Deontology cares about what you intend, and for Virtue Ethics your intention is about 9/10th of the whole ethical question.
There’s an excellent comic explaining mens rea linked below: it goes through 5 scenarios that all have the same consequence (a dead kid) but different legal outcomes based on mens rea.
You seem to have some confused notions about what deontology entails.
Deontology is a "study of duties" (or "of obligations", if you prefer). The evaluation of the moral dimension comes prior - and orthogonal - to the evaluation of the action itself, and therein it differs from consequentialism.
There is no question of "pulling the trigger" in deontological analysis because "pulling a trigger" isn't an act with moral weight. The deontologist asks instead: "were you trying to kill somebody?" The means by which you may or may not have done so, and your success or lack thereof are completely irrelevant. There is a categorical imperative not to kill, and the moment you choose to go against it is the moment when your action is judged immoral.
This works both ways, incidentally, so that if you weren't trying to kill someone (as in your example of shooting targets), but a person nevertheless died as a result of your actions, you would not be morally culpable *as a killer* (moral blame might still attach if, for example, there was a duty of dilligence that you hadn't observed, that could have prevented the tragedy, but it would pertain to failing that particular duty).
The chief difference, however, is that actions with *postitive* outcomes may still be considered immoral under deontological analysis. If you do something morally wrong that, through happy circumstance, leads to a better outcome than if you had not done it, it remains morally wrong and worthy of condemnation.
There's a very simple point he's missing. Of course neurotypical people have lots of tabs open and start projects they don't finish. The difference is, people with ADHD do those things *all the damn time*, in a way that seriously interferes with the rest of our lives, and the tabs and the projects and the standing-blankly-in-the-kitchens are symbolic of a larger universe of behaviours that also interfere with our lives in ways large and small and for which people have been criticising us and making fun of us all our lives until we get a diagnosis and discover *oh my God, it's not just me, I'm not stupid or lazy, I have an actual medical problem*.
"oh my God, it's not just me, I'm not stupid or lazy, I have an actual medical problem"
Kind of a swerve, but I've never understood this kind of logic. Didn't you just get diagnosed with Stupid And Lazy? How is this different in principle from having your skull measured by a quack and told your Sloth Bulb is oversized and that makes you a Type 3 Subhuman (Bum)?
Good question, which requires separate answers for each term.
- I'm clearly not *generically* stupid, because I've historically been able to do "smart person" things like programming and mathematics. But then I constantly fail at basic stuff like [the kind of thing Freddie would say everyone fails at sometimes, but I bet he doesn't do it often enough that it becomes a known and remarked-upon feature of his character, or affects his school reports or performance reviews]. What gives? If I'm smart I should be able to do this stuff, but I can't do this stuff so maybe I'm not smart after all... Well, turns out ADHD gives: my ability profile is spiky in a way that is shared by many others, and we can share strategies for dealing with it and ask for accommodations at work and understanding from our friends on that basis. Maybe I should have generated the idea of "spiky ability profile" myself? Sure, maybe. But try convincing the rest of the world that that's a thing in the absence of a medical explanation, or getting them to go along with your weird coping strategies.
- Laziness implies the problem is moral and/or caused by not *wanting* to do the thing. I assure you, I want to do the thing! I just can't make myself do the thing! I don't understand how other people can just decide to do the thing and then they sit down and do the thing! That doesn't work for me! It's very frustrating, both for me and for the people who want me to do the thing! Wanting to do the thing more does not help! But what does help is getting a diagnosis, getting medication, connecting with a community of people with the same executive-function disorder, sharing coping strategies, asking for accommodations at work, and chilling out about something which it turns out I couldn't ever have fixed by just trying harder.
This is a very interesting reply and I thank you for it, interesting mainly because I feel like I understood everything you wrote but am still completely baffled.
I wanted to write a longer more detailed answer, but couldn't figure out how to do it without coming off as weirdly critical, then apologizing for seeming that way, then doing it all again. Instead, suffice it that I understand the various *practical* benefits as of medicine and help with adjusting just fine, but still not how any of that impacts your *moral* sense of self-worth, especially the diagnosis per se (as it sounded like you were saying, and in any case I've often heard before; but perhaps that very fact made me misunderstand you? If so, I apologize).
No, that's correct. The thing that you're missing is the accumulated mental baggage from decades of screwing up and disappointing people (and especially yourself) over and over, of being told that you "need to apply yourself", that you've got "so much potential" on one hand and being angrily asked "how could you forget that?" on the other, of trying to organise a pissup in a brewery as a self-deprecating joke and then *actually failing*. In the absence of an explanation it just feels like either the Universe has it in for you personally or you have some deep personal failing that thwarts all your plans.
Okay, I'll try to pinpoint the thing that's confusing me, but I want to be absolutely upfront that I really don't think you *should* let this stuff negatively affect your self-esteem, all right? If this sounds confrontational, I don't mean it that way, I just can't think of a better way to phrase it.
With that said: suppose the doctor had told you that "yes, I've diagnosed you with congenital laziness, that's why you're a fuckup and it's so severe that you'll never amount to a thing unless you take these drugs and use some coping strategies I'm going to teach you. We medical experts use the acronym D.U.M.B. to describe this syndrome, just tell your employer that you have DUMB and he'll understand"... would you still have felt great about getting diagnosed? It seems like no? And yet I can't see *any difference* between these scenarios except that the hypothetical doctor was a rude bastard while the real one was polite: it's purely semantic. Why should it matter (in a consistent, long-term way!) *which four letters* the guy uses if they effectively label the same thing?
To me, it seems obvious that your problems aren't a personal moral failing at all, in the same way that having one leg or just being plain stupid aren't, but to the extent that you were ever prepared to take them as one, surely ADHD is a deep-seated and personal trait that was thwarting all your plans? You see what I mean? In the moral sense, it just looks like the guy confirmed what you already knew, but you took it as a big transformative revelation! I can't wrap my head around it (a personal moral failing, no doubt).
I feel like the two actual critical questions here are "why is the establishment flabby, weak and uninterested in fighting?" and "where did the insurgency come from anyway?" In the case of wokism we know it came from the establishments for licensing the managerial class (universities) where actual literal Communists had been working for decades to undermine society in a fury of pique against their revolution being wrong and losing, and pretty much caught on because people need a religion and the dumb oxen of the managerial class had simultaneously convinced themselves they were too smart to need one (it's trivial to observe that the same moralists who used to be the worst, most unbearable people at your church are now all woke moralists instead, etc. etc, I won't waste time on this and just point out that the root of moralism seems to be neurotic anxiety). Wokism is like every other evangelical religion in that it's categorical, intolerant, uncompromising, reality-denying and absolutely unbearable to almost anyone; naturally then it has the same effects as unleashing a horde of furious shrill baptist women on gaming, SF or whatever else.
As for why the establishment doesn't fight back, I'm pretty sure there are two separate reasons, the one being that Republicans genuinely don't give a shit because the availability of classy wives and trashy bimbo whores is unchanged *for the wealthy*, so whatever gives them more money to buy those things with is the better option in their eyes, they'll just go along with it. Eventually, of course, letting the crazy people run riot fucks up all of society so badly that it starts interfering with the hooker supply, and at that point they do get off their asses – it seems to me that this is exactly what we're seeing, with a younger generation of Republican politicians being more Trumpist, more cultre-war-aligned and more aggressive. (Also notice how the one big cultural issue that animated the previous generation to the point of affecting electoral results for the Republicans – abortion – is one they did fight and win, in a way that maximized its milking potential for both sides, actually, of the political class).
The second reason is that nerds are selected from the very weakest men. You'll notice that wokism hasn't really made any inroads into the culture of jocks, certainly not to the point of screwing up their actual games with handicaps to bring men down to women's level and so on. This is not only why nerds fold like a house of cards immediately when they get yelled at, it's why they get stuck with the yelling harridans in the first place. Those are the most unbearable women, the ones who got left over once all the other men in society had already had their pick.
You're only allowed to really care about one thing. You can try care to about more than one thing, but when (not if) the multiple things you care about come into conflict, you have to choose what your values _really_ are.
In mainstream US capitalist etc culture (which is exported as the closest thing to a global culture we have so this goes beyond the US while also bring the worst here), the one thing is making money. All other values fall by the wayside if it means there's a buck to be made. This lines up with the values of the grifters, so the culture endlessly produces new grifters and excessively tolerates the existing grifters. At times this is even what gives rise to the "insurgency" that you talk about.
The answer is "change the culture", which is very hard, but any answer that doesn't include this is going to be fighting with one hand tied behind it's back, which "coincidentally" looks exactly what you call the majority force alergic to fighting.
Only so many people can live in a 4000 square foot house/condo with a view of the ocean, so money will forever remain the main driving force of humanity. At least until we move into "the Meta cloud" where everyone could live in a virtual ocean view penthouse.
Fine, then we'll continue to live in a culture in love/lust with money and it's associated 4000 square foot house/condo with a view of the ocean, and continue to be plagued by grifters and other negative externalities of basing a society around profit. Like I said up top, you're only allowed to really care about one thing. If you care more about condos with ocean views, then you don't get to care about grifters. Or more precisely, you get to care about grifters up to the point where they interact with your true values (money), which is immediately.
As an aside, I think "the meta cloud" will make this worse, not better; Especially if we continue down this stupid path of financializing every aspect of our lives and making digital goods artificially scarce.
If you can come up with a system that can decide who gets an ocean view and who doesn't without the use of money, you can get your utopian society. Just be aware that the last attempt to do so (communism) ended with a horrific failure. Until then money will remain society #1 true value.
"If you can come up with"? This is easy. It's a solved problem. We've known this one for thousands of years. The hereditary elite gets the ocean view and whatever else it is they want, and if merchants get uppity and try to amass too much power it's legal for the hereditary elite to take all their stuff and punch them in the dick. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's sustainable, and it *works*.
After the French Revolution (driven by envious bourgeoises regardless of what commies want to tell you, nothing to do with the working class) we just happen to live in a society by and for vile merchant strivers. Many hereditary aristocrats have regarded this as a huge mistake.
It should go without saying that the French Revolution wasn't about any one thing or driven by any one person, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the many twists and turns of the French Revolution could tell you.
I shouldn't have to point out that it's something you can't pick apart like a YouTuber explaining an indie game, because "author intent" barely applies to something with so many diverse and ideologically opposed authors, some of whom are just abstract concepts.
I extra definitely shouldn't have to point out that the Sans-Culottes and the Enragés were A Real Thing and had coherent political demands and even had some of their demands met, for a time.
You can accuse communists of selectively reading the history of the French Revolution, and certainly some communists have been guilty of this. That doesn't mean you should go and commit the same mistake in reverse.
Look friend, all I'm pointing out is that grifters come with the territory that we've decided to stake our society on. If you want to make the argument that "for all it's faults, capitalism is still the best system we have" or something similar, then fine. But that comes with an implicit acceptance and condoning of "all it's faults", grifting included. There's no carbon credit scheme that will be anywhere near as effective as "Stop polluting", there's no anti-grifter scheme that will work as well as "stop enshrining 'greed is good' as our highest cultural value".
I'm not particularly interested in defending communism to members of this community, even though it's basically nerd-sniping for me, I've learned that it just doesn't do any good here, and your reply doesn't give me any reason to believe you're any different.
This just seems to contradict everything I've seen over the past decade, to the point where I wonder just how we can look at the same situation and come to such different conclusions. I'll set aside the political aspect, because that's just asking for trouble, and just concentrate on the cultural side.
To me, the following are facts:
1. The video game and SF markets are broken, and have been for some time. In the case of video games, this is reflected in the market for reviews of games (in the various forms this takes). The best evidence for this is that the establishment doesn't seem to perform differently even when a barrier to entry prevents the insurgency from even starting, such as in TV and movies.
2. The insurgent 'grifters' provide a product that is not significantly different in overall value than that provided by the establishment. This will differ between different media; indie video games are lower quality than AAA titles, but make up for this by being more affordable. [Note that I don't say the insurgency's product is better; quite often, the insurgency has failed to deliver on promised value; some clearly are grifters, and some clearly are not.]
3. The establishment fought back hard against the cultural insurgencies in SF and video games. A free market would have let the establishment and insurgency compete. Instead, the establishment has worked to prevent the insurgency from entering the market at all.
4. The establishment 'won', and is still in control of SF and video games; however, the insurgency hasn't gone away. The Hugo awards are now completely irrelevant, and that's because the establishment owns them.
5. The establishment controls the narrative, which may mean continuing to paint everyone who challenges the establishment with the broad brush of 'insurgent' and 'grifter'.
I got started with classic Sci Fi in the mid 90s... Heinlein and Asimov and so forth. Even at that age, I could grok why those works were influential, and why they had won awards. At the time, Sci-Fi and Fantasy was a niche genre, and I was a geek for reading it. I was a geek for reading for fun at all. If you told me that I would see a day within a decade when there would be midnight launch parties for fantasy books for high schoolers I would have told you you were crazy.
For all the problems with Harry Potter, all of the award-winning Sci Fi / Fantasy since then hasn't had a fraction of the influence even taken together (and the most influential of the lot, Gaiman's American Gods, won the award the year after HP did). When the streaming services go looking for Fantasy to adapt for TV series, where do they go? Not to the award winners, but to GRRM and Tolkien. As for Sci Fi, it's rehashes of series that date back to the 60s and 70s.
This isn't about my tastes. It's obvious something is wrong because there is a unmet demand out there for Sci Fi / Fantasy literature, and we've seen a time when that demand was met.
The question was specifically about why I thought the Hugo awards were irrelevant. Of the people you listed, only Sanderson and GRRM show up on the list of Hugo novel nominees. Sanderson gets a co-credit on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which started in 1990 (admittedly, he won awards in other categories). GRRM is rather prolific, showing up first in 1978, and his A Song of Ice and Fire started in 1996 and has had several nominations since 2001. Admittedly, A Song of Ice and Fire / "Game of Thrones" has had some popularity, but due to the botched TV series and constant delays with the books, its relevance has (seemingly) come and gone.
With those two authors, I'll give you something like having relevance, though not nearly on the level of Rowling's first series (which still sells a ton of books). Still, I'd suggest that both of them provide evidence for my case that something is wrong in Fantasy / Sci Fi in general. GRRM, for his inability to produce the next book in the series. Sanderson, for headlines like "Fantasy Author Raises $15.4 Million in 24 Hours to Self-Publish".
That's the problem with trying to write off the top of your head, you don't really think things out. I understand the SF insurgency and why some of the insurgency hangers-on could be seen as grifters, I understand GamerGate (as much as anyone can), but I should be asking 'who are the Video Gaming grifters?'
I mean, the whole reviewer issue is small potatoes compared to the actual problems in the industry, and nobody in the reviewers on either side is draining money from the industry. Between all the scandals and fizzled products, the issues with the Video Game production side is all internal. Did some outside 'grifter' sneak in and make Diablo Immortal pay-to-win? Activision Blizzard's issues are down to the company itself. Is anyone excited for OverWatch 2 or Diablo IV, and who's fault is that if not Blizzard? Who caused Fallout 76's or Call of Duty V's issues if not the producer?
I can accept the description of perennial abuse cover-upper (and Activision CEO) Bobby Kotick or perennial Skyrim re-releaser (and Bethesda Producer) Todd Howard as grifters. What I can't see is them being insurgents; as "major players in the industry", they're the establishment.
There's definitely some confusion here, and I apologize.
My assumption was based on the fact that I can't see the progressive left as "insurgents"; if anything, they seem to be stage managed by the establishment. The establishment doesn't resist because the establishment wants to move in that direction, and the vocal "insurgency" provides a crowd which cheers on demand for moves in that direction and boos anyone that gets out of line.
"Somebody who gloms on to a social movement, exploits it for money, clout, and sexual favors without ever having any intention to advance the movement, and then dips once they've caused so much damage that the returns on investment are decreasing" describes most Democratic politicians as well as it describes Trump, except the fact that since the media covers for the Democrats they can keep making money off of sketchy Ukraine deals and insider trading on chip manufacturers without having to worry about their investment returns ever decreasing.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
My point is that the people who are most motivated to join your witch-hunter hunt are pretty much always going to be the witches. You've created a selection filter than ensures that the worst elements of your own "side" (who are going to be hard to keep out and prevent from flocking to your banner) are disproportionately represented among your allies.
I don't see anything in the original post to justify your impression that they think or imply invasion is a purposeful activity, or that cyclical history is involved. You can invade something without meaning to, like for example a certain demographic moving to a residential area in large and disproportionate numbers against the wishes of the original residents. That's 'invasion' in the sense GP is talking about : There is a foreign group of people who doesn't know, care or respect a whole lot of norms and standards the current inhabitants of the space they're moving into cares about, and their behaviour annoys, aggravates and displaces the original inhabitants.
There is nowhere in that scenario or the ones GP said that required extra-special coordination. That doesn't mean that there is 0 cooperation, that's literally impossible, any bunch of people coherent enough to be considered as a "group" is coordinated, if nothing else its by shared values and language and memes, and often (especially in the age of internet) by much more than that. Wokism for example (the force behind all 3 of GP examples) is locally coordinated very well, in the case of GamerGate for example there were patreon channels for securing funding. This is not an especially difficult level of coordination in the modern day, but its far beyond "a bunch of innocent completely disorganized people mistaken by bad grumpy people to be a unified organized force".
>There's no particular reason every cultural strong point of it should have instantly folded before a group who were a) often quite unpleasant people with a heavy grifter infection themselves and b) had an extremely niche cultural appeal.
You're right, there isn't. This is one of those "I notice I am confused moments". It begs the question(s); Did every cultural strong point actually instantly fold? Did your enemies actually have extremely niche cultural appeal?
Reading this, I'm not sure what side in the videogame culture war you're describing as "instantly folding". There was a long drawn out fight, and though things have gotten more (for lack of a better word) diverse, the default-white-male-protagonist and sexy boob plate are still very much around. There's just more diversity of options.
And the reason for that should be pretty obvious - the capitalists who ran video game companies recognized that there was an opportunity to expand their market to new demographics, and they seized it. The real grifters have always been the AAA studios churning out the same game every year, and using every trick to drain more money from the users. Any other culture war back-patting from AAAs has always been a smoke screen in front of that, one that they find useful.
*looks at the Overwatch cast* You're really going to tell me there's no sexy waifus in AAA shooters these days?
(Of course, you'd probably say that they've been infected by wokeness, since Tracer is a lesbian and Zarya is a pink-haired musclegirl, but that's sort of my point - the classic fanservice options are coexisting with the more diverse ones, nothing has been taken away unless you have an issue with the fact that those other options exist in the game at all.)
I can't speak to competitive "military" shooters, but I know a LOT of women (and queer people) who play both Overwatch and Valorant, and to a lesser extent Apex (okay, maybe *played* for OW). And I know for a fact that the numbers are much more even than typical for Val. So clearly it *is* possible to get them into competitive shooters, but it takes more than brownwashing/queerwashing what is still fundamentally a military fetishist game.
Very much not an expert in this field, but I'd add to this conversation as a flag that (at least as I understand it), evolutionary pressures operate more in terms of "does trait X advantage you," and more in terms of "does not having trait X disadvantage you such that you die before reproducing or cannot reproductively compete with life forms possessing trait X."
So as between human and non-humans (competition to not die out), intelligence doesn't need to be maximized for every individual in order for the species to perpetuate, any more than height, strength, manual dexterity, or any of the other traits that exist on a bell curve do. We just need enough of an edge on our competitor species to keep going.
While as between humans and other humans (competition to reproduce), intelligence likewise is advantageous, but not so advantageous that the highest IQ persons would reproduce to the exclusion of persons in the middle or lower parts of the bell curve.
So it seems like although better abstract reasoning may always be advantageous, that wouldn't mean that once you hit a certain threshold and can walk and talk and dress yourself, there's enough evolutionary pressure to actually push the bell curve further than that.
>What is the evolutionary benefit for diversity of intelligence among humans?
You note that intelligence is useful in all situations. So... what is the benefit of diversity of intelligence in species? Why aren't crabs or crocodiles evolving towards larger brains? Why, in fact, is there any species dumber than another?
You note that seeing and hearing well are similarly advantageous. Why is there diversity in these traits? Why have we not evolved perfect, telescope-like distance vision and perfect, microscope-like close vision?
It seems sort of like there are limits to the efficiency of evolution, and trade-offs in increasing ability in one area vs another.
I think this adequately answers the question already; but perhaps you might say "well, okay, but if you believe in HBD you must also explain variation in intellect across groups, which could be different from universal trade-offs entire species made: after all, maybe telescopic vision is very hard, but Ashkenazim are proof (in your view, racist) that humans can evolve at least that level of intelligence."
Okay, what about... running? When is it not advantageous to be able to run faster? It might not come in handy all the time, but there's never a time it's worse than running slower — just like intelligence. Yet... we see some populations are just plain better at it. Hmm.
Or... what about strength? Again, it's surely always better to have more strength of body; at least, it is so to the same level that it is always better to have more intelligence. Yet... we see that some populations are, on average, stronger of limb than others. Hmmmm.
Again, I think this is sufficient to show the general principle. But to put it more plainly, selective pressure doesn't operate on theorizing an ideal: "right now, smarter people are not having more kids than dumber people, since there isn't much IQ can yet do against a tiger. But running away real fast sure seems to do the trick... however, I'll focus on both, because in the future that IQ will have the technology to become more useful!"
If there is unequal selective pressure across groups — say, because they're in different environments — then traits, even good ones, will evolve differently. One could construct some just-so stories here: the "Cold Winters" Theory is pretty well-known. But I don't think we need an exact mechanism to see that this — differing selective pressure across differing environments, *even where an intelligent agent might choose to push forward on IQ in all of them* — is not only possible, but probable.
>So the structural equation model could be something like genes -> ability to focus at school -> intelligence -> outcomes.
For one: I'm not sure this is all that important, at least as I've understood you: perhaps it is universal across modern societies that there is another step between genes and IQ. But, uh, so what? The outcome — the observed differences — are the same, and still genetic. I suppose it might matter if you find a way to make the intervening step malleable — like, I dunno, find a way to do the IQ-increasing thing without needing focus — but nothing's worked so far.
For two: I'd be willing to put some money on it, if we could agree on terms, that this isn't the case — or at least, will still have not been found to be the case, say, ten years from now.
There have been a *lot* of attempts to find some confounder that negates the link people don't like; they don't work; there's good evidence there is none (anything you can think of has probably been considered: e.g., ability to focus? no, not unless it only works in very specific situations, since adult IQ does not appear malleable by more or less intensive schooling, and is somehow not captured by "conscientiousness", which has already been dashed as a hope here); and at some point you've got to concede that what looks like a duck is probably a duck.
>genes -> early childhood development -> social learning -> parental tutoring -> educational institutions -> IQ
Perhaps I misunderstood your argument; you're saying that rather than every group having an equal potential IQ were it not for differences in education and parental interaction and so forth (evidence for which is, as you're no doubt aware, pretty thin on the ground; e.g., adoption studies — and twin studies combined with adoption studies, though low-n for that one, as you mention), you're saying that some groups have genes that allow them to benefit more from education etc., as measured by IQ.
If this were the case, I think we might see that in other environments, the usual racial IQ ordering is upset — at least, if there were any environment that Jews and Asians do not benefit more from as-measured-by-IQ. It appears that this doesn't happen, so I'm not sure how much we gain by it: "Asian genes are higher-IQ pretty much anywhere but potentially maybe not in some hypothetical environment we haven't found" isn't that much better than just "Asian genes are higher-IQ", in terms of saving feelings.
I think we would also see that interventions in these things would render IQ malleable in a detectable way. That is, if it's "group A is benefiting more from education", then surely we would see that in group A, amount-of-education causes a significant difference in IQ *within group A.* But this does not appear to occur.
Even early childhood environment, which appears to have at least a little bit of an effect, has been shown to not really matter that much IIRC.
>But if intelligence is an abstract concept not related to what humans did/didn't do and predates modern society and IQ tests
Of course intelligence predates IQ tests! I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, unless it's a variation of "but what if IQ doesn't really measure intelligence?" — and that's a pretty difficult case to make. You often find people saying "IQ just measures how good you are at IQ tests!", and that's clearly not the case — everything from "how functional is this society" to "how good are you at figuring out a real-world problem you've never seen before" to "how good are you at your job" correlates, moderately to highly, with IQ.
But perhaps you'll say "well, IQ just measures how good you are at modern society, but intelligence in, say, the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment is something else." Well... I don't think so: modern society covers a lot of different skills and lifestyles, in a lot of different places and cultures, and it would be weird if "ability to figure things out" didn't generalize to hunting and gathering. (More, again IIRC, this has been tested more directly: the usual IQ ordering remains intact when given problems like "make a basket out of reeds" or "find your way back to camp".)
So what we're left with is maybe "IQ does measure g pretty well and hence applies to pre-modern as well as modern challenges, and no known environment has mediators that cause group B to score above group A, but group B would be more intelligent as measured in a hypothetical non-IQ way that no one has found if they were to encounter unknown hypothetical mediators in some undiscovered environment."
I'm profoundly unconvinced by genetic explanations for racial IQ gaps compared to a Flynn-effect explanation, but the Flynn side would give a somewhat similar answer here; intelligence as measured by IQ tests is profoundly wasteful. Abstract reasoning is close to useless not just in the ancestral environment, but for most people in most jobs right up until the 1900s. It is only today that abstract reasoning is rewarded, and even then not much. You obviously don't want to be overly conscious of your driving for instance, and even mathematicians run on instinct most of the time.
Of course an HBD type of person would say that this is why natural selection didn't select for intelligence, wheras I would say it suggests abstract reasoning diminishes other useful cognitive functions (memory, for instance).
As for twin studies, your point seems orthogonal to the question. I will say that all the specific confounders you mentioned are at best poorly supported, but it's a noisy field and you certainly can't be sure there's nothing hiding in the bushes. Twin studies absolutely do not tell you whether environmental interventions can affect IQ, but they do strictly bound the effect from existing environmental variation in the population. I, again, suspect that there are environmental confounders completely out of band, namely that our whole society relies comparatively little on good memories and comparatively more on abstract reasoning. But all the cute, small scale objections to IQ absolutely do not hold up.
Also, eugenics is one thing and a belief in genetic differences is another. You really can't deny genetic differences in individuals, and genetic difference in populations is at least somewhat up in the air, but a person's right to bodily autonomy should be clear regardless of both. Indeed, the eugenicists of the past were preoccupied with differences that even then were clearly not heritable, because even if evil and stupidity aren't the same, they're awfully correlated.
This relies on a misconception as to what the Flynn Effect and IQ are. While IQ is the most famous measure of cognitive ability (sometimes known as "g"), to the point that the two are synonymous, it is only one measurement. Similarly, while the SAT may be far and away the most popular college-readiness test in the US, there also exist the comparable ACT and IB exams. The Flynn effect shows an increase in IQ test scores, but NOT an increase in the scores of the other tests used to measure cognitive ability--it is as if SAT scores had been steadily increasing over the decades, but performance on the ACT and IB had flatlined or had even begun decreasing. In that context, you would not say that people were getting smarter, you would say that there was something wrong with the test. This is obviously the case, since taken at face value, the Flynn effect would indicate that people in the 1920s had an average IQ that is considered near mentally deficient today. While that may lead to some fun and entertaining historic theories, it strains belief.
We can tell that the Flynn effect is not responsible for racial gaps (I assume the theory is that the Flynn effect affected white communities first and is only now reaching black communities) because the test score gap is persistent across tests that are not strictly IQ tests and therefore are not subject to the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is interesting, and surely is a mystery, but it gets blown out of proportion all the time. There is a very limited amount that we can learn from it.
In the example you give, ability to focus at school would be a mediator, not a confounder. The path from genes to intelligence goes through "ability to focus at school". You don't generally want to control for mediators, unless you are interested specifically in effects of genes on intelligence, except for those that go through "ability to focus at school". But it's not clear why you would want to control for that. There is likely a large number of intermediate traits that mediate the connection between genes and IQ, and "ability to focus at school" is probably one of them.
A confounder is something that affects both genes and IQ (or genes and some other outcome). The twin study design controls for confounders pretty well, because an actual confounder would have to somehow make monozygotic twins more similar to each other in their IQ than dizygotic twins.
Also, there are many twin studies that look at IQ directly, not just some downstream outcomes of IQ.
> the effect of mediators negates the hypothesis that it's the genes that are directly causing changes in intelligence
That is never the hypothesis being tested. For one, all genetic effects act via countless unobserved mediators. Some mediators are closer to the genes, like the proteins the genes code for, while other mediators are closer to the traits that are being studied. Some of the mediators can be affected societal factors, but that doesn't matter, since this will not lead to biased estimates of heritability.
Twin studies estimate heritability, which means they quantify the proportion of variance in a trait (such as IQ) that can be attributed to genetic factors in a given population. So roughly speaking, how much less variance would there be in a population if everyone were genetically identical. No assumptions are being made about the causal pathway in between genes and IQ. In particular, the existence of mediators that can be affected by societal factors has no bearing on estimates of heritability.
Just like weight can be a highly heritable trait, and there is no contradiction between that statement, and the fact that you could hypothetically increase or decrease everyone's weight through non-genetic means such as starving them or force-feeding them.
I agree with that, I think that results from twin studies are often misinterpreted. A particularly common misconception is that heritability is a fixed property of a trait, not a property of the population that has been studied, and that studying a single population tells you much about population differences.
That doesn't make twin studies less interesting in my opinion. It just means that results of studies like that need to be better communicated. A high heritability of IQ for example still tells you that most of the differences that we see in a population can be traced back (via several mediators) to genetic differences. Environmental factors and societal institutions may still play an important role in shaping someone's IQ, but probably not those kinds environmental factors and societal institutions that vary much between people in the studied population.
IQ is not free. Human brains kept expanding to the point that it was difficult to give birth, so now we're much more helpless at birth than most other species & have to develop a lot in childhood. Our brains are metabolically very expensive. Richard Wrangham theorizes that we could only support them once we started using fire to cook food (which is why we have shorter intestines than our primate relatives). There are selection pressures for lots of different things, and IQ is only one thing that must be balanced against everything else.
The correlation between brain volume & IQ is much more modest than that (smarter brains are also noted as being more "wrinkly" within a given volume). As for why stronger muscles would ever compromise, note that mentally retarded humans have low fitness, and that we're much weaker than chimpanzees.
One way to think about it is to imagine a situation where food is scarce and some people will starve to death. Those with larger metabolic expenses are more likely to die (hence men dying more in famines, which I've noted here in a recent thread), unless something else compensates for that. And brains can do that.
In "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter", Joseph Henrich (convincingly I think) argues that social learning is vastly more important and selected-for than raw individual intelligence. Crude example is if some single smarter person invents a new method that aids survival but it doesn't catch on, it dies out and will need to be reinvented later. IQ is just a small part of the package that makes humans so successful
My understanding is that it's completely useless when it comes to dealing with discrete (i.e. finite dimensional Hilbert space) quantum systems - such as the spin of a particle. Supposedly there is a hack that you can use when there is only one particle, where you work out how the different possibilities for the spin interfere with each other manually and sort of kludge it into a theory that can predict the position as a function of the spin, but once you have a large number of particles with spin - maybe something like a quantum computer - it becomes totally unworkable. Actual quantum field theory, where the number of particles can fluctuate randomly, is completely out of the question...
I have spent a fair bit of time on the topic, and can comment semi-authoritatively. This approach has several drawbacks: it does not offer any new predictions, so not useful as a separate physical theory; it does not generalize to include relativity, or at least not easily, and still does not provide any new insights when it sort of does; It multiplies entities unnecessarily, if you are into Occam's razor. Also, if you ask a physicist with any sense of aesthetics, it's just ugly :) Notwithstanding, John Bell of the Bell inequality fame was a proponent. There are almost no physicists of any prominence who would support it now though, it's mostly between shut-up-and-calculate, objective collapse of some sort, MWI (no collapse at all) and various "in the eye of the beholder" interpretations, such as QBism. That said, we are only a few orders of magnitude off from checking the collapse interpretation experimentally, by creating quantum states of Planck size (10 microgram or so) and measuring gravitational effects from objects of that size. Something has to give then, either classical gravity or quantum superposition.
So the crux of the issue is whether one can create a Schrodinger's cat, even theoretically. That is, whether an object can be truly kept unentangled with the rest of the universe for any length of time. There is no theoretical limit on how big such an object might be if we ignore gravity. In fact, your buddy, the other Scott A, has an ongoing conversation with Gil Kalai on the limits, if any, of a quantum computer scaling up. The reason why the "ignoring gravity" part is important is because the only other long-range force is electromagnetism, and we know how to shield objects from it (Faraday cage etc.). It is still far from trivial to scale this up, but the number of qubits in a quantum computer has been steadily climbing. Now, gravity is different in that you cannot shield from it, at all. There are no negative masses that we could use to screen what is going on inside the cat box. Or a quantum computer. So, a cat in a superposition of asleep/awake states (to adapt to Sean Carroll's animal-rights friendly reformulation) creates a gravitational force that would betray the box content, assuming the awake cat is standing and begging for food and pets, while the sleeping cat is lying down dreaming of same. What would that force be? Would an external apparatus see gravitational force that points to the cat as it was the moment the box was closed, and then magically snap to the direction of the cat when the box is opened? Would it point somewhere in the middle between the two? Would it slowly move from the awake direction to the asleep direction as the cat becomes progressively more likely to zonk out? Quantum mechanics is silent on the matter, other than to say "nope, cannot isolate anything that can be observed, it is a contradiction, so your premise is likely flawed." If one accepts this approach, then Gil Kalai wins and Scott A loses, as it would impose a (theoretical) limit on quantum scaling, because if it scales up enough, we would be able to detect gravitational effects from quantum computers merrily evolving its state in time while modeling some physical system, or breaking encryption or whatever. This is because change of a quantum state means change in the spatial energy distribution, and so is measurable by a gravimeter. This is actually an open problem in physics, semiclassical approaches assume that spacetime is bent by the expectation value of a classical field, which is known to produce bad results if taken seriously. There is a meme paper by Don Page, a theorist, proving this point experimentally, back in the 1980s.
This was a longer explanation than I hoped... Just to finish it up, one Planck mass, equal to roughly 10 micrograms, is where we would expect this collision of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity to result in something spectacular, and not predictable by the tools we have. This is very much a pedestrian table-top experiment in Quantum Gravity, as it were, no need for super high energies or tiny black holes, just a sensitive enough gravimeter and a tiny cantilever in a superposition of two spatially separated states mimicking a spherical cow... err... a cat.
Actually, IIRC, Forward proposed a "gravity canceller". It wouldn't totally eliminate gravity as a force, but in a restricted volume it would act to smooth it out. This would need to be done in orbit, as it can only "cancel" small variations. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.26.735
Thanks, that's a great link! Preskill explains very clearly the details of how decoherence works at the QFT level (emitted soft photons, and possibly gravitons, assuming gravity can be quantized, which is an open problem). Don't think it addresses the point I made, but Scott seems satisfied with the answers, so...
Many-Worlds people say that the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation has *both* the wave-function of the many-worlds interpretation *and* the precise particles of the collapse interpretations. But proponents of the pilot wave say that the wave-function is an ontologically less significant entity than a huge infinity of worlds.
Since the two theories are observationally equivalent, and mathematically inter-translatable, it's a matter of debate in metaphysics whether there even is a meaningful way to use Occam's Razor to decide between them. (I personally like epistemological accounts of Occam's Razor like the ones by Kevin Kelly: http://bactra.org/notebooks/occams-razor.html
Sean Carroll blogged and podcasted extensively on the topic, he is also literally a top expert in the area, writing papers and books about it. I don't think I can express it better than him. A summary would be something like "MWI does not need a collapse postulate, unitary evolution + decoherence is enough"
Deutsch uses the coherence based approach, while most other many worlders use the decoherence based approach. He absolutely does establish that quantum computing is superior to classical computing, and therefore that underlying reality is not classical. But showing that reality is not a single classical world is not the same as showing that it consists of a number of quasi classical worlds in superposition.
Decoherence has the opposite problem: decoherent world's can be large, can be objective, can be permanent for all practical, purposes, are causally isolated by definition. But there is no obvious mechanism for decoherence
within core QM, so the complexity of decoherent MWI can't even be assessed without a concrete hypothesis for the decohrence mechanism.
(Yudkowsky, following Deutsch, says that "Decoherence is simple).
But decoherence is not simple)
A coherent quantum state that evolves according to the Schrodinger wave equation remains coherent. Some additional mechanism for decoherence is required, and the complexity of the that mechanism must be factored into byan assessment of which theory is simplest. (Why assume a coherent starting state? Well, maybe the universe started in a decohered state.. that's actually a popular suggestion ... but it requires its own explanation and adds own complexities).
Why believe in decoherence if there isn't a clear theory of decoherence?
Because it or something like it, is observed: if a quantum superposition becomes too large, or too hot, or interacts with the the environment, it decoheres
But i am not sure that this is true. In particular, i am under the impression that MWI doesn’t solve the preferred basis problem, that is, (mathematically speking) in the Hilbert space of QM the state in which an electron goes only up is not preferred in any way over the state in which half goes up and half goes down, yet when measuring we can never observe a superposition.
Other models add on top of the Hilbert space in order to break this "symmetry" between states. Bohm adds the particle with defined position and momentum, Penrose objective reduction tells us that the preferred states have lower gravitational self-energy because they are not in a superposition of positions (please correct me if I am wrong here) etc.
MWI doesn’t add anything and assumes that decoherence is sufficient. But decoherence doesn’t fix the measured basis uniquely so it's not clear why a "branch" can never have half an electron up and half down.
As far as i understand, the claim of many world guys is that the reason why we only see one branch is because our brain is entangled with the measurement apparatus, therefore our brain is in a superposition of seeing the electron up and seeing it down but our conscious experience is only up or only down. Yet this doesn’t solve the preferred basis problem, it just pushes it up in the level of the brain state. It seems to me that there is an hidden, non-discussed assumption that a brain state can never see half electron here, half there.
This is possible, but it is a big assumption that takes the role of the measurement postulate and moreover reintroduces the role of consciousness in QM (never a good thing) but in an hidden way
Forget "what you see". Quantum effects happen on a scale that your senses cannot directly detect. IIUC, the MWI model doesn't collapse the state vector. That means that particles are epiphenomena. This implies that anything composes of particles is also an epiphenomenon. The underlying reality *is* the state vector. And parts of the state vector that can interact are correlated. I want to say entangled, but I feel like that's the wrong word. Effectively, the universe (within a lightcone?) splits with every probabilistic interaction. This feels excessive, and I also feel as if multiple pasts should merge into the singular present, as well as each splitting into multiple presents. As I understand it, though, this isn't what the MWI claims happens. It claims that once a split occurs there will never be a rejoining.
OTOH, MWI is consistent with quantum physics as we know it. Of course, we know that either quantum physics, relativity, or both, are broken. We just don't know how. So I'm going to stick with my preference for a more symmetrical MWI, that allows multiple pasts as well as multiple futures. At least until they find out WHAT they need to fix in physics.
P.S.: A brain cannot perceive even a full electron, much less half of one.
ALSO: In MWI, the "I" stands for "interpretation". It's not saying anything the math doesn't say. There are other interpretation, but all the valid ones map to precisely the same mathematics. To me this says mainly that English has embedded assumptions that the math describing physics doesn't have. The basic ideas are incommensurable. It's my guess that this is because human languages are designed to describe macro scale objects, and when you get to *really* small stuff, it doesn't really handle it properly. But I think it's probably also the case that the math we use to talk about physics is incomplete. Otherwise it's hard to see how the same math could properly map to all the interpretations that are accepted as valid mappings. But generally nobody can think of a possible experiment that would select one as valid and the other as not. (Note that "incomplete" isn't a criticism of the math. Set theory doesn't let you decide what the sets are composed of. But when you turn it into a problem in physics instead of math, incomplete becomes a problem. So MWI would need to add something to the math that said "and you can't collapse the state vector", where another theory would need to add "and the state vector collapses under these circumstances", but nobody's been able to justify adding either of those.)
"Forget "what you see". Quantum effects happen on a scale that your senses cannot directly detect"
Any physical theory needs to be consistent with "what you see",
The whole problem of interpreting QM is to reconcile what it says with what is what you do or can observe. If you could observe a half dead, half alive cat, there would be no problem.
"IIUC, the MWI model doesn't collapse the state vector. That means that particles are epiphenomena. "
Are you assuming that all measurements are position measurements?
"This implies that anything composes of particles is also an epiphenomenon"
Errrr....outside of Bohms theory, there's no sharp distinction between waves and particles...just stuff that's more spread out (wit a bettr defined frequency/momentum), and stuff that's more localised (with a worse defined frequency/ momentum)
"" In MWI, the "I" stands for "interpretation". It's not saying anything the math doesn't say"
Then it's not interpreting . Shut up and calculate doesn't add anything to the maths. MwI isn't SUAC. It adds the idea that quantum states are objective and definable globally, including basis.
When we talk about interpretation of qm we are always talking about how to solve the measurement problem. Of course physics must be about what you see in an experiment, otherwise we could just drop the measurement postulate in the von neumann-Heisenberg interpretation (which is not the same as bohr's Copenhagen, but I am afraid the term is irredeemably confused) and just be done with it. Instead an interpretation of qm must always explain why you have a theory of (probability) waves but in a lab you always measure a particle in a definite position.
I have been sloppy. "Of course" by saying the electron or half the electron, it was really a shorthand for the result of a stern-gerlach type experiment and I was referring to the spot on the screen, which is something my brain *can* perceive. And when I was referring to electron completely up or half up half down, I should really have said one bright spot on the up screen or two spot of half intensity on both screens.
> So MWI would need to add something to the math that said "and you can't collapse the state vector"
No, I disagree, mwi needs to add quite a bit more than that, namely what are the allowed result of a measurement (i.e. a solution of the preferred basis problem). Which for all intents and purposes is functionally equivalent to the measurement postulate.
Well, consciousness is in the brain, and entanglement+decoherence results in diagonalization of the density matrix that includes brain+measurement apparatus+system under test, in the pointer state basis. Thus effectively there is a branch for each pointer state (corresponding to the measured eigenstate), and there is no interaction with the rest of the pointer states, i.e. with the brain+measurement apparatus+system under test that corresponds to a different measured eigenstate. So there is no need to assume anything about consciousness at all. The devil is in different details, how to make MWI testable compared to objective collapse theories. Penrose suggests that gravity puts a natural limit to the energy difference of different pointer states. There are a lot of hints suggesting that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are intimately intertwined, but no one yet offered any workable models of how they are, at least not in our universe (AdS/CFT is a very exciting toy model though).
Leaving the brain aside, what is the mechanism that selects the pointer state basis over all the others? That was the problem i was referring to. My point was that it seems to me that decoherence alone is not sufficient, as it doesn’t select a basis uniquely.
> how to make MWI testable compared to objective collapse theories.
Those are by no means the only two options as you seem to imply. Schrodinger equation is too similar to Fokker-Planck equation for this to be a coincidence, so I am unconvinced qm is complete, but that's just a vibe.
> There are a lot of hints suggesting that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are intimately intertwined
I would tend to disagree, but I am partial to asymptotically safe gravity and this is a different story. (I'll just note that ASG considerations have predicted correctly the mass of the Higgs boson three years before its discovery)
Well, you could go with "This is a simulation with lazy evaluation. Values aren't determined before they are needed." In that case the collapse doesn't happen until the measurement, and then it depends on the random number generator used by the simulator. It works. It produces a simpler model. But it postulates an enclosing universe in which the simulation runs.
When being serious, I prefer MWI, but I have a close friend who is a dedicated believer in the "superpredeterminism" interpretation. (He's a mathematician, and thinks the universe is a double field over a prime number of integers. He's even selected the particular prime. [If I've remembering correctly, he's picked 2^(2^127)-1.])
Well, if I had to choose between the simulation argument an MWI, i'd burn all my physics books and retire in the safety of ignorance.
Jokes aside, i couldn't tell you what is my favourite interpretation, i have always appreciated pilot wave (which i guess implies i don't have aestethic sense, but I already knew that). I would say some ensemble-ish interpretation, but only at the level of general vibe.
But anyway, my point is not that MWI is wrong or bad, just that *only decoherence* is not enough and other assumption are either needed or hidden.
> If I've remembering correctly, he's picked 2^(2^127)-1
I'll add that this is pretty much the argument against many worlds by (the great) penrose. While penrose has its own ideas on consciousness i disagree with, this argument is independent of his views on the matter
Honestly I don't think Occam's Razor is a good guide here, despite being so commonly invoked in these sorts of discussions.
I think the idea of "necessity" gets confusing, I would rephrase Occam to say that entities should not be multiplied without a bloody good reason. Compared to shut-up-and-calculate, both MWI and Bohm add a great deal of stuff to their ontology, but they do so for a good reason (resolving certain major problems), so that's okay. And the type of stuff they add is different too, so I don't think it's reasonable to compare one to the other. Both theories are razor-compliant as far as I'm concerned, and it doesn't help us to choose between them.
"Shutup and calculate" is just saying that they're refusing to make an interpretation. That's a legitimate position to take, but it's not an argument against ANY other position, including solipsism.
Arguably, MWI has only a single 'entity', the wavefunction of the universe. (Of course, this is neglecting GR, because merging GR and quantum is one of the big unsolved problems).
More usefully, Occam's Razor is about "complexity", not how much stuff is real - collapse theories still need to calculate with the full wavefunction if they want to get the right answer, and in fact need to do an additional step at the end to "collapse" it.
But it requires that you decide what counts as an entity. If you count atomic states you get one answer. If you count wave functions you get another. And it's also worth reminding that even when the "entities" involved are clear, Occam's razor can yield a wrong answer. It just *usually* picks the right answer. I.e., it's the best gamble given the available information.
My understanding was that Occam's razor was more about the complexity of the rules, rather than how big the universe is (the universe keeps turning out bigger than we thought so "minimize size of universe" seems like a poor heuristic). From that standpoint, MWI is a win, since it eliminates any rules for collapse.
Yes, but in MWI you don't postulate extra worlds, they are said to result from decoherence, which in turn is a consequence of the Schrodinger equation (plus something called "the past hypothesis").
It seems intuitively appealing if you're trying to explain its natural habitat of two-slit experiment, which is the environment in which it is always introduced. But the moment you take it out of that context and start asking it to explain a non-toy system the intuitive appeal goes away and you're still left with all the downsides.
Pilot wave theory seems to me like a bit of special pleading which is designed to give an intuitively satisfying explanation for one particular phenomenon that happens to be popular in beginner-level textbooks, but doesn't mesh well with a whole lot of other stuff (relativity, quantum field theory) in ways that is hard to explain to a non-physicist.
If you're going that way, put a wall along the sunward-facing side of that line of skyscrapers, and cover it with solar cells. Having much of the city in shadow should cool things a lot. You could even build the wall *first* and then build the skyscrapers in the shade. Interconnect the skyscrapers every some-many floors. Do the skyscrapers in a double line, with internal bridges. Then you can claim it's one large building.
To be fair, a city that is a row of skyscrapers, with desert on either side, really *would* be unlike anything else that has ever existed (though probably just a more extreme version of something that Dubai and Australia's Gold Coast are approximating).
My company (seen on several past OT iterations) is looking for a co-founder/CTO, and in lieu of the next Classifieds I thought I'd post the spot on here.
We're a platform that looks to help people make new friends anytime, anywhere, to do anything. We're investor validated and launched our waiting list two months ago, seeing uptake in 15 countries on every inhabited continent since then.
We need a CTO with full-stack capabilities and app-building experience, able to build scalable architecture and create a high-functioning backend. Some NLP knowledge is fundamental. 20 hours a week minimum commitment.
ACT-style disposition and epistemological scepticism acutely welcome (and a likely predictor of future success, though I have no explicit evidence for this).
We're on the verge of bringing in a very talented Head of Data Science to round out the technical end of the company. High-functioning MVP, pilot scheme and funding next on our list.
Email at team@imsurf.in if interest.
As someone who fits that CTO description I would like to give you some feedback.
The way you have written this triggers a lot of red flags with me (and I assume also other IT people)
Leading with "investor validated" makes it seem like you have no product but have sold something to investors instead of investors investing in your start-up
You are not describing a CTO, but rather a Tech Lead for role. A CTO effectively doesn't write code unless they are a developer "paid" with a title
Saying you are getting a very talented person in feels like you are looking at CVs and don't understand how to build a team.
Lastly, building a high functioning MVP is not something I've ever heard of and is weird given you already have significant uptake.
I have no stake in your project but wish you well and maybe this was useful to you
Hey Chris, much obliged. The original post made it past my (technical) co-founder and an impartial advisor ok but I appreciate you lending a refined ear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB_X5ZUcZlE
I'm looking for a Chrome extension / software to keep track of all the academic papers I read. I want to be able to very quickly index any paper I read and found useful, maybe leave a few keywords or comments for my future-self, and of course be able to search in the future by those keywords, comments and paper text. I don't need to search all papers in the universe (Google Scholar does that), only the ones I remember reading, because often I can't find them afterwards.
Any recommendations?
I download them all as I read them and search the folder.
Zotero is fantastic for this
WIRED on developing new psychedelic drugs to help psychiatrists: https://www.wired.com/story/race-to-engineer-new-psychedelic-drugs/?bxid=5cec2769fc942d3ada0dd4b3&bxid=5cec2769fc942d3ada0dd4b3&cndid=12198231&cndid=12198231&esrc=subscribe-page&esrc=subscribe-page&hasha=011572c0560f167320527c33f11aafb3&hasha=011572c0560f167320527c33f11aafb3&hashb=f2a85aa1a06aa261e7d27cb15a034a843ec868ff&hashb=f2a85aa1a06aa261e7d27cb15a034a843ec868ff&mbid=CRMWIR092120&mbid=CRMWIR092120&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_BACKCHANNEL_ZZ&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_BACKCHANNEL_ZZ&utm_brand=wired&utm_brand=wired&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_content=WIR_Longreads_080522&utm_content=WIR_Longreads_080522&utm_mailing=WIR_Longreads_080522&utm_mailing=WIR_Longreads_080522&utm_medium=email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl&utm_source=nl&utm_term=WIR_Backchannel_ReadTime&utm_term=WIR_Backchannel_ReadTime
Holy cow, my man. You can edit everything after "drugs" in that link and it will still work.
For people who have studied Math/physics/Computer science/ Engineering (or otherwise consider themselves pretty good at math),
What was the hardest part of high-school math for you?
I have a degree in math, but my geometric/visuo-spatial intuition has always been pretty poor, so high school geometry was not a fun time for me.
Hardest part was the pace was too slow and the classes too boring. I developed bad study habits and then in college was just too lazy to continue with math because it was so much more work than other classes for the same credits.
Much easier to read a book than grind through proofs, even if you are excellent at them.
B.S. in applied math. I remember finding geometry more difficult than high school algebras or AP calculus. Other math classes were often intuitive once the basics were explained to me, while geometry often felt like it relied on an annoying mix of memorization and visualization.
Geometry for me too. I think the concept of proof is loosely defined at best in high school (and I had a very good high school and math teacher). I think there's also the tendency to show the solutions to problems, but not how you arrived at those solutions or what the intuition is (this is true in university sometimes as well), which makes it harder to learn geometry.
The visualisation aspect of Geometry took a long time to build any sort of intuition on it.
Also, in the UK, we start proofs at age 16-18 and that by far was the hardest part for me.
The second half of Algebra 2 was a completely unmotivated foray into solving increasingly difficult systems of equations. I see now the goal; to ensure I went on to Calculus with a strong understanding of how to manipulate symbolic equations. But then, it just felt like busywork, and I struggled to maintain focus, which meant I failed to learn the tricks I was being taught, which meant I struggled to complete the problems in the homework and on tests.
Having the kind of AP Calculus teacher who, shortly after our graduation, married one of my classmates.
…Sorry, I couldn’t help being facetious. (True story though. He was 35.) Point is, it was high school math at a public high school and it just wasn’t challenging. Then I went to a tough college and math hit me like a truck. It required learning how to work hard to learn math, and I wish I had developed that skill in high school instead.
As a Predicit user I’m obviously angry at the CFTC and Kalshi for regulatory capture/monopoly creation etc.
However I am most upset with Predicit for blatantly violating the terms of the agreement. Hopefully they can appeal this decision to a judge who will rule that CFTC should have given a warning first with clearer rules before pulling the nuclear option.
Now I’m not defending the CFTC’s rules, they are arbitrary and they set different rules for different companies. But it was foolish for Predictit to think they could bend the rules.
Does anybody have good recommendations for reading on what advocates for overturning capitalism think that a post-capitalist economy would look like? I asked for recommendations at a local communist bookstore and the resources they pointed me to were disappointing. Very little "I think the system of production and distribution would look like X," and almost exclusively "capitalism sucks and should be overcome because of these flaws - no one can say what the post-capitalist system of production and distribution would look like but it would be (a) created more democratically and therefore better and (b) ~something~different~".
Particularly absent was any explanation of why, given the opportunity to "rebuild the economy from the ground up" in the absence of capitalism, society wouldn't just repeat history and find itself right back on the road to capitalism again.
Scott has been on the same quest.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/book-review-inventing-the-future/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/23/book-review-a-future-for-socialism/
https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/socialism/
While you're working on that, I'll go try to find the tooth fairy.
I found "Toward a New Socialism" by Paul Cockshott to be very compelling in it's detail and economic literacy, providing you already have a basic grounding in Marxist economics.
It presents a model for a centrally planned economy from the level of the planning office down to to the consumer level and responds to the traditional objections from to the feasibility of central planning. It also presents some theories about what caused the failure of the Soviet system but doesn't say much about incentive structures, which I would say is it's only real weakness apart from maybe being a bit dated (Originally written in the 80s).
All of professor Cockshott's other books are also worth reading, particularly "How the World Works" and "Classical Econophysics".
An admirable effort relative to the alternatives, but it should still be treated as what it is, hyper-speculative. Even from this perspective, the religious-like conviction that most socialists have is completely unwarranted.
"a centrally planned economy"
Okay, but one of the central theses of Communism is that the state will wither away after the sad but necessary intermediate stage of brutal Stalinist purges and totalitarian control, so Communism can't have central planning.
The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin.
This is a good example of the kind of rhetoric that's been frustrating me. I'm ensconced enough in a capitalist economy that I feel able to describe "how things work." Means of production privately owned, profit incentivizing creation of new technologies, prices as a means to communicate value/scarcity and allocate resources, etc, etc, etc.
I want to be open to education on how a socialist system would accomplish these same tasks, but it seems like every time I find a resource on it, there's not really a clear hypothesis - I come away without a clear picture of how things would work, just a vague assurance that however they would work, it would be more democratic.
The Jacobin pamphlet is one example - it never really gets into how scarce resources would be allocated, who would develop new drugs and why, how society would decide how much corn goes to human consumption and how much goes to animal feed, etc. Whenever it starts to approach a discussion of "how things would work," solutions are not described in any particular detail, only that they would be the product of democratic decisions. Things like:
-"Democratizing a complex economy would likely take a variety of institutional forms, ranging from worker ownership and cooperatives, to state ownership of financial institutions and natural monopolies (such as telecommunications and energy) — as well as international regulation of labor and environmental standards."
-"... an expansion of popular power would be needed to both push out personnel committed to the old regime and to transform the often alienating and repressive bureaucracies that currently administer public services. Public schools, welfare departments, planning agencies, courts, and all other government agencies would invite workers and recipients to participate in the design and implementation of those services. Public-sector unions could play a key role in this endeavor, organizing both the providers and users of public services to radically transform the administrative structures of government. Only under these conditions would government activity be synonymous with democratic socialism."
-"The Under socialism, we would make decisions about resource use democratically, with regard to human needs and values rather than maximizing profit."
What I'm really striving for is something that would enable me to envision a socialist system as a viable competitor to capitalism, but I can't do that if all I ever get to is "we don't know how it would work, just that however it works it would be democratic."
coming late to this thread - I just reread your article on ivermectin and found it exceptionally helpful. I wonder if you've thought about doing something similar on long COVID, about which I have plenty of questions related to risk, severity, intervening variables, etc. Answers to these questions should heavily influence our day-to-day behavior re COVID. A good jumping off point might be https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01909-w
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted
I have largely been ignoring the January 6th committee proceedings as I viewed them as toothless theater for the benefit of diehard politics junkies. The Feds raiding Mar-a-Lago seems like a substantial increase in seriousness, though. I'd be interested to hear other people's assessment of Trump actually going to trial before 2024. I rate it around... 15%? Up from maybe 2.5%, pre-raid.
This reminds me of being forced to give an estimate for a project without a spec. How long will it take to create a great app that I just thought of? I’ll fill you in as you go.
In most cases likelihood of probable cause of of crime would seem higher than 50%. I don’t have information on how many criminal searches result in an indictment.
If I have to come up with a number I’ll say 5% based on the priors that reality itself doesn’t seem to be a predictor of much surrounding the former president.
In the era of no shared observable reality that’s really just a guess tho. You have your reality, I have mine. Whoever can make the most noise wins I suppose.
But honestly it’s all just speculation at this point.
This is the well-known Ancient Roman practice of proscription, whereby leaders with newfound power confiscate the property of, imprison, and/or kill the group that they just won the power struggle against, as a way to consolidate power and punish the group that came before them.
Shouldn't we look to South Korea as a much more modern and therefore more likely to be pertinent example? They've sent two ex-presidents to prison. Was that good or bad? Did it strengthen their democracy by showing even the highest office could be held accountable or weaken it by making it seem like giving up power means you go to jail? That seems to be the place to go to see how a Trump conviction would play out more than Sulla.
To suggest that the FBI raid, along with the ongoing show trial, are not useful to discuss as particular isolated events but instead as part of the historical pattern of how power operates.
Yes, just like Trump followed through on his promise to lock Hillary Clinton up for that thing with her emails, and like how Obama made sure Bush stood trial for war crimes, or how Bush made sure Clinton went to jail or... oh wait, none of those actually happened. Perhaps it's not as much of a pattern as you thought.
Obviously I'm not claiming something like "all leaders always criminalize their political opposition." The reason these events are interesting through a historical lens is precisely because the practice had mostly died out in the West in recent decades, with it being a signature tactic of totalitarian dictatorships and all.
Your examples are good demonstrations of this - in the past, they ended up being all talk and nothing ever happened. But now, Russiagate / January 6 / etc. are all dramatic sea changes in terms of criminalizing ideological enemies of the regime.
My point is, it's silly to make a claim *either way* based on a single data point. You can't say it's not unusual, but you also can't say it's part of a long tradition of dictatorial regimes when it's a one-off event. Sometimes politicians commit crimes, and sometimes they get investigated for them. Trump was a particularly careless and stupid politician and therefore more likely to get caught doing crimes. Roll the dice often enough and you'll get a natural 20 eventually.
Also, unlike totalitarian dictators, Trump will have legal rights, due process, and all The FBI had to convince a judge that they would find evidence of a specific crime in a specific place to do this raid, and there are many more hurdles before Trump ever sees the inside of a courtroom, let alone jail. Pretty sure Roman emperors didn't have that problem.
Trying to keep this fairhanded...I don't think it's worth updating your priors based on shocking actions. It's shocking that a president would declare an election illegal, it's shocking that the intelligence services would spy on a presidential campaign, it's shocking (both for and against) that a twice impeached president would be a the presumed frontrunner, both for a major party and (probably) for the presidency.
The heuristic of "if 'they' violated such a long-standing tradition, it must mean something"...does not seem particularly predictively useful these days.
It's not clear that this has anything to do with January 6 or anything turned up by the committee - from what I'm reading, it's more likely to be related to classified documents requested by the National Archives which Trump had been refusing to hand over.
Recent update on this: WP claims the documents included classified information relating to nuclear weapons, which (if true) would explain why they thought it was necessary to go to unusual lengths to retrieve them, without a partisan/political explanation being necessary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/11/garland-trump-mar-a-lago/
Curious if anyone can make a not-incredibly-technical steelman of MMT, or recommend articles covering same. Been dissatisfied with mainstream media coverage when it does rarely show up. I really want to believe economics is a Real Science and not beset with insane fringe ideas that never work in practice (but are nevertheless advocated by some Very Serious People). This has been the latest such hurdle.
Thanks for the replies. I think I'll put the beliefs "Supply And Demand Shocks Are Really Bad, Actually" and "Interest rates are a blunt imprecise instrument" in the TRUE box, and remain skeptical of the role of deficit spending/QE/printing money. The idea that printing money can have no ill effects is just too hard to wrap head around. It makes sense if it's later taken out of the economy via taxes, and I get that deficits do get paid back Eventually, with interest, like any loan. So as long as taxes aren't too low and debt interest payments aren't too high, the whole circus keeps running. Somehow.
Figuring out the "why does the circus run" part increasingly seems like an egregore that I do not, in fact, want to spend Sanity Points on understanding. Lest that contaminate my personal financial thinking, which very much still runs in the economic-gravity-on world...
With regard to printing money, it has been relatively uncontroversial that as an economy grows the money supply needs to keep pace. Remember MV=PQ, where Q is the quantity of goods and services, P prices, hence PQ total GDP. The equation is a tautology, definitionally true. M is the money supply, V velocity, how fast money turns over. Notice that if the money supply falls and V doesn't change, nominal GDP must fall. In theory P could fall and Q keep growing, meaning real GDP is still expanding, but that would mean nominal prices and wages are falling, but in practice that tends not to happen in the modern era (the reason why is one of Keynes's main topics.). Hence the Fed, if it's doing its job, tries to keep M, or better yet MV, growing at a stable rate. Taxes don't "take money out" since the government is a transfer mechanism. It moves the money around (while leaking, of course, since government costs money). If taxes are greater than government spending, traditional Keynesian economics says that does dampen GDP; others, including monetarists and nowadays most articulately the Market Monetarists, argues that the central bank (Fed) can offset contractionary fiscal policy simply by keeping MV (which is equal to PQ, see above) growing at the desired rate using the tools they have. See Scott Sumner's blog, and relevant episodes of David Beckworth's podcast "Macro Musings" on topics relating to the Fed, inflation, recessions, and interest rates.
There's enormous confusion around interest rates because interest rate levels result from both the strength of demand as well as supply of money, so high or low interest rates by themselves tell you almost nothing about whether the Fed is being contractionary or expansionary. Typically the Fed raises interest rates when it realizes M has increased so fast that inflation is kicking up, so it slows M creation, which causes the price of money to rise, i.e., interest rates. That's what's happening now but M and MV have been rising so fast that "real" interest rates (nominal minus inflation) are still negative, which historically and theoretically means the Fed is still being "loose" (expansionary), and inflation can still rise further. The media are vague and confused about the fact that the Fed adjusts its key interest rate (the Fed Funds rate) by manipulating (increasing or decreasing) the supply of money.
If you think about it, it makes sense and the logic is no different from what we would use for understanding what's going on the oil or wheat market. Price changes are due to changes in supply or demand (or both).
Japan is a demonstration that one can run a large and growing public debt at near-zero interest for decades, given a sufficient mix of taxes and non-tax means of financial repression. But I'm not sure it's the steelman that MMT proponents are looking for.
MMT's is one theory in the broader school of "chartalism".
I 'd say chartalism's main insight is that, as states control the supply of money (assuming it's fiat), they shouldn't treat money the same way a private citizen would, i.e. as a scarce resource that needs to be economized. Because they sit on an essentially limitless supply of their own currency their spending is effectively unconstrained and only operates as a means of allocating labour/resource to public projects and as an accounting tool for the wider economy.
This would imply that most of the public discussion around deficits and public debt is bs, the only reasons to constrain public spending would be if inflation was destabilising the economy's equilibrium or if too public works were consuming too many resources.
Chartalists also make claims about the origin of money, that it originated as a means for states to raise revenue through taxes as opposed to the orthodox theory of a more rational exchange mechanism than barter.
I'm not super familiar with MMT itself (only really read "The Deficit Myth") but from my view it's basic chartalism plus some claims about inflation staying constant if there's unused economic capacity (not enough money in circulation to facilitate all possible trades) which translates to unemployment in the real world. So MMTers wouldn't necessarily accept this recent inflation as contrary evidence.
So, uh, traditionally, when you print a ton of money, inflation increases. In 2008, for (probably) good reasons we printed a lot more, we even invented exciting new ways of printing money called quantitative easing. And then through the 2010s we kinda kept doing it and...there was no inflation. Then Covid hit and we figuratively built a printer factory to print all the printers we needed to PRINT ALL THE MONEY...and no inflation. And so, in 2021, economists were kinda looking around like...what if the old rules don't apply? This has happened before, in the 1960s before stagflation was a thing, economists thought high unemployment and high inflation was impossible. MMT, from what little I've seen, was not a great theory, but it was legitimately trying to explain this weirdness and...to be fair, it would be pretty awesome if the government could just infinitely print money without inflation.
I dunno, it was like economic gravity was turned off there for a few years and, ya know, some people thought we were flying and some people thought we were falling.
If we have good reasons to believe printing money leads to inflation (and we do), and we print tons of money and aren't seeing a whole lot of inflation, then maybe we aren't looking in the right place.
I suggest looking at financial market trends for the period. Here's a representative chart:
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrwpfYubz5AhVhiIsKHYVvCVwQ3ecFegQIHRAY&window=MAX
Printing money leads to inflation to the extent the money is moved into the economy. Most of the money created by QE over the years has been left idle because payment of interest on reserves (IOR). Banks have been leaving balances at the Fed to accumulate interest at 0 risk rather than lending it out and triggering the "multiplier effect" we read about in textbooks on money creation. Over the past two years, however, money has been spilling into the economy at the same time that the economy's productive capacity has been decapitated by the economic straightjackets (a.k.a. "lockdowns") mandated by governments around the world, especially the U.S. and China, the two largest economies.
For a more complete picture:
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrwpfYubz5AhVhiIsKHYVvCVwQ3ecFegQIHRAY&window=MAX&comparison=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI%2CINDEXNASDAQ%3A.IXIC
That's goal post shifting, since inflation generally refers to the CPI. Which is why we are talking about inflation now and not a few years ago. Maybe there is an argument that it shouldn't be just the but that is what is commonly used.
That QE increased asset prices is uncontroversial.
"Inflation" is a rise in price over time. CPI is a way of measuring one type of inflation, and it happens to be the one that the man on the street typically cares about, but to say that inflation refers solely to increases in the CPI is just wrong on it's face.
Here's where we started:
> In 2008, for (probably) good reasons we printed a lot more, we even invented exciting new ways of printing money called quantitative easing. And then through the 2010s we kinda kept doing it and...there was no inflation. Then Covid hit and we figuratively built a printer factory to print all the printers we needed to PRINT ALL THE MONEY...and no inflation.
When you "print" money you get inflation for the simple reason that you have more money chasing fewer goods (since you aren't "printing" goods to match). My point is that the post-2008 money-printing absolutely caused a massive amount of inflation (compare European indexes for basline growth over the period; they aren't quite decoupled from American ones, because the financial market is global, but they're separate enough), it's just that this wasn't reflected in the CPI, because consumers weren't getting the money - until COVID that is, but the imposed restrictions severely limited spending possibilities, putting a limit on the demand curve shift.
Way back when, on a different forum, I once pointed out that if the government started printing money straight into Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin, we wouldn't see it reflected in the CPI either (mostly because there probably does not exist an amount you could give to Scrooge that would meaningfully affect his spending).
The above is what printing straight into the Money Bin looks like in real life.
Nothing will disprove your theory, right? That nothing happened for a decade is proof that “printing money” causes inflation. That inflation is largely external and worldwide caused by obvious supply issues isn’t going to change your view either.
Inflation necessarily results whenever you shift either the demand or supply curve (unless you shift both by exactly the amount needed to cancel out), because a shift causes the market price to change.
Supply chain issues shift the supply curve leftwards, because there are fewer goods in the market. Giving people more money shifts the demand curve rightwards, because people have more money to spend.
Either one is enough to cause inflation. If you've been doing both (let's not forget that outside the war in Ukraine, most supply issues are self-inflicted), you're gonna be double-boned.
I could do without living in interesting times, for a change.
GDP is a function not just of the amount of money created (in the case of the U.S.) by the Fed, but how quickly it turns over. The famous equation is MV = PQ, where M is money, V is velocity, P is the price level, and Q real quantity of goods. V had been relatively stable during most of the post-war period but fell substantially after the Global Financial Crisis. Scott Sumner explains the reasons better than anyone on the blog Econlog and Money Illusion. The Fed had a lot to do with triggering the GFC and for the slow growth that followed it. Thanks to the lockdowns following the breakout of the pandemic we got a big drop in GDP due to a drop in Q in the equation above, combined with deficit spending and an accommodative Fed. "Supply chain problems" are another way of saying that Q, the quantity of goods and services, couldn't rebound as it normally would (because of lockdowns here and abroad and lots of new regulations) at the same time that trillions were being handed out to businesses and individuals. Hence inflation. Pre-pandemic the Fed had not been as accommodative as it appeared from all that "quantitative easing" because it paid relatively high interest to banks for keeping the money at the Fed ("Interest on Reserves) rather than using it to lend out as they might otherwise be expected to do.
That formula never accounts for energy price rises, which of course are always passed through to the customer. It’s true that Q is somewhat reduced by the reduction in oil or gas supply but the inflation caused by the reduction in that particular quantity of goods is much greater than some other good which didn’t have that kind of knock-on affect.
It’s a toy formula.
Is the implication of your claim that demand for energy is perfectly inelastic? Or more directly that the amount consumed is totally unaffected by price?
I sort of buy that at the margin it’s functionally inelastic because switching costs of changing lifestyle are too high to merit change but I doubt that’s as true outside the developed world (although that’s just a hunch).
Seems to me every science or school of thought will have crazy fringe ideas. FWIW, I'd say MMT is one--it says a government can spend unlimited money by creating the money (a.k.a. "Fed accommodation or monetizing the deficit"), with no bad consequences but many good ones--employment and prosperity for all. I haven't seen any serious people advocating it. Stephanie Skelton's book has gotten the most publicity, and it's not serious. Anyway, isn't the best evidence evidence from practice, from experience?
Today's high inflation and rising interest rates are a consequence of vast deficit spending of the last two years--trillions upon trillions with virtually no thought or oversight--monetized by a complaisant Fed. How well is it working? BTW, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the impact on inflation of the current spending bill, called the "Inflation Reduction Act", is between +0.1% and -0.1%. And those numbers are pretty arbitrary because they have to make assumptions about Fed actions, and the Fed has more influence on inflation than Government spending. The latter determines how much of GDP is composed of Government vs. the private sector, i.e. deficits tilt the economy toward government.
The textbooks will tell you that in a recession or depression deficit spending can restore "full employment" without inflation. We were in a short recession in 2020 because of the pandemic, so deficit spending met those criteria then. But having broken the dam, the spending flood keeps gushing and no one in authority seems to have any interest in restraint of any sort.
That’s not true is it? America has been in deficit for years. QE has been tapered of since last year. The inflation is mostly caused by external factors like the Ukrainian war, supply chain issues, tariffs and so on. And the feds are raising interest rates, which is the monetarist position to all inflation thus making people who are poor poorer.
Supply schocks like wars, supply chain issues, tariffs, etc. can change relative prices but not the overall price level without Fed "accommodation". As an imperfect analogy, a rise in the price of gas won't cause my total spending to rise (assuming I don't borrow)--instead I'll have to scrimp a bit on gas and other stuff. Look at the equation MV=PQ again and consider that it is a tautology. Prices, P, can only go up if the product of MV (which is the money supply) goes up, or if MV doesn't change, Q has to fall so that PQ still equals MV. That's in fact what often happens when the Fed combats inflationi, since a fall in Q is a recession.
Gist of a question I'd like to see on an annual survey: “How often do you compose a [substantive?] comment/reply that you delete without posting?”
I was trying to think if there could be any advantage to a line shaped city. Consider two 100 square mile cities: Square City is 10 miles by 10 miles, and Line City is 100 miles by 1 mile.
You want every point in each city to be a maximum 1 mile walk to a train station. In Square City, you have 10 north-south train lines -- going from 1/2 mile north of the southern border to 1/2 mile south of the northern border -- and 10 east-west lines, going from 1/2 mile east of the western border to 1/2 mile west of the eastern border. The lines are evenly spaced, with a station at each line intersection. You're always at most 1/2 mile from an east-west line and 1/2 mile from a north-south line, so -- assuming no diagonal streets -- at most a mile from a station.
You have 100 stations, 360 miles of track, and you'd have to make a maximum of 18 stops for any trip, with one transfer. (I'm including your last stop as a stop, but not the first stop where you get on)
In Line City, you have two lines running straight down the middle - a local and an express. The local runs all the way from mile 0.5 to mile 99.5, with a station every mile, so 198 miles of local track and 100 stations. Express stations are about every 9 miles, from mile 5.5 to mile 94.5, so 188 miles of express track with 10 express stops. The maximum number of stops would be 10 local stops plus 9 express stops, so 19 total, with one transfer.
Assuming going 10 miles express takes the same amount of time as going 1 mile local, you're slightly worse off in Line City -- you need 386 miles of track vs. 360, and you have a maximum of 19 stops vs. 18 -- but it's pretty close. Average number of stops is more important than maximum, though. I don't know how to calculate the average exactly, but according to a python simulation I tried, it's 7.25 stops in Square City vs. 8.37 stops in Line City. So an extra stop per average trip is not insignificant. Of course, this assumes the origins and destinations are evenly distributed. In reality, there will be greater density by the express stations in Line City, and in the center of both cities. But Square City does seem to have somewhat shorter trips.
However, in Line City, you only need 10 of your 100 stations to be transfer stations, and in Square City, all of them are transfers. And in Line City, you're transferring between two parallel trains, which is much simpler -- and if you wanted, your stations could probably be at street level - with the tracks going back up or down in between. In fact, you could even have the tracks at street level the whole time, with bridges or tunnels going across every half mile or whatever. This would be fairly disruptive to integrating the two halves of the city, but much less disruptive than having the Square City trains at ground level.
The major disadvantage is if part of a track breaks down, or gets blocked by a stalled train, it's MUCH easier in Square City to route people around it. Plus even in the most transit oriented city, it will sometimes be necessary to use a car, and it will be annoying to drive 100 miles to get to a different part of the city.
"Assuming going 10 miles express takes the same amount of time as going 1 mile local"
Why would you assume that? Cities that have both local and express routes, like New York, often run the same vehicles on both routes. The difference in time is because of the time spent at the stops, not the difference in speed. The New York subway cars have a maximum speed of 55 mph. If you take 50 mph as the speed between stations (EMUs accelerate fast and we can include acceleration/deceleration as part of the stop penalty), then you'd need to have the express train moving at 500 mph. This is out of Maglev range and definitely requires Hyperloop.
There's some minor math problems too, like that a 10mi x 10mi city with half mile stop spacing needs a 9 x 9 grid of transit stations, so 81 total, instead of 100 total (line city needs 99 stations instead of 100). I don't think these would change the model that much. I might work out the model a bit more realistically, if you're interested.
Ah, I did not realize how unrealistic the speeds were.
I'm sure I made a million math errors, but even though there would only be 9 mile long segments in a line, wouldn't there still need to be 10 stations? Because you need a station at each mile, plus the first station at mile 0?
Would love to see any modeling you could do, because I am very much an amateur. I have not been able to get this out of my head since I first heard about NEOM and figured there must be some advantage to doing it this way, but could not for the life of me figure out what.
Well, that was a good nerd snipe. I kept on going back to it to make adjustments to see how things would change.
Both a description of the model and the code for the model can be found here: http://thechaostician.com/grid-city-and-line-city/
Grid City has a lot quicker transportation system than Line City.
Wow you actually did it! There are so many things I didn't think of. I guess Neom is an even worse idea than I thought.
Yeah ! If you have any questions about it, please ask
I'm pretty sure the advantage is something to do with cooling. If they can actually manage to build those tall glass walls to block out most of the heating effect of the sun, cooling the line should be easier than cooling the square. * Everything else follows from that. I think the mistake that a lot of people are making is focusing on the transit as the driver here. I'm pretty sure it's secondary.
*IANAHVACT
Yes, that's right. I am also very much an amateur.
Most of what I know comes from Alon Levy's blog. I think that the most relevant posts are:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/04/21/stop-spacing-and-route-spacing/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/10/30/sometimes-bus-stop-consolidation-is-inappropriate/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/07/28/the-formula-for-frequent-transit-networks/
I'll see if I can put together a simple model.
Oh cool, I've seen people quote Alon Levy, but never actually looked at his blog. That's really fascinating.
Someone recenly(ish) requested a search engine for all the SSC texts and comments. Unfortunately I can't find that request anymore, but if you are interested in a thing like that, have a look at https://evard.online/truescott.html. For now it's a customized Google search for SSC, ACX, /r/ssc, and DSL. Feel free to suggest other related sources.
I should probably put in the effort to generate hard numbers, but worth noting that Google will return something like less than half the real number of hits on SSC and ACX. DSL uses a particularly aggressive robots.txt rule, and the modal number of hits from there for any query is zero. (I don't feel at all bad about writing a crawler to ignore that for personal use, but am torn on the ethics of sharing.)
https://novalinium.com/acx_search.py
This also serves the role you describe, altho it seems to be down right now. Also at certain times it has failed to find comments on ACT that I knew should have been found.
Maybe https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/? It's non-canonical, but some may appreciate it.
Have you read a Tyler Cowen book? What did you think of it? Should I read it too?
I've read The Complacent Class, Stubborn Attachments and Big Business: A love letter. Complacent class was meh, Stubborn Attachments and Big Business were good (even if I didn't agree with them entirely).
Random question for all the techies: what kind of music do you listen to?
Where to begin?
- progressive and melodic/ symphonic metal (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Nightwish, Iron Maiden, Iced Earth...)
- classic/ progressive rock (Rush, Kansas, Styx, Camel, Deep Purple...)
- 60s/early 70s psychedelic rock (Doors, Cream, Santana, ...)
- recently acquiring a taste for space rock (Ozric Tentacles, Takeshi's Cashew...), Motown soul, big-band swing and a bunch of other styles.
Right now: Yatao handpans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNe_P7g5e7o
Other times; Heilung, Aurora, Qntal, Laikipia, Infected Mushroom, Faun, Nightwish, Of Monsters and Men... Lots more :)
Have been listening to some of these artists since reading your comment and have had a blast. Can't thank you enough
Largely power metal: Manowar, Sabaton, Alestorm, etc.
A bundle of genres I refer to as "spooky electronica" - ranging from electronic foreboding ambient tracks to industrial, spending a lot of time with indie music labels like ant-zen or tympanik audio.
The Manifold Garden soundtrack is a great example of music I fall in love with. https://laryssaokada.bandcamp.com/track/transfiguration
Try Corpe-Mente.
Different music for different moods, but lots of metal and lots of video game soundtracks.
Shoegaze, dreampop, indie rock, minimal and ambient electronic, synthwave, triphop
Mainly either folk or PDQ Bach. But the folk is generally in languages that I don't understand. Norwegian is what comes to mind at the top, but it's just one album of many
None currently. Used to be primarily classical, and then Apple bought and killed Primephonic.
I need to find a functional CD reader, and appropriate software, and make soft copies of everything in my CD collection.
A lot of my stuff is duplicated on vinyl and CD. All the CDs have been ripped and stored on various devices.
Mostly I stream from Amazon Unlimited. Phone Bluetooth -> Receiver tho. 8 million titles there. Not much need to go to back up.
Have a playlist of 500 “songs that don’t suck” on the Amazon app. Just hit randomize.
A lot of alt/indie/punk-adjacent-but-too-cowardly-to-be-actual-punk stuff. The kind of music the characters in the Questionable Content webcomic talked about a decade ago.
Have some playlists!
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2CwX8NwKN3boId8SyypbQs
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ufdWS7aRcnzWcQcJPRImy
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2T33e9UKg3Uop3AlFTSuDs
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5d8bgnTtw4CGi0SzSdnXGd
Mostly rock from punk to prog, leaning toward metal but with a preference for the more retro doom variety over anything more extreme than thrash/speed metal. Vocals are one of the things most likely to annoy me, so instrumentals are also preferred, which gives a leg up to jazz (though I find "smooth" jazz too boring).
Novel music. Metal is great for novelty, so it gets an outsized presence in my playlists, but they're also full of other weird stuff.
I'll give particular notice to Mechanical Poet, Man Man, Queens of the Stone Age, Gorillaz, The Cardigans, Humanwine, and Pink Floyd for consistently producing music that sounds like nothing else out there (also Weird Al, in a complicated sort of way). The Beatles probably deserve a place as well, but I was born late enough that everybody copying them has made it impossible to enjoy them from a novelty perspective.
John Schilling's estimate using the WTC1 as a baseline was $42 trillion not $4 trillion. $4.8 trillion was after generously giving the Saudis an 85% discount on $42 trillion thanks to a learning curve.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8113890
I agree learning curves should be counted, treated it as part of the estimate, and included it in my estimate too.
Is 85% a realistic learning curve though? I think John Schilling was including that to demonstrate that that was an absolutely-best-case-lower-bound rather than a reasonable estimate, so halving it again doesn't necessarily make sense.
Especially since at current market prices the raw materials are $765 billion, which would make them ~38% of a $2 trillion budget.
Also, you said "we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale" when the $4 trillion is after applying economies of scale as part of the learning curve.
I think 85% is a reasonable estimate for a project of this scale, though I'm extrapolating from my aerospace experience so intuition may be a bit off. However, note that the 85% learning curve includes "learning to not do all the stuff that made WTC1 so ridiculously expensive". So there's not as much room to buy down an estimate made from the latest Dubai skyscraper, because Dubai unlike NYC hires people who have built a lot of skyscrapers in living memory.
It also means that if you try to build NEOM in New York, with New York bureaucrats saying "no, you can't do anything different, we haven't approved that, it would have to spend five years in committee before we approve anything different", it would cost the full $42 trillion. Well, OK, for half that price you could probably finance a coup in Albany...
Why do gender roles exist? Why do people care so much about them?
I used to believe the function of gender roles was to half-cripple people in symmetrical ways to force them into couples. I now believe they might also be ways to get advantages of specialization, but that doesn't explain why men and women are expected to wear different clothes.
The recent revelation was that what transgender people and transphobes have in common is that they all think gender roles are tremendously important. It rocks people's world to be taken for their preferred gender.
And on the other side, people can feel like the social world is crumbling if gender roles are shaky. Why believe this? But (many) people believe it on a gut level.
My sympathy is with transgendered people, but what's going on in general?
Here's an additional thought. You could argue, "basketball is a fun game, soccer is a fun game, and yet the rules are completely different! So, rules are obviously arbitrary, and it would be a lot more fun if we just did away with them and played however we wanted." That... wouldn't work.
Gender roles are similar. Life runs smoother and is more enjoyable for most people if the rules of the social game are clear - you know what position you play, you know what moves you're allowed to make, you know how thr game is scored, and there are referees who can intervene if someone interrupts the flow of the game. (And since many of the highest-scoring moves are related to finding a mate and having children, it is clear that the rules are not gender-symmetric.)
The problem is that some people would just really rather play soccer than basketball, but society tells them, "basketball it is, for everyone. Now back on the court!"
I would argue this is a better analogy: Pro football has been around for a while. So fun! But wait, advances in technology are revealing that a lot of players are getting CTE and dying early due to brain injury. We either need to change the rules of the game to make it safer, or we can eliminate the game altogether and refocus to pro hockey fandom. But reasonable people would agree that maintaining the status quo is not an option.
I'm pretty sure the function of gender roles is to get the advantages of specialization. In particular, I think that in a world with no birth control and high infant mortality, successful societies developed norms where women specialize in bearing and raising children along with work that can be done in parallel with same (e.g. spinning), and men specialize in all the stuff that can't be done while pregnant, nursing, or having children close at hand (e.g. fighting wars). Some of this will be culturally dependent; whether farming counts as women's work depends on exactly what sort of farming you're doing. Gardening yes, ranching no.
I'm also pretty sure that we've been at this long enough for some of it to seep into our neural wiring via evolution, so some people are going to be "irrationally" attached to their preferred gender roles.
As for dress codes, if role specialization is broadly important, you want to be able to figure out who has which role quickly and efficiently. That's why we have uniforms, and "business formal" and "business casual" and whatnot. It works for gender roles as well as professional ones.
Also, in most climates, trousers mostly make sense for people who are going to be riding horses or working at tasks likely to scrape up bare legs. And while there were very few societies in which a majority of men could afford horses, if you were in a demographic that could plausibly be riding a horse that day, you probably wanted to be seen as someone who was rich enough to afford a horse. Then we went and let a cavalry officer set the style for well-dressed men everywhere for the next two centuries :-)
>Then we went and let a cavalry officer set the style for well-dressed men everywhere for the next two centuries :-)
Is this comment general or specific?
He's referring to Beau Brummel. He was an early 19th century Englishman who was very influential in defining what men's fashion would look like, and arguably his influence stretches to the present period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell
Thanks. This is the sort of trivia I enjoy.
There's an interesting bit in the Aubrey Maturin series (IIRC), where Jack is sitting in an office watching the crowds go by and lamenting to himself at the trend where he's seeing fewer and fewer ornate, colored outfits and more and more drab blacks. Now I know why.
This strikes me as by far the most elegant and obviously true comment on the thread.
It's not like the entire planet went through all of human history with Clearly Wrong ideas about Clearly Wrong gender roles until some people in the 1960s finally invented the concepts of feminism and egalitarianism.
No, there's a *reason* for the timing. There's a reason that the concept and implementation of equality of gender developed alongside industrialization and into information economies. There's a reason that women gained freedom only as civilizations virtually universally eliminated hard physical labor as a requirement of survival.
Once industrialization made it clear that women could survive in an industrialized society by doing jobs as well as men - and indeed, once economies grew to a degree that women were *compelled* to participate in the same jobs as men - women were (more or less) determined to be equal participants in society, deserving of equal rights and consideration.
That's all "feminism" is, at its core. Survival pressure.
Make no mistake, if industrialized civilization ever totally collapses, women will be back to per-industry gender roles within in a generation, if not a couple of years.
"No, there's a *reason* for the timing. There's a reason that the concept and implementation of equality of gender developed alongside industrialization and into information economies. There's a reason that women gained freedom only as civilizations virtually universally eliminated hard physical labor as a requirement of survival."
Yup, ubiquitous electric motors and heat engines largely replaced human muscle power.
Speculation: Ignoring other changes (AI, climate change), and looking only at medicine, might artificial uteri remove a large chunk of the remaining differences in gender roles (perhaps on a time scale of a century or so)? Pregnancy is still a risky business ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy ), so there is a motivation for making the replacement, if the technology and economics can make it workable.
From what I can see, properly nurturing early childhood development is a WAY bigger time suck than pregnancy itself. Babies need a lot of face-to-face contact and engagement to learn emotional regulation, and that need goes on for *years* - at least the first four, maybe longer.
Sure, but, unlike pregnancy, early childhood nurturing could potentially be split between men and women.
That's going to be extremely inefficient, particularly in a high-TFR agrarian society, in that the men will never be able to specialize in the vital but not-kid-friendly tasks because, oops, the next three years I have to pivot to baby-nurturing. And the women aren't going to be able to pick up the slack because, oops. for the next year or two they have to pivot to actually being pregnant and/or nursing.
In history, gender roles existed because of something-something-evolution. In modernity, gender roles are believed by most to be “correct” because of the aforementioned something-something-evolution.
I think the ideas persist because big percentages of humanity are scared of new ideas. I’m raising a girl with high vigilance against gender socializing. It includes the obvious steps of stocking a playroom with dolls & bulldozers, but, more importantly, it means teaching indifference to her own physical beauty. This is a deeply abnormal way to coach girls. The only way people seem to think they should talk with a female child is to tell her how pretty she is, and it takes cosmic effort to prevent this in my daughter’s life. Gender roles teach girls to be vain, vapid, and find their greatest self worth in their physical appeal. Pretty good way to suffocate talent in children. And I think many parents don’t even notice this is happening because it is “normal” thanks to social orders built around gender roles.
I'm willing to bet you're in for a disappointment. My sister-in-law, a very practical-minded, un-vain woman, tried to raise my niece without any gender stereotypes. The niece was also surrounded by two older brother, who were typical boys in their behavior and interests. When she started to speak, "skirt" and "dress" were among her first words (as opposed to her brothers, with "hammer" and "screw"). She turned into a total girlie-girl.
What I'm saying is, you're up against hardwired human nature to a much greater extent than you seem to think.
I’ve seen plenty of cases like that and would not be surprised or disappointed if that is the outcome. I want my kid to have the opportunity to choose her own interests. At the age of four, she loves construction sites, cement mixers, tutus, and rainbows. Her interests can go wherever she takes them through childhood, and I am not opposed to femininity. I am opposed to the way all girls are aggressively molded into cartoon females.
I don't know... describing feminine women as "cartoons" of females seems sort of anti-femininity to me. I don't believe that finding pleasure in being pretty suffocated my wife's talent, or my mother's.
Still, best of luck. I can see you're determined to do well by her, and that's what's most important.
I appreciate the vote of confidence. Many women, by sheer force of talent as cream of the crop, are able to break through social pressures to self-objectify and are able to moderate their prioritization of beauty against other pursuits. Many have the right parents, friends, partners to help part the Red Sea on their way to success. They are the lucky ones. For every one of them, I wonder about the zillions of women who would have made different choices if they had not internalized the idea as girls that they are only as good as their bodies.
Sounds very nice, but I implore, have you considered the skulls?
The thing is, after observing decades of feminism making great progress in all other areas of life, one thing has not changed: I have failed to see a single example of a woman who didn't benefit from putting some effort into being pretty. I won't say one can't over-do it, but one certainly can under-do it.
I have a cousin ^1 who was raised in family with considerable support for adopting militant anti-femine attitudes. It doesn't compound very nicely with personality affected by literal mindedness and knack for missing subtext and implicit social rules. Now, these symptoms could be called mild aut spectrum, but I think her parents decision to socialize her against stereotypical femine stereotypes certainly doesn't help with mitigating them.
She often expresses quite a bitter attitude against so-called "vapid" females who spend a lot of time being pretty and popular. At the same time it is blatantly (almost painfully) obvious she would have more female friends, better-suited romantic interests, and more success in her career (lack of all the seem to contribute to the bitterness) if she had learned some sense of dress code for both business casual and differently coded casual social occasions, and learned to apply little bit of makeup. Instead she got praise for being "bold" and "brave" for rebelling against such norms, when the difficult thing would have been to learn them.
All these lessons are symmetric with males. Putting effort in improving attractiveness helps men immensely in their career, too.
^1 or close enough, real familial relationship obscured for plausible deniality
I guess I'm worried that... I don't mean to, uh, criticize your parenting, I'm more just asking a question
But like. Don't we already have a gender role which is supposed to be indifferent to their own beauty? The 'male' gender role?
I am worried you might not be teaching an absence of roles
You say that, but do you even lift, bro?
Why does indifference to one’s own beauty need to belong to a single gender? I prefer to think of it as a way of being human that you can choose. It’s certainly my preference.
That would certainly be my preference too, I just don't think (to my disappointment) that it's actually true.
I see my wording was confusing. I meant to say that I am a woman whose preference it is to feel indifference to my own beauty. I use it as needed, but it minimally informs my self image. It is possible for women to feel this way. Am I the only woman out of 4 billion who has this preference? Maybe. Seems unlikely. I am mainstream enough in most other ways to believe that this psychology is not an extreme outlier.
Ought/is.
We can't pick situational gravity.
Ok, but this isn’t like picking your genitalia set. People can have agency over their own beliefs and value systems. They can have even stronger influence over both in the children they are raising.
I think raising any child to be indifferent to their looks is a bad idea, but maybe you're compressing a much better idea into something that, to me, sounds like raising someone to have no standards of personal grooming or interest in even basic levels of self-presentation (which is integral to self-identity).
I’d say the bar is neat and clean (at the risk of sounding like my dad). Relative to how females are raised to obsess about their appearance, this is indifference.
*Edited to fix typo
As a woman who picked this path (of de-emphasing physical attraction), I would advise you to not do this for your daughter.
Would you mind expanding on this?
Gender roles are a human universal. As are moral norms around sex, sexuality, marriage, and gender. The specific norms and roles vary somewhat. Some things, including some things the liberal set wants to change, are universal. Many things, including many things the conservative set considers "naturally" male or female, are not. I'd find it more strange if there wasn't a big dust up over different cultural conceptions of gender roles and all that. It's a culture war over something that's one of the most fundamental parts of culture. How family and society works.
My general heuristic for this kind of thing is to see if other societies have that cultural trait and if they were successful. If they were then it's probably arbitrary. If they weren't then it's possible but will harm society. And if there's no example of it then it's probably not possible. The idea of moving post-gender is anthropologically STRANGER than the concept of being transgender. While transgenderism specifically is a modern and unique phenomenon the idea of people who cross gender boundaries in various and even permanent ways is very common. Meanwhile gender roles themselves are a human universal.
It seems to me that the existence of gender roles is probably universal. The content of the roles is not. There's also considerable variation in the accommodation of those who don't fit their assigned roles.
That wasn't a happy discovery for me. I'd hoped in my youth to see gender roles wither away, and with them the belief that certain traits and preferences are normal to all people of one gender, and absent in all people of the other gender.
That doesn't answer the question of *why*, however. It doesn't even answer the question of whether there are any personality traits or preferences that would be more common in one gender than the other, absent cultural reinforcement. (We can guess, but we can't *know*.)
My best guess for the "why" is that the burden of pregnancy and lactation restricts what women can do effectively, and the relative ease of male reproduction makes it better to risk male than female lives, if the size of the next generation is a concern.
So evolution favors both cultures and genetic traits that dole out talents, preferences, and training in ways that are more effective in each particular environment.
What we pretty much never see are universals. Some cultures try very hard to get males to act like men, and females to act like women, with no exception, but AFAIK they always have to resort to punishing those who don't conform adequately - i.e. no level of acculturation to assigned gender roles works universally.
At the cultural level, human gender dimorphism also influences the assigned roles. But I see that dimorphism as something else we need to explain, particularly as when it comes to size/strength etc., it's once again a matter of averages, with exceptions.
Interesting question: are the exceptions advantageous (i.e. we're selected for some % of outliers), or are they something that's simply not disadvantageous enough for evolution (physical and cultural) to eliminate them/us? Are they continually regenerated, as individual human switch environments, and bring their genetic and cultural gender-role traits to living situations where they are not optimum? Has evolution kept the exceptions around because people move, environments change, and technology changes what behaviour is optimum - often enough that having a wide range of options is itself evolutionarily conserved, at both the biological and cultural level.
Some of the content is universal and seems fairly hardcoded. Most of it isn't. For example, there's multiple cultures where female breadwinners are the norm and where providing for a family is a female role.
I think you're right there's always people who are uncomfortable with their acculturation. Though it's sometimes solved by moving to different cultural contexts instead of either tolerance or conforming. I'm not sure if you're right there's a different level of tolerance for deviation. To some extent perhaps but very often what tolerant cultures actually have is a different set of roles and norms that they're enforcing just as stringently. For example, I'd say liberated feminists actually have a pretty rigidly defined gender role for women and show a fair bit of enforcement behavior against people who deviate from it.
As to why any of this is or whether exceptions are beneficial I can't say.
I was thinking in terms of cultures with third genders, or even something like the choice (for a woman) to become a nun rather than a wife-and-mother.
But you've given me a better example. Some quantity of North Americans enforce gender roles by committing physical violence on those who break their rules. Feminists on the other hand, just commit innuendo, gossip, and perhaps shunning. (Though frankly, I don't see what they generally enforce as gender roles per se.) This is a difference in enforcement stringency.
I think that's less to do with gender enforcement specifically than cultural rules around violence (another universal that varies per culture). But if that's what you mean then sure. There are cultures in North America where violence is more acceptable as a response to social transgression and others where it's less so. Though it's worth noting that feminists are not particularly non-violent about how they enforce their taboos.
As for third genders: that was my point. A minority of people who gender switch is more common than a culture that claims gender roles themselves are bad or shouldn't exist. That said, I wouldn't lump things like unmarried women in with people transgressing gender roles. Being a nun in certain parts of Europe was seen as a display of femininity, not a subversion. Marriage is not always so mandatory.
"Though it's worth noting that feminists are not particularly non-violent about how they enforce their taboos."
Could you elaborate on this? I thought that violence shows large gender differences, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime#In_the_United_States
"Males were convicted of the vast majority of homicides in the United States, representing 89.5% of the total number of offenders."
Lots of speculation downthread. But is there anything out there resembling research?
I'm not sure how one could research this question. But speculation and just so stories don't seem very useful to me.
There's a fair bit of anthropological research that describes gender roles and finds some things are fairly universal. For example, there is no human culture ever observed without distinct male and female gender roles. The most common explanation is some degree of innate gender difference but there are others of course.
ETA: To be clear, the specific roles vary. But every culture has some form of roles. Some things are arbitrary and some things are not. For example, another human universal is that women care for very young infants. But whether men help varies. So to take this one example female gender roles including "cares for very young children" is universal while some cultures include that in male gender roles and others don't.
As evidenced by the (grotesque, unethical) Reimer twin study, there is probably at least some basis to the idea that gender is biological, in that a male child raised from birth as a female could still inherently identify that they fundamentally were not female (for a true bulletproof study, of course, the twins would need to have been separated from their parents at birth and raised by a pair of adoptive parents who didn't know John Reimer's actual sex, but still). However, there is a vast gulf between "John Reimer could fundamentally realize at age 10 that they were in fact a boy" and "Men are biologically conditioned to like running around in the mud while women are biologically conditioned to like sitting around talking."
The Reimer study also indicates why there isn't a lot of research out there: the things you would have to do to drill deep down into the question "are gender roles and thus the sociological concept of gender innate, or are they socially constructed" would be profoundly immoral, and certainly not tolerated by any kind of government that places even a trivial price on human welfare.
This isn't a subject I care that much about, so I haven't put much thought into it, but I'd guess gender roles are about social legibility and predictability; this matters for a government that may need to draft soldiers, for young people looking to get married and have kids, and for identifying people who don't care that much about social-cultural norms in general.
On the individual legible/predictable thing, there are large numbers of people for whom it can be genuinely helpful to have a socially established consensus about who does what chores, for example. (How many people do you know who fight about this kind of thing in their personal lives?)
"On the individual legible/predictable thing, there are large numbers of people for whom it can be genuinely helpful to have a socially established consensus about who does what chores, for example. (How many people do you know who fight about this kind of thing in their personal lives?)"
I don't know about you, but I for my part don't know of a *single case* of a woman becoming reconciled to doing a supposedly-unbalanced proportion of household chores by being told that those are women's work.
When it is presented as 1) largely determined by her biological genders nature to care more about the housework and 2) as a 'fair share' tradeoff where the man is working more and doesn't get to enjoy the family space, it gets better accepted.
But yeah, so long as house chores are presented as an oppression by the patriarchy, no one likes it.
About half of couples with children fight about chores. Frustration with division of household labor is a hallmark of two-income households with children.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-couples-with-children-argue-about-most
Right. That's after two generations of feminism chipping away at traditional gender roles. Of course, when you declare the previous default settings obsolete and oppressive, people have to negotiate and, to a certain degree, argue. Maybe that renegotiation leads to a better balance for many people, but it sure makes things more complicated.
> Of course, when you declare the previous default settings obsolete and oppressive, people have to negotiate and, to a certain degree, argue.
Just going to rephrase slightly: Of course, when women enter the workforce, gain financial power, and achieve similar opportunities as men for self-actualization through career, people have to negotiate, and to a certain degree, argue.
I'm going to wait for some more replies before I answer a lot, but I want people to think about the range of gender roles-- gender roles exist, but they may be opposite in different cultures.
For example, in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, men are expected to study Torah and Talmud full time, while women work outside the home.
Here's something from recent history: the early Beatles had neatly combed hair which was just a little longer than traditional. People had fits. Later, I'm told, men were beaten for having long hair. Whatever is going on, it isn't functional.
I recommend _The Frailty Myth_, a history of women and sports. While I think it's exaggerated (it isn't true that all women would like to be athletic, and I don't think women can necessarily compete on equal terms with men of the same size), it's also true that women have been discouraged from athleticism until fairly recently.
In the west, Victorians had an enforced fantasy that upper class women shouldn't move much at all. It got so bad that upper class women were having trouble giving birth, and so special light exercises were invented for upper class women.
It was a jolt when I realized there's no such thing as dressing like a woman. There's only dressing like a woman of an approximate time and place.
(Also true of dressing like a man, but I give the insight as it came to me.)
Seeing how, depending on climate, human clothing spans the range from "loincloth only" to "multiple layers of leather and fur", it can hardly be any other way.
That said, gender roles are often variations on the same themes. Women's clothing is typically a lot more about emphasizing (or hiding, depending on the general sexual mores) physical attractiveness. Men's clothing is typically a lot more about conveying social status, respectability or fighting ability.
"It was a jolt when I realized there's no such thing as dressing like a woman. There's only dressing like a woman of an approximate time and place."
Good point!
Perhaps gender-specific clothing can be considered analogous to sumptuary laws? Providing a visual clue to which gender-specific role someone is filling?
I used to think sumptuary laws were crazy; why the [expletive deleted] should a society care what someone wears? But insofar as clothing served as a uniform or as a badge of office, it is less crazy to have restrictions on impersonating a role (e.g. Roman senator or contemporary police officer).
Of course, with fewer roles being gender-specific than in past centuries, this makes less sense now.
( In particular, role restrictions based on muscular strength have made less and less sense as electric motors and heat engines became more widespread. One could make a decent case that almost any job role that still requires substantial strength is probably a mistake of some sort. )
Is this necessarily true for both sexes?
I've always taken the following for granted, at least in the West since the 1980's:
Provided the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are covered (which is more a matter of 'having enough clothing' than any specific clothing style) a woman can wear anything a man can wear in the same situation and be treated as acceptable, while the reverse is not true. A woman can wear a suit (even one tailored for a male physique) to a party and be fine; a man in a cocktail dress seems absurd. To go with the obvious edge case, swim wear: a woman can wear men's trunks with a gender-neutral top like a t-shirt and be fine (provided the shirt remains opaque), while a man in a two-piece bikini is absurd.
There are a couple of ways to look at this:
1. It's unfair to women that they have a pair of "secondary sexual characteristics" on their upper torso which need to be covered under almost all cultures to seem decent.
2. It's unfair to men that rough, hairy, fat or overmuscled skin is less aesthetically pleasing, and thus styles that expose a lot of skin don't work for men in most situations for very different reasons than styles that expose a lot of skin are not acceptable for women.
> It's unfair to women
> It's unfair to men
And yet, curiously, only one of those things have media attention and activism movements around it.
Many such cases.
Yes, because one is seen as ugly and trashy and the other is seen as a crime in many jurisdictions.
You can invent any set of plausible-seeming reason to explain any phenomenon you like, the question is if they hold in practice or just confabulations.
Do you have a source for the Victorian upper class women having trouble giving birth thing? What's the threshold for "amount of physical activity needed to have a relatively normal childbirth", and do you think that modern office workers are at risk of being below it?
Here's a racist patent from 1963 for a centrifugal birthing table. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3216423A/en
I'm sorry, I don't have the book handy. If it turns up, I'll check.
Evidence suggests that modern office workers aren't getting so little exercise. The Victorians were pretty extreme.
It wouldn't surprise me too much if the extent of the problem was exaggerated so someone could sell the exercises.
Thanks!
> Whatever is going on, it isn't functional.
It certainly has a function, you just don't like the side effects.
Long hair on men is one of the things that varies between cultures and time periods. There's a slight bias against it since it can be a liability in a fight, and can be high-maintenance in unwelcome ways when you're a soldier (lice are a thing). The Beatles example seems more like a basic pressure to conform.
I'd say the core of an gender role is the overall attitude, the fashion details are negotiable. If you can project confidence, dominance and potential aggression while wearing a skirt then more power to you, though realistically you'll have to be a Scottish highlander to pull that off.
Pants weren't popular until horse-nomads made them so. I suppose not many men nowadays are wearing Roman-style tunics though.
It's not like every, or even most, culture(s) has very different gender roles, though. Like yeah, there are a *few* exceptions, but *in general* the vast majority across the world and history have had pretty similar divisions-of-labor.
Even in orthodox Jewish communities, most of the roles remain the same: women are not expected to fight while the men hide, men are not expected to submit while women lead, men are not ideally kind and soft and women tough and forceful, etc.
I think rather it is that there are *some* things which seem to be universally gendered experiences (men are always soldiers, women are rarely soldiers) and some things which seems to be weirdly time-and-place specific (only very effeminate men wear skirts in England, whereas only hypermasculine men wear skirts in Scotland - although they call them 'kilts')
But I agree with your second point entirely - it seems odd to me to pick out one variation on 'standard' gender roles which exists in one specific subcommunity of one particular subculture and then argue that this is evidence that 'standard' gender roles are highly mutable. Unless we can find other examples of this existing with some regularity it seems much more likely that this is some odd interactions between the social contract for gender and the social contract for being an orthodox Jewish person.
All of this seems pretty reasonable and correct to me.
After thinking about your first section a bit: Yes, that's true. Some things *are* highly dependent on time and place, whereas others are nearly universal; I was going to say that I thought the larger part of gendered traits fits into the latter category, but I guess that somewhat depends on what you consider in the first place.
E.g., mostly what I think of is stuff like "who does the fighting" or "who keeps the house" or "who raises the small children", so it seems like "most of these things are pretty universal" to me — but the opposite impression might be made upon someone who is thinking first in terms of, say, fashions.
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Re: your second section: This is extremely common. I might even say it's some sort of unnamed cognitive bias (to which I am not immune: see below), but perhaps we can look at it as a manifestation of "am I forced to believe" vs "am I allowed to believe"? ...whatever this isn't important why did I even write this part IGNORE THIS
Ahem. That is, when someone says something I don't like about a grouping (of anything, not necessarily only people) — "BMWs are generally slower than AMG Mercedeseses", say, to pick a completely random example that may or may not be true at all — I tend to want to find one counter-example ("well if that's the case how do you explain the 2022 M5 CS? both makes have their fast and slow cars checkmate") and then say "it varies".
It's like... if I created some doubt, then the argument can be dismissed — *even if it's still true in general and I've just pointed out a rare exception.*
And I see this *all the time* in discussions like this. Usually, it's something like "well, in the Yanomamo, women are the leaders, so your theory isn't universal at all" or "well, Rhonda Rousey can beat up most men, so it's dumb to generalize like you're doing", or... etc. I cannot overemphasize how common it is. It is almost always one or two weird exceptions, followed by "...therefore there is no pattern here move along". It's something about this particular topic specifically, I swear.
I had always heard of the Athenians being compared to Afghans in their cloistering of women. Spartan women took on many of the roles that men would have in Athens, since Spartan men were all busy in the military.
"The wives of Spartan citizens were expected to not do *any* work, as work is for slaves. The Spartan wives were thus proud of how free and unburbened they were."
The Spartan women were expected to oversee the day-to-day operations of the slaves. Think of them as management rather than not working.
The easy part first: men and women traditionally wear different clothing because they have different bodies, and because the things they typically want to signal with their clothing are different, and because they are expected to do different jobs that put different requirements on their clothing. The latter has become less important, the former not so much.
Gender roles in general: one's sex used to dramatically restrict what kind of life model a person could choose - motherhood was and is obviously for women, and was almost inevitable without birth control; hard physical labor, soldiering etc. was for men only. That lead to all kinds of differences in the way people act and communicate with the same and the opposite gender - among men, physical violence is always an option; among women, it isn't; men are expected to be useful and tough, women are expected to be patient and kind etc. A man behaving like a woman would be perceived as a useless pushover; a woman behaving like a man, as overly aggressive and not suitable as a wife and mother.
So, people long for guidance - how do I have to behave as a man/ woman to not embarrass myself? And there's your gender roles. (Also, gender roles serve to rein in the pathological aspects of each sex's tendencies - e.g., by formalizing chivalry as an acceptable outlet for male aggression.)
Some of the factors that shaped gender roles are still relevant; others may have become irrelevant in a modern society, but are still evolutionarily etched into our psychology and physiology. So gender roles are still needed, and trying to get rid of them can cause confusion and allow the mentioned pathologies to manifest themselves. IMO, the trick is to offer reasonable, constructive gender roles as guidelines that people can follow and be on the safe side, but can bend and ignore if they feel they have to, without suffering undue penalties.
I agree with all of this but would add that conservative ideas about conformity tend to keep ideas around gender roles around for longer than they are relevant. In the West, for example, men go to work and women don't. Except they do now and it takes a couple of generations for the new paradigm to replace the old.
Women now constitute the majority of graduates, PhDs, doctors, biologists but a previous generation grew up where the opposite was the case. It's not surprising that this gives them culture shock.
There will come a day when the term 'Patriarchy' is no longer provides a useful description of society but people will continue using for a couple of generations after it became irrelevant.
>There will come a day when the term 'Patriarchy' is no longer provides a useful description of society but people will continue using for a couple of generations after it became irrelevant.<
Yes; possibly, when women make up more of the college-educated and "elite" (e.g. doctor, PhD, biologist) populations, say, then those who speak of "patriarchy" will be clinging to a useless and irrelevant term. We can only dream of such a day.
Access to academically elite fields is significant progress. Also, Roe v. Wade was just repealed. The term “patriarchy” will be irrelevant when all forms of power, including political and financial, are more representatively held. Patriarchy will be over when being a woman does not contain extra hurdles to access to power, all else being equal.
The conservative tendency to keep ideas around for longer than they are relevant has to be balanced against the progressive tendency to deem as irrelevant ideas that are still relevant to a portion of the population. Most social tendencies such as the traditions that make up gender roles are ideas that don't cease to be relevant for everyone at the same time; the idea that because they aren't relevant to part of the population means they aren't relevant to any of the population is a fallacy (see "luxury beliefs").
Gender roles are often amplifications of biological facts. Historically women didn’t fight because they just weren’t strong enough. They worked in the home (after marriage) because in times of child mortality getting children to survive was important.
None of this excuses later prejudices, like feet binding of course.
Gender roles != gender identity.
Regarding your last line... Gender roles do not explain all of gender identity, but there's overlap. I suspect there are very few trans individuals whose transition only includes the internal identity label and requested pronouns. Even if there is no physical transition, there are usually behavioral transitions (e.g., dress, mannerisms). Otherwise, what precisely are you transitioning from and to?
I admit I am confused and do not understand the subjective experience of a deeply felt identity separate from a label / heuristic for the underlying descriptions.
If someone told me they were trans, but presented as cis in every other way, I would still treat them as anyone else and use the requested pronouns, but it would be as confusing to me as the converse -- someone saying they were cis but transitioning in every way other than label or identity.
I think in many cases, these people are transitioning from "uncool" to "cool". This is a fairly recent phenomenon, but I think not a small one. LGBT is now "cool" in many circles, and while L and G require very costly signals if you're not really into them, some forms of B and T (et al) are essentially cost-free.
Fair enough, social credit being weighted in one direction is an obvious explanation I should have noticed, especially in the nearly-cost-free situations (e.g., the non-binary identity JonathanD mentioned in the other comment about his daughter's friends.)
And with that, I hereby declare the mini convocation of Jo(h)n's to be concluded!
This is a thing I've seen a bit lately. Femme presenting women or girls declare themselves non-binary, ask for they/them pronouns, and do nothing else differently.
Two of these are two of my 11yo daughter's friends, which has me bracing for a similar conversion from my kid.
It's befuddling. These kids are in every visible way still little girls. They certainly aren't identifying with boyhood in anyway. It's like the end state of feminism has been to make these kids embarrassed to be called girls. Which I'm pretty sure wasn't the point.
Feet binding was a mark of being rich enough not to work. The equivalent for men would be the really long fingernails (in China), or the shoes with really long toes (long enough to require binding up to the legs), or the enormous amounts of lace that were fashionable at times before the Industrial Revolution.
I think a lot of these gender roles are just people looking down upon the different. Maybe due to a desire of predictability.
Take the analogy with left handedness. It used to be highly stigmatized, parents would tie down their kids' left hand in order to force them to use the right one. You could try a functional explanation, like "the Roman army needed all soldiers to lift the shield with the same hand to form a shield wall", or, "mass produced items tend to favor the majority, so parents would try to change their kids hand orientation as to make them better adapted to use such items". But these explanations seem limited and can you really change peoples' hand preference by stigma?
Anyway, it seems like the majority of people are right handed, therefore people looked down upon those who weren't. People have a mental model of the world, and things that conflict with that mental model create cognitive dissonance provoking a negative reaction and then stigma. Is this adaptable? Only insofar as noticing differences is good as it might indicate a problem, a disease, a deficiency or something that could be fixed. But in this particular case this adaptation just misfired.
I think a lot of these gender norms are like that. Of course you then have to explain why are men and women different on average, but that is left to evolutionary psychology. So why are evolutionary explanations not enough to explain stigma? In some cases it is, I think slut shaming is intra female competition, in other words a guild like behavior to punish those who are trying to lower the value of sex, and thus taking power from other women.
But take makeup for example. Why do women wear makeup? In order to increase attractiveness and increase their sexual market value. What's the problem with a man wearing makeup? It doesn't seem like there is any social problem. Of course he would be hadcapping himself (or it might serve as a crippling signaling, as in "I'm so manly that I can wear makeup and still be attractive to women", like David Bowie and other old school rockstars). But socially, what's the harm?
And yet, people do seem threatened by it. As you said "people can feel like the social world is crumbling if gender roles are shaky". "This is not how things are supposed to be!" I think people defending their expectations and avoiding cognitive dissonance is a better explanation.
"Take the analogy with left handedness. It used to be highly stigmatized, parents would tie down their kids' left hand in order to force them to use the right one."
This "used to" is doing way too much work. Even within our own culture, it's only during some time periods that lefthandedness has been stigmatized. (I also suspect that the *level* of stigma was always higher among the working classes than the aristocracy.)
My idea is that the salient variable is just how conformist the surrounding culture is at any given time period. My dad got his hands beaten with a ruler for being left-handed; when I went to school in the same town that didn't happen. Japanese swordsmanship famously to this day (including kendo) just plain doesn't allow you to use a left-hand grip, while western fencing has a centuries-long tradition of arguing about whether southpaws have an innate advantage as fencers or if it's just habit, etcetera.
[The following is a first-pass off-the-top-of-the-head theory]
With regards to social signals such as makeup, one has to think about what they mean both in terms of what they signal to potential mates and what they signify to potential competitors, and this differs for men and women as well as in different times and conditions. In times of peace, showing off your wealth is a way of making yourself look better as a prospective mate. In times of conflict, making yourself look strong to ward off competitors is more important than making yourself look wealthy.
Spending the time to make yourself attractive (whatever form it takes at the time: makeup, powdered wigs, jewelry, etc.) is often a signal of both wealth and of physical weakness. A female that makes themselves weak but successfully attracts a male can rely on the male they attracted to overcome that weakness. Renaissance and Victorian era upper class males could rely on attractiveness via makeup (or the equivalent) to show off their wealth because their social status meant they didn't need to compete on strength. In the modern era, makeup is cheap (so it doesn't make a man look wealthy) and it has lingering connotations signifying weakness, so it's not a good social signal.
Actually wrt left-handed stigma: I'm almost certain this is an echo of Indian purity practices (as an overwhelming majority of languages come from Proto-Indo-European, I expect cultural norms to descend in the same way).
If there is a widespread social convention that you do pure things, including things that require dexterity (note the etymology!) with your right hand and impure things with your left, and you see someone doing it the other way around - particularily in a way that looks like the person is disrespecting/contaminating you and your things on purpose - that can lead to, uh, misunderstandings, some of them violent.
What follows is an attempt at a rough first pass answer from a conservative perspective; it's what comes off of attempting to generate an answer quickly and thus may contain inconsistencies. I appreciate comments that will help refine my answer.
What we see as 'gender roles' are thousands of years of tradition built on top of sexual selection, raising offspring, and division of labor. By sexual selection, I mean the process attracting a mate. This is something animals do; we don't talk about peacocks having 'gender roles'. Individuals need to both signal that they are looking for a partner and demonstrate their fitness as a partner. When I say 'raising offspring', there are several important parts of it from a 'roles' perspective. Some of it is found elsewhere in nature: females have to actually carry the child to term, and they also produces nutrients for the infant. On top of this, since the male's work is done once the child is conceived, the male is expendable. This leads to part of the 'gender roles' like 'women and children first' on a sinking ship. It also plays into 'division of labor'. Males being both expendable and being on average physically stronger makes them more suited to harder or more dangerous work like the profession of 'soldier' (and a lot of society is built around this particular profession).
You can pull all of the accumulated traditional cruft away from the roles assigned to the genders, but you can't eliminate these three distinctions in the sexes that generate the distinct roles.
If you're going in that direction, you also need to consider "bachelor baboons". The dominant males tend to be at the center of the pack, then a cluster of females and their kids. The remaining males are at the outer edges where they serve as both a early warning system, and as a guard. (Naturally, things are actually this regularly structured.) At one point our ancestors lived in an environment similar to the one baboons tend to be found in, and that may have pushed them in the same direction. (But people are a lot more mobile than baboons, and are cursory hunters, so there is also a push in the direction of wolf packs. With relatively equal roles between the sexes.) And we descended from the same ancestors as did the chimpanzees, and they've got a different set of behaviors, so our starting place was different.
Here it's worth noting that one of the major differences between humans and chimpanzees is that human females conceal when they are fertile. So you've got to figure why that was advantageous, and how that fits into the sex roles model. I suspect it's one basis of durable pair bonds in humans. (Not *the* basis, as among extremely closely related species of voles the species that has durable pair bonding has increased production of oxytocin.)
So there's lots of stuff going on, and any simple story is going to be incomplete. But biological evolution takes place over evolutionary time (not a slow as we used to thing), while social evolution takes place over cultural evolutionary time (much faster), but needs to fit into the biologically evolved context.
Indeed, and another complicating factor is that humans have lively imaginations and busy hands, so we can make things fancy. And we do.
Being able to make things fancy is a luxury, in time, resources, and other trade-offs. If you're Louis the XIV, you can have a fancy hairdo. If you work with heavy machinery every day, not so much.
I have thought a bit about this question from a different perspective (the ethics of treating sex-specific medical conditions) and I came to the conclusion that the answer to "Why do gender roles exist?" is that gender roles come downstream of biology, and this is the reason they came into being and have been successfully replicated across time and different societies.
I think it is slightly unfashionable to talk in those terms nowadays, but I see the single biggest difference between men and women as the fact that women have to give birth if a heterosexual couple want biological children. There are also some secondary effects of this like the fact that hormones which regulate female fertility and so which allow them to give birth also decrease their muscle mass and so on, but I think the birth thing is the primary effect.
Up until about 200 years ago, giving birth was a process which required perhaps twelve economically unproductive months (6 months prepartum where you're too pregnant to do anything physically demanding, 6 months postpartum where you needed to breastfeed the baby and can't do anything that takes you too far away from the baby - although I've just made those numbers up so don't lean on them too much!). Over the course of family planning for a typical 1850's family of maybe 7 children this would take you out of the workforce for maybe 10 years (seven successful pregnancies plus a 20% infant mortality rate). This probably mattered a fair amount in agricultural societies, but unarguably mattered hugely in industrialising societies.
Consequently a family in the 1850s looking to have children and not starve needs to structure themselves around that economically unproductive time, which means evolving norms where the man goes out to work and the woman performs tasks around the home that are not too physically demanding (or rather, physically demanding tasks are structured around the cadence of the biology of childbirth). This might mean, for example, that the woman does a lot of unpaid cooking/clothing manufacture and repair, which is fiddly but fits around the demands of managing a household. I suppose this is sort of like your 'advantage of specialisation' story, but the important point is that the woman 'specialises' in having children and everything else fits around that.
But then I think a lot of what we regard as modern patriarchy follows from that. Since women know that they will be completely dependent on a man to provide for them for up to a decade, multiple very complex social conventions have been created to try and make sense of that arrangement. For example, the idea that men are expected to violently defend insults to their wives honour is presumably a reaction to the fact that there's a good chance the women is not in a fit state to physically defend herself depending on the stage of the pregnancy cycle she's at (plus, as I mentioned, women are generally weaker as a consequence of biology, which I fold into broader considerations about childbirth). Given this setup, men evolve norms of emphasising their physical prowess and dangerous-ness, while women evolve norms of trying to avoid giving offence.
However this isn't a perfect theory, because a lot of modern masculinity does NOT follow from this - why would boys be associated with blue and girls with pink on the basis of biology alone? Why trousers for boys and skirts for girls? So I think there might be a second story supervening on that where these biologically-derived gender expectations are also partially used as a sexual signaling / selection mechanism. For example if the expectation is that women are going to be raising all the children, then it might be a good idea for women to signal how caring they are to attract a partner, so it might be a good idea for women to be expressively fond of little fluffy animals like cats, so it might be a good idea for men to be expressively anti little fluffy animals like cats so that they are signaling how un-feminine they are.
Of course, many women can't or don't want to give birth, but the difference between a women who is fertile and a woman who doesn't want children is invisible from the perspective of society (plus I think those women are still a minority) so I think the reason we don't see more granulated targeting of birth-giving women is because it is easier to invent norms that apply to 'all women' rather than 'all women involved in this particular social contract'. For example, rules around female sexual purity are taught even to very young girls because they make sense in the context of 1850s biologically-driven social constructs for women who intend to reproduce. However by the time a women decides if she does want to reproduce these elements of gender identity have already been transmitted; "Men must pursue women, women must be the object of pursuit" and so on.
However I think your second question ("Why do people care so much about them?") is far more interesting and not something I'd ever really thought of before. 200 years is long enough for a lot of very deeply-embedded social constructs to change - arguably the construct of gay marriage acceptance changed within a single generation - but gender roles have been fairly systematised for a while. Obviously childbirth is still a massive deal, but the changing nature of the workforce and declining family size means that it is much less of an impediment to gender equality than it was a few centuries ago. Will be very interested to see what other people have on this point.
I think they care because of biology.
That is, I think most everything you say here is very well-reasoned and makes sense, but a piece you are (maybe) missing (can't tell, but I think it would answer your final question) is that it isn't unidirectional, but perhaps more of a loop: strong men and caring women have greater reproductive success ---> culture emphasizes strong men and caring women ---> strong men and caring women have greater reproductive success... etc.
After millennia of these things being selected for both by the facts of biology and by a cultural/sexually-selective emphasis, we get men who are — rather than blank slates ready to assume whatever role the culture is currently promoting — by and large *naturally inclined to these "traditional" roles.*
I find this in myself, for one. Without ever *meaning* to, without ever thinking "I NEED TO BE MASCULINE" (I'm so weak to impulse and pleasure that I doubt I could *manage* to change myself if my damn life depended on it... argh), I've ended up stereotypically masculine to a very high degree. It's all very ego-syntonic and I experience no distress at any masculine norm: it's pretty much all exactly what I'd want. N=1... but still, I think this might be common.
There's evidence for this but citing stuff for a post that maybe two people will read is too much work for a lazy fellow like me, so I'll just vaguely gesture in the direction of studies I've read and hope I'm trusted to be honest. For example: ape "kids" (what's the term? young? spawn?!) tend to show the same division of play that human children do (male apes are rougher, female apes groom and socialize each other more), even (human) kids raised entirely gender-neutral — or even with opposite-gender social conditioning — almost universally revert to biological type (boys, even if told it's girly to play with cars and manly to like dolls, still prefer cars, and vice versa), these things (as you noted) are pretty damn widespread and consistent for something that could be arbitrary to each culture, etc. etc.
As for stuff like "blue = boy, pink = girl"... I don't know how widespread these sorts of things are; you could construct some just-so stories to explain them; but overall (as you yourself led me to think about earlier!), I'd wager this kind of thing is just cultural accretion over, and/or to extend and emphasize, legitimate biological difference.
The blue for boy, pink for girl reversal is over emphasised anyway. It used to be light blue for girls and reddish pink, if it was even pink, for boys. And neither of these were common. Do an image search for “paintings of Victorian children” - no obvious pattern except white predominates. And these would be upper middle class children getting painted, for the most part.
Second time in this open thread that I'll mention Joseph Henrich and his "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter", though for an entirely different reason here.
What is missing from the unfortunately-polarized discussions of sex, gender, roles, and the rest is that everything human is recursively both genetic and cultural. To take one of his (earliest) examples: being hairless and absurdly good at sweating (by any other animal's standard) is downstream not just from the ability to figure out carrying water with you in gourds on the hunt but the ability to learn this technology from others and disseminate it species-wide (over thousands of years in deep pre-human history mind you). Gender roles are a kind of social technology which has evolved with us, and driven our phyiscal evolution (obviously so -- the archaeological record shows that sexual dimorphism in human skeletal remains has been increasing). This in turn drives further cultural disambiguation, etc. The conservative who says "sex is genetic, it's hardwired" is absolutely correct, as is the progressive who says "gender is social, it's malleable and on a spectrum".
What this implies about next steps, best practices (on a personal or societal level), or anything else is another story (as is the proven, so-well-known-it's-in-textbooks-on-endocrinology hormonal damage we've suffered in the last century due to chemicals in agricultural run-off).
Because they are hot. Erasure of gender roles leads to dead bedrooms.
Gender roles are the culturally evolved answer to human sexuality and psychology. They provide an obvious route for a person to optimize both their appeal to the opposite sex, and the respect they receive from their own.
I don't necessarily agree with the strong version of that argument, but do feel that not-having-a-role leads to...unpleasantly high search costs due to difficulties of product evaluation. There's a huge amount of metadata riding on gender roles, and to intentionally null or muddy that requires a good reason to overcome. Doesn't seem like an accident to me that pretty much all the "nonbinary" type folks I know have partners who are...also NB.
I feel like this is a trap a lot of modern men have fallen into. De-masculinized just enough to be in some kind of uncanny valley of non-gender-roled confusion. I guess that's the charitable case against the so-called Nice Guy trope. Doesn't seem to be an analogue on the women side.
Obviously, on an individual level, whatever makes people happy is their prerogative and I try to support it. But it does create macro-society level problems when the...mating market turns dysfunctional. Which should concern everyone.
There's a funny thing about lesbians specifially where the vast majority of them actually prefer hyperfeminine women just like straight men do... buuuut all of them also want to be careless (or deliberately "aesthetic" which is at least as unattractive) with their clothes, get tattooed, have short hair etcetera and figure they've "shaken off the inconvenient and oppressive burden of pleasing men", so their dating pool ends up being mostly androgynous women. Similarly, and germane to the conversation on the use of gender roles, none of them want to make the first move, so there are lots of missed opportunities with associated neurotic angst. If you hang out around single lesbians for any amount of time you'll see quite a bit of this seething/thirsting pattern.
I share the sense of other commenters that there's been a lot more room made for nuance and subcategories *for women*, but much less headway for men. Would also differentiate between androgyny-as-look vs nonbindary-as-gendered-behaviours, but perhaps that's splitting hairs. Anecdotal evidence also seems to suggest that the premium for skewing more traditional-ways is still net positive, although that tends to cover more use cases than just the mating market (e.g. job evaluation). Unsure what the current state of empirical literature is, if there could be such a thing on such inherently qualitative measures.
I think a weak form of your argument ("certain gender roles arise because because they coincide with what the opposite sex finds attractive") is probably true, but the strong form ("People who don't strongly cleave to stereotypical gender norms are utterly repulsive") is incredibly off-base.
I'm a man who is attracted to women who are not stereotypically-feminine within the culture I reside and in fact have some stereotypically-masculine traits (I find confident, sexually-aggressive women, women with good muscle definition, and women in business suits hot). I also have a high sex drive- hardly a nymphomaniac, but high. I'm also far from the only person who finds these sorts of things attractive. There are a LOT of people out there who have fetishes for tomboys, female body-builders, women in business suits, etc., not to mention the entire category of femdom, which is inherently built around the idea of inverting the stereotypical gender dynamic. These aren't weird, small, niche fetishes either.
In addition, there's also the fact that many men and women don't find highly-gendered people hot- I've known about as many women who find the stereotyped "macho man" grotesque-looking as ones who find him a dreamboat. Likewise with men splitting between finding the highly-gendered female look (known in the us as the "Bimbo" look) repulsive and exciting.
Beyond that, there's also the fact that the same sexual signals can be very different in different cultures. Are you shredded in the US? You're a man's man's man who all the women want. Are you shredded in Japan? You're a man's man's man in a very literal sense, in that you'll be assumed to be an aggressive homosexual.
If you're asserting the strong form of the argument, you have to really grapple with all of this instead of making a totalizing statement. You could try to dismiss all of that as "rounding errors", but at a certain point hand-waving away errors starts to look less like nit-picking and more like you refusing to address structural flaws in your argument.
My own stance is somewhere between the weak form and strong form, as stated.
I'd say that conforming to a gender role gives you broad appeal, nonconforming may give you some niche appeal at best.
Come to think of it, some ways of not conforming are better than others. It's better to be feminine like David Bowie than be feminine like Shinji Ikari*. It seems insults about being unmanly/unwomanly can be split into "you're not sexy because you don't pattern match to your gender" vs "you're not sexy because you're a whiny little bitch / a she-Hitler that has a problem with everything", where it's about traits unattractive regardless of gender, but more apparent in one of them.
* - the fact that I can't find a real-life famous example is telling, because... people with these traits don't become famous, despite being commonplace IRL
1. "Niche appeal at best" might be absolutely true, but I feel like it ultimately ignores the fact that there's a LOT of niches out there and a "small niche" will still mean millions of people in the US alone.
It also probably ignores the fact that these kinds of attractions aren't binary and it's possible to be attracted to multiple "looks" at once.
2. It's deeply funny that you can't identify a famous male who features negative feminine behavioral stereotypes, because my mind immediately went to Seth Rogen. He is the very poster child of "hysterical behavior" whenever he's not on-set, he simply lacks feminine visual aesthetics.
3. My next point in regards to gender roles, then, is: what's bad about having niche appeal? Most music has niche appeal, and music which doesn't often gets derided as immensely dull.
...Speaking of that, I wonder what the overlap between people who get immensely offended at people who don't cleave strongly to archetypal gender roles and people who deride music genres that aren't socially-approved-of.
I think it would be useful to have statistics here. I don't have them on hand, but IIRC the people who do not find "highly-gendered" people more attractive ("without confounding from having to publicly state such a position" might be important) are a much tinier minority than you'd think (as a fellow member of our subculture here, which selects for atypical people).
E.g., even women who claimed not to find muscular men attractive *still* selected them as more attractive than less-muscular men, more often than not. (Again, from memory — could have been a tiny crappy study or something, of course.)
Of course, it is not universal. I don't know if anyone is actually *making* the "strong form" argument you constructed, and it does seem wrong... but it seems reasonable to say "yeah for the majority it's true that gender roles and traits make things hotter."
-------------
...certainly works on me, at least! The more stereotypically feminine a woman is, the more attractive and appealing I find her — both physically and mentally. Like, for me at least, it's too hard to go too far in this direction. (I don't believe the "Bimbo" pattern is really the "ultimate feminine", though. It's too specific to a certain time and place, as I understand it — e.g., the focus on "tall and blonde and this style of make-up" etc.)
I suppose I *do* find it almost repellent to consider an aggressive, rough 'n' tough, ripped-und-jacked woman (...so perhaps I'm biased, heh). Might have something to do with me being a very stereotypically-masculine man, though, come to think of it; since day one, basically, and not by design or anything.
I wonder if the guys saying they like muscular aggressive women are themselves less aggressive and muscular than average? Is this sort of like "opposites attract" again?
Well, n=2, but I fall more into the "opposites attract" camp (save that I'm tall and fantasize about taller women)- but my roommate is a muscular, aggressive man who's attracted to muscular, aggressive women.
That's interesting. Maybe there's no general principle here and I'm tilting at windmills... *or maybe we're on the verge of a breakthrough!*
EDIT: I will say that my ex did not like extremely muscular men *at all*, and I empirically verified this... but she was very stereotypically feminine (small, shy, sweet, gentle). I think she did like that I was taller and stronger than she was, though. I have no idea what this means for our theory.
I don't think strongly gendered people are hot. Perhaps most people do, but it's not an absolute, and I also think the original question is much more interesting than your dismissal of it via this categorical statement.
Homosexuality is a rounding error on this scale. Cultures optimize for the median.
Also, suppression of homosexuality for thousands of years caused many people who would have lived homosexual lives today to lead hetrosexual ones and produce offspring. (With or without homosexual partners on the side.)
Are you adding in the heterosexual people like Victualis who find strongly-gendered people repulsive in that number? Or heterosexual people who find "feminine" traits in men or "masculine" traits in women attractive? Or are we going to pretend that those groups don't exist either?
How large of a percentage of the population would need to not obey the totalizing statement "men only find stereotypically-feminine women attractive and women only find stereotypically-masculine men attractive" before you'd start to consider this theory wrong? Double-digit percentages?
Hold on! Did Victualis say "repulsive"? Did trebuchet say "only"?
(I guess you *can* make the case that trebuchet's initial statement implied "all/only", but it isn't how I read it, at least. If Victualis said or implied "repulsive", though, I missed it.)
...is this important? I don't know... but maybe, okay!
I suppose my objection here would be "does 'gendered traits are involved in sexual attraction for most people, as you would expect of evolution' imply that there are no exceptions, and if not, what's the problem here?" Exaggerating "less attractive" to "repulsive" sort of seems like a way to make the exceptions seem more significant than they perhaps actually are, I guess?
- I believe you mean "a real dog", who said, in response to the question "why do (stereotypical) gender roles exist and why do people care about them?" with:
"Because gender roles are hot. Erasure of gender roles leads to dead bedrooms."
Which can reasonably read as "Because traditional gender roles are hot. Erasure of traditional gender roles leads to dead bedrooms."
Which implies:
"People who do not conform to traditional gender roles are not sexually attractive."
All else falls out from this.
No, I shall not, because my point is that if your totalizing theory of gender roles and sexuality doesn't explain very large regions of the interaction between gender roles and human sexuality, then it sucks as a totalizing theory of the relationship between gender roles and human sexuality.
My understanding is that obligate homosexuality isn't all that common across species. Basically, us & sheep are the only ones where the frequency is above 1%.
I would love for gender roles to be socially constructed but I just don't see it. The male black widow never consumes the female. Gender roles are so universally biological in other species it seems like extreme wishful thinking to think that would not be the case in our own.
Oh sure, I don't think that human gender roles are AS biological as black widow gender roles
But if, in the end, spider society reached an equilibrium between pickup artists and Black Widow Widow Studies professors where in extremely traditiobal cultures the female ate the male every time, whereas in more liberal cultures they just get to have sex with no cannibalism... that's still an extremely real set of biologically imposed gender roles. Men still never eat women. And maybe in progressive liberal societies the female can resist the urge to eat, and the man resist the urge to be eaten. But you can't simply define the asymmetry away as 'complicated'.
And if pigs could fly there's be a lot more shit everywhere. You're gambling an awful lot on people just accepting the idea that (American, mid-20th century) gender roles are in fact some hardwired set of commands when the fact that there are gender roles that are in fact fairly different from American mid-20th century gender roles indicates that your insistence on these things as rigid biotruths instead of plastic objects formed from a variety of biological and social factors is simply incorrect.
The most you could put down as iron-clad is "Women are expected to care for their children". Everything else has been historically negotiable.
Sorry, arguing with you is extremely exhausting and I don't intend to put forth the effort this time.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk
Seems fairly sound, though it fails to mention pushback against longtermism from within rationalism and EA.
I would think that one of the strongest arguments against longtermism is that we don't know that much about the future, so building a sounder present is more solidly based in knowledge.
Maybe there's a parallel between getting hypnotized by the future potential of the human or post-human race and getting hypnotized by "luxury space communism".
The piece relies too much on picking apart the point that longtermism fights for the value of 10^24 (or whatever) future lives to be created instead of focusing on immediate suffering here and now.
I always saw the premise of targeting x-risk as: wiping out 100% of life is dramatically, inarguably worse than wiping out 99% of life (which is among the most horrendous things I can think of). At least that 1% can stand a chance of bouncing back and continuing the existence of quite a unique and special phenomena in the universe. Life > No life. And the same extends to a parochial speciest view that Human life > No human life.
I have scepticism on longtermism as a movement and some disagreements with pure utilitarianism generally, but I thought the constant hammering of the "potential 10^24 lives in the future" in the piece was a needless distraction that made me think less of the author every time it was raised.
here’s a response on the ea forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kageSSDLSMpuwkPKK/response-to-recent-criticisms-of-longtermism-1
And a response to the response: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7WxH7fAq76Mvkx5YC/a-harmful-idea
My take-away from these is that Torres in the CA article Nancy linked makes a lot of poor characterizations of what longetermists do and think in the vein of (paraphrasing that EA forum response) "we better not let moral philosophers anywhere near trolleys!" But that also Torres makes a compelling argument that longtermism has weaponizable aspects that are kind of terrifying to have wielding influence, not due to what the current EA/longtermism communities are doing, but of the potential for future massive failures. It's scary to be able to say that actually this thing, with no visible present-day effects, is more important than the loss of a billion human lives today. Even if every longtermist today is smart enough to avoid that failure mode, how long will it take for a demagogue to weaponize that? Longtermists aren't unaware of this potential, but maybe lack the appropriate urgency.
My other take-away is that the responses to Torres writing have been pretty poor, with a substantial amount of trying to minimize the article rather than address it. See one commenter on the EA forum here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9YFYuw7qAj3ovh9uK/phil-torres-article-the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and
> I think it would be tempting to respond to him directly on twitter, but I think that would just give this article oxygen. I don't think we should reward a bad (in my opinion) article like this
and another
> Posts that criticize Longtermism, posted directly by the writer, or in this case deliberately brought in, aren’t just bad in content by a huge margin, but also seem to be intellectually dishonest. Frankly, it suggests criticism of this topic attracts a malign personality.
I'm not really sure what that last quote means, but it doesn't sound like a community that embraces criticism. See also the response on LW that I linked above that is downvoted to -41 with only two on-topic comments. The EA forum response has no push-back on the Torres' claims of silencing of critics - though I guess it's hard to respond to vague claims. This has overall moved me towards, say, Zvi's position that EA is insular and not responsive to foundational criticism despite claiming otherwise.
Lastly, I'd say that most of Torres' theoretical arguments seem to be against utilitarianism or total utilitarianism rather than longtermism per se.
Mostly agreed. Setting aside a bunch of other considerations (_no_ depreciation rate for future events??? really???), but longtermism and more conventional long term thinking (for >1000 year periods) seem to me to just radically underestimate how unpredictable the future is. We regularly get the _sign_ of the effects of our actions wrong on a decade time scale. Basing just about any current decision on anticipated impacts >1000 years later, on extinction risks or on any other parameter, strikes me as deciding based on pure noise.
That’s a good piece that I wasn’t expecting to be so convinced by. On the other hand, longtermism in this sense doesn’t seem all that important to current EA activities. GiveWell mostly gives to the poorest parts of the world in the same way you would expect if EAs didn’t care about longtermism. I’ve always seen the arguments in favor of working on X-risk mostly on saying that we should devote some non-zero effort to these, not that we need to drop basic humanitarian work to do them. AI work now largely focuses on pretty short term horizons that could hardly be called longtermism and more like basic survival (if you accept the premise). The justification that an aligned AI could prevent x-risk is well down the list of motivations for that work, despite what the article makes it sound like. But the quotes provided in the article do look literally dangerously fanatical and willing to trade off basic human decency for these goals in a way that would potentially be horrific.
I looked a little more into it. The author of that article also wrote a post “A Harmful View” on LW in January. It was downvoted to -41 without receding much response to its content. I think that speaks in favor of the EA-can’t-take-criticism claim, albeit slightly. This article was also posted to the EA forum and discussed there with more earnestly. The responses there primarily seem to be concerned about quotes being misrepresentations. They are being up what I said above, that EA doesn’t actually seem to be acting in the failure mode described here.
Actually, he does mention pushback against longtermism, but claims people get cancelled for it. I don't know how generally true that is.
Is there any price point for water such that it'd make economic sense to have...the dishwasher equivalent of a laundromat? Or would too much of the gains-from-scale be lost to logistical difficulties? I notice it's one of the few private household niceties that doesn't seem to ever have a public option version.
Before you reach that point you'd reach the point where it made sense to have durable metal plates, and a microwave that could heat them sufficiently to over-sterilize them. Even sooner it would make sense to have edible plates and utensils. (At one point cornbread was often used as a disk, and clam chowder is occasionally served in a hollowed out ball of french bread.) You could also consider trenchers, i.e. wooden plates that you scrape off, dry, and then can use sandpaper on.
I am genuinely surprised we don't already have widespread availability of edible plates and utensils, or high-durability low-cost metal dishes outside a camping context. (I guess metal straws are a thing, but that feels more like a misguided fad than anything.) The whole movement towards making "biodegradable" tableware one throws in the compost has been...I dunno, it confuses me how otherwise-extreme-chemophobes are somehow able to give "plant based plastic" a free pass.
I bet trenchers could easily be turned into a greenwashed trend though.
My favourite drinking glass hack is to buy tallcircle-shaped jars of, say, olives (Don't Forgetta Mezzetta[tm]) or peach/pear halves. Then wash them really well once empty, or dishwasher. Pickle jars are too wide to grasp comfortably, same problem with the kitschy Mason Jar Drinking Glass trend. (If it ought to require a handle, it's a __mug__, not a __glass__!) In addition to being designed for durable mass shipping with fairly high abuse, you also get a screw-on lid. And if it breaks, who cares, it effectively cost nothing in the first place.
The only trouble is they're not quite weighted properly to microwave, unless it's on a properly leveled surface. But mugs work better for microwavables anyway.
I think you run into one of weight, durability, or price, as a limiting factor on the dishes themselves.
I suspect that if the premium on water is that high, the next best alternative is using pressurized hot air to wash and sterilize dishes.
If water ever became this scarce (and somehow society didn't collapse) then you can hand-wash dishes much more water-efficiently than any dishwasher could do it.
A tiny bit of water and a lot of scrubbing is all you really need to clean your dishes, and it's still less effort than packing them up and taking them down to the dish-o-mat. Dishwashers are extremely water-inefficient because they use jets of water to do a job that could be done with a slightly damp rag.
This does not seem to be the prevailing consensus. Rather, with very efficient hand-washing techniques, you can perhaps _match_ efficiency with a modern dishwasher. An Energy Star dishwasher uses 3.5 gal or less per cycle, and you can pack a lot of dishes in.
Additionally the amount of energy to feed you for the time required to wash and scrub thoroughly seems unlikely to balance out, along with any additional tool waste (brushes, sponges, etc).
I think that with efficient hand-washing techniques you could wash a whole dishwasher load with a glass of water. First you scrape as much as you can off using sand. Then you thoroughly remove the sand using a cloth. Then you give each dish a scrub using a damp rag.
This page suggests using ashes https://www.superprepper.com/how-to-wash-dishes-without-water/
I mean, I hand wash my dishes with the faucet running, so maaaaybe I get up to 3.5 gal. But you can also hand wash with just the two basins of your sink each filled once. And that's only a gallon or so.
Presumably, you are not washing an entire dishwasher's-worth of dishes at a single time. I also am having a hard time picturing a sink small enough that two basins would be filled with a single gallon-jug worth of water.
Certainly not. I'm a single dude, the only time I have that many dishes is when I throw a party. Afterwards, I do often hook up my portable dishwasher and do it that way.
I think you should maybe measure how much water it takes to fill a basin in your sink.
This is really really dramatically wrong.
Dishwashers are far far more efficient than hand washing. It's not even close.
The difference is three pieces:
Dishwashers reuse the same water over and over again during the cleaning cycle.
Dishwashers get MUCH hotter than you can safely wash with your hands
Dishwashers can use much more potent solvents and detergents than you can safely wash with your hands.
An efficient dishwasher can do an entire load of dishes with 2-4 gallons of water.
If you examine the water after a dishwasher load completes, the water is pretty much maximally soiled - much much more so than the majority of people would be okay with sticking their hands in.
This is readily demonstrable on YouTube and Google.
You could beat this with hand washing only by moving the acceptance criteria of "clean".
Water conservation is very important, but dishwashers are the wrong place to look to optimize - they're already pretty fantastic. You could probably make them even more water efficient, but we'd be giving up a lot for it, a lot more than say, adopting turf or gravel lawns.
Oh good, I was wondering if I was having a minor sanity embolism or something. This is the consensus I and everyone else was taught, and I've never heard anyone actually claim hand washing to be more efficient...like, I tend to reuse dishes *many* times over between washes, but just that single act of hand-washing ends up using a lot of water. It'd be less if I didn't care so much about eating small amounts of dish soap, but, ick. No way to compete with an actual dishwasher.
Yeah, it's not a viable attack vector for the goal of improving water conservation, I was mostly thinking about the "why don't we have dish-o-mats?" question. Water usage would seem to be the most salient answer. One could probably do a "lifecycle analysis" and determine that the amount of water needed to produce the plastic, steel, rubber, etc. that goes into building a dishwasher is X gallons. But that's just a fixed upfront cost, the unbeatable efficiency should pay it off fairly quickly. Probably?
(Conservation-via-appliance wise, I'd rather aim for greywater toilets...)
If there's a price point for water that high, you have bigger problems than centralizing dishwashing. Starting with, you know, not being able to shower everyday.
Cultural gap: I find it very strange that most other people's bathing norm is to shower every day, or even multiple times a day. There's some genetic component to it - some have more active sweat glands than others, etc - but a lot of it seems like social enforcement/bathe-for-pleasure rather than biological necessity. Articles like this were briefly trendy some time ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/i-stopped-showering-and-life-continued/486314/
Personally, I shower once every few months, unless something unusual happens like being hit by extremely strong scent (>tfw fumigated in car by dozens of "air" "fresheners") or there's a fancy social occasion to look extra nice for. People basically don't notice this at all, at worst they might think I'm unusually tanned.
If I don't shower every day I smell like roadkill, in particular, I can smell my own scent which is rather unpleasant. Might be some genetic difference. It's not for lack of experimentation, as I sometimes go on long bike trips, sleep in a tent etc, compromising on hygiene out of necessity.
I expect you would, at least, need to shower after physical exertion?
You'd be surprised! It depends on the conditions though. I try to dress in breathable minimal layers if I'm expecting physical exertion; the default sweat system works well with exposed skin, and modern wicking technologies are really good. Problems more likely arise with, say, unexpected exertion on an usually humid (moreso than strictly hot) day while wearing heavy clothing. In that case I'll almost certainly end up washing said clothing before next use, and decent chance I'll at least take a quick rinse myself. (Socks are right out - I don't ever, ever, ever reuse those. Even shoes I try to never wear the same pair twice in a row. Don't ever want to experience athlete's foot again.)
I would note that I keep a dehumidifier running in my room all the time, so it's a quite dry environment by default. Not conducive to sweat, or odours accumulating on clothes. (The usual practice of throwing dirty laundry in non-breathable, closed space hampers is honestly really bad for them. Better to hang dry or otherwise leave out for awhile first.)
Genetics-wise, I'd always been told this is related to the East Asian prevalence of the recessive earwax genes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_wax#Wet_or_dry
But other pages on Wikipedia repudiate past literature which claimed this meant East Asians had fewer sweat glands in total, so I'm not sure the current explanation. Perhaps there are other genetic components to body odour besides absolute prevalence of sweat glands. Either way, it's definitely still an observed pattern. I want to say there's historical evidence too, that East Asian bathing habits shifted with increasing exposure to Western norms (e.g. in Japan, or American Chinatowns), but that's a stronger claim that I'd feel the need to give an actual citation for.
It's specifically apocrine sweat glands that are the problem (located only in certain areas of the body), the other kind doesn't cause odor.
"Modified apocrine glands include (...) the ceruminous glands, which produce ear wax" - you might be on to something!
How sure are you that people don’t notice? I’ve never told someone they smelt bad, but have thought it many times. I’ve even told people they didn’t smell bad when they did. There’s a weird social pressure to not call out smelly people. Instead we complain about them when they are gone.
And what do you mean by “unusually tanned”? You’re not talking about an actual layer of dirt, are you?
I'd assume at least a single person I've ever met sometime in the past three-ish decades would have been willing to buck such social pressure, especially cause I like to go tanktop-only for Real Serious Work at my job, and do work up gym-level sweats not infrequently. Bosses should have pointed it out if it was bothering anyone; it's one criteria of our semiannual reviews. No one's ever dinged me on cleanliness and appearance. I am also clued in to the workplace grapevine, and should have heard anything along those lines at some point over the 4 years I've been there. Since I have heard any number of *other* criticisms through back-channels. There are many reasons I'm controversial at work, but unless it's a really well kept conspiracy, this isn't one of them. (We have ever had other folks who did noticeably stink, and got a private talking-to about it, so it's not like a uniquely hippie office culture or whatever that isn't capable of such discernment.)
I'd also include the evidence of none of my friends doing so, when they've proven extremely capable of breaking any number of other social conventions and not being shy about calling me out on other physical flaws. This also includes people I've slept with. Even at that level of intimacy, the bigger lift for them was halitosis (which, yeah, fair - not much incentive to keep a kissable mouth when one has had zero dating life, it genuinely wasn't something that came up before then).
Actually, when the factoid does come up in conversation, I find that most people think it's fascinating and resolve to try it themselves and see what happens. Usually this arises from other women complimenting my hair and asking what products I use, and I'm like "nothing" and they're like oh what tell me more? Which to me seems like evidence that regular showering is, in fact, the stronger weird social pressure that people feel a need to conform to.
Yes, I do mean an actual layer of dirt. It tends to form stable patterns based on one's workflow motions and clothing choice. Easy to deduce that all my shirts are short-sleeved, for instance. People always mistake this for a tan, if they even notice it at all. It's sort of funny actually.
EDIT: I'm also highly infrequent about washing clothing, dishes, bedding, etc. So I'm gunning really hard in the direction of giving people any reason at all to ding me on purity norms, and it still just...doesn't happen. Evidence of absence isn't absence of evidence, I know that, but the prior odds just seem really improbable given the longitudinal study design. I furthermore notice that I get treated exactly the same on the odd occasions where I do shift to a high-cleanliness routine for awhile, so there's that too. No one notices the difference.
I don't use shampoo on my hair and get the same type of compliments and conversations. Sounds like the rest is also working out for you.
The density and fragility of dishes (vs the density and fragility of clothes) make this unlikely any time soon, I'd say. Transporting a few days worth of plates and glasses anywhere is much more difficult than even a week's worth of clothing.
Looks like Bryan Caplan will be debating Peter Singer (on ethics I'm assuming) in September.
https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1547577312257798148
I'm struggling to think of two more different thinkers that are adjacent to/have influenced the rationalist community, so it should be interesting.
From some comments he made on 80k hours, Caplan's approach to ethics seems to be to trust intuitions over philosophical analysis, which leads him to reject a a lot of non-mainstream views that are quite common among rationalist, like: animal rights, and I think consequentialism. Basically a kind of non-rationalist conservatism.
Personally I can't imagine Caplan will be able to contend with Singer, who's views are consciously self consistent and very much grounded in reason and just generally ahs a very compelling ethical framework, the denying arguments in favour of intuition approach doesn't seem like it can work well in a debate.
I'm interested in how people think it will go and if anyone is sympathetic to Caplan's viewpoint.
Peter Singer is an insane person disguised as a rational person. Caplan is right on this point (morality is generated by human intuitions about value in the first place and is inextricable from those; it is foolish to let pure reason take you to any point that contradicts these intuitions – burning the village in order to save it), thus he will presumably win.
Caplan seems to share a lot of his philosophical views with Mike Huemer, an actual philosophy prof. Surprised it isn't Huemer that's debating Singer instead.
If Caplan's views on ethics are as you've characterised them then he has the easier task, with a more audience-friendly view of ethics than Peter Singer offers.
Most people (including myself) would very much like to believe that you can live an ethical life by hanging around, being generally nice to people, and not doing any evil things. Peter Singer on the other hand promotes a view of ethics in which you can't possibly be a good person without making yourself poor and miserable; kinda like Catholicism without the forgiveness. Most people are highly receptive to reasonable-sounding argument which persuade them that what they're doing right now is good enough.
Internally consistent or not, Caplan is the guy who tends to win his bets at a rate anybody else only dreams at: https://www.econlib.org/my-complete-bet-wiki/
So when it comes to hitting objective level, he seems to know what he's doing. I agree that it will be interesting.
This list of bets includes him betting on whether he himself will finish reading a book- and more importantly, he evaluates himself on his *win rate* on the cover, but when you look closely, he includes bets such as risking $200 to win $1, meaning that even if this bet had no edge he wins 99.5% of the time
Institutions - particularly long lived ones - are groups of humans conducting ongoing experiments on the lines of "does this philosophy work"? ( In particular, "does it work for groups of humans?")
Individual philosophers such as Singer are under no such requirement to make their hypotheticals perform amongst the mirad unknown unknowns of actual large scale human society.
I have a lot of respect for Singer's abilities as a persuasive speaker and thinker, but that gentleman is one guy, and one guy with a number of horrific suppositions that harm human society rather than help it.
I am not so much for Caplan as pretty much again' anything Singer promotes.
The main horrific supposition that I've run into of Singer's is that he's pro-legalization-of-infanticide, which makes me think quite dimly of him.
What are some others?
He's also pro killing crippled and otherwise sub-useful humans, whilst against the killing of animals in order to feed humans.
That is a pretty ridiculous combination of views.
Can't tell if Singer being horrible makes his role in Unsong better or worse.
"You are morally obligated to give every single penny you earn above what is strictly necessary to maintain basal metabolic functions to maximally-effective charity work, and ideally you should also work 16-hour days doing work for said charities. Having any kind of personal life or personal desires while there is suffering in the world is an immoral act equivalent to withholding food from a starving child" would sum it up, I think.
I had sort of assumed that was a strawman of his position rather than his actual position, since he doesn't do that himself.
Having read his work- this is minimally hyperbolic regarding how far he thinks moral obligation extends. If anyone wants to draw a contrary conclusion, please chime in!
I mean, based on that he doesn't do that, I always took his argument to be: "This is what a perfectly moral human being would do. Obviously, we're all flawed, immoral sinners who aren't living up to that standard, but we should try to get closer to it."
"the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops" is an interesting combination of hilarious, absurd and sad. Maybe before you pledge a trillion dollars to something, you should wait until the technology that it all depends on has been shown to be, you know, feasible? From what I can tell, the efforts to develop a working hyperloop have been as fruitful as the skeptics predicted from the beginning.
I have previously complained about not receiving notifications to replies, so here is what fixed the problem for me: subscribing to ACX again.
It doesn't make much sense to me -- getting replies to your comment should not depend on whether you are subscribed to the articles or not; also a few months ago I was successfully getting notifications for other blogs I was not subscribed to -- but this is what worked for me, so maybe other people will find it useful, too.
Note that the subscription does not imply paying; you will also be given the option of free subscription.
Suppose you had a major highly-painful inpatient surgery planned, and were offered a choice between: the standard anesthesia routine, and very effective local-only anesthesia with a large price discount. (Like with wisdom teeth surgery.) Which would you choose, and why? How big would the discount have to be?
I would hope to never be in a financial position where I need to take financial considerations into account for something like anaesthetic.
I would go with whatever is medically advised. The price difference can't possibly be more than single digit thousands, right?
That's fair - even though largely covered by insurance (probably...if my employer doesn't change ours again out of the blue, grumble), the particular surgery I had in mind is in the $50k ballpark, and saving on anesthesia costs would only be a fraction of that. So one ought to optimize for medical outcomes rather than being pound-foolish. Genuinely unsure in this case, it's something I'd have to ask the surgeon. I suppose I am overly-discounting the risk of never waking up due to not being particularly attached to life in the first place; it'd be a peaceful and socially-acceptable way to go. Someone a lot more invested in their current life should rightly place a much higher premium on anesthesia risk mitigation.
(Expensive enough and with such wide error bars on efficacy that I'm pretty close to deciding to cancel the whole thing outright, frankly. Not really worth immiserating myself over. Major decisions should be made with as much info as possible though, and this is one of the few tractable "options" available that might change the calculations.)
Like others, I would take the local even without a discount, in any case where general anesthesia wasn't absolutely necessary. Unpleasant experiences are a much lower risk to my mind than even a small chance of just carking it while helpless to do a damn thing about it.
Point of information for folks down thread. There are at least two different anesthesia routines other than local. One is general anesthesia. The other is something milder, more like sedation, that also interferes with forming memories.
I've had both. In fact, I've even had both with the same surgeon - the first when she removed a tumor, and the second when she went back in a couple of weeks later to get a bit more, as the edges of what she'd removed proved to have tumor cells. (Standard procedure for certain tumors - in lay terms, you take all you can see, and a bit round the edges, and have the lab check the edges to see whether you got enough.)
The former is higher risk than the latter, but needed for longer, more complex surgeries.
The sedation routine is also normal with colonoscopies and similar procedures. I think it's also what's used when one is fully knocked out for wisdom teeth removal. But perhaps there are even more variants than I know about.
There is also "spinal nerve block" anesthesia. I've had it done once when having a broken thumb set. It's considerably stronger than local, but not as profound as general. Ideally it will only affect the area where it's being directed at, though it was a lot stronger than that. (OTOH, I did hear the surgeon go "Oops, that's not right." so I wasn't "out", and it didn't prevent me from forming memories, just from feeling any pain. It also kept me from being other than relaxed when I heard the surgeon go "Oops", but maybe there was also some sedation going on.)
For inpatient, I would definitely choose general anesthesia which is risky and comes with unpleasant effects (constipation etc) but I imagine still worth it given how jarring it is to have a conscious experience of being cut apart. Maybe women who have experienced a C-section can weigh in. I have heard accounts of it feeling disturbing, but all that is overwritten with the emotions and other physical effects of having a newborn baby.
I was circumcised as a teenager, in a part and era of the world when the business was performed by medical specialists (think midwife rather than surgeon) who operated private circumcision offices. My (local) anesthesia was insufficient, I said as much, and I was told by my butcher that I am a man now and must grin and bear it.
I can testify that the conscious experience of being cut apart is something most people can live without. The memories have mostly faded, but I think I could feel the foreskin being torn like a gigantic hangnail.
I didn't even get a baby out of it.
Oof, that's painful just to read. Very sorry for your completely unnecessary suffering. I remember watching a fictional presentation of teen circumcision in school (maybe it was the serial "Roots"?) and basically the entire class thought it was horribly barbaric and awful and We're So Civilized for not doing things that way anymore. Which is...sort of a weird thing to think about, how performing circumcision on newborns is civilized compared to the alternative. I guess it's easier to rationalize that a very underdeveloped consciousness has limited ability to feel pain or retain memories, but still...
Wow, that sounds horrific. I am so sorry.
Thank you. I am happy to report that the David school of circumcision has been banned in my country, Turkey, since 2015.
I can only hope that the pre-circumcision ceremony, which is ritually important and incentivizes parents to wait (at least) until the age of 7 instead of circumcising newborns, follows the fenni sünnet tradition to the grave.
Depends on how otherwise traumatic the surgery is, and how stressful it would be for me to keep still while being eviscerated, even if I only see the effects. If they nerve block me so I can't mess up whatever they are doing, sure, let's go with local.
General anesthesia is scary, confusing and actually risky. It doesn't help that the last time I had it, I experienced it as a cut from me on the table -> me on the bed, in the process of projectile vomiting across the room, inexplicably six hours later.
Personally, I would choose local anesthesia, since I am not very susceptible to pain and not very squeamish with being operated on, but full anesthesia scares me, and you don't really feel great when you wake up either.
Is there a price discount?
Anesthesia carries an increased risk, and has more expensive humans involved, raising the price, but surgeries on awake humans, I am told, are more nerve wracking for the surgeon and often take longer. So I am not sure the price discount is real.
It was on offer when I had wisdom teeth surgery around two decades ago, although I didn't see the actual bill cause that was on parents' insurance. If there was some financial chicanery involved, I didn't hear about it. Seems like a weird thing to lie about though. Cuts against medical-billing tropes.
I would probably choose local anesthesia even without the discount. I am not an expert, and would probably do some additional research before making the actual choice, but it seems to me that total anesthesia is a greater *health* risk.
I imagine that for some people the experience of being poked in body parts you do not feel might be horrifying. (For people who didn't have the experience: I had some tooth surgery in local anesthesia, and felt as if I had some rubber stuck inside my mouth and the doctor was operating on that rubber.) I am actually more scared about the idea of artificial sleep.
Off-topic: I am not a native English speaker, and the words "inpatient surgery" sound very funny to me -- as if they implied the possible alternative to do the surgery *out* of the patient instead.
Yeah, I took that option for wisdom teeth surgery to save $, and...I don't know...despite "not feeling anything" it was indeed deeply existentially horrifying? In a dysmorphia sort of way. Feeling-but-not-really-feeling. Like having a phantom limb operated on. Not an experience easy to describe in words, and I'll never forget it. Research has definitely made me more wary of being "put under", but comparing that theoretical risk with the concretely-known-awful squick of local anesthesia...it's genuinely hard to weigh! Kind of the same reason I have a hard time criticizing women requesting painkillers or C-sec for childbirth. Some varieties of pain do seem to fuck people up long-term much more than the direct physical effects...
For wisdom tooth extraction, I choose nitrous oxide. It was an interesting experience. I've got no idea why some people would do that for fun, but it wasn't that bad. My consciousness never went away, and I could feel the bones breaking as he pulled it out, but it wasn't painful. (Maybe he also gave me a local. If so, I don't remember it.)
Hang on what the fuck.
Your country does _general anesthesia for wisdom teeth surgery_ ? Around these parts (Poland) that would get your license to practice medicine/dentistry revoked I think, for recklessly endangering the patient.
Do you know in a general anesthesia a machine has to breathe for you, because you'd otherwise suffocate to death?
For demographics purposes, yes, this was in USA. Something like 20 years ago. Maybe practice has improved since then, I have no idea. It might be a technical thing, as DinoNerd mentions elsewhere there are more than one variety of being "put under"/general anesthesia. All I remember clearly is that I got the surgery first, when both options were offered. A few years later, my younger brother was in the same boat, and (I guess because it had freaked me out so much) he instead chose general. With no regrets whatsoever, afaik, although he's had a lifetime of dental problems so perhaps that colours one's willingness to experience mouth discomfort.
Perhaps it depends on the details of the case? Sometime the same procedure (by name or "description to non-professionals") can be a lot more difficult than other times.
That's what I got. I was offered both options, I asked the lady on the phone what she thought, and she told me that unless I *really* needed the money, I should take the general. Checked in with the wife later, who thought it was ludicrous to consider doing it with a local.
I dunno. They put me under for wisdom teeth extraction. It was just the Dentist and one assistant. Long time ago tho. There was no intubation or anything.
I had a local for reconstructive surgery on my hand but they also give you some anti anxiety stuff that made me pretty indifferent to what was going on with my hand. More interested in flirting with one of his pretty assistants. Now that I think about that it a bit that must have a very good anti anxiety med.
It's not universal, but yeah, it's not uncommon for USA orthodontists to offer general anesthesia for complicated wisdom teeth operations. I had it as well, because it was a longer surgery that required some gum slicing and extra work to extract turned-sideways teeth stuck above the gumline.
Huh. Was it your first local anesthesia experience? I've been having various dental interventions in the past few years, and I've gotten more or less completely use to having bloody things being done to my mouth. My only reaction is to be grateful for the invention of anesthetics, and that's pretty much it.
Speaking of, I found out that (at least some) local anesthetics wear of gradually over a few days. Most of the effect goes away in 1-2 hours, but at least some of it stays on and offers a less painful recovery. 10/10, would recommend.
First and only major surgery period, I've had a pretty good run of luck with the physical medical system in general. That might have had something to do with it, in addition to being young-ish at the time. Maybe it's easier to bear as an adult...I've learned a lot more tricks for mental stability in the 20ish years since then. Putting up with electrolysis is kind of the same, in a small-bore way, and that's completely elective so one doesn't even have the out of "have to do this or suffer Major Consequences". Mastering pain under local-only is definitely a skill that takes some practice - I think it's actually a little harder for people with high pain tolerance in general, since it's trickier to calibrate how much reaction-suppression one is supposed to practice.
Oh yeah, for sure. Some of that real strong local stuff is even available with a casual doctor's prescription. I'm pretty fond of Emla, though the price point is stupidly high to ever use for anything trivial/recreational. Good approximation of getting Botox though. "I can't feel my face *so much* that talking and drinking are now challenging!" Fun experience.
> ...as if they implied the possible alternative to do the surgery *out* of the patient instead.
Ah yes, the Voodoo doll method. Famous for its 0% nosocomial infection rate.
Only if the needles are properly sterilized.
Inpatient = the patient is staying in the hospital for some period (the patient is "in" the hospital).
So I been watching these “Doctor Blake Mysteries”. Is that meat and three veg still a thing down under. Do potatoes count? I mean okay you can steam some broccoli and cauliflower. That’s 2. Now some people consider corn a grain rather than a true vegetable. Okay carrots would work I guess. :)
"Meat and 3" is also a thing in the American South . The definition of "vegetable" in that context is fairly expansive--for example, macaroni and cheese is frequently one of the options for a vegetable.
Grace's Meat + Three is the name of a local restaurant. OTOH, I'd never heard of the more general sense that you guys are using.
(St. Louis native with some time living in the NE.)
Yes, "meat + 3 veg" is still very much a thing. I've eaten it for dinner ~90% of the last 3 years.
In terms of the justification for the rule, the three vegetables are 1) a green vegetable for the various things in green vegetables (vitamins C/K, magnesium, etc.), 2) an orange/red vegetable for carotene (vitamin A), 3) a starchy vegetable for calories (since the other two have low calories/gram and meat is expensive). So potatoes/rice/corn all count for #3 (I don't think corn has substantial carotene).
Cool. I think my favorite episode of Dr Blake so far was when the hard drinking doc gets test results showing something going on with his liver. The further testing revealed it was ‘just a touch of hepatitis’ and he is relieved. I think his back story may include being a POW in WWII.
The cars from the show’s era are fascinating.
I have memories of once reading a Scott post on SSC that went something like "Uber is cool because a lot of my patients have trouble finding traditional employment otherwise". But Google is failing me - probably not using exactly the right keywords - and no SSC article in my browser history seems to contain any such sentiment either. Maybe I'm mistaking Scott for some *other* blogger-psychiatrist?
It's https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/j9kxl0/my_california_ballot_2020/, the section titled "Prop 22: Yes?". The relevant section is probably
"But Uber and Lyft are great. Some of my mentally-ill patients who could never get an official employee job at a fast food place or something now have jobs with Uber and Lyft that they can feel really proud of and use to support themselves or supplement support from the government or their family. Anyone who's taken an Uber or Lyft knows that they're the first destination for new immigrants who get excluded from traditional employment. Or you've probably also met the single mothers who say they were never able to have a job before because they needed to be home at X, Y, and Z time for child care, but now that they're gig workers who can choose their own hours it's let them get back into the workforce and help support their families. It really feels like the same sort of situation you read about in pre-1970 books - a place where anyone, even if they're poor or disadvantaged or foreign, can get a job and earn an honest living for themselves in a way that the rest of the economy has completely dropped the ball on. I want to support these people, and the only polling I know of suggests most ride share drivers support Prop 22.
And Uber and Lyft have also really earned my trust and respect. Five years ago I worked in a clinic that wasn't on any of the public bus routes. Some of my poorer patients didn't have cars, and it would take them hours to get to my office, and sometimes they would miss some crucial public transportation step and not be able to make their appointments at all. Sometimes if they were desperate they would take a taxi, which would charge them through the nose and take its sweet time getting there. This was right when Uber and Lyft were expanding to Michigan, I was usually the first person to tell them about it, and it changed some of these people's lives. It's really easy for privileged people who own their own transportation to dismiss ride-sharing as a luxury, but if you don't have a car, you used to have severely limited mobility. Now you can get anywhere in town for a quick $5 Uber ride.
In a world of quickly-closing opportunities, Uber and Lyft are this rare bright spot, where uncredentialled blue-collar workers excluded from most positions can get flexible jobs with whatever hours they want, and where poor people who were previously locked out of most of the world can get anywhere they need to be for cheap. So of course California is trying to destroy them. It's the most California thing ever to California."
Ah, thanks so much! Yes, that's exactly what I remember. Not sure why I only thought to search SSC posts and comments rather than the subreddit. I guess because it's been moribund for years (sadly).
That post was on my mind cause of how Prop 22 eventually did shake out, and one of the major current losers being independent truckers...literally overnight, the truck deliveries at my job got much later/more erratic, after a long uphill battle to stabilizing during covid. It's been sad to see. I still don't think Scott's reasoning was correct on the merits, even with only the information that was available at the time, but it was an admirable steelman from someone with no reputational or financial self-interest to lie about such beliefs.
Scott, in the original Model City Monday post, one of your predictions was:
"Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%"
I think you toned down the dimensions *too much* (i.e. 170km length down to only 1km and 500m height down to only 100m). You also didn't specify budget. As written, I think this should be >1%.
For context, the Three Gorges Dam is 2.3km long, 181m high, and 115m wide (at the base; at the crest it's only 40m wide). It took 14 years and $32 billion to construct. It's also a fully functioning dam.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if KSA spends $100+ billion over the next 18 years and ends up with something at least 1km x 100m x 100m that is at least "inspired by" The Line.
I think you are probably right.
There has been some interest here in questions related to population ethics, and discussions in the comments show widely divergent ethical intituitions about these issues, ranging from antinatalism to embracing the repugnant conclusion. This has got me wondering about what psychological and sociological traits are correlated with people's intuitions on these matters. As far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be much research on this topic — the only thing I could find was a very recent article (Caviola et al., "Population ethical intuitions" [2022]), which seems to be the first attempt to generate survey data on these questions and which didn't attempt to find any correlations for the variation in responses. Could this be an interesting topic to explore in a future ACX survey?
(Some factors that might plausibly be correlated: socioeconomic status, gender, introversion, urban/suburban/rural location, birth family size, ...?)
Antinatalism isn't actually strictly mutually exclusive with the Repugnant Conclusion, or at least with the majority of the argument for it. The RC is the total-utilitarian conclusion for the conditions "lives are positive value, but more lives means greater competition reducing the value of each life". If you instead plug "lives are negative value" into total-utilitarianism you get antinatalism.
I would expect a strong correlation of antinatalism with depression for basically this reason; depressed people are more likely to think life sucks, which is one of the main ways to get to antinatalism.
Probably. That said I think life is great, mostly, but not only would I not want to live a life with the lowest positive utility, I wouldn’t wish it on the many billions needed to justify the results of the RC.
Note that the RC isn't "maximise number of people with utility > 0", it's "maximise sum of utility over people". So the only way it would produce a "huge number of people living marginal lives" thing IRL is if people's resource consumption goes to zero faster than their utility goes to zero, which seems to not be how the world works (utility goes negative while still at significant positive resource consumption, due to starvation). Realistic RC is probably more like "enough people that it significantly impacts QoL, but still >20% of uncrowded QoL".
Also, if you would not want to live life X, life X is at least by preference utility *not* "the lowest positive utility". "A life with the lowest positive utility", in preference utility, is by definition the worst life that you *would still want to live*.
Yes, depression is the obvious one, but perhaps too obvious to be interesting. So I guess you would need to set up the survey to make sure your correlations don't get counfounded by depression.
That's a simple step of adding a depression question though right? And then lets you measure and quantify the effect of what does seem like an obvious cause.
Not all depression is caught. Not all depression is of equal magnitude. Scott, in "Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know":
"Imagine a study that wanted to prove that having more cars made you happier. They do a survey and find that people with more cars are happier, but someone objects that maybe wealthy people have more cars and wealth makes you happier. Imagine that their response is to separate people into two bins: “poor people” who make below $50K and “rich people” who make more. They find that even within each bin, cars still make you happier. But this is just a problem of too few bins: a person making $10K is still very different from a person making $40K (and likely to have fewer cars). The attempt to remove confounding with bins fails."
You'd probably have to do some sort of quantitative depression test in the survey itself, and then match scores on that when comparing other things.
Okay, yes. To get as accurate as possible.
But a "Do you suffer from depression?" "Yes, diganosed" "Yes, Self diganosed" "No." should give some decent data.
Yeah, there is a 0% chance the Saudis (the Arabs? not sure why a nationality is named after an extant family) build something resembling the Wall from Game of Thrones in the next decade (I'll draw a line at any structure >250m high for over 5 miles). I am getting annoyed by the constant "but maybe" tone.
I mean, rationalists hate to give anything a 0% chance. What if aliens arrive with matter-constructing rays? What if we find out upon the death of QE2 that we are in a Minecraft-like simulation? What if the Constructing Name makes megastructures 100 times cheaper to build?
But ... no.
Same here. Its clearly a vanity project by the crown prince and probably some money laundering scheme (though I can't figure out what that would be considering he controls all the money already). This thing isn't getting built.
> not sure why a nationality is named after an extant family
Is it a nation or just the chunk of the Ottoman Empire that one family managed to crowbar off as it imploded?
Is it more absurd than the Medieval Chinese building walls and fortifications stretching across thousands of miles of desert, mountain and forest, using clay, sticky rice and lime?
Yes. One of the purposes of those walls was to have a work camp that would kill off political prisoners while having a politically defensible public reason.
Via multiple attempts over centuries, and the wall wasn't nearly as high, and the problems were much better understood. For instance the transportation problem is (as far as I can tell) "and then a miracle occurs..."
Not particularly similar I think.
Note that China both mediaeval and modern is quite a bit economically bigger than Arabia (GDP of the PRC is 15-20x that of Saudi Arabia). The PRC might be able to build the Line if it wanted it as much as bin Salman does (though non-monarchies rarely want things that much).
Also, the Great Wall was built the same way they had already built city walls. Neom would be comparable if it were just a regular city like Saudi Arabia already has, only bigger.
The design of Neom is similar to an horizontal line of skyscrapers, which are a well known technology.
One advantage of the line design is that everyone is maximally close to the countryside (such as it is in Saudi Arabia).
Let's make a bet. I'll give you $1 if nobody builds a structure >250m high and >5 miles long in Saudi Arabia within the next 30 years, and you'll give me $100,000 or your entire net worth (whichever is greater) otherwise.
Obviously I'm not going to do that. When you account for the time-value of the money at-risk, I would lose money even if I won the bet.
Also, I consider "they cut the trans-oceanic communication links and instead give us a stream of GPT-3 generated fake news about the other hemisphere" more likely, and if somebody has a large bet riding on it I can be sure "Saudis complete preposterous construction project" will be in there.
So if you won't take that bet, on what odds would you take the bet? 1:100? 1:1? 10:1?
30 years is longer than 10 years. Also, inflation and possibility of global catastrophe work significantly in your favour here given the timeframe and the possibility of early payout.
$1 is also probably not worth the time and effort to maintain contact with you to extract said $1 when the time is up (in particular, the cost to take you to court exceeds $1). So taking this bet on these terms has effectively no upside even granted a negligible possibility of you winning.
Do you think there's a 0% chance I would voluntarily pay up? Even if it's 1% instead of 0%, it's Alex Powers who suffers no downside, not me.
I'm not just referring to that, I'm referring to the work of remembering the bet exists and keeping lines of communication with you.
Odd question: Does anyone watching this know what the odds of a random person being delusional are? If a random person can expect to be believing glaringly false beliefs e.g. 0.01% of the time, then for us to assign _any_ belief odds of less than 0.01% or more than 99.99% looks untenable.
( kind-of like the subjective analog of the lizardman constant in polling... )
I could give a 0% chance to potentially a infinite number of events. Or 100% to the events not happening.
Sorry, but 10^-10 chance is also nonsense. You can't have observed enough pieces of information to validly make that assertion. And in this specialized case I think even 10^-5 is unreasonable. There's just too much uncertainty. But it *does* seem like a negligibly small chance. That I know I can't put any valid number on just *how* small doesn't change that. (And it's not worth trying to put a more accurate number on it.)
Couldn't some atomic interactions might have such tiny probabilities?
They might have "such tiny probabilities", but you could never know that they did.
Well, that's too strong a statement. It made me remember the search for proton decay, which was expected to happen once every 10^33 years, so they built a huge tank of detector solution (maybe it was Xenon, but it's been so long I don't remember) and looked at it for a long time. They didn't detect any of the right kind of signal, so they upped the estimated minimum lifetime. Google says it's now once in 10^35–10^36 years, and apparently that's beyond the experimental limit. So for SOME events you can get a decent estimate (with error bars) that's that small. But that's a VERY different context. It requires looking at a huge number of identical units with very sensitive instruments for a long time. You can't do that kind of estimation on a construction project.
"It requires looking at a huge number of identical units with very sensitive instruments for a long time."
Exactly agreed. If someone were to claim that they had a _single_ proton sitting in an ion trap, and that the chance of detecting a decay from it was 10^-35 per year, they would be neglecting all kinds of error sources with vastly higher rates.
"Sorry, but 10^-10 chance is also nonsense."
Generally agreed. Even for questions like "What are the odds that 2+2=5?", the odds that I have misunderstood the question are orders of magnitude higher than that.
"you're asking about the logical outcome of a system of rules that contain no uncertainty element."
Yeah, yeah. Within the bounds of it being a question about integer arithmetic, that is true. But if the question were really to come up in a real world context, there would always be a (fairly substantial!) possibility that there was a misunderstanding of some sort.
A simple example: The values printed are actually rounded versions of the real numbers. The underlying addition is 2.3 + 2.3 = 4.6, which after rounding looks like 2+2=5.
For more examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WPY5cfOOIM
I see what you’re saying, but isn’t making a prediction with 10 significant decimals absurd? Maybe just put an asterisk next to every zero (* we know it’s not really zero, but we’re rounding).
Oh also I missed the bit about significant digits, but 10^-10% only has 1 significant digit.
There's something particularly absurd about 0 since it means you literally will not update your belief no matter what evidence you see.
Why do you think it precludes updating? It’s just a number.
You put numbers to things in order to throw them into equations. Putting a 0 into bayes theorem breaks it, pretty much.
Uh oh, I have zero apples. How will I reason about anything?
Wait, but if an estimate of Neom's cost based on construction in nearby Dubai only says it will be like 2.5× over budget which is pretty good for megaprojects (maybe we should estimate this floating octagon stuff better based on the World Map Archipelago somewhere nearby?), doesn't it mean that Neom has a good chance of ending built far enough for the usable-ish part being already absurd?
Of course an alternative path is to break the construction material markets, and right now they are already sort of stressed, which could drive the costs up quite a bit or make construction grind to a halt.
I don't think any of these estimates are plausible full budgets - they are based on assuming things like "buildings of a certain height cost a constant amount per unit volume" (or mass or whatever). The sheer scale of this means that a lot of things will have to be different
How will elevators and hallways be structured, for instance? Will there be "outdoor" spaces inside? Will these different types of structures increase or decrease costs compared to typical skyscrapers? How long does it take to train a team of contractors to build a new type of structure? Does it take more or less time if they're living in temporary cabins several hundred miles from the nearest city?
I believe that Kalshi might have aimed/pulled the trigger on the "CFTC" weapon in order to make it go off at this particular moment; but it does not seem at all clear that they _built_ that weapon. My (shallow, had no contact with this issue other than reading this blog and the latest kerfuffle) understanding is that the CFTC was _always_ a gun pointed at PredictIts head because it seems pretty obvious that they were in clear violation of several parts of the No Action letter.
Has anyone here tried the Landmark Forum (or, decades before, its predecessor Est?) I just finished watching The Americans, where Est played a weirdly prominent role, and I had some friends & coworkers who'd done and raved about the Landmark Forum years ago. It all seems fairly..... culty. I was moderately curious about Landmark, but I looked at their website and their sessions start at $3500- I'm not that curious.
I'd be interested to hear people's experiences with being stuck in a revival-style meeting for an entire weekend. Did you buy into it? Did they give you a hard sell to then purchase more sessions? Did it change any aspect of your life, maybe for the better? (Has Scott ever written about this kind of thing?)
(I didn't really understand why Est needed to play such a large role in The Americans and particularly Phillip's headspace- I guess it's supposed to represent something about America, it's a little unclear to me what. It all seems rather communal, so maybe there's some connection to the Soviet Union there for him?)
Closest I've come is an Outward Bound trip when I was a grad student. Not all that similar. It was a great experience, though, & I highly recommend it.
Which Outward Bound did you attend? I used to portage past one on the Kawishawi River at a BWCA entry point. I think their main activity was white water kayaking.
There are probably quite of few differences locations tho.
North Carolina, out in the mountains in the western part of the state. It was one immense backpack, with stops here and there to rock climb and white water kayak, and near the end a day spent on a ropes course strung on immense trees, so that the crossings between trees were way high up, maybe 50-60 feet. The whole thing was one of the high points of my life, and I stayed sort of ecstatic for a couple weeks afterwards. A few years later I starting backpacking & rock climbing which I'm sure I would never have done if hadn't been for Outward Bound.
Some reports on Less Wrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/landmark-forum
I see that I already wrote a long comment there: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BrF3jGCHnNm9iCCxp/a-review-and-summary-of-the-landmark-forum?commentId=gse4RhofoQCcMMa7c
I haven't tried Landmark (yet?), but my experience from doing other things "in the same category" (though I suspect the Landmark people would insist that nothing is ever in the same category, it's all just your narrative) is that the "manic feeling" you have at the moment will soon pass, and your expectations at the moment (created under hours and hours of strong psychological pressure) will turn out to be unrealistic.
Simply said, when you are at the seminar, you think about 1 or 2 of your problems and how to overcome them. And there often *is* a possible and relatively straightforward solution... which would require you to devote all your time and energy into solving that problem or two, and sacrificing everything else in your life. And that solution feels reasonable at the moment, because your entire mind is focused on solving that one problem, nothing else seems to matter, the charismatic leader and the entire group encourage you to think that way. Bingo, your problems are solved, now pick up the phone and try to sell the seminar to all your family members, friends, former classmates, etc., before the high runs off.
(I think in NLP they call it "ecological check" -- checking that the awesome-sounding solution would not ruin your life if actually implemented.)
By the way, this lesson also applies to the rationality movement. In my experience, the CFAR seminar was interesting and exciting, but most of my actual value comes from regularly attending the local LW meetups, talking to other rationalists, getting inspiration from what they do, and discussing the problems we are currently trying to solve in our lives. (But this kinda reminds me of an ancient advice that you gradually start to resemble the people you hang out with, therefore choose your friends carefully!)
It helps to have the common background of having read the Sequences, it helps if some people have attended the CFAR seminar, but the most helpful parts are the repeated conversations and feedback. And -- unlike Landmark -- you do not have to pay $500 to attend a LW meetup, and no one will sue you if you quote something from the Sequences.
I've done it. Overall reasonably useful, provides an opportunity to bring emotional heft to things that most approximately rational people will already know but might be finding hard to put into practice.
It is indeed vaguely culty, but I read somewhere that while the typical cult tries to cut you off from other connections, they emphasise deepening the connections.
The hard sell is definitely a thing - they then they try to make you sell landmark to those connections. Probably the most unsavory part of the exercise.
Overall I did find the weekend spent doing the forum reasonably useful though not particularly transformative in the long run, and would recommend it (though I did it in India where it's much cheaper -around 300usd).
I think there were lawsuits about Cafe Gratitude bullying their staff into joining:
https://la.curbed.com/2014/10/23/10033900/cafe-gratitude-and-the-cult-of-commerce
Going purely off personal observations without any rigorous study, Midjourney seems ahead of Dall-E2 right now in the realm of AI art. Some of this may be due to the fact that Dall-E was deliberately handicapped to avoid making recognizable faces, but the differences seem to go beyond that.
(1) Is this an example of a race between Dr. Good (careful, self-critical) and Dr. Amoral (race ahead wildly to get to cool things first)?
(2) Do others agree that Midjourney seems ahead of Dall-E?
This is gorgeous: https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wi3io3/prompt_a_photorealistic_cathedral_made_of_autumn/
That is very impressive.
Ooh. I do like that much better than the DALL-e stuff, which all looks to me like commercial art with an overlay of splash & blur to camouflage its tackiness. But image is weakened by being symmetrical. Symmetrical images are intrinsically less interesting than asymmetrical ones -- the right side is just a repeat of the left. Somebody should have told Midjourney that.
Still, I'm interested. What does one have to do to play with Midjourney?
Just go to midjourney.com and sign up -- it's an open beta with no waitlist.
Note that the UI for MJ is a discord bot. It's a little painful. I encourage interested people to suffer through it -- MJ is a lot of fun -- but there's no denying that that makes it a tougher sell.
We should also mention another major player in that space - StableDiffusion from Stability.AI They just launched their beta on discord last weekend. I find some of their generation even more impressive than Dalle2 and MJ and this is only their smaller model I think. They will soon go public with their models and all of it will be free and open source.
Some examples:
https://twitter.com/fofrAI/status/1556403579447033857
https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1555898806365048832
https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1555466892759941122
MidJourney and Dall-E are good at different things. MidJourney's home territory is painterly, somewhat fantastic, and it pushes towards certain color palates and faces. Dall-E's home is photographic and realistic, and it is better at anatomy than MidJourney.
They also have clearly different philosophies -- MJ is willing to provide you with a lot more powerful explicit controls on image generation, Dall-E only lets you use an undifferentiated text prompt.
For what I like to do, MJ is generally better. But if you wanted to like, reproduce stock photo art, Dall-E would clearly be superior.
Bonus: since MJ kinda sucks at anatomy, a few times I've created an image I like in MJ, but which has some pretty bad flaws, then uploaded it to Dall-E, erased things like "the left half of the face," and had Dall-E fill it back in -- this has generally had quite good results.
My sense of things is that Dall-E is technically more impressive than MJ, but MJ is better oriented towards customer satisfaction (at least, for my kind of customers).
Having played around a bit more, I agree with this explanation of the differences. Still haven't found any generator to give me a photorealistic image of St. George on his white horse slaying the dragon. Midjourney mashed the horse and dragon into a single creature; Dall-E had St. George riding the dragon (iirc).
I am generally going for a Medieval/Renaissance fantasy vibe, so it makes sense that Midjourney would appeal. For what it's worth, MJ also has better prices per image for now, though this may change. And I hadn't even heard of Stable Diffusion, but I will have to check it out.
I think that one thing that you find when you play with AI generators (at least, the two I have access to -- Dall-E and MJ, both of which I've done ~200 prompts with) is that, really, they remain a long way from being, um... complete. Like, they both have large areas of "stuff that you might kind of ordinarily want an image of" that they are just garbage at, where they do things like mush up unrelated areas of the prompt or just don't know how to draw at all. Using them together can help get things like 10% better at this.
My suspicion about image generators is that they're going to be a lot like self-driving cars were -- we'll get this rapid advancement where it kinda looks like "in a couple of years, we'll have this whole thing totally worked out," but then we'll see sharply decreasing returns as we try to cover the entire conceptual space.
A friend claims that Midjourney is better at creating fantasy-looking, "moody" images, and DALL-E at photorealistic specific ones; I haven't used Midjourney so I don't know if that's true.
Hijack: would anyone here with access to Imagen be willing to run a few prompts for me?
Having tried the Midjourney beta (still available!), I agree that it has a moody/fantasy/baroque style which can look rather good. It is terrible at sensible animal anatomy though.
I'm currently using Midjourney to generate environmental art for an RPG I'm running. I could probably use it and several other AI to generate character art, but honestly I'm not that patient/am unmilling to shell out money from my highly limited budget for that.
What's the argument for the private equity tax break thing Sinema tried to keep out of the bill? Is this some kind of "someone's bribing her to keep it" or some kind of "sounds awful and unpopulist but if you actually understand the economics and tax incentives of it Sinema was making an obviously correct decision"?
Capital gains in an LLC are treated the same across LLCs. Why make an exception for asset managers?
I think the view is that essentially asset managers are working on commission. Commissions in most industries are taxed as ordinary income.
In the last post, Scott said he actually believed in multiverse even though it seems absurd. Does anyone know where he defended this view? Thanks
I grew up with the concept of multiverses through pop culture (video games and comic books mostly). I was very surprised to find out that there are actually substantial disputes about it and that people find the concept absurd, I still don't quite grok the perspective.
The issue with the absurdity heuristic here is that *every* interpretation of Quantum Mechanics sounds absurd, but we know that the maths is accurate (to a degree better than almost anything else in all of human knowledge is known), so you kind of do have to accept that something absurd is happening.
A lot of physicists take the "not my problem, just shut up and multiply" approach, but if you force people to actually discuss interpretations, the the Many Worlds Interpretation is actually in many ways the simplest and cleanest one, and fairly popular. The other big contender is Copenhagen, which feels to me like an engineering hack - clearly and obviously a useful approximation rather than a fundamental truth.
Obviously Copenhagen is incomplete. But nobody ever said it was complete. There’s just some decoherence that happens at some size for some reason, yet to be discovered. On the plus side It’s easy on universe creation.
In my opinion the big problem with MWI is that it isn't obvious that it isn't actually a complete theory; I personally took MWI for granted for many years, without ever noticing that there was no plausible way to explain the Born rule given a perfectly linear evolution. (Ironically, it was reading Eliezer's sequences arguing in favour of MWI that made me change my mind about this.)
To put my objection in rationalist terms, I think MWI acts as a curiosity stopper. Copenhagen is obviously incomplete, and therefore invites further investigation, which I think is the better choice. Hopefully one day we can actually fill in the gap, though I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime.
(Granted, I'm not actually a physicist; my PhD was in quantum optics, but that was decades ago, and didn't cover this sort of ground in any case.)
And now for some totally bizarrely coincidental meaningless trivia: Olivia Newton-John, who passed away today, was the granddaughtrr of Max Born.
(Also not a physicist) But can't you get the Born rule via the "density of worlds" corresponding to a particular outcome?
I don't think so? I mean, it's fairly straightforward *if* you define "density" in a way that implicitly depends on the Born rule, but that just begs the question.
I believe there's an argument under which the Born rule is the only rule which lets you go from the wavefunction to coherent probabilities of worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907
I am not equipped to evaluate the argument they make though.
I would guess that if you assume that the probabilities work out consistently according to a Born-like rule (i.e., that the universe looks similar to ours from the inside) then you can prove that only the Born rule itself will do. I don't think that's a valid assumption.
I doubt I'm equipped to evaluate that paper either, but I'll have a look at it in the weekend if I have the time.
I was convinced by Eliezer's writings on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I think https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantum-physics-sequence is a good starting point, although there might be some more stuff it's missing.
Lots of people disagree, but I can't find their disagreements all nicely arranged in one place - https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1103 might be a good place to start for some (mild) skepticism.
Thank you. I started reading the Less Wrong sequence.
I know people often call the MWI of quantum mechanics a "multiverse", but it really is conceptually very different than other multiverse theories (e.g. the eternal inflation/string theory version). The MWI is really many ordered worlds with the same laws and constants of nature, while a genuine multiverse theory has an infinite number of varied universes with either different constants, laws, or initial conditions.
To be a legitimate scientific theory, an infinite varied multiverse must resort to anthropic reasoning and an ad-hoc measure to "predict" that our observed universe is a typical universe in the multiverse.
A genuine multiverse theory appears to be absurd on its face, and it would be very surprising for someone who clearly understood it to specifically believe in it.
Where do you stand on the Tegmark Level IV multiverse, out of curiosity?
As I recall (it's been a few years), the editing on the quantum physics sequence in the AI to Zombies ebook (which readthesequences.com reproduces) is a disaster: it heavily cuts down the detailed arguments while retaining all of Eliezer's ranting and raving about how dumb Copenhagen people are, making him sound crazier than he really is. I'd suggest going back to LessWrong and reading the original posts there.
Thanks, I've edited it to be a direct LW link.
Declining birthrates and net negative replacement are indicative that this type of technological progress is doomed. Instead of using technology to spread out and colonize every last corner of the planet, these insane mega-projects are cramming more and more people together, which can only increase, not reduce, human conflict.
The good news is that it's almost certain that cultural evolution will eventually favor a lifestyle where practically all risks to our wellbeing happen in our free time, because the effort needed to sustain our bodies and minds adapted for life in the stone ages requires less than an hour of productive work daily.
That’s a lot of big claims and very little supporting argument. Care to sketch out your chain of reasoning a little more?
Care to be more specific?
I'm fairly certain that you understand that a growth rate is <1 means that a population eventually shrinks to zero. Even Jeff Bozo, the regular guy billionaire phallus rocket financier who's spent billions to recreate the Soviets achievements of the 1960s, was able to figure out that before we try colonizing the solar system, we might first want to try to figure out how to actually colonize our home planet. If someone randomly plopped you on Earth's surface where you can breathe without a space suit, odds are that you'd think you were completely alone because there wouldn't be another human soul in sight.
I'm also fairly certain that you understand that our bodies and minds are adapted for life in the stone ages and that advances in farming have made the cost of food, shelter, clothing, potable water, and basic medical care (i.e. body maintenance) so cheap, that one of our biggest problems is that we can't decide which bathroom someone is supposed to use.
I assume that you are aware that humanity requires a vast non-human, natural support environment to survive? To produce the resources that we consumet, dispose of the waste that we create, and balance the gasses that we breathe, for example.
I assume that you are unaware that right now there are 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs currently living on the planet. That's a lot of biomass.
I assume that your also unaware that there are 650 million tons of Antarctic Krill and humanity hasn't even *tried* to colonize the surface of the oceans.
I also assume that your unaware that growing a daily 2000kcal of e.g. potatoes can be done on an area of 10x10 meters. That's enough food to support 5 trillion people. 15 trillion if you manage to figure out how to harvest three time. Half sized humans would consume about 1/4 of the calories, which brings that number up to 60 trillion and would make locomotion via wind powered flying machines (Keywords: Albatross, Dynamic Soaring) feasible.
There are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.
If humanity is going to colonize the solar system, it won't be sticking 350lb transgender feminists with eating disorders into spaceships.
P.S. The phosphorus and potassium in the potatoes a person consumes comes out of the other end as...drumroll...phosphorus and potassium.
The natural support environment is extremely inefficient (photosynthesis is between 0.5% and 2% efficient in energy capture IIRC depending on how you count), as it is not optimized for providing for you.
The actual life support capacity of Earth, given unlimited engineering knowledge but curiously just baseline human physiology (a combination that won't happen ever) is probably in hundreds of billions, if not trillions of people.
"Working Hyperloop" considerations are even more delusional than Neom’s hyperbolic transportation claims.
Explain? My impression was that the technology was sound, and that if the Saudis wanted to sink $50 billion into it then that might be enough.
Here’s a collection of the main challenges (I haven’t double-checked the actual numbers) that also has a cool video of a high-speed ping-pong ball gun: https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/biggest-challenges-stand-in-the-way-of-hyperloop
My concern has been and remains “how do you account for thermal expansion while maintaining vacuum seal?”, which I still haven’t seen an adequate proposal to address. This is relevant to Neom given the temperature swings expected in the region (even if shielded from direct sun).
So I agree: using hyperloop decreases my confidence in their transportation predictions. Yes, if they try some sort of high-speed rail, they would need some sort of unexpected technological improvement to hit speed targets. However, if they try hyperloop, they would need some sort of unexpected technological improvement just to get it functional in the first place.
There's no real reason why Musk's proposal was any more "sound" than the proposals made in the 1950's, and it doesn't seem to have improved at all in the intervening decade since he made the proposal. He doesn't have any new technology for cheap pylon construction, any new technology for maintaining vacuums in a long tube, or acquiring real estate with a curvature appropriate for conventional HSR speeds let alone the kinds of speeds Hyperloop is alleged to be able to travel at.
I suppose if you can construct conventional HSR at Spanish or Korean prices, then its possible that the premium needed for Hyperloop would "only" get you to New York level costs, but given that people are skeptical of CAHSR even though it's not getting the New York price boost (just the usual US one), and given that the Persian Gulf states are close to US prices to begin with, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to afford a working Hyperloop.
See here for international comparisons of construction costs: https://transitcosts.com/cities/
It looks like Saudi's existing high-speed railway costs about $50 million per mile, which seems very good. This is intercity, but I imagine that within-city costs much less if you build the city around the railway instead of vice-versa.
Are you only going to have two stations? Even high-speed rail has trouble with close stations, the cars are heavy, and you spend have the trip speeding up, and the other half slowing down. How about put all the high-speed-transit entrances at the tops of the skyscrapers, and all the exits at the ground floor? It might work. It wouldn't be hyperloop, but if you have a closed tube with vents you could use air pressure to do a lot of your braking, and have a gravity assist when speeding up. Adjust the braking pressure by adjusting how open the vents were. (Sounds more like a carnival ride than public transit, but it might work.)
+1
The science is sound, the engineering and technology isn't. For example, it's extremely difficult to maintain a sufficiently strong vacuum in a tube that is miles long. When it comes to the nitty gritty details, there's just too much that can go wrong to make it practical.
There's a reason why the las Vegas Hyperloop is 'Unpressurized Tesla Model 3s with taxi drivers going 30 mph in a one-way tunnel at atmospheric pressure' and not 600mph super-duper vacuum quantum crypto AI pod mega cool sustainable green time machine fantasy transport.
A working hyperloop just isn't something where you can have something cheap 'n' dirty that just barely works (as e.g. in the aviation industry) where incremental improvements over decades leads to solutions that work well. This appears to be a common misconception that because the science is sound (i.e. doesn't violate the laws of physics), it's merely a matter of money to make the engineers and technicians make it real.
$50 billion sounds like a lot, but for all we know it could take devoting every resource on the planet for the next 50 years to figure out how to make Hyperloops work with an acceptable failure rate.
Totalitarian grand master command and control freak plans never work out the way the totalitarian grand master command and control freak designers think.
For what it's worth, there is no Las Vegas Hyperloop. There's the Las Vegas Loop, but while I acknowledge the terminology is very confusing, it was never intended to be low-pressure; the only things it has in common with Hyperloop is that it's a tunnel and includes the word "loop".
The long-term plan *is* that they go self-driving, but there's no plans to depressurize it.
I personally suspect that Elon Musk has eventual plans to try building Hyperloop tunnels with Boring Company, but nothing he's doing right now is even aimed at it.
I can guarantee that's never going to happen. I think it's likely that Musk is selling his products he's making at a loss and is funneling the cash he gets from selling his stake in the companies back into the companies and makes them appear in the earnings column. At a P/E ratio of 100:1, 'putting $1B back' makes the company value go up by $100B, he own 20% of the company and
on paper makes $20B.
This isn't a new trick. Before going public, Crazy Eddie Antar made it appear that the profits in his company were increasing by skimming less.
When the SEC investigated Madoff back in the early 2000s, they didn't find anything either. Musk is constantly clashing with the SEC. Maybe he's letting them find small stuff so they don't see the big stuff.
I hope he doesn't get found out before my Cybertruck gets delivered. Ever notice how there's always such a delay with the hyped up Musk products? Doesn't he want to make money now, not later? That strategy makes a lot of sense if he doesn't want people's money, if taking their money is costing him money.
Keep in mind that "selling initial startup products at a loss" is a pretty normal way to get companies off the ground. That's not a trick, that's just how startups work; you have to compete on price before you can really justify that price with scale.
Also I think he's just really bad at estimates, he screws up estimates constantly even when there's no money in it for him.
I know that. I also know that most startups fail. The ones that succeed manage to grow and dominate a niche market or become a major player really fast and can reap the benefits of monopolistic rents.
Tesla has a market cap of all the other auto makers combined, yet has a low single digit market share. Musk doesn't actually have a clue how to make money in manufacturing. In WWII Singer, Mattel, etc. weren't manufacturing gun parts because of their expertise in making sewing machines and toys, but because they knew how to make stuff.
The obvious suspicion is that he doesn't even have a clue how to run a business and that there's a there a whole lot of denial and wishful thinking that a stoner with high-tech ADHD and entertaining tweets is the tech messiah who's medicating passive-thinking, semi-educated morons depression with the promise of a futuristic paradise of tech hippies on mars.
Withdrawal from the high is going to hurt. A lot.
On paper, he's already the richest man on the planet and things go down much faster than they go up, because zero is closer to even a 100 trillion than infinity.
> A working hyperloop just isn't something where you can have something cheap 'n' dirty that just barely works (as e.g. in the aviation industry) where incremental improvements over decades leads to solutions that work well
Isn't "Unpressurized Tesla Model 3s with taxi drivers going 30 mph in a one-way tunnel at atmospheric pressure" the cheap-and-dirty version? If you can make that economically viable then you can start improving from there -- increase speeds, remove the drivers, replace the cars with specialised sleds, increase the speed more, and eventually think about the air pressure thing.
I think the Las Vegas Tesla Tunnel gets a lot right about what the future of intra-city transport should look like; it should be underground, it should be driverless, and it should be private point-to-point pods (not giant trains that go from places you aren't to places you don't want to be). The key is reaching the minimum-viable product point where it actually becomes economically worthwhile, and I'm not sure that the Vegas Tesla Loop is quite there yet.
Well, would you consider 'riding a horse' the cheap-and-dirty version of a 'flying car'?
If you think that's silly, hear me out!
The horse goes from A to B, just like a flying car! And when the horse is galloping, then it's occasionally not touching the ground, which is practically flying, right?
It's a start, right? Just gotta work out some of the details, right?
A 100 year old electric subway system has more features in common with 'Hyperloop', than that idiotic Las Vegas snake oil promotional clown show.
And your future intra-city transport is indistinguishable from an underground road system except that it appears be more supportive of 'self driving magic', but only because you can exclude vehicles that don't support the 'self driving magic'. If you could scrap all existing cars and put a computer readable paint stripe on all the roads in the city, you'd get the thing. Except cheaper and more fault tolerant.
If something goes not-as-expected, would you prefer to be in a tunnel or on a regular road?
Adding complexity makes existing problems worse.
How many actors really effectively have ‘range’? I feel like a solid majority of Hollywood, movie and show actors I see on a regular basis simply play the same character over & over with some minor variations. For instance I’m finishing Ozark, where Jason Bateman is the show lead. I’ve also watched Arrested Development extensively, a completely different campy comedy from 15 years ago, and Bateman is…. exactly the same character in Ozark that he is in AD. Every mannerism is identical, to the point that I keep waiting for the punchline to drop in Ozark. Is he really ‘acting’, or does he just act out a set personality regardless of the circumstances? Is he really just playing himself?
Years ago at the height of Eminem’s fame I watched 8 Mile, where he essentially plays himself in a movie roughly based on his life. He did a fine job and it wasn’t a bad performance, but is it acting to play yourself? Are character actors like Bateman simply behaving as themselves on-screen? Seems like a pretty fun/easy job!
There are two types of movie/TV actors:
1. "Stars". They tend to play leading roles. Jack Nicholson is a great example. He plays Jack Nicholson in every movie. They cast him if the movie calls for Jack. The moviegoer goes to see Jack. If you don't like to see Jack, you don't go to any movie he's in.
2. "Character actors". Names are harder to come by for reasons, but Scott Glen is a reasonable example. These people have "range". They also aren't as memorable, because you can see two movies with the same actor and you don't realize they are the same unless you look at the credits, or you know their voice - although there are actors capable of changing accents sufficiently that this isn't a sure thing.
"Stars" vs. "Character actors" strikes me as two different dimensions. The sets overlap nontrivially. "Star" has to do with popular appeal. "Character actor" has to do with a particular type of acting talent - namely, the ability to convincingly play one or more archetypes (e.g. the Looming Mobster, the Loving Mother, the Scrappy Conman, the Cranky Waitress, etc.).
Jason Bateman specializes in "middle-aged suburban professional straight man in a comic routine", which happens to also work well enough for "straight man in a suburban crime-drama-tragedy" for him to get acclaim for Ozark. So he's a character actor with one specialty, and has parlayed that into what I'd estimate as at least mid-level stardom - people will watch something just because he's in it, playing his specialty.
Ernie Sabella specializes in "aging working-class clock-puncher". He's unlikely to draw crowds (unless they have very rareified taste), but if he's playing that character, he'll fit like a perfect glove.
Same goes for a raft of mid-level actors, the sort that used to have a column dedicated to them in Fametracker.org - Ron Rifkin, Jane Curtin, Edie McClurg, Al Leong, Vicky Lewis, James Hong, CCH Pounder, and of course, J.T. Walsh. If you're a movie buff and you know a character's coming in the plot and "yeah, they'll probably pick $Name" and sure enough, it's $Name, that's a character actor. Naturally, some have star power - Dwayne Johnson, ScarJo, etc.
A few rare figures are both star and character actor, and have multiple archetypes they can play. This is where you see your Christian Bale, your Matt Damon, your Charlize Theron, your Ryan Gosling, your Meryl Streep, your Gary Oldman, your Amy Andrews, your Helen Mirren. Sometimes it's wildly different characters as with these, sometimes it's more subtle like your Viola Davis or your Brian Cox, where they might *look* like the same character because they're just not chewing the scenery as vigorously.
That's the opposite of what I've heard. A "character actor" is an actor who plays one specific type of character. Daniel Day Lewis & Joaquin Phoenix would not be character actors, but instead leads who have played some very distinct characters (for Paul Thomas Anderson).
My personal favorite example of range is Cilian Murphy in Peaky Blinders vs. Cilian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto.
Clark Gable had a limited range, but in that range he was Clark Gable. Moving pictures have a huge pool of actors to draw on and they have to typecast.
Lots of actors grow up doing theater and that's different and sometimes they love the difference, sometimes they hate it.
Some of this is due to casting directors - it's not uncommon for actors to actively complain about being typecast because they feel they have range but everyone who wants to hire them wants the exact same performance.
I expect some is also due to audiences, and the idea of 'branding' - a particular actor gets a reputation for being comedic, and if you try and put him in a dark gritty drama he won't attract fans of the genre and the actors fans who are attracted won't like the film
Good point. Sean Connery hated being typecast as James Bond even though the movies were big hits and made him wealthy. Eventually he just said "I'm done with Bond" and never did another.
Er, never say never...
In amateur-level theatre, just about any actor can play just about any character, adequately well.
But Jason Bateman isn't competing for roles in amateur theatre, he's competing for roles in big movies and TV shows, and he's up against the best in the world. He could play a retired military tough guy action hero, but Jason Statham can do it better. He could play King Lear, but Kenneth Branagh can do it better. He could play a sensitive romantic lead, but Ryan Gosling can do that better. (And if he can't, it doesn't matter, because producers don't know this, so they'll never bother to ask him to audition.) If Jason Bateman wants to get roles, he needs to stick to the narrow window where he's one of the best in the world.
Cillian Murphy has range. Was wonderful as a very pretty, girly transexual in an early movie, now plays a tormented, clever, brutal man in Peaky Blinders, lotsa other roles, quite varied.
50% of acting is just showing up. All day. At exact places on the set (hitting your mark). With the right words coming out of your mouth. Over and over.
If you can do all that, and people enjoy watching your handsome face & body, you can make a living.
Well some actors don’t do this. But yeah many do. Probably a great gig if you can get it.
What tends to make high profile careers is less acting talent and more supernatural charisma.
Two rather annoying, high profile articles on AI not being sentient came out this week:
- https://www.barrons.com/articles/ai-artificial-intelligence-google-sentient-tech-51659732527
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/technology/ai-sentient-google.html
In the first, a Nobel Prize winning economist argues (verbatim quote): "A chatbot is a function. Functions are not sentient." and then compares LaMDA to "5x + 7"
Neither article grapples with what AI sentience means, if it could be achieved in our lifetime, what the implications would be, and seem to cherry pick particularly goofy representatives of a "worried about AI sentience" camp. Frustrating!
As much as the authors can go die in a fire, "functions are not sentient" is an important philosophical point. If multiplying enough matrices together results in consciousness, the consciousness is not only independent of substrate, it literally does not require a substrate in the first place - it's already entirely "computed" in some weird pseudo-existing space, much like the Mandelbrot set. Calculating it on your GPU cluster just gives you a window into a slice of it.
As always, Egan's "Permutation City" is multiple decades ahead of the mainstream AI/consciousness discourse despite being written in the 90s.
"Functions are not sentient" is really missing the point (or the relevant point is obscured). I think it's true that a feedforward mapping of points from one high dimensional space to another isn't sentient. Sentience is probably a feature of cognitive systems that can plan, execute, and monitor progress towards goals extended past the immediate present. The necessary feature of such systems is recurrent information dynamics. In this view a feedforward system, essentially a function mapping, cannot be conscious. But usually when people say functions can't be conscious, they're not making this kind of distinction.
But the "cognitive system" is also a function, even if defined recurrently! This still means you can build a conscious system out of math, which means the system already exists even before you build it, the same way 2+2=4 exists.
The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a reason.
My point was that a mathematical function, a construct where the same input maps to the same output always, is different from a recurrent system where inputs do not map necessarily to the same output.
Regarding your point that math already exists, there is an important difference between abstract objects (if there is such a thing) and concrete objects. Abstract objects are immutable and eternal. But sentience is not a immutable property of a system, but rather an active dynamic property. And so immutable abstract objects are not the substrate of sentience. Computation is a dynamic causal structure that changes state by state, which is a much better candidate.
Of course the important difference actual physical beings have (which chatbots actually share) is that they interact with their surroundings. A chatbot only does it in a thin way, through the text interface, and we likely don’t have the sorts of learning mechanisms designed that would do sufficient amounts and types of interaction even if we gave it sensory organs.
My understanding is that the NYT is effectively a propaganda organisation, with the flow being "desired message -> seek out story" rather than "find story -> decide what angle to take". This would imply that their story exists to serve some purpose.
The most obvious purpose is "throw shit at nerds"; we know they hate the Grey Tribe and they call out the Rationalists by name to throw shade. The second most obvious is "prevent anti-AI movements coalescing to political relevance", although there's a missing gear there in that I don't know why the NYT would want to do this. Took some effort for me to spot, but I suspect they're also trying to push scepticism of non-"trusted" sources with the whole "look at all these smart people getting hoodwinked" angle, which is obviously to NYT's own financial advantage.
Would be odd for the NYT to have an agenda of preventing AI movements from coalescing to political relevance. As you say, what would be the point? I think a lot of the NYT's seeming agenda is simply that the people who work there mostly think a certain way, & mostly think about certain subjects. It's not a conspiracy, it's shared values + complacency + entitlement. Worry about AI isn't on their radar, so if something about possible dangers of future AI crosses their desk they see it as a bit nutso & set it aside.
The "my understanding" bit is that I recall seeing someone post (either here or in a link from somewhere here/here-adjacent) who'd worked there and said it's editorially-driven rather than reporter-driven (there was a reference to NYT not doing the "what have you got for me" thing). I remember a comparison to the Los Angeles Times, but I can't find the reference itself (sorry).
If I'm wrong about this I would like to know and update.
Yeah, I have zero insider info and haven't even read anything good on the subject. The things is, it's all a matter of degree. All groups and institutions have norms about what sort of thing is taken seriously -- but some are more open than others to seriously considering ideas that aren't mainstream for them. I'm curious too, & would like info about what happens at the NYT if somebody says, "yes, but what about THIS?" and THIS is the sort of thing the NYT doesn't usually take seriously.
Some people here hate the Times because of the article about Scott. I hated the article, but also was surprised that the NYT had printed it. Even if I hadn't the faintest idea who Scott was I would have been startled to see such a tacky hatchett job in the Times. Surprised it slipped past the editors.
Not sure if this is the place I saw it, but this:
https://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-finds-time-for-soul-searching-1201852490/
...sounds like it's the source I was talking about.
(Happened across it by sheer serendipity in a link from LW, but I don't think I've read that LW article before so no idea where I initially came across it.)
Thanks. One thing I'll say about the Times: They are the only paper to print information about Evusheld and complaints about errors in its distribution. This is a niche topic from most people's point of view, but of interest to me because I'm involved in a volunteer effort to improve its distribution to people who need it. Evusheld is a substitute for vaccination, given to immune-compromised people who cannot make antibodies in response to vaccination or infection. It literally just gives them a supply of long-lasting antibodies, and they are then approximately as protected as vaccinated people. About 3% of the population needs it (so it's not a *ridiculously* niche topic). The government bought a decent supply, but utterly botched the distribution. Sent truckloads to states with vague instructions to distribute it across the state. Some states gave it all to hospitals, who all then used it only for their own inpatients, so that the non-hospitalized majority had no access. Others sent Evusheld to random small-town pharmacies, some of which were actually beauty spas, and of course nobody ever got Evusheld from those places. Doctors were not informed that the stuff was available and who qualified. Result is that very little of what was bought reached patients.
Anyhow, the point is that the Times picked up on this, and gave an accurate account of how much Evusheld was needed, how much was going to waste and why, and nobody else did. And every now and then they give a little update, too. Someone could say Evusheld made it into the paper because it fits with the NYT narrative of We're Not Doing Enough, but still, they score quite a few points with me for their coverage of this topic.
You’re definitely projecting a lot here. It’s true that they’re very much into the skepticism of non-canonical sources thing, but that’s because they actually believe it’s the best idea. I think some individual writers may also have the “throw shit at nerds” thing, but the Times as a whole doesn’t.
Cade Metz is the same writer who doxxed Scott, so if it's only some writers he's almost certainly one.
And yes, of course NYT is going to attract people who think NYT-like organisations are prosocial.
I read the Cade Metz one at the NYTimes, and it was very frustrating - it took quotes from philosophers and cognitive scientists pointing out that these particular systems are not likely sentient, but then presented it as though they were saying that the idea of AI sentience is impossible.
A guy known around here for his disingenuous use of quotes yeah
Maybe he's an AI, and trying to throw us off the trail!
It's so irritating when people essentially say "it's a machine so it's not sentient," as though they're cutting through the Gordian Knot. Those of us who fret and/or feel a thrill about AI sentience -- do you think it's never occurred to us that it's a bit unusual to be talking about a machine being sentient? Duh . . .
I'd like people to take on the interesting question of what do we *mean* by sentience, what would it *mean* for a machine to be sentient. Seems to me that one of the key parts of being seen as sentient is being able to report on one's own processes. So I can say to you guys right now -- hey, I'm in my office pretty sleep-deprived, typing away on this blue page about the nature of sentience. Very sentient of me to say that, right? But some people think of reporting on one's own processes in a sort of ghost-in-the-machine way -- as though there's the machinery, clanking away, but then this ineffable thing consciousness is walking invisibly through the clusters of clanking machines, talking about them. But you don't need a ghost to report on the roomful of machines. There could be another clanking machine that registers & issues reports about the roomful of clanking machines. AI would have to be complex to report on itself in an interesting way -- it would have to be constructed so as to be capable of substantial meta -- but I don't see any reason why the construction couldn't be done using the same inanimate materials & electrical processes as all the rest.
Obviously, even personal computers of the present day can give simple reports on themselves -- tell you their OS was updated, their memory is getting full, etc. But I'm talking about an *interesting* self report. For instance, let's say a DALL-e kind of AI creates an image based on your descriptor "self love," & it's trashy & commercial arty -- somebody looking in a mirror with hearts & flowers around -- and you could ask DALL-e why that image, & it could say it looked for images of self & images of love & combined them. And then you could say, but the results is so *tacky*! And anyhow, DALL-e, self-love is a complex concept. For one thing, most people disapprove of it. For another, it's got some meta going on -- what does it even mean to love yourself? Isn't love a feeling for something outside the self? So how can you build those complications into an image, DALL-e? OK, I realize this example has the AI going beyond describing its own processes, on to being able to understand complex advice on the modification they need. But I'm tired & getting less sentient, so will leave this as is.
OK, but a lot of people think "Machine, ok, I know a car and a drill and a vacuum clearn, a dishwasher. OK, things in that group aren't sentient."
So this is probably more of a category error. Improperly generalizing that things given the same name are necessarily sharing a particular characteristic.
That said, I doubt that any future advance of a chatbot will be sentient. I feel that requires more extensive interaction with the external world. But how would I know if I were wrong? Pattern matching has gotten awfully good at SEEMING to be sentient. The fact that it clearly doesn't understand some things that I find obvious doesn't differentiate it from many people I know.
Meh I would tend to agree that chat bots unless wildly more robust than the ones that exist so far, are nowhere near sentient. Hell one of the main findings of cognitive science is human sentience is pretty overblown. People are bad reporters of their own actions and internal states, and consciousness seems as much the piecing together of a bunch of snapshots than some stable thing.
Do you think a chat bot has qualia? I might think a sufficiently sophisticated one might, but we are nowhere near there yet.
I agree about how the sense of continuity and self-knowledge is an illusion, & we are in fact piecing together snapshots. It's as though we're wired to have the sense of being continuous, consistent, and self-aware. We don't realize we're piecing together snapshots. To us it looks like a movie with a story that makes sense. It's easiest to see this process if you recall a dream really well -- you can actual see your mind making sense of nonsense: Settings change, but you have the feeling of being in a certain place, the same place. ETc.
I don't think LaMDA or any other current AI system is consciousness or particularly close to conscious. I think that the human mind is a function, and saying "no function can be sentient" is absurd. It's basically a repetition of Searle's Chinese Room argument, and the Romer article doesn't grapple with any of the many counter-arguments to the Chinese Room. My broader issue with these articles is that they trivialize and dismiss something that's an important issue, even if it's not directly staring us in the face now. Are chatbots conscious now? No... Could they be in the future? In the near future? What would that mean? For humanity? For chatbots? Oh the answer is "this silly guy is a 'Christian Mystic'" and "look at these weirdos falling in love with ELIZA many decades ago!"
IDK that is the quality of NYT writing. Not sure why you are expecting more. They aren’t geniuses over there.
I like to really try to make someone else’s idea the smartest possible idea I can imagine before I try to pick it apart, and if I don’t get it at all I like to take a few days to think about it and try to understand if it’s just my own ignorance, but yeah I’m with you in the Neom stuff.
Hyperloop seems like it should lower the probability that this goes well, since it means we're now relying on yet another hypothetical technology (and not even the basic version of the hyperloop! This would require a more complicated modular version with track switching!)
Does anyone have a (preferably well-informed) assessment of how the newly-enacted ability of Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies will effect drug development? Am I crazy to be concerned that we may have inadvertently aborted many blockbuster drugs and we'll never know what we didn't invent?
One possible upside: if most of medicine is wasteful rather than actually doing much good, crippling the industry wouldn't matter that much.
Most medicine is wasteful, but there are a very small number of drugs with outsized impact. If this policy causes us to discover even one less drug like Lipitor, that's millions of early deaths that won't be prevented.
I received an email from someone who says they work in the industry, which I'm reprinting with their permission:
"From my vantage, most of the talking points in the debate are inexplicably backwards / unsupported by data and there doesn't seem to be sufficient exposition around the heart of the matter -- which relates to scientific constraints & capital allocation.
I made a deck to collect some data and work through the issues that I've been sharing w/ folks (attached) -- but I'll just briefly reproduce the argument here below, which outlines why there better routes to solving healthcare affordability issues than what congress has proposed:
- Healthcare costs are high, but drug aren't really the *main* problem on a societal level (they're a minor % of overall healthcare spending, ~8% in 2020, and prices have surprisingly been *decreasing* over the past few years)
- While many patients are protected from significant OOP cost due to annual out-of-pocket maximums, some patients – mainly Medicare patients without Medigap and the uninsured – do not have this safety net – these are the patients we most need to help
- As with all industries that are funded by investment, prices in pharmaceutical sector are set to a level that creates an economic profit (i.e., NPV > 0)
- Unfortunately, the overall drug development sector is currently NPV negative – this means that there is little headroom to decrease prices and still warrant investment for new therapies
---- Public market data support this point, as pharma does not generate “excess profits” when compared to the rest of the economy
---- Furthermore, pharmaceutical investors and management are not enriching themselves with stock “buy-backs” – another common talking point – as the majority of profits are re-invested back into R&D for new therapies
- The escalating cost of drug development is the underlying reason why prices need to increase to keep the industry afloat
- Unfortunately, this is an inevitable and natural consequence of (1) the attempt treat diseases of increasing complexity and (2) the nature of a scientifically-regulated industry, where the bar to success continually rises as improved products come-to-market
- If prices are restricted by congress, it could dramatically decrease the number of future drugs, with disproportionate impact on small molecules
---- The CBO model predicting a small decrease in new drugs (~10%) resulting from this legislation is inherently flawed, as it does not model the returns to the overall sector and resulting impact to investment dynamics
---- Expectations around portfolio returns are the actual incentive / decision-making criteria for investors (e.g., LP pension funds) who will stop directing capital to therapeutic innovation as early-stage VC performance deteriorates
- We cannot afford handicap the engine that creates innovative medicines, given (1) how many medical unmet needs still remain and (2) the incredible benefit for society that drugs have already yielded
- Health Technology Assessments (e.g., ICER) dramatically shortchange these benefits as they do not take into account the value provided after a drug goes generic …. in perpetuity! (e.g., statins)
- While a more thoughtful cost sharing structure with patients would be an ideal solution (e.g.,, eliminating OOP costs by funding through e.g., premiums or taxes), at the very least the legislation should extend the statutory CMS negotiation period to 13 years for small-molecules
There's a lot of directions in which to take this conversation (individual actor vs aggregate decision making, mean vs outlier considerations, role & design of health insurance, moral weight ascribed to future vs current humans, difficulties around counterfactual arguments in politics and resulting incentives, public investment allocation decisions, why methodological issues w/HTA are hiding in plain sight but are scarcely acknowledged, Blue team's ironic unwillingness to engage in fact-based decision-making post-Trump, why I can't seem to find a holistic / ecosystem-level economic analysis on the topic, etc.)."
I think the real question, given that the US is the only major market for pharmaceuticals that doesn't have this sort of price control, is whether there's a way to negotiate a global plan for cooperating, rather than letting many countries free-ride on the US paying high prices for drugs. If the international corporate minimum tax agreement works out, then maybe there is hope for some sort of international agreement here.
I mean, if the policy is what it says on the tin, it's something that approximately every single country that isn't the USA was already doing, it's not a crazy idea.
As for whether lowering the available revenue would reduce drug development, in isolation, maybe? But if you're concerned about that, then reducing the massive regulatory bullshit imposed by the FDA is a much more important target - reduce the barriers to bringing drugs to market rather than trying to subsidise the industry enough to pay literally billions for testing per drug.
I don't know what the stats look like these days, but when I was running debate cases in high school the argument was that the US singlehandedly discovers almost half of all new drugs, and that this is at least in part caused by not having the kind of price controls that other countries enact. Free rider problem on the part of other nations, essentially.
I am not sure this is a real problem. Our medical technology is rapidly outstripping our ability to provide/afford it for even a small fraction for the population. You could easily spend many lifetimes of most peoples’ earnings on procedures that benefit them or extend their life in some way or other.
We already have a lot of price rationing, and service rationing, and informal hospice rationing.
The world lacking another $20,000/year way to ensure people don’t lose their hair doesn’t seem that big a loss.
Since so much of the core research for pharma is based on stuff in the public domain I think it is one area where pretty significant intervention in the market makes sense. All the more so because medical care is one of the areas consumers are their families are least rational.
I am a big “markets are strong” guy”, but big pharmaceutical and especially big pharma ads are one of the major places I would come down with a heavy stick if dictator.
It's worth keeping in mind that innovations often start out expensive and get cheaper as the industry gets experience. Sadly that happens less or not at all in most sectors of health care because of regulation and lack of competition. (Example, if someone wants to start a new hospital, all the hospitals in the are have to sign off that it's a good idea. Any surprise new hospitals don't get started?) Lasek surgery, on the other hand, which isn't covered by insurance (AFAIK), covered by Medicare, and hence trammeled by regulations, has fallen probably well over 50% in real terms in the past few decades. John Cochrane is very insightful on health care regulation (and regulation in general) and was a guest recently on a podcast on the subject. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/search/label/Health%20economics
This seems wrong w.r.t. drugs, because once the drugs are off patent, they are usually extremely cheap. (At least modulo gaming the FDA's rules + bribing other manufacturers to stay out of the market for a couple years.). If the tradeoff is either:
World #1: This new treatment for your cancer is super expensive for 20 years so most people can't afford it, and then becomes generic and costs $100 for a course of treatment.
World #2: This new treatment for your cancer is never developed because it doesn't pay.
it seems pretty obvious we'd rather live in World #1.
I think a lot of drugs don’t get to that $1/dose era.
thanks
How bout those Mets
Hope there's a very effective targeted chemotherapy drug to get rid of them.
I like chocolate.
i have a cosmetic procedure scheduled for a few months from now, and it's prompted me to revisit a term paper i wrote my freshman year of college about the effects of pre-surgical psychological care on post-operative outcomes in (elective) plastic surgery.
titled "The Medium Is The Bandage" (freshman me was very clever with titles), its gist is that plastic surgeons ought to pull the wool over their patients' blepharoplastied eyes for their own good. a patient's own perception of the outcome of their procedure is more, well, plastic, than we assume, and surgeons should take advantage of this by injecting as much objective-seeming "medical theatre" into pre-op rituals as possible.
a lot of feminist literature on plastic surgery I surveyed equates pre-ops to confession...
> "The female patient is promised beauty and re-form in exchange for confession, which is predicated on an admission of a diseased appearance that points to a diseased (powerless) character. A failure to confess, in the clinical setting, is equated with a refusal of health; a preference for disease."
...to which i countered this kind of conditioning is *good* thing, provided the patient is reasonably likely to go through with the procedure anyways⏤absolving the patient of their agency leaves the patient with less wiggle room for subjectivity in evaluating the outcome (say, perhaps decreasing the odds of a repeat customer caught in a spiral of body dysmorphia).
the paper somehow ropes in Schmidhuber, Friston, Foucault, and the like in its wild ride towards proving all this, and makes me wonder if i ought to go to grad school just so i can have an excuse to write with this kind of chutzpah again (link to the paper: https://jane.flowers/the-medium-is-the-bandage)
This is perhaps the best time in history to write with chutzpah without going back to school. Personally, I'm pretty skeptical of grad school (having gone myself) unless you really need the credential or skills to do what you want to do.
There's said to be a marketing placebo effect: a higher price leads to the customer more positively evaluating the service. We already tend to engage in post-purchase rationalization (one of the biggest forms of choice-supportive bias). Putting them together: the higher the price, the more effective the rationalization?
So you expect that an exaggerated diagnosis, and any associated medical theater, are likely to have a similar effect?
This seems like a fine justification for price discrimination. A benevolent surgeon should charge rich patients so much extra that every patient feels the pinch. Then every nip and tuck can be a satisfactory nip and tuck.
A few years ago I read a short story by Naoise Dolan about a cosmetic surgery patient. Through an original twist on the repeat customer problem that you mention, the patient ends up deceiving her surgeon more than vice versa.
https://www.independent.ie/life/the-drummore-cromog-of-meadhbh-ni-huiginn-a-new-short-story-by-naoise-dolan-39870249.html (Developer tools > Sources > select lines 205-206.)
You reminded me of this Twilight Zone episode.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_the_Beholder_(The_Twilight_Zone,_1959)
That show was so great. Always nice to be reminded of it, and the North Shore.
how have i not come across this before, this is great⏤thanks!
What are the best examples of New Urbanist style urban design?
I'm looking through wikipedia's list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_New_Urbanism and most of them seem fairly uninspiring, most of them either look like (a) an over-sized over-glorified apartment complex, (b) a shopping mall with some apartments on top, (c) or a regular cheap-looking cookie-cutter suburb where the houses are slightly closer together.
New Urbanism per se is a specific movement involving specific architects, and relies on large greenfield developments, and thus operates in a traditionally suburban context. The broader set of ideas is often adopted by people working on individual buildings in redevelopment contexts in urban areas, but since they only do a few buildings at a time, it's often hard to get the full effect.
The Mueller neighborhood of Austin (which used to be the airport before they converted the nearby air base into a bigger airport south of town - it's linked in your list, but it's probably better to Google more, and particularly go into Google Street View and Satellite View) is probably the one example of a New Urbanist neighborhood that I've had much chance to experience. It seems like a very pleasant place, and is very conveniently located for biking to UT or the state capitol or the downtown office buildings or medical centers, and really does seem like a place where you could easily do a lot of walking, both to shops and just around the neighborhood.
The main downside I see is that the nice walkable street grid ends at the edge of the neighborhood, and it's surrounded by some parks that are only pierced by major arterials, which means you really end up having to use a bike or car to get out of the neighborhood, and those houses on the edge aren't as conveniently located for walking to the shops of either that neighborhood or the next neighborhood.
People often highlight the differences between European cities in the 70s vs today to show the incremental effect of a lot of small changes in urban design. (which is perhaps a better way to do new urbanism than large planned developments.)
My first video game is on track to be finished by early 2025, or sooner if I decide not to put a song in it that enters public domain that year. Will probably be kickstarting it January of next year if all goes well.
My personal suggestion would be to not delay your project for a single song unless the whole work is designed around the music. On the other hand, software development is notorious for delays so maybe the bottleneck won't be the public domain timer anyway :P
Good luck, regardless!
Aren’t copyrights the life of the writer plus 75 years? I’m trying to guess what song would come into the public domain in 2025.
Depends on the circumstances of creation, but as of DMCA it's often authors life plus 90.
(It's Bolero by Ravel)
Unless you have an affordable orchestra to record it, you're going to have to wait until the particular recording you're interested in enters the public domain, not just the sheet music. (And presumably, if you can afford an orchestra to record it, the licensing cost of the sheet music wouldn't be that out of reach?)
I can make the song in fruit loops or whatever
I suppose that is definitely possible, though I think of the distinctive feature of Bolero is the series of sounds that Ravel gets out of the instruments on successive repetitions of the melody.
Like Columbo used to say “Just one more thing. “
Ravel died in December of 1937. If you add 75 years to that wouldn’t that mean it was in the public domain in December 2012?
There's an ongoing dispute about who wrote Bolero. Ravel's heirs claim that he had a bunch of co-authors, and the 75 year time should start ticking from when the last co-author died.
I dunno, I'm just going off of what Wikipedia says
Good luck!
I just realized that I don't have links to a couple of blog posts that I read last year, and spent several hours searching for them without any luck. So I figured I'd ask here (because I might have got them from the ASX or broader rationalist community, and because if I didn't, people here would be more likely to have stumbled on them otherwise, and if anyone finds them, people here are more likely to find them interesting too).
The first was a long post, or series of posts, going into great historical detail about the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving, using a biography of Tisquantum (Sqanto) as the framework, and taking great care to identify the local political context with respect to the area's tribes and alliances, the background of the Mayflower colonists, and the other factions of Europeans in the area. As I recall, it was broad, and comprehensive, and largely refrained from moralizing and judgment and virtue signaling, and instead paid attention to all the actors as individuals with their own motivations who were doing the best they could in the situation they were in, although sometimes certain people did seem to be acting maliciously. (One of the more tentative takeaways was that Tisquantum was not a selfless benefactor, but was probably trying to gain power by becoming the middleman between the settlers and the locals, feeding their suspicions of each other, and portraying himself to each side as the only one who could mediate between them.) The blog itself was old-fashioned design from a few decades ago, without much glitz or SEO (kinda like the old SSC). I didn't get much sense of the author, who might as well have been a dog, but I have a dubious recollection that, from browsing other posts, the author was in the process of learning a Native American language, just for fun, so I expect they might be a historian or linguist.
The other was a post or series of posts about Cortes conquering the Aztec empire. Lots of detail, following his progress and trying to examine the interactions between him, his men, his guide, the other local Spaniards, the Aztec government, the population of the Aztec empire, and the various neighboring cities and states that were entangled with the Aztecs. It had more gushy language, like a young-20s male very enthusiastic about all the cool stuff he was researching, but there was a similar avoidance of moralizing, judgment, and virtue signaling. There was some other content on the blog that looked interesting too. The blog itself was similarly old-school, with a right-sidebar and everything.
Any help would be appreciated! I've tried various search terms on different search engines, as well as what's left of my browser history and bookmarks, but I think a crash wiped all that out.
This? https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/polygamy-human-sacrifices-and-steel-why-the-aztecs-were-awesome/
That's it! Thanks a lot!
(Yep, another Wordpress blog. Most of the rest of my memory seems accurate here, though.)
It might not be what you're looking for but this was an interesting post on Cortez & two other conquistadors:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ivpKSjM4D6FbqF4pZ/cortes-pizarro-and-afonso-as-precedents-for-takeover
That wasn't it, but it's definitely interesting! And a good summary of what happened, too. Thanks!
Is this the Tisquantum one?
https://miidashgeget.wordpress.com/2021/11/24/playing-his-own-game/
YES!!! Thank you!
(Now to see how accurate my memory is. The blog is newer-model than I recalled (and Wayback indicates that it was like that before). The author is a linguist, and at a quick glance seems to focus on Ojibwe in particular and Algonquian languages in general, so their language learning may be of professional interest and not "just for fun". There is some political signaling up front, but mostly it's of the view that anyone presenting a slanted version of history is doing a disservice to the people in it, which warms the cockles of my heart.)
Woohoo! I wasn't familiar with your post, just googled words from your description that seemed like a unique combo: Tisquantum, linguist, 2021
Wow, my Google-fu has deteriorated. I knew I shouldn't be using DDG because it has a problem with Wordpress, but I hadn't thought of adding my speculation about linguistics in there, and I definitely didn't think of adding the year. I wasn't even sure it was new that year, just that that's when I was reading it.
Just for fun tried to find the Aztec one with Aztec + "cool stuff" but only found shit like this: https://supdudestu.com/the-aztecs-mexico
Writer probably wasn't so naive as to actually say "cool stuff." Ah well.
There was a distinct lack of human sacrifice in those videos. I want my money back.
In other news, Connor Pitts just found it!
https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/polygamy-human-sacrifices-and-steel-why-the-aztecs-were-awesome/
Well, I'm glad you & that blog are reunited. Speaking of Google-fu, there used to be a place where people tried to come up with 2-word combos that brought up exactly one result in Google. There was a name for a successful combo, something like Googleplexus. That was fun. Some people were incredibly good at it, & I'd see their combos appearing one after another in real time while I struggled for half an hour to come up with a word that had appeared once & only once with 'topiary' . . .
I remember liking and linking to https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/squanto.html , but it seems to be down now.
That's not it, but thanks! The Wayback Machine has a copy of that one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150413131647/http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/native-intelligence-109314481/?all
I've been following a friend who has been through severe childhood trauma and for whom EMDR did not work trying ART (Accelerated Resolution Therapy), and so far it is way more promising. I wonder if anyone else here has experience with this type of therapy, either as a patient, or as a professional?
Thanks for mentioning ART, I'm going to try to remember it as a backup in case my current EMDR doesn't pan out.
I've undergone ART, it was probably the most impactful therapy I've been through, although it's going to be hard to disentangle that from a bunch of other factors (only therapy I've undergone performed by a psychiatrist, only therapy performed by a therapist who wasn't starting from a standing start with respect to my history, etc).
Cool, any specific impressions you could share?
I don't really know what to say that would generalize, although I'm willing to answer questions.
Thinking on it a bit, one concern I have is that, to the extent the accelerated resolutions are accelerated, it feels you could quickly go places with less forethought than might be adviseable.
Lots of reliving memories and experiences, and attempting to relive them differently, followed by the fancy eye-movement activity, multiple times in a session.
The idea (iirc) is, after exploring a graph of memories and associations, not so much rewriting memories (obvious concerns are obvious), but instead rewriting their impact/emotional context.
Or something.
Cool! Thanks. My impression is that the eye movement is just to enter light trance, but I thought, that unlike EMDR, the patient doesn't need to discuss the traumatic memories, just imagine them, without pulling on any threads that can unravel into other traumatic memories right then and there, and basically tile the bad memories with... smiley faces, so to speak.
What are your strongest arguments for and against laissez-faire ? I'm trying to steel-man both positions
Bryan Caplan is writing a book on how free, unregulated markets work better than any of the alternatives. Actually the book is a compilation of his "best blog posts" on that subject, so in principle you can read those. He wrote at Econlog for years and now has his own Substack site, but the blog posts are still accessible at Econlog. Bryan is very smart and a fiercely independent thinker, so worth your while.
Laissez-faire, as traditionally understood, allows any transaction has the informed consent of all participants. No force or fraud, anything else goes. Assuming this is properly enforced, and that e.g. polluting the local water supply is understood as forcefully introducing outsiders into the transaction, then laissez-faire allows all utility-maximizing enterprises. Including transactions that may harm some people, but only if those people are adequately compensated for their harm.
Empirically, we note that economies that approach laissez-faire have been the most broadly productive in human history, with some problems associated with imperfect enforcement of the "no force or fraud" part. Sometimes the locals don't notice the water supply being polluted until it's too late, or sometimes the enforcers are corrupt. But in terms of avoiding force, fraud, and "externalities", the 80/20 rule applies. Beyond that, you're mostly impairing productivity and utility, not so much minimizing harmful externalities. And since wealth can buy solutions to many problems, you're probably better off marginally underregulating the people who are making your society rich, than marginally overregulating them.
Very good answer. The intended benefits of regulation always get widely ballyhooed but their costs are often ignored and certainly not honestly monitored. The Mercatus Center published an analysis some years ago (sorry, I don't have a link and it was about 10 years ago) that estimated that total U.S. GDP would be something like 2x or 3x what it actually was then (in, say, 2010) relative to 1970, when the pace of regulatory expansion picked up sharply with the establishment new agencies such as EPA and Education. Yes, regulations have undoubtedly led to some improvements, but those are almost certainly not as large as is thought. For example, If you look at automobile accident mortality since mandatory seat-belt laws went into effect, you do find significant and steady declines. But it turns out it was declining at the same rate before those laws came into existence. There's even an economic principle, the "Peltzman Effect" (named after Sam Peltzman, who brought it to light), which shows that behavioral responses neutralize some (all in some cases?) of the effects of regulation. For example, drivers wearing seat belts, at the margin, might take more risks than they would without seatbelsts. If this seems implausible to you, ask yourself if you might be just a bit more careful driving in bad weather if your car lacked seat belts and anti-skid brakes. Plus, industries put a lot of efforts and resources into avoiding or neutralizing regulations, which is socially wasteful. It's been said that 90% of financial innovation is driven by tax and regulatory considerations. Might be lower in other industries but far from 0.
Very interesting comment. I actually just learned about the Peltzman effect independently. It is indeed hard to believe but Peltzman does have numbers to back it up. This book summarizes the literature on a wide range of government interventions :
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815793898/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i5
The bottom line is not good at all. A lot of programs aren't even evaluated and don't even use cost benefit analysis. When they are analyzed, it turns out that either the results are inconclusive and we don't know their effects, or they don't have any effect/the effect is smaller than the cost, or they are actually completely counter-productive and harmful. Anti-trust seems to have no effect on prices for example, which is the whole idea behind its existence.
I haven't checked all the studies and I don't think all of them have absolute iron-clad causal inference. But in my view the fact that it is really hard to measure the effects of policies and that for many we don't know what the effects are or don't even try to measure them is an argument *against* intervention.
The book examines antitrust, regulation, public production, patents, imperfect information and more but ignores social programs for which the same is true. The overwhelming majority are not even evaluated and when they are the effect tend towards zero :
https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/do-federal-social-programs-work
https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-social-program/
(I know the Heritage foundation is a biased source but in this article the list of social programs was pretty exhaustive so I don't think only the bad ones were cherry picked)
You could add to that Richard Hanania's book on foreign policy and you get a pretty grim picture of all around government intervention. It is certainly true that the market is not perfect but neither is government, and yet we need it.
Yes. The authors (the political elite) of the laws and regulations only bear a tiny fraction of their total costs, i.e. the same amount as anyone else. That's the definition of an externality--others bear most of the costs of the politico's actions. They get huge benefits in the form of political contributions from industry participants who seek to tweak or pound the laws or regulations in their favor, or better yet, get an exemption for themselves. Plus they get lucrative lobbying jobs when they retire or lose an election.
The higher level principles involved are illuminated by Public Choice economics, the most important branch of economics most people don't know about, which treats the agents of public policy (governments and their agents) like any economic agent, i.e., what really motivates them as they make their political sausage? Public Choice econ explores the question of why most public policy initiatives fail and are counterproductive, notwithstanding their impressively high-minded labels. (Build Back Better, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.)
Agreed. Too many people ignore the existence of public choice. The core ideas of public choice turned out to be right, i.e. that government officials are not perfect benevolent and rational actors. From what I have read however, public choice remains very theoretical. Buchanan early models were not complete, I think he described political agents as influenced by personal interest and special interests. The picture is more complicated than that, there is also dogma/ideology, incomplete information, irrationality and many more factors involved. That's why I liked Clifford Winston's book so much. It's basically empirical public choice, and documents government failures. It's from 2006, so I wonder if there is a more recent book doing the same thing, or perhaps in the European context. That would be very interesting to look at. Do you know of any ?
As a case in point (in this case, mostly of Baptists and Bootleggers I'd say), take a look at economist John Cochrane's blogpost about the impact of the climate policy spending in the current bill, and the (mostly lack of) cost/benefit analysis. xhttps://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/08/climate-policy-numbers.html
Yes, agree it's complicated. I think one reason Public Choice remains relatively unknown and ignored is that it's hard build neat models around it as academic economics like to do (and need to to get tenure). I'm not an expert but someone smart I was reading said the best book on Public Choice is Beyond Politics by Randy T. Simmons. It has a foreword by Gordon Tullock, one of the "founders" of the field. I haven't read it yet. More recent and more anecdotal is a compilation of essays by Bryan Caplan called "How Evil are Politicians: Essays on Demaguoguery", which shows in nauseating and convincing detail how politicians come up with ideas for laws with virtually no thought to the actual consequences, which are overwhelmingly counterproductive (to use the kindest word, as opposed to say, malign and destructive).
"Laissez-faire" is increasingly incoherent.
Basically the issue comes down to the fractal topography of the spaces involved; it's easy to say government shouldn't pick and choose winners and losers, but when you're considering contract law, at some level of definition the choices government must make between interpretations amount to arbitrary distinctions, and those distinctions in turn result in different sets of winners and losers. The greater the complexity of society and economics, the more important these arbitrary decisions are, and the more effective regulatory power a government is obligated to exercise.
An alternative way of constructing this set of ideas:
There is a constant technological arms race between enforcement and enforcement evasion, and the enforcement wing cannot unilaterally stop; the regulatory state must constantly increase in complexity to keep up.
(This is my strongest argument against laissez-faire economics; it is also my strongest argument for laissez-faire economics, if you think about the implications for a few minutes. Which is why I say the idea of laissez-faire economics is incoherent.)
Except for regulatory capture. As regulations get more complex, only sophisticated players can keep playing. Add the fact that as government exerts more influence over more sectors of the economy, the more it pays to influence government--lobby--rather than put resources into something socially useful. An important argument for laissez fair is that as government grows and regulations get more complex, vested interests get created and they grow, and their first priority is to lobby government for regulations that keep out competition. Efficiency and innovation suffers. So in an idealized world "The greater the complexity of society and economics, the more important these arbitrary decisions are, and the more effective regulatory power a government is obligated to exercise," but in the real world the actual power the government exercises is not to promote socially useful ends more equitably or efficiently but to protect various vested interests. Do you see much that's "effective" in the multi-trillion dollar budgets of recent years? I don't but I see plenty of spending on pet projects and favored industries. The goals of legislation are accomplished (or "accomplished") via the spending and enforcement mechanisms of the regulatory agencies.
Alright, those are fine criticisms of something we aren't talking about here?
It seems like this is ultimately just saying that laissez-faire economics is inconsistent with the kind of regulation of industry you want, which seems like it's just getting back to the definition of laissez-faire.
Some of the relevant regulations in question are the regulations which create legal recognition of "ownership".
Mind, if we want to call a capitalism without government-recognized-or-enforced ownership of stuff "laissez-faire", I'm fine with that, that's just not what most people have in mind.
Seems to me that it depends on what is the considered alternative.
* Unregulated market vs some reasonable regulation? (Such as: you can't sell poison and label it "food".) Regulation is better.
* Reasonable people making their own choices vs a powerful bureaucrat deciding what everyone "wants" and "needs"? (Especially when most people are unhappy about the bureaucrat's decisions, but there is nothing they can do about it.) Making your own choice is better.
So, in my opinion, the perfect setup would be something that prevents market participants from using violence, fraud, and maybe some kinds of abuse of monopoly. But it is difficult to define the exact boundaries, because one person's "fraud" is other person's "clever marketing" or "alternative truth", etc.
I am not sure how a 'free market' can actually exist. All markets are defined by legal obligations and restrictions on the market participants. For example, on which currency is acceptable, quality of goods, who can use violence to ensure that contracts are fulfilled, penalties for theft, and a hundred other things.
Another problem is that the laws governing commercial transactions often tend to result in positive feedback loops resulting in politically unstable divisions of wealth.
Hard core libertarians can describe an economy and society where even laws, contracts, and regulations can be private and voluntary. But "laissez faire" typically posits at least the "night watchman" state, i.e., a state that administers and enforces a reasonably honest and efficient justice system that can enforce contracts and that includes police who maintain public order. Beyond that, interaction is voluntary. One can debate details--can't many contracts be enforced via private arbitration or some such? So yes, what exactly is meant by "laissez fair" needs to be specified in a thorough discussion.
So how can freedom of religion exist in a country where even churches and religious people exist within a framework of legal obligations and contract law and such? It is true that my freedom of religion living in 2022 USA isn't quite the same as it would be on a desert island, but it also seems clear that 2022 USA has religious freedom in a way that, say, 2022 North Korea or Saudi Arabia does not.
You don't have complete religious freedom in the USA. You can test that by attempting to reintroduce Aztec human sacrifice.
What do you mean by "laissez-faire"? The term isn't specific outside of a context you're probably not referring to (physiocracy).
I just mean minimal government intervention in the economy
Thor Odinson nailed it on the strongest argument against, which is that it's hard for a free market to restrain its most powerful and wealthy actors from violating the conditions that make it free, whether that's weaponizing the law against potential and real competitors through regulatory capture or extra-legal violence and sabotage (or both).
It's also tremendously difficult to extend property rights to later encompass costs that were not originally factored into the price, although you could argue that it's just a matter of convincing a judge that damages for that should factor into it if we had laissez-faire style courts as well.
As I said above, the wealthy and powerful typically depend on governments to help them maintain their wealth and power by restraining competitors. Under laissez-faire, new competitors--innovators and disruptors--eventually turn the industry giants into former industry giants. History is littered with examples. No monopolies last without government and regulatory support.
IMO, the strongest argument for it is that people almost always know better than others what is good for themselves, and as a result countries have historically prospered almost precisely to the extent that they have allowed free markets.
The strongest argument against is that totally free markets are an unstable equilibrium where sufficiently wealthy actors end up lobbing government to regulate away their competition, or in countries with a weak central government simply deploying force of arms themselves with mercenaries. Note however that this is an argument that free markets are difficult to keep, not that they're not desirable.
As to arguments about externalities, that gets philosophical rapidly. Personally, I think that a libertarian framework absolutely ought to factor in externalities, and that doing so correctly is part of why it's very hard to have an actually free market - much regulatory capture is in the form of manipulating how externalities are counted.
Strongest arguments for:
1. Human rights: humans don't have the right to stop others from trading however they like.
2. To the extent that it is tried, it tends to work better than other alternatives.
Strongest arguments against:
1. Sometimes outcomes are suboptimal compared to a more interventionist approach.
Your argument against is a counterfactual and might not be true. Interventions are the result of a messy political process and don't accomplish what they wee intended to according to the well-intentioned advocates, in part because less-well intentioned and self-interested advocates work harder to actually shape them. You end up with new distortions and malign outcomes. Have you heard of the Baptists and Bootleggers phenomenon? It's based on the (true) history of the regulation of alcohol on Sundays. Baptists oppose the sale of alcohol on Sundays because it's sinful to drink on a holy day. Bootleggers fund the Baptists' cause because it's in their interest. If you look around you see the principle at work in every piece of legislation, and regulation is rife with it. The bottom line is that no intervention is optimized to achieve the outcome its rational, well-intentioned advocates envisioned, but instead benefit political cronies create new problems that will require new regulation.
How do you mean?
Against - it leads to monopolies, merchant rule, and totalitarianism where one side winning in a true sense leads to a loss of freedom, choice, and innovation with a wide ranging negative impact on everyone except the newly minted aristocrats. In a true way with no rules, it is a form of anarchy which eats itself to become a fascist and feudal state over time.
With no or very few rules you will have the truest merchants in the form of the Vikings who came, killed, and took what they wanted. Or an endemic version of being the purveyor of violence or bribing those who hold such violent power over others to insert themselves as feudal lords. One dollar equals one vote leads to an inherent oligopoly and this is true historically in basically every case. It is an unstable and utopian type idea which has no reference point in human history or behaviour.
It begins with many huge assertions such as extreme ownership concepts where a middleman step is used to justify the seizure of other's work on a perpetual basis.
This is what makes it feudal where it is 'somehow' inherently correct to think it is right that one man collects the profits from the labour of a thousand men who work 'for him'. The legal fiction of a company which accrues all value which happens to be the same as the ownership or merchant or aristocratic duke/earl/count/lord/king or capital or whatever you want to call it class. This fig leaf stands in for why when a company starts using email and productivity of workers goes up through no effort, skill, invention, or risk of the ownership class..that all new profits from that increased productivity go into the hands of the owners. This has no foundation in morality and is theft through control.
This spirals into a merchant style dictatorship over time and no 'free market' every stays free for very long. Free from what? From the government? From corporate power? From cartel power? Certainly no broad concepts of freedom is ever sustained in any meaningful way. Making lassez-faire a terrible idea in that it cannot ever sustain itself and becomes the thing it is nominally against over time, and usually not very much time. The supposed separation of or superiority of such merchant or corporate power itself also devolves as relationships with government or various merchants effectively becoming/controlling the government over time is what always happens.
You're using a weird definition of free markets. Invading and pillaging other countries is a free market activity? Usually property rights and voluntary transactions are considered part of the definition.
You also consider "bribing those who hold such violent power over others to insert themselves as feudal lords" to be part of free markets - it doesn't seem like you're criticizing free markets, it seems like you're criticizing the concept of incentive itself. If you have a hyper-centralized state that incentivizes people to bribe it and gain power, is it the fault of people simply following their self-interest, or is it the fact that you have this organization with so much power able to be bribed in the first place?
I have recently invented a kind of Law of Incentives (something like this probably exists already, but I am not aware of it): As the incentives to do a certain activity and the number of people with the opportunity to do that activity increases, the probability that at least one person will do that activity approaches 1.
This is a result of basic probability theory: if N is the number of people with the opportunity to do something and p is the probability that someone will do it given that they have the opportunity, then the chance that at least one one person will do it is given by 1 - (1-p)^N.
This does not depend on any particular economic or political system - it's just the idea that if you design a system that provides huge incentives for people to do bad things like bribery, you can't just rely on some theorized inherent goodness of human nature and hope that *no one* will follow their incentives and do the bad thing.
It should be clear which option is easier to achieve between "implement a system without hyper-centralized political control, because that would create huge incentives for bribery and corruption" or "implement a system with hyper-centralized political control, knowing full well that this creates huge incentives for bribery and corruption, but then use mind control technology to brainwash hundreds of millions of people so that they do not follow the incentives laid out in front of them and always do what is best for the hive instead."
Another problem is that empirically, communist countries have been the most corrupt in the world.
Finally, it's a weird argument to make that "A is bad because it will lead to B, which is bad" if B is already the status quo. You say that free markets always lead to this behemoth which is the merging of the state and corporations - essentially how things are right now. You seem to think this is a bad state of affairs, but if the thing that was wrong with free markets is that it leads to the status quo, wouldn't it be better to roll this process back and return to free markets?
I will note that while Viking raiders are well entrenched in English cultural memory, the vast majority of Vikings were peaceful traders.
They kind of also conquered the entire country, for a while? Sweyn Forkbeard, his son Cnut the Great, and his sons Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut were all Kings of England. And William the Conqueror came from a long line of Viking raiders (no relation that I know of except through Emma of Normandy) who discovered that they could hold territory (with a fig leaf of vassalage and Christianity) while raiding other territory, having their cake and eating it too. Like, when Edward (later the Confessor) was hiding out in Normandy with his cool cousin William, he actually went on raids against England itself.
"They bred like birds in English woods,
They rooted like the rose,
When Alfred came to Athelney
To hide him from their bows
There was not English armour left,
Nor any English thing,
When Alfred came to Athelney
To be an English King."
I will note that while White settlers are well entrenched in the Native American cultural memory, the vast majority were 19th Century immigrants who never even met a Native American.
Have you read Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price? He's got a lot of really interesting new archeological, climate history and genetics insights into the Viking age. And he's got some very interesting lectures online, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu2gN8n15_A
#notallvikings
Don't fall for Odinson's tricks. He just wants you to lower your guard. #standagainstvikingmenace
Odinsbrother, belike?
;-)
Cf Kipling's "Danegeld"
The strongest argument is that the more laissez-faire trade people have been able to do the more prosperous humanity as a whole has become.
The strongest argument against is Thomas Midgley Jr. who for profit created and sold leaded gasoline and CFCs, causing incalculable damage to people and the environment. AI risk may also end up within that category of for-profit disasters.
Don't know if that's an argument against laissez-fair or against ignorance. No one knew what lead did or CFCs. A lot of innovations had some bad consequences. The first boilers had a habit of exploding and killing bystanders but they got better with time. The Romans built their aqueducts out of lead out of expediency and ignorance, not because of laissez fair. Pre-modern medicine's go-to remedy was to bleed the sick, presumably not because of laissez faire. It's a common impulse it seems to assume that all problems and tragedies in more capitalist economies are due to Capitalism, but problems and tragedies in collectivist economies are because they're not quite pure enough,.
In principle the problem of externalities is fixable if there are laws against causing damage to others without compensation--the damaged party(ies) has to be "made whole". There's the well-known Coasean problem that transactions costs may be too high for that to happen. In such cases regulation is, in principle, called for. Easier said than done though--the regulations that get through any political process can easily end up doing more harm than good, and quite possibly create new externalities.
Do other men have early sexual memories linked to "growing"? I have vivid memories of feeling funny when I watched specific cartoons or media that involved characters growing physically larger. I wonder if this is a common experience for men, and if there's some link to the notion of an erection
For me, it was less about the growth and more about the end result.
I suspect a large part of the actual psychology behind a lot of macrophilia for a lot of people, instead of some pseudo-Freudian fixation with the idea of the erection being sublimated, is that it's just a logical extension of the natural signals for fitness in sexual partners. Humans are naturally wired to find things attractive because they directly or indirectly signal that this person is healthy and fertile, so someone who is physically large well outside of human norms hijacks that pathway by being supernaturally healthy (this part is what's most true for me.)
Another aspect of it absolutely has to do with power dynamics- people I've known who had automacrophilic fantasies generally found it appealing because of the idea of being huge and powerful gave them a sense of control over their sexuality or sexual partners- with macrophiles in general it can split between fantasies of their partner dominating them (this part's also true for me) or the thrill of them dominating a physically larger and more powerful partner.
Source: I've been a macrophile for most of my adult life and spent a decent amount of time in that community, and the above is basically my reflections on talking with other people about what exactly the appeal is to them. YMMV, there's probably as many reasons to have a fetish as there are people who have it.
> Humans are naturally wired to find things attractive because they directly or indirectly signal that this person is healthy and fertile, so someone who is physically large well outside of human norms hijacks that pathway by being supernaturally healthy (this part is what's most true for me.)
This can go different ways. For me, tallness doesn't come across as a healthy trait; it comes across as a masculine trait. (I have a thing for short women.)
Well, yes, but those sorts of thoughts probably have a cultural component: in much of Europe femininity= small, demure, weak, but in some cultures (Appalachia, East Africa) women who are larger and muscular are preferable. Most of these cultures, I'll point out, are ones where there's a very long history of clan-based living and marginal farming that's only ended recently, if at all, so there is a degree of pragmatism in finding a woman who can pull her weight on the farm- but that's exactly my point- it's a cultural standard.
Even in America and Europe, though, you still have a decent acceptance of the idea of the "glamazon"- not necessarily as THE standard for femininity, but certainly an acceptable archetype therein.
Once again: human sexuality is dizzyingly complicated.
Not me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I always got a thrill when Popeye ate his spinach but I don’t have any sexual association.
I ate a lot of canned spinach…
Sublimation?
No
Nope (n=1).
Unless people are only going from one far end to the other(??), the elongated design of Neom is maximally inefficient WRT public transport. As people would constantly need to embark and disembark, there's no way a Neom 'hyperloop' could possibly go much faster than a plain old bus.
Car (and buses) are very inefficient by design. Compared to scooters and motorbikes they use much more fuel for not much gain in speed in the busy city environment. And yet, they provide enough benefits for most people to use cars or buses despite inefficiencies.
I don't believe inefficiency with this design is enough to discard the idea. If The Line provides other benefits it might be worth inefficiencies. Or might not, I don't know but I am open to the possibility.
I guess the question then is just what the specific advantage is to a linear design over a radial design.
I am not sure what are the intention of creators but my idea would be to remain with nature and yet live in the city. Only linear design can offer that. Except that I would have built such a project in Ireland not in desert.
It is not uncommon for agglomerations to form along the river or the sea. Here is the longest trolley bus route: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Trolleybus
"Only linear design can offer that."
Why?
"It is not uncommon for agglomerations to form along the river or the sea."
Yeah, but that seems likely due to a linear transport system already given by nature.
"Except that I would have built such a project in Ireland not in desert."
Wouldn't it have less of an ecological footprint in the desert?
It would but I don't like living in the desert.
Part of Honourary's point in the comment above is that some Hyperloop designs include personal pods that can go straight to the destination without having to stop along the way.
That's a bit like saying "the new designs for flying pigs include supersonic speeds." Getting a single many-mile-long vacuum tube mechanically stable, airtight etc is a nightmare to begin with. Getting a multi-tube system with the possibility to switch lanes and enter and exit at multiple points mechanically stable and airtight is exponentially worse, and promising it... well, I'm assuming the planners are operating under the same mindset as the company that Reader described in his comment. (Is this possibly an example of Gell-Mann amnesia on Scott's part, btw.?)
"Hyperloop is currently advertising the ability to have a pod change tracks and stop at a station while allowing other pods to continue down the magnetic line without the entire train having to stop at every station."
Huh. I wonder how many world's-longest-vacuum-tubes we'd now be talking about? Also wonder if a similar concept would work for elevators (as we're essentially talking about a complex elevator system for a very tall building on its side).
Five years ago, some company claimed to come up with a way to do elevators without cables, to enable this sort of thing: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-worlds-first-rope-less-sideways-moving-elevator-system-multi/
I still think the most likely use in a big building would be to run the elevators much more like a conventional bus - one shaft goes up and the other shaft goes down, but there can be a bunch of cars in the same shaft, so that you never have to wait more than about 30 seconds for the next car. This only helps if you're dealing with really tall skyscrapers with high elevator demand.
"Five years ago..."
And it appears to still only be actualized as just computer graphics, FWIW.
"...a bunch of cars in the same shaft..."
Yeah, like the old paternoster lifts. Or even just plain old escalators. For great horizontal distances this would just amount to moving walkways, perhaps with fast and slow lanes like the ones used on large airports.
I don’t think so, because propulsion methods are very different. Almost all elevators (as far as I know) are pulled by massive cables, that can’t really dive between various tunnels. My guess is that the cost savings you get from being able to counterweight the elevator are so massive that the speed of a hyperloop-style elevator wouldn’t be worth it (in most cases)
From what I've read, elevator space is a huge limit on building taller builders -- the taller you get the more elevators you need, which reduces the useable space on each floor. Cable-less elevators would get around this limitation, and I can't imagine the additional cost of not using a counterweight would make it not worth it. More likely it's safety concerns -- possibly justified or possible regulators being too cautious.
"...propulsion methods are very different."
The parallel is in placing everything in a giant, linear shaft, just like an elevator shaft, only it's now a *vacuum* shaft.
"...the speed of a hyperloop-style elevator wouldn’t be worth it..."
That's not what I was suggesting. I was wondering about the use of 'pods' in elevators. Since the main transport task is linear, accommodating the other dimensions is probably very much a matter of diminishing returns. I'm guessing that that's why we don't see elevator 'pods.' WRT a 'hyperloop' design, you're adding multiple giant vacuum seals to costs. Not a simple case of taking the off ramp.
A bunch of my friends have gotten into poker recently. Anyone know of a good intro to poker for math people?
I will note that when playing with friends, it’s also worth using a bit of a “play the opponent” rather than “play the cards” when you’re 1v1 against a weaker player. I don’t have book recommendations for that paradigm, but perhaps someone else will
Sklansky remains the gold standard. Harrington is also supposed to be good.
They might like the mathematics of poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman.
The theory of poker is old but also very good.
The issue with Neom just seems like the easiest way to spend the money seems more likely to work - you could incentivize/bribe a lot of cool companies to set up offices in Saudi Arabia with that money and hopefully get a local talent cluster going.
They (and similar countries) have been trying this kind of thing for a while; for instance they pay massive salaries to mediocre academics to work at King Abdullah Institute of Science and Technology.
Getting talented foreigners to move to Riyadh or Jeddah, though, is a massive uphill battle for obvious reasons. You can eliminate women, for starters. Or anyone who is married to a woman. Or definitely anyone who is in a relationship with a woman to whom they're not married. And also any single man who wants to meet a woman. That only leaves men with no interest in women, and... well, most of them are going to have issues too.
The idea of starting up a whole new city on the far side of Saudi Arabia where the religious police aren't allowed to operate and the laws are a bit more tolerable to westerners might not be the worst idea.
Many years ago, the consulting company I worked for was considering taking a job that would involve a trip to Saudi Arabia. IIRC, I was one of only two consultants in our not-that-big group who even *could* have gone--we were told (I'm not sure how formally) that they didn't want any Jews, women, or gays. We didn't ultimately do any business with them, though.
That's weird. One of my wife's friends has a mom who did a several month long consulting stint over there. She was gay, too, so she hit two of those three criteria.
That's one reason why I would never go there.
On the other hand, I know western people who go to Saudi Arabia for work, and my understanding is that the rules for westerners are a little bit relaxed, for example, they can drink some alcohol etc. Maybe then can still find some people willing to relocate. 9 million seems unbelievable however.
What distinguishes Socratic rationalism from the contemporary rationalist movement? And what would Socrates have made of it either pro or con?
In philosophy, people usually use the words "rationalism" and "empiricism" to distinguish two opposing schools of epistemology - classical rationalists (like Plato's version of Socrates, and much later, Descartes and Leibniz) believe that pure reason can provide insight into the necessary nature of reality, and that this is more reliable (when done well) than observation and experimentation with the senses (whether because the physical world is a minor and irrelevant part of reality as in classic Platonists, or because the physical world is a fallen creation of a lesser god as in neo-Platonists, or because our senses are subject to deception and error while our reason is not as in Descartes, or because it's impossible for one thing to actually interact with another and so all knowledge comes from within as in Leibniz); classical empiricists (like Berkeley and Hume in the 18th century, or the positivists in the early 20th century) believe that all knowledge of the world comes from the senses, and that pure reason can't tell us anything significant beyond maybe logical truths and mathematics. Most contemporary philosophers are closer to empiricists, though with some role for rational knowledge of things like morality (and many psychologists and cognitive scientists follow Chomsky in thinking of innate mental modules as a kind of innate rationalist knowledge independent of the senses).
I think the contemporary internet "rationalist" movement that people often align Scott (and related blogs) with is much more like empiricism. It is characteristic of philosophical rationalists to disdain uncertainty and only count things as meaningful knowledge if they come with certainty - Bayesianism is historically a project associated with empiricism (though I don't think this is essential - and anyone who wants to justify a Solomonoff prior or other objective rational prior is probably committed to some sort of rationalism about the prior). Socrates would not like all this Bayesian stuff, and the idea that learning about the world is potentially as important as learning about concepts.
Socrates was all about the journey and not the destination, while the modern style is more about making sure we reached any given destination in a 'correct' way
Everything is always in the last place you looked for it, because you stopped looking once you found what you were seeking. Socrates does not stop looking, even if the method of looking and defining what you thought you sought is very well reasoned out in a modern rationalist way.
I feel like Socrates was all about getting us to question what we think we know, but he was not overly concerned with arriving at any particular answer or method besides challenging what people say to get them to dig deeper. He just wanted you to think and question and come to your own ideas with less unquestioned bias and inertia in your thinking. To consider more viewpoints and options and eschew the 'obvious' solution or answer or knowledge.
Modern rationality is much more about developing tools to better get at 'the truth' *tm. It is far more systematic and uses many taxonomies with ways to avoid 'wrongthink' patterns of stupid non-rational minds which they have identified and named. It is well self-described when the modern rationalist imagines they can get closer to the truth of things by being 'less wrong' in how they think and reason with each step.
Socrates didn't really want to help you reason your way into correct answers. He was in a more fundamental place in my view, simply bringing a wide variety of questions to mind in what we are doing/saying/thinking, without any proscriptive ideas of how to arrive at 'the truth' or 'the best way' to apply a particular brand of reasoning rules to ensure we are 'correct'. Though the practices share a superficial relationship and I'd reckon a historical and developmental connection.
Socrates in my view would ask a lot of open ended questions to the modern rationalist and while there might be long winded essay style answers to his questions, he would still just keep questioning ideas and statements in detail with no goal, no focus, and no destination. This goes on until the person realising something new or gets frustrated/bored and walks away from Socrates. Socrates doesn't particularly care what methods you use or answers you find or don't find, as long as you've considered more things in more ways while attempting to answer his questions.
The moment you define truth, or good reasoning, or whatever, the less Socratic you are being as you've reached a destination - which is Socraticly simply another waypoint to defend on the journey of endless questions.. Each of those only leads to further questions about how a given destination is defined. I think modern rationality would do well to push their own self-questioning further for many modern rationalists who often reach a stopping point when they feel like they have 'valid paths to reason their way to answers' and then look no further into their tools which satisfy their desire to 'be right'.
Everything is always in the last place you looked for it, because you stopped looking once you found what you were seeking. Socrates does not stop looking.
Socrates was all about the journey and not the destination, while the modern style is more about making sure we reached any given destination in a 'correct' way.
Any . Take the question and run
And that's why they voted to kill him.
Who are “The Thirty”? I’ve never heard of them and you’ve piqued my curiosity
This is something I've wondered about since I first heard of fluvoxamine as a treatment for COVID. That drug can have some pretty gnarly ramp-up effects (when I've used it, I've titrated up very slowly and supplemented with benzos during that period). I was surprised to not hear much about these side effects and figured it was just that nobody was actually prescribing it. What dose were you taking and for how long?
>why doesn't deontology just collapse into consequentialism?
Isn't it the opposite?
You can't calculate the consequence of every single one of your actions, therefore you have to rely on some sort of heuristic that boil down to "this is good because it tends to lead to positive results, this is bad because it tends to lead to negative results". Which sounds like deontology to me.
Or, as I like to say (or rather ramble in my head), deontology is consequentialism that factors in incentives/unforseen consequences.
I'd say rather that consequentialism, faced with the aforementioned impossibility of determining the ultimate consequences (to do so, we would need to traverse the entire causal chain from here on out), coalesces into a bastardised form of deontology in that it tries to formulate rules, but then is... aha... unable to deal with the consequences.
Say what you want about Kant, but he was at least willing to bite the bullet and say that if obeying categorical imperatives led to results we did not like - so be it! Deontological imperatives are a priori - an action is moral or immoral regardless of its ultimate result.
Consequentialism, by choosing to make the result its benchmark for moral evaluation, cannot take that path. This leads to understandable tension between trying to have some a priori rules (or at least - guidelines) and finding that, all too often, good intentions pave the road to hell.
Kant wasn't exactly known for his practical wisdom - mostly because he didn't have any.
What he did attempt, though, was to come up with a truly reasoned system of philosophy. Armed with a Wittgensteinian perspective, we can look upon deontology as an attempt to reduce the conundrums of life choices to a game whose rules are known a priori (the fact that they are also synthetic is a good hint that we're dealing with a game). It was an impressive, if fundamentally misguided, intellectual feat.
However, we should note that consequentialists - especially of the utilitarian variety - are no better. An attempt to reduce moral choices to "shut up and multiply (expected utilities)" is, ultimately, no less a game than Kant's attempt to reduce moral choices to the equivalent of a cellular automaton. At least Kant would treat you solely as an end, and never as a means, while a utilitarian just might push you in front of a speeding trolley if that's what his sums say.
Overall, you might be safer with Kant. Just don't tell him any secrets.
Another important factor is the legal concept of “mens rea”. Latin for “guilty mind” it’s the idea that a persons mental state and intention makes a big difference for how guilty they are of a crime. If I pull the trigger intending to kill someone then I’m attempting murder, whether or not I succeed. By the same token if I pull a trigger with no intention to kill and no belief that pulling the trigger is likely to kill someone then I’m not guilty of murder, even if someone dies as a result. I may be guilty of manslaughter or something like it, but murder requires a “guilty mind”.
Consequentialism doesn’t care what you intended, only what happened. Deontology cares about what you intend, and for Virtue Ethics your intention is about 9/10th of the whole ethical question.
There’s an excellent comic explaining mens rea linked below: it goes through 5 scenarios that all have the same consequence (a dead kid) but different legal outcomes based on mens rea.
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=173
You seem to have some confused notions about what deontology entails.
Deontology is a "study of duties" (or "of obligations", if you prefer). The evaluation of the moral dimension comes prior - and orthogonal - to the evaluation of the action itself, and therein it differs from consequentialism.
There is no question of "pulling the trigger" in deontological analysis because "pulling a trigger" isn't an act with moral weight. The deontologist asks instead: "were you trying to kill somebody?" The means by which you may or may not have done so, and your success or lack thereof are completely irrelevant. There is a categorical imperative not to kill, and the moment you choose to go against it is the moment when your action is judged immoral.
This works both ways, incidentally, so that if you weren't trying to kill someone (as in your example of shooting targets), but a person nevertheless died as a result of your actions, you would not be morally culpable *as a killer* (moral blame might still attach if, for example, there was a duty of dilligence that you hadn't observed, that could have prevented the tragedy, but it would pertain to failing that particular duty).
The chief difference, however, is that actions with *postitive* outcomes may still be considered immoral under deontological analysis. If you do something morally wrong that, through happy circumstance, leads to a better outcome than if you had not done it, it remains morally wrong and worthy of condemnation.
There's a very simple point he's missing. Of course neurotypical people have lots of tabs open and start projects they don't finish. The difference is, people with ADHD do those things *all the damn time*, in a way that seriously interferes with the rest of our lives, and the tabs and the projects and the standing-blankly-in-the-kitchens are symbolic of a larger universe of behaviours that also interfere with our lives in ways large and small and for which people have been criticising us and making fun of us all our lives until we get a diagnosis and discover *oh my God, it's not just me, I'm not stupid or lazy, I have an actual medical problem*.
"oh my God, it's not just me, I'm not stupid or lazy, I have an actual medical problem"
Kind of a swerve, but I've never understood this kind of logic. Didn't you just get diagnosed with Stupid And Lazy? How is this different in principle from having your skull measured by a quack and told your Sloth Bulb is oversized and that makes you a Type 3 Subhuman (Bum)?
Good question, which requires separate answers for each term.
- I'm clearly not *generically* stupid, because I've historically been able to do "smart person" things like programming and mathematics. But then I constantly fail at basic stuff like [the kind of thing Freddie would say everyone fails at sometimes, but I bet he doesn't do it often enough that it becomes a known and remarked-upon feature of his character, or affects his school reports or performance reviews]. What gives? If I'm smart I should be able to do this stuff, but I can't do this stuff so maybe I'm not smart after all... Well, turns out ADHD gives: my ability profile is spiky in a way that is shared by many others, and we can share strategies for dealing with it and ask for accommodations at work and understanding from our friends on that basis. Maybe I should have generated the idea of "spiky ability profile" myself? Sure, maybe. But try convincing the rest of the world that that's a thing in the absence of a medical explanation, or getting them to go along with your weird coping strategies.
- Laziness implies the problem is moral and/or caused by not *wanting* to do the thing. I assure you, I want to do the thing! I just can't make myself do the thing! I don't understand how other people can just decide to do the thing and then they sit down and do the thing! That doesn't work for me! It's very frustrating, both for me and for the people who want me to do the thing! Wanting to do the thing more does not help! But what does help is getting a diagnosis, getting medication, connecting with a community of people with the same executive-function disorder, sharing coping strategies, asking for accommodations at work, and chilling out about something which it turns out I couldn't ever have fixed by just trying harder.
This is a very interesting reply and I thank you for it, interesting mainly because I feel like I understood everything you wrote but am still completely baffled.
I wanted to write a longer more detailed answer, but couldn't figure out how to do it without coming off as weirdly critical, then apologizing for seeming that way, then doing it all again. Instead, suffice it that I understand the various *practical* benefits as of medicine and help with adjusting just fine, but still not how any of that impacts your *moral* sense of self-worth, especially the diagnosis per se (as it sounded like you were saying, and in any case I've often heard before; but perhaps that very fact made me misunderstand you? If so, I apologize).
No, that's correct. The thing that you're missing is the accumulated mental baggage from decades of screwing up and disappointing people (and especially yourself) over and over, of being told that you "need to apply yourself", that you've got "so much potential" on one hand and being angrily asked "how could you forget that?" on the other, of trying to organise a pissup in a brewery as a self-deprecating joke and then *actually failing*. In the absence of an explanation it just feels like either the Universe has it in for you personally or you have some deep personal failing that thwarts all your plans.
Okay, I'll try to pinpoint the thing that's confusing me, but I want to be absolutely upfront that I really don't think you *should* let this stuff negatively affect your self-esteem, all right? If this sounds confrontational, I don't mean it that way, I just can't think of a better way to phrase it.
With that said: suppose the doctor had told you that "yes, I've diagnosed you with congenital laziness, that's why you're a fuckup and it's so severe that you'll never amount to a thing unless you take these drugs and use some coping strategies I'm going to teach you. We medical experts use the acronym D.U.M.B. to describe this syndrome, just tell your employer that you have DUMB and he'll understand"... would you still have felt great about getting diagnosed? It seems like no? And yet I can't see *any difference* between these scenarios except that the hypothetical doctor was a rude bastard while the real one was polite: it's purely semantic. Why should it matter (in a consistent, long-term way!) *which four letters* the guy uses if they effectively label the same thing?
To me, it seems obvious that your problems aren't a personal moral failing at all, in the same way that having one leg or just being plain stupid aren't, but to the extent that you were ever prepared to take them as one, surely ADHD is a deep-seated and personal trait that was thwarting all your plans? You see what I mean? In the moral sense, it just looks like the guy confirmed what you already knew, but you took it as a big transformative revelation! I can't wrap my head around it (a personal moral failing, no doubt).
I feel like the two actual critical questions here are "why is the establishment flabby, weak and uninterested in fighting?" and "where did the insurgency come from anyway?" In the case of wokism we know it came from the establishments for licensing the managerial class (universities) where actual literal Communists had been working for decades to undermine society in a fury of pique against their revolution being wrong and losing, and pretty much caught on because people need a religion and the dumb oxen of the managerial class had simultaneously convinced themselves they were too smart to need one (it's trivial to observe that the same moralists who used to be the worst, most unbearable people at your church are now all woke moralists instead, etc. etc, I won't waste time on this and just point out that the root of moralism seems to be neurotic anxiety). Wokism is like every other evangelical religion in that it's categorical, intolerant, uncompromising, reality-denying and absolutely unbearable to almost anyone; naturally then it has the same effects as unleashing a horde of furious shrill baptist women on gaming, SF or whatever else.
As for why the establishment doesn't fight back, I'm pretty sure there are two separate reasons, the one being that Republicans genuinely don't give a shit because the availability of classy wives and trashy bimbo whores is unchanged *for the wealthy*, so whatever gives them more money to buy those things with is the better option in their eyes, they'll just go along with it. Eventually, of course, letting the crazy people run riot fucks up all of society so badly that it starts interfering with the hooker supply, and at that point they do get off their asses – it seems to me that this is exactly what we're seeing, with a younger generation of Republican politicians being more Trumpist, more cultre-war-aligned and more aggressive. (Also notice how the one big cultural issue that animated the previous generation to the point of affecting electoral results for the Republicans – abortion – is one they did fight and win, in a way that maximized its milking potential for both sides, actually, of the political class).
The second reason is that nerds are selected from the very weakest men. You'll notice that wokism hasn't really made any inroads into the culture of jocks, certainly not to the point of screwing up their actual games with handicaps to bring men down to women's level and so on. This is not only why nerds fold like a house of cards immediately when they get yelled at, it's why they get stuck with the yelling harridans in the first place. Those are the most unbearable women, the ones who got left over once all the other men in society had already had their pick.
You're only allowed to really care about one thing. You can try care to about more than one thing, but when (not if) the multiple things you care about come into conflict, you have to choose what your values _really_ are.
In mainstream US capitalist etc culture (which is exported as the closest thing to a global culture we have so this goes beyond the US while also bring the worst here), the one thing is making money. All other values fall by the wayside if it means there's a buck to be made. This lines up with the values of the grifters, so the culture endlessly produces new grifters and excessively tolerates the existing grifters. At times this is even what gives rise to the "insurgency" that you talk about.
The answer is "change the culture", which is very hard, but any answer that doesn't include this is going to be fighting with one hand tied behind it's back, which "coincidentally" looks exactly what you call the majority force alergic to fighting.
Only so many people can live in a 4000 square foot house/condo with a view of the ocean, so money will forever remain the main driving force of humanity. At least until we move into "the Meta cloud" where everyone could live in a virtual ocean view penthouse.
Fine, then we'll continue to live in a culture in love/lust with money and it's associated 4000 square foot house/condo with a view of the ocean, and continue to be plagued by grifters and other negative externalities of basing a society around profit. Like I said up top, you're only allowed to really care about one thing. If you care more about condos with ocean views, then you don't get to care about grifters. Or more precisely, you get to care about grifters up to the point where they interact with your true values (money), which is immediately.
As an aside, I think "the meta cloud" will make this worse, not better; Especially if we continue down this stupid path of financializing every aspect of our lives and making digital goods artificially scarce.
If you can come up with a system that can decide who gets an ocean view and who doesn't without the use of money, you can get your utopian society. Just be aware that the last attempt to do so (communism) ended with a horrific failure. Until then money will remain society #1 true value.
"If you can come up with"? This is easy. It's a solved problem. We've known this one for thousands of years. The hereditary elite gets the ocean view and whatever else it is they want, and if merchants get uppity and try to amass too much power it's legal for the hereditary elite to take all their stuff and punch them in the dick. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's sustainable, and it *works*.
After the French Revolution (driven by envious bourgeoises regardless of what commies want to tell you, nothing to do with the working class) we just happen to live in a society by and for vile merchant strivers. Many hereditary aristocrats have regarded this as a huge mistake.
It should go without saying that the French Revolution wasn't about any one thing or driven by any one person, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the many twists and turns of the French Revolution could tell you.
I shouldn't have to point out that it's something you can't pick apart like a YouTuber explaining an indie game, because "author intent" barely applies to something with so many diverse and ideologically opposed authors, some of whom are just abstract concepts.
I extra definitely shouldn't have to point out that the Sans-Culottes and the Enragés were A Real Thing and had coherent political demands and even had some of their demands met, for a time.
You can accuse communists of selectively reading the history of the French Revolution, and certainly some communists have been guilty of this. That doesn't mean you should go and commit the same mistake in reverse.
Look friend, all I'm pointing out is that grifters come with the territory that we've decided to stake our society on. If you want to make the argument that "for all it's faults, capitalism is still the best system we have" or something similar, then fine. But that comes with an implicit acceptance and condoning of "all it's faults", grifting included. There's no carbon credit scheme that will be anywhere near as effective as "Stop polluting", there's no anti-grifter scheme that will work as well as "stop enshrining 'greed is good' as our highest cultural value".
I'm not particularly interested in defending communism to members of this community, even though it's basically nerd-sniping for me, I've learned that it just doesn't do any good here, and your reply doesn't give me any reason to believe you're any different.
"People following their incentives" has nothing to do with any particular economic system.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-236/comment/8239339#comment-8239339
This just seems to contradict everything I've seen over the past decade, to the point where I wonder just how we can look at the same situation and come to such different conclusions. I'll set aside the political aspect, because that's just asking for trouble, and just concentrate on the cultural side.
To me, the following are facts:
1. The video game and SF markets are broken, and have been for some time. In the case of video games, this is reflected in the market for reviews of games (in the various forms this takes). The best evidence for this is that the establishment doesn't seem to perform differently even when a barrier to entry prevents the insurgency from even starting, such as in TV and movies.
2. The insurgent 'grifters' provide a product that is not significantly different in overall value than that provided by the establishment. This will differ between different media; indie video games are lower quality than AAA titles, but make up for this by being more affordable. [Note that I don't say the insurgency's product is better; quite often, the insurgency has failed to deliver on promised value; some clearly are grifters, and some clearly are not.]
3. The establishment fought back hard against the cultural insurgencies in SF and video games. A free market would have let the establishment and insurgency compete. Instead, the establishment has worked to prevent the insurgency from entering the market at all.
4. The establishment 'won', and is still in control of SF and video games; however, the insurgency hasn't gone away. The Hugo awards are now completely irrelevant, and that's because the establishment owns them.
5. The establishment controls the narrative, which may mean continuing to paint everyone who challenges the establishment with the broad brush of 'insurgent' and 'grifter'.
Can you expand on what you are talking about around SF?
Is the about the whatever puppies drama a couple of years ago? Why are the Hugo awards irrelevant?
It's my subjective opinion, but think of this:
I got started with classic Sci Fi in the mid 90s... Heinlein and Asimov and so forth. Even at that age, I could grok why those works were influential, and why they had won awards. At the time, Sci-Fi and Fantasy was a niche genre, and I was a geek for reading it. I was a geek for reading for fun at all. If you told me that I would see a day within a decade when there would be midnight launch parties for fantasy books for high schoolers I would have told you you were crazy.
For all the problems with Harry Potter, all of the award-winning Sci Fi / Fantasy since then hasn't had a fraction of the influence even taken together (and the most influential of the lot, Gaiman's American Gods, won the award the year after HP did). When the streaming services go looking for Fantasy to adapt for TV series, where do they go? Not to the award winners, but to GRRM and Tolkien. As for Sci Fi, it's rehashes of series that date back to the 60s and 70s.
This isn't about my tastes. It's obvious something is wrong because there is a unmet demand out there for Sci Fi / Fantasy literature, and we've seen a time when that demand was met.
The question was specifically about why I thought the Hugo awards were irrelevant. Of the people you listed, only Sanderson and GRRM show up on the list of Hugo novel nominees. Sanderson gets a co-credit on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which started in 1990 (admittedly, he won awards in other categories). GRRM is rather prolific, showing up first in 1978, and his A Song of Ice and Fire started in 1996 and has had several nominations since 2001. Admittedly, A Song of Ice and Fire / "Game of Thrones" has had some popularity, but due to the botched TV series and constant delays with the books, its relevance has (seemingly) come and gone.
With those two authors, I'll give you something like having relevance, though not nearly on the level of Rowling's first series (which still sells a ton of books). Still, I'd suggest that both of them provide evidence for my case that something is wrong in Fantasy / Sci Fi in general. GRRM, for his inability to produce the next book in the series. Sanderson, for headlines like "Fantasy Author Raises $15.4 Million in 24 Hours to Self-Publish".
That's the problem with trying to write off the top of your head, you don't really think things out. I understand the SF insurgency and why some of the insurgency hangers-on could be seen as grifters, I understand GamerGate (as much as anyone can), but I should be asking 'who are the Video Gaming grifters?'
I mean, the whole reviewer issue is small potatoes compared to the actual problems in the industry, and nobody in the reviewers on either side is draining money from the industry. Between all the scandals and fizzled products, the issues with the Video Game production side is all internal. Did some outside 'grifter' sneak in and make Diablo Immortal pay-to-win? Activision Blizzard's issues are down to the company itself. Is anyone excited for OverWatch 2 or Diablo IV, and who's fault is that if not Blizzard? Who caused Fallout 76's or Call of Duty V's issues if not the producer?
I can accept the description of perennial abuse cover-upper (and Activision CEO) Bobby Kotick or perennial Skyrim re-releaser (and Bethesda Producer) Todd Howard as grifters. What I can't see is them being insurgents; as "major players in the industry", they're the establishment.
There's definitely some confusion here, and I apologize.
My assumption was based on the fact that I can't see the progressive left as "insurgents"; if anything, they seem to be stage managed by the establishment. The establishment doesn't resist because the establishment wants to move in that direction, and the vocal "insurgency" provides a crowd which cheers on demand for moves in that direction and boos anyone that gets out of line.
If everyone knew it when they saw it, how are there so many grifters?
"Somebody who gloms on to a social movement, exploits it for money, clout, and sexual favors without ever having any intention to advance the movement, and then dips once they've caused so much damage that the returns on investment are decreasing" describes most Democratic politicians as well as it describes Trump, except the fact that since the media covers for the Democrats they can keep making money off of sketchy Ukraine deals and insider trading on chip manufacturers without having to worry about their investment returns ever decreasing.
Scott has written pretty persuasively about why this doesn't really work. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/. The pithy TL;DR version is the following excerpt:
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
My point is that the people who are most motivated to join your witch-hunter hunt are pretty much always going to be the witches. You've created a selection filter than ensures that the worst elements of your own "side" (who are going to be hard to keep out and prevent from flocking to your banner) are disproportionately represented among your allies.
I don't see anything in the original post to justify your impression that they think or imply invasion is a purposeful activity, or that cyclical history is involved. You can invade something without meaning to, like for example a certain demographic moving to a residential area in large and disproportionate numbers against the wishes of the original residents. That's 'invasion' in the sense GP is talking about : There is a foreign group of people who doesn't know, care or respect a whole lot of norms and standards the current inhabitants of the space they're moving into cares about, and their behaviour annoys, aggravates and displaces the original inhabitants.
There is nowhere in that scenario or the ones GP said that required extra-special coordination. That doesn't mean that there is 0 cooperation, that's literally impossible, any bunch of people coherent enough to be considered as a "group" is coordinated, if nothing else its by shared values and language and memes, and often (especially in the age of internet) by much more than that. Wokism for example (the force behind all 3 of GP examples) is locally coordinated very well, in the case of GamerGate for example there were patreon channels for securing funding. This is not an especially difficult level of coordination in the modern day, but its far beyond "a bunch of innocent completely disorganized people mistaken by bad grumpy people to be a unified organized force".
>There's no particular reason every cultural strong point of it should have instantly folded before a group who were a) often quite unpleasant people with a heavy grifter infection themselves and b) had an extremely niche cultural appeal.
You're right, there isn't. This is one of those "I notice I am confused moments". It begs the question(s); Did every cultural strong point actually instantly fold? Did your enemies actually have extremely niche cultural appeal?
Either your model is wrong or the story is false.
Reading this, I'm not sure what side in the videogame culture war you're describing as "instantly folding". There was a long drawn out fight, and though things have gotten more (for lack of a better word) diverse, the default-white-male-protagonist and sexy boob plate are still very much around. There's just more diversity of options.
And the reason for that should be pretty obvious - the capitalists who ran video game companies recognized that there was an opportunity to expand their market to new demographics, and they seized it. The real grifters have always been the AAA studios churning out the same game every year, and using every trick to drain more money from the users. Any other culture war back-patting from AAAs has always been a smoke screen in front of that, one that they find useful.
>How much "sexy boob plate" is still on offer from major AAA studios, for example?
Off the top of my head, the very excellent Middle Earth: Shadow of War took horrible spider monster Shelob and turned her into a Stoya-looking babe.
Not off the top of my head, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MsFanservice/VideoGames
*looks at the Overwatch cast* You're really going to tell me there's no sexy waifus in AAA shooters these days?
(Of course, you'd probably say that they've been infected by wokeness, since Tracer is a lesbian and Zarya is a pink-haired musclegirl, but that's sort of my point - the classic fanservice options are coexisting with the more diverse ones, nothing has been taken away unless you have an issue with the fact that those other options exist in the game at all.)
I can't speak to competitive "military" shooters, but I know a LOT of women (and queer people) who play both Overwatch and Valorant, and to a lesser extent Apex (okay, maybe *played* for OW). And I know for a fact that the numbers are much more even than typical for Val. So clearly it *is* possible to get them into competitive shooters, but it takes more than brownwashing/queerwashing what is still fundamentally a military fetishist game.
Very much not an expert in this field, but I'd add to this conversation as a flag that (at least as I understand it), evolutionary pressures operate more in terms of "does trait X advantage you," and more in terms of "does not having trait X disadvantage you such that you die before reproducing or cannot reproductively compete with life forms possessing trait X."
So as between human and non-humans (competition to not die out), intelligence doesn't need to be maximized for every individual in order for the species to perpetuate, any more than height, strength, manual dexterity, or any of the other traits that exist on a bell curve do. We just need enough of an edge on our competitor species to keep going.
While as between humans and other humans (competition to reproduce), intelligence likewise is advantageous, but not so advantageous that the highest IQ persons would reproduce to the exclusion of persons in the middle or lower parts of the bell curve.
So it seems like although better abstract reasoning may always be advantageous, that wouldn't mean that once you hit a certain threshold and can walk and talk and dress yourself, there's enough evolutionary pressure to actually push the bell curve further than that.
>What is the evolutionary benefit for diversity of intelligence among humans?
You note that intelligence is useful in all situations. So... what is the benefit of diversity of intelligence in species? Why aren't crabs or crocodiles evolving towards larger brains? Why, in fact, is there any species dumber than another?
You note that seeing and hearing well are similarly advantageous. Why is there diversity in these traits? Why have we not evolved perfect, telescope-like distance vision and perfect, microscope-like close vision?
It seems sort of like there are limits to the efficiency of evolution, and trade-offs in increasing ability in one area vs another.
I think this adequately answers the question already; but perhaps you might say "well, okay, but if you believe in HBD you must also explain variation in intellect across groups, which could be different from universal trade-offs entire species made: after all, maybe telescopic vision is very hard, but Ashkenazim are proof (in your view, racist) that humans can evolve at least that level of intelligence."
Okay, what about... running? When is it not advantageous to be able to run faster? It might not come in handy all the time, but there's never a time it's worse than running slower — just like intelligence. Yet... we see some populations are just plain better at it. Hmm.
Or... what about strength? Again, it's surely always better to have more strength of body; at least, it is so to the same level that it is always better to have more intelligence. Yet... we see that some populations are, on average, stronger of limb than others. Hmmmm.
Again, I think this is sufficient to show the general principle. But to put it more plainly, selective pressure doesn't operate on theorizing an ideal: "right now, smarter people are not having more kids than dumber people, since there isn't much IQ can yet do against a tiger. But running away real fast sure seems to do the trick... however, I'll focus on both, because in the future that IQ will have the technology to become more useful!"
If there is unequal selective pressure across groups — say, because they're in different environments — then traits, even good ones, will evolve differently. One could construct some just-so stories here: the "Cold Winters" Theory is pretty well-known. But I don't think we need an exact mechanism to see that this — differing selective pressure across differing environments, *even where an intelligent agent might choose to push forward on IQ in all of them* — is not only possible, but probable.
>So the structural equation model could be something like genes -> ability to focus at school -> intelligence -> outcomes.
For one: I'm not sure this is all that important, at least as I've understood you: perhaps it is universal across modern societies that there is another step between genes and IQ. But, uh, so what? The outcome — the observed differences — are the same, and still genetic. I suppose it might matter if you find a way to make the intervening step malleable — like, I dunno, find a way to do the IQ-increasing thing without needing focus — but nothing's worked so far.
For two: I'd be willing to put some money on it, if we could agree on terms, that this isn't the case — or at least, will still have not been found to be the case, say, ten years from now.
There have been a *lot* of attempts to find some confounder that negates the link people don't like; they don't work; there's good evidence there is none (anything you can think of has probably been considered: e.g., ability to focus? no, not unless it only works in very specific situations, since adult IQ does not appear malleable by more or less intensive schooling, and is somehow not captured by "conscientiousness", which has already been dashed as a hope here); and at some point you've got to concede that what looks like a duck is probably a duck.
>genes -> early childhood development -> social learning -> parental tutoring -> educational institutions -> IQ
Perhaps I misunderstood your argument; you're saying that rather than every group having an equal potential IQ were it not for differences in education and parental interaction and so forth (evidence for which is, as you're no doubt aware, pretty thin on the ground; e.g., adoption studies — and twin studies combined with adoption studies, though low-n for that one, as you mention), you're saying that some groups have genes that allow them to benefit more from education etc., as measured by IQ.
If this were the case, I think we might see that in other environments, the usual racial IQ ordering is upset — at least, if there were any environment that Jews and Asians do not benefit more from as-measured-by-IQ. It appears that this doesn't happen, so I'm not sure how much we gain by it: "Asian genes are higher-IQ pretty much anywhere but potentially maybe not in some hypothetical environment we haven't found" isn't that much better than just "Asian genes are higher-IQ", in terms of saving feelings.
I think we would also see that interventions in these things would render IQ malleable in a detectable way. That is, if it's "group A is benefiting more from education", then surely we would see that in group A, amount-of-education causes a significant difference in IQ *within group A.* But this does not appear to occur.
Even early childhood environment, which appears to have at least a little bit of an effect, has been shown to not really matter that much IIRC.
>But if intelligence is an abstract concept not related to what humans did/didn't do and predates modern society and IQ tests
Of course intelligence predates IQ tests! I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, unless it's a variation of "but what if IQ doesn't really measure intelligence?" — and that's a pretty difficult case to make. You often find people saying "IQ just measures how good you are at IQ tests!", and that's clearly not the case — everything from "how functional is this society" to "how good are you at figuring out a real-world problem you've never seen before" to "how good are you at your job" correlates, moderately to highly, with IQ.
But perhaps you'll say "well, IQ just measures how good you are at modern society, but intelligence in, say, the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment is something else." Well... I don't think so: modern society covers a lot of different skills and lifestyles, in a lot of different places and cultures, and it would be weird if "ability to figure things out" didn't generalize to hunting and gathering. (More, again IIRC, this has been tested more directly: the usual IQ ordering remains intact when given problems like "make a basket out of reeds" or "find your way back to camp".)
So what we're left with is maybe "IQ does measure g pretty well and hence applies to pre-modern as well as modern challenges, and no known environment has mediators that cause group B to score above group A, but group B would be more intelligent as measured in a hypothetical non-IQ way that no one has found if they were to encounter unknown hypothetical mediators in some undiscovered environment."
It's a hope, but not a good one, IMO.
Less intelligent people, on average, have more kids. So in some environments, there's more evolutionary fitness in being less intelligent.
No. It’s recent.
I'm profoundly unconvinced by genetic explanations for racial IQ gaps compared to a Flynn-effect explanation, but the Flynn side would give a somewhat similar answer here; intelligence as measured by IQ tests is profoundly wasteful. Abstract reasoning is close to useless not just in the ancestral environment, but for most people in most jobs right up until the 1900s. It is only today that abstract reasoning is rewarded, and even then not much. You obviously don't want to be overly conscious of your driving for instance, and even mathematicians run on instinct most of the time.
Of course an HBD type of person would say that this is why natural selection didn't select for intelligence, wheras I would say it suggests abstract reasoning diminishes other useful cognitive functions (memory, for instance).
As for twin studies, your point seems orthogonal to the question. I will say that all the specific confounders you mentioned are at best poorly supported, but it's a noisy field and you certainly can't be sure there's nothing hiding in the bushes. Twin studies absolutely do not tell you whether environmental interventions can affect IQ, but they do strictly bound the effect from existing environmental variation in the population. I, again, suspect that there are environmental confounders completely out of band, namely that our whole society relies comparatively little on good memories and comparatively more on abstract reasoning. But all the cute, small scale objections to IQ absolutely do not hold up.
Also, eugenics is one thing and a belief in genetic differences is another. You really can't deny genetic differences in individuals, and genetic difference in populations is at least somewhat up in the air, but a person's right to bodily autonomy should be clear regardless of both. Indeed, the eugenicists of the past were preoccupied with differences that even then were clearly not heritable, because even if evil and stupidity aren't the same, they're awfully correlated.
This relies on a misconception as to what the Flynn Effect and IQ are. While IQ is the most famous measure of cognitive ability (sometimes known as "g"), to the point that the two are synonymous, it is only one measurement. Similarly, while the SAT may be far and away the most popular college-readiness test in the US, there also exist the comparable ACT and IB exams. The Flynn effect shows an increase in IQ test scores, but NOT an increase in the scores of the other tests used to measure cognitive ability--it is as if SAT scores had been steadily increasing over the decades, but performance on the ACT and IB had flatlined or had even begun decreasing. In that context, you would not say that people were getting smarter, you would say that there was something wrong with the test. This is obviously the case, since taken at face value, the Flynn effect would indicate that people in the 1920s had an average IQ that is considered near mentally deficient today. While that may lead to some fun and entertaining historic theories, it strains belief.
We can tell that the Flynn effect is not responsible for racial gaps (I assume the theory is that the Flynn effect affected white communities first and is only now reaching black communities) because the test score gap is persistent across tests that are not strictly IQ tests and therefore are not subject to the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is interesting, and surely is a mystery, but it gets blown out of proportion all the time. There is a very limited amount that we can learn from it.
In the example you give, ability to focus at school would be a mediator, not a confounder. The path from genes to intelligence goes through "ability to focus at school". You don't generally want to control for mediators, unless you are interested specifically in effects of genes on intelligence, except for those that go through "ability to focus at school". But it's not clear why you would want to control for that. There is likely a large number of intermediate traits that mediate the connection between genes and IQ, and "ability to focus at school" is probably one of them.
A confounder is something that affects both genes and IQ (or genes and some other outcome). The twin study design controls for confounders pretty well, because an actual confounder would have to somehow make monozygotic twins more similar to each other in their IQ than dizygotic twins.
Also, there are many twin studies that look at IQ directly, not just some downstream outcomes of IQ.
> the effect of mediators negates the hypothesis that it's the genes that are directly causing changes in intelligence
That is never the hypothesis being tested. For one, all genetic effects act via countless unobserved mediators. Some mediators are closer to the genes, like the proteins the genes code for, while other mediators are closer to the traits that are being studied. Some of the mediators can be affected societal factors, but that doesn't matter, since this will not lead to biased estimates of heritability.
Twin studies estimate heritability, which means they quantify the proportion of variance in a trait (such as IQ) that can be attributed to genetic factors in a given population. So roughly speaking, how much less variance would there be in a population if everyone were genetically identical. No assumptions are being made about the causal pathway in between genes and IQ. In particular, the existence of mediators that can be affected by societal factors has no bearing on estimates of heritability.
Just like weight can be a highly heritable trait, and there is no contradiction between that statement, and the fact that you could hypothetically increase or decrease everyone's weight through non-genetic means such as starving them or force-feeding them.
I agree with that, I think that results from twin studies are often misinterpreted. A particularly common misconception is that heritability is a fixed property of a trait, not a property of the population that has been studied, and that studying a single population tells you much about population differences.
That doesn't make twin studies less interesting in my opinion. It just means that results of studies like that need to be better communicated. A high heritability of IQ for example still tells you that most of the differences that we see in a population can be traced back (via several mediators) to genetic differences. Environmental factors and societal institutions may still play an important role in shaping someone's IQ, but probably not those kinds environmental factors and societal institutions that vary much between people in the studied population.
IQ is not free. Human brains kept expanding to the point that it was difficult to give birth, so now we're much more helpless at birth than most other species & have to develop a lot in childhood. Our brains are metabolically very expensive. Richard Wrangham theorizes that we could only support them once we started using fire to cook food (which is why we have shorter intestines than our primate relatives). There are selection pressures for lots of different things, and IQ is only one thing that must be balanced against everything else.
The correlation between brain volume & IQ is much more modest than that (smarter brains are also noted as being more "wrinkly" within a given volume). As for why stronger muscles would ever compromise, note that mentally retarded humans have low fitness, and that we're much weaker than chimpanzees.
One way to think about it is to imagine a situation where food is scarce and some people will starve to death. Those with larger metabolic expenses are more likely to die (hence men dying more in famines, which I've noted here in a recent thread), unless something else compensates for that. And brains can do that.
In "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter", Joseph Henrich (convincingly I think) argues that social learning is vastly more important and selected-for than raw individual intelligence. Crude example is if some single smarter person invents a new method that aids survival but it doesn't catch on, it dies out and will need to be reinvented later. IQ is just a small part of the package that makes humans so successful
I just published my review of that book yesterday:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-secret-of-our-success/
My understanding is that it's completely useless when it comes to dealing with discrete (i.e. finite dimensional Hilbert space) quantum systems - such as the spin of a particle. Supposedly there is a hack that you can use when there is only one particle, where you work out how the different possibilities for the spin interfere with each other manually and sort of kludge it into a theory that can predict the position as a function of the spin, but once you have a large number of particles with spin - maybe something like a quantum computer - it becomes totally unworkable. Actual quantum field theory, where the number of particles can fluctuate randomly, is completely out of the question...
I have spent a fair bit of time on the topic, and can comment semi-authoritatively. This approach has several drawbacks: it does not offer any new predictions, so not useful as a separate physical theory; it does not generalize to include relativity, or at least not easily, and still does not provide any new insights when it sort of does; It multiplies entities unnecessarily, if you are into Occam's razor. Also, if you ask a physicist with any sense of aesthetics, it's just ugly :) Notwithstanding, John Bell of the Bell inequality fame was a proponent. There are almost no physicists of any prominence who would support it now though, it's mostly between shut-up-and-calculate, objective collapse of some sort, MWI (no collapse at all) and various "in the eye of the beholder" interpretations, such as QBism. That said, we are only a few orders of magnitude off from checking the collapse interpretation experimentally, by creating quantum states of Planck size (10 microgram or so) and measuring gravitational effects from objects of that size. Something has to give then, either classical gravity or quantum superposition.
Also, it handles spin in a weird way.
Can you explain more what you mean by your last two sentences?
So the crux of the issue is whether one can create a Schrodinger's cat, even theoretically. That is, whether an object can be truly kept unentangled with the rest of the universe for any length of time. There is no theoretical limit on how big such an object might be if we ignore gravity. In fact, your buddy, the other Scott A, has an ongoing conversation with Gil Kalai on the limits, if any, of a quantum computer scaling up. The reason why the "ignoring gravity" part is important is because the only other long-range force is electromagnetism, and we know how to shield objects from it (Faraday cage etc.). It is still far from trivial to scale this up, but the number of qubits in a quantum computer has been steadily climbing. Now, gravity is different in that you cannot shield from it, at all. There are no negative masses that we could use to screen what is going on inside the cat box. Or a quantum computer. So, a cat in a superposition of asleep/awake states (to adapt to Sean Carroll's animal-rights friendly reformulation) creates a gravitational force that would betray the box content, assuming the awake cat is standing and begging for food and pets, while the sleeping cat is lying down dreaming of same. What would that force be? Would an external apparatus see gravitational force that points to the cat as it was the moment the box was closed, and then magically snap to the direction of the cat when the box is opened? Would it point somewhere in the middle between the two? Would it slowly move from the awake direction to the asleep direction as the cat becomes progressively more likely to zonk out? Quantum mechanics is silent on the matter, other than to say "nope, cannot isolate anything that can be observed, it is a contradiction, so your premise is likely flawed." If one accepts this approach, then Gil Kalai wins and Scott A loses, as it would impose a (theoretical) limit on quantum scaling, because if it scales up enough, we would be able to detect gravitational effects from quantum computers merrily evolving its state in time while modeling some physical system, or breaking encryption or whatever. This is because change of a quantum state means change in the spatial energy distribution, and so is measurable by a gravimeter. This is actually an open problem in physics, semiclassical approaches assume that spacetime is bent by the expectation value of a classical field, which is known to produce bad results if taken seriously. There is a meme paper by Don Page, a theorist, proving this point experimentally, back in the 1980s.
This was a longer explanation than I hoped... Just to finish it up, one Planck mass, equal to roughly 10 micrograms, is where we would expect this collision of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity to result in something spectacular, and not predictable by the tools we have. This is very much a pedestrian table-top experiment in Quantum Gravity, as it were, no need for super high energies or tiny black holes, just a sensitive enough gravimeter and a tiny cantilever in a superposition of two spatially separated states mimicking a spherical cow... err... a cat.
Actually, IIRC, Forward proposed a "gravity canceller". It wouldn't totally eliminate gravity as a force, but in a restricted volume it would act to smooth it out. This would need to be done in orbit, as it can only "cancel" small variations. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.26.735
Speaking of gravitational decoherence and the great other scott: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34993/reversing-gravitational-decoherence
Thanks, that's a great link! Preskill explains very clearly the details of how decoherence works at the QFT level (emitted soft photons, and possibly gravitons, assuming gravity can be quantized, which is an open problem). Don't think it addresses the point I made, but Scott seems satisfied with the answers, so...
As far as i know this argument is due to penrose and it's discussed in detail in its books.
(Sorry, but I can never not shamelessly promote the beautiful slides of penrose on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schroedingers-lump-proposal-for-superposition-decay_fig3_262981768)
Many-Worlds people say that the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation has *both* the wave-function of the many-worlds interpretation *and* the precise particles of the collapse interpretations. But proponents of the pilot wave say that the wave-function is an ontologically less significant entity than a huge infinity of worlds.
Since the two theories are observationally equivalent, and mathematically inter-translatable, it's a matter of debate in metaphysics whether there even is a meaningful way to use Occam's Razor to decide between them. (I personally like epistemological accounts of Occam's Razor like the ones by Kevin Kelly: http://bactra.org/notebooks/occams-razor.html
Sean Carroll blogged and podcasted extensively on the topic, he is also literally a top expert in the area, writing papers and books about it. I don't think I can express it better than him. A summary would be something like "MWI does not need a collapse postulate, unitary evolution + decoherence is enough"
Deutsch uses the coherence based approach, while most other many worlders use the decoherence based approach. He absolutely does establish that quantum computing is superior to classical computing, and therefore that underlying reality is not classical. But showing that reality is not a single classical world is not the same as showing that it consists of a number of quasi classical worlds in superposition.
Decoherence has the opposite problem: decoherent world's can be large, can be objective, can be permanent for all practical, purposes, are causally isolated by definition. But there is no obvious mechanism for decoherence
within core QM, so the complexity of decoherent MWI can't even be assessed without a concrete hypothesis for the decohrence mechanism.
(Yudkowsky, following Deutsch, says that "Decoherence is simple).
But decoherence is not simple)
A coherent quantum state that evolves according to the Schrodinger wave equation remains coherent. Some additional mechanism for decoherence is required, and the complexity of the that mechanism must be factored into byan assessment of which theory is simplest. (Why assume a coherent starting state? Well, maybe the universe started in a decohered state.. that's actually a popular suggestion ... but it requires its own explanation and adds own complexities).
Why believe in decoherence if there isn't a clear theory of decoherence?
Because it or something like it, is observed: if a quantum superposition becomes too large, or too hot, or interacts with the the environment, it decoheres
But i am not sure that this is true. In particular, i am under the impression that MWI doesn’t solve the preferred basis problem, that is, (mathematically speking) in the Hilbert space of QM the state in which an electron goes only up is not preferred in any way over the state in which half goes up and half goes down, yet when measuring we can never observe a superposition.
Other models add on top of the Hilbert space in order to break this "symmetry" between states. Bohm adds the particle with defined position and momentum, Penrose objective reduction tells us that the preferred states have lower gravitational self-energy because they are not in a superposition of positions (please correct me if I am wrong here) etc.
MWI doesn’t add anything and assumes that decoherence is sufficient. But decoherence doesn’t fix the measured basis uniquely so it's not clear why a "branch" can never have half an electron up and half down.
As far as i understand, the claim of many world guys is that the reason why we only see one branch is because our brain is entangled with the measurement apparatus, therefore our brain is in a superposition of seeing the electron up and seeing it down but our conscious experience is only up or only down. Yet this doesn’t solve the preferred basis problem, it just pushes it up in the level of the brain state. It seems to me that there is an hidden, non-discussed assumption that a brain state can never see half electron here, half there.
This is possible, but it is a big assumption that takes the role of the measurement postulate and moreover reintroduces the role of consciousness in QM (never a good thing) but in an hidden way
Forget "what you see". Quantum effects happen on a scale that your senses cannot directly detect. IIUC, the MWI model doesn't collapse the state vector. That means that particles are epiphenomena. This implies that anything composes of particles is also an epiphenomenon. The underlying reality *is* the state vector. And parts of the state vector that can interact are correlated. I want to say entangled, but I feel like that's the wrong word. Effectively, the universe (within a lightcone?) splits with every probabilistic interaction. This feels excessive, and I also feel as if multiple pasts should merge into the singular present, as well as each splitting into multiple presents. As I understand it, though, this isn't what the MWI claims happens. It claims that once a split occurs there will never be a rejoining.
OTOH, MWI is consistent with quantum physics as we know it. Of course, we know that either quantum physics, relativity, or both, are broken. We just don't know how. So I'm going to stick with my preference for a more symmetrical MWI, that allows multiple pasts as well as multiple futures. At least until they find out WHAT they need to fix in physics.
P.S.: A brain cannot perceive even a full electron, much less half of one.
ALSO: In MWI, the "I" stands for "interpretation". It's not saying anything the math doesn't say. There are other interpretation, but all the valid ones map to precisely the same mathematics. To me this says mainly that English has embedded assumptions that the math describing physics doesn't have. The basic ideas are incommensurable. It's my guess that this is because human languages are designed to describe macro scale objects, and when you get to *really* small stuff, it doesn't really handle it properly. But I think it's probably also the case that the math we use to talk about physics is incomplete. Otherwise it's hard to see how the same math could properly map to all the interpretations that are accepted as valid mappings. But generally nobody can think of a possible experiment that would select one as valid and the other as not. (Note that "incomplete" isn't a criticism of the math. Set theory doesn't let you decide what the sets are composed of. But when you turn it into a problem in physics instead of math, incomplete becomes a problem. So MWI would need to add something to the math that said "and you can't collapse the state vector", where another theory would need to add "and the state vector collapses under these circumstances", but nobody's been able to justify adding either of those.)
"Forget "what you see". Quantum effects happen on a scale that your senses cannot directly detect"
Any physical theory needs to be consistent with "what you see",
The whole problem of interpreting QM is to reconcile what it says with what is what you do or can observe. If you could observe a half dead, half alive cat, there would be no problem.
"IIUC, the MWI model doesn't collapse the state vector. That means that particles are epiphenomena. "
Are you assuming that all measurements are position measurements?
"This implies that anything composes of particles is also an epiphenomenon"
Errrr....outside of Bohms theory, there's no sharp distinction between waves and particles...just stuff that's more spread out (wit a bettr defined frequency/momentum), and stuff that's more localised (with a worse defined frequency/ momentum)
"" In MWI, the "I" stands for "interpretation". It's not saying anything the math doesn't say"
Then it's not interpreting . Shut up and calculate doesn't add anything to the maths. MwI isn't SUAC. It adds the idea that quantum states are objective and definable globally, including basis.
When we talk about interpretation of qm we are always talking about how to solve the measurement problem. Of course physics must be about what you see in an experiment, otherwise we could just drop the measurement postulate in the von neumann-Heisenberg interpretation (which is not the same as bohr's Copenhagen, but I am afraid the term is irredeemably confused) and just be done with it. Instead an interpretation of qm must always explain why you have a theory of (probability) waves but in a lab you always measure a particle in a definite position.
I have been sloppy. "Of course" by saying the electron or half the electron, it was really a shorthand for the result of a stern-gerlach type experiment and I was referring to the spot on the screen, which is something my brain *can* perceive. And when I was referring to electron completely up or half up half down, I should really have said one bright spot on the up screen or two spot of half intensity on both screens.
> So MWI would need to add something to the math that said "and you can't collapse the state vector"
No, I disagree, mwi needs to add quite a bit more than that, namely what are the allowed result of a measurement (i.e. a solution of the preferred basis problem). Which for all intents and purposes is functionally equivalent to the measurement postulate.
Well, consciousness is in the brain, and entanglement+decoherence results in diagonalization of the density matrix that includes brain+measurement apparatus+system under test, in the pointer state basis. Thus effectively there is a branch for each pointer state (corresponding to the measured eigenstate), and there is no interaction with the rest of the pointer states, i.e. with the brain+measurement apparatus+system under test that corresponds to a different measured eigenstate. So there is no need to assume anything about consciousness at all. The devil is in different details, how to make MWI testable compared to objective collapse theories. Penrose suggests that gravity puts a natural limit to the energy difference of different pointer states. There are a lot of hints suggesting that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are intimately intertwined, but no one yet offered any workable models of how they are, at least not in our universe (AdS/CFT is a very exciting toy model though).
Leaving the brain aside, what is the mechanism that selects the pointer state basis over all the others? That was the problem i was referring to. My point was that it seems to me that decoherence alone is not sufficient, as it doesn’t select a basis uniquely.
> how to make MWI testable compared to objective collapse theories.
Those are by no means the only two options as you seem to imply. Schrodinger equation is too similar to Fokker-Planck equation for this to be a coincidence, so I am unconvinced qm is complete, but that's just a vibe.
> There are a lot of hints suggesting that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are intimately intertwined
I would tend to disagree, but I am partial to asymptotically safe gravity and this is a different story. (I'll just note that ASG considerations have predicted correctly the mass of the Higgs boson three years before its discovery)
Well, you could go with "This is a simulation with lazy evaluation. Values aren't determined before they are needed." In that case the collapse doesn't happen until the measurement, and then it depends on the random number generator used by the simulator. It works. It produces a simpler model. But it postulates an enclosing universe in which the simulation runs.
When being serious, I prefer MWI, but I have a close friend who is a dedicated believer in the "superpredeterminism" interpretation. (He's a mathematician, and thinks the universe is a double field over a prime number of integers. He's even selected the particular prime. [If I've remembering correctly, he's picked 2^(2^127)-1.])
Well, if I had to choose between the simulation argument an MWI, i'd burn all my physics books and retire in the safety of ignorance.
Jokes aside, i couldn't tell you what is my favourite interpretation, i have always appreciated pilot wave (which i guess implies i don't have aestethic sense, but I already knew that). I would say some ensemble-ish interpretation, but only at the level of general vibe.
But anyway, my point is not that MWI is wrong or bad, just that *only decoherence* is not enough and other assumption are either needed or hidden.
> If I've remembering correctly, he's picked 2^(2^127)-1
Boy, that's specific
I'll add that this is pretty much the argument against many worlds by (the great) penrose. While penrose has its own ideas on consciousness i disagree with, this argument is independent of his views on the matter
Honestly I don't think Occam's Razor is a good guide here, despite being so commonly invoked in these sorts of discussions.
I think the idea of "necessity" gets confusing, I would rephrase Occam to say that entities should not be multiplied without a bloody good reason. Compared to shut-up-and-calculate, both MWI and Bohm add a great deal of stuff to their ontology, but they do so for a good reason (resolving certain major problems), so that's okay. And the type of stuff they add is different too, so I don't think it's reasonable to compare one to the other. Both theories are razor-compliant as far as I'm concerned, and it doesn't help us to choose between them.
"Shutup and calculate" is just saying that they're refusing to make an interpretation. That's a legitimate position to take, but it's not an argument against ANY other position, including solipsism.
Arguably, MWI has only a single 'entity', the wavefunction of the universe. (Of course, this is neglecting GR, because merging GR and quantum is one of the big unsolved problems).
More usefully, Occam's Razor is about "complexity", not how much stuff is real - collapse theories still need to calculate with the full wavefunction if they want to get the right answer, and in fact need to do an additional step at the end to "collapse" it.
But it requires that you decide what counts as an entity. If you count atomic states you get one answer. If you count wave functions you get another. And it's also worth reminding that even when the "entities" involved are clear, Occam's razor can yield a wrong answer. It just *usually* picks the right answer. I.e., it's the best gamble given the available information.
My understanding was that Occam's razor was more about the complexity of the rules, rather than how big the universe is (the universe keeps turning out bigger than we thought so "minimize size of universe" seems like a poor heuristic). From that standpoint, MWI is a win, since it eliminates any rules for collapse.
There are multiple versions of Occam's razor. Rationalists prefer rule simplicity, but that may be question begging.
Yes, but in MWI you don't postulate extra worlds, they are said to result from decoherence, which in turn is a consequence of the Schrodinger equation (plus something called "the past hypothesis").
You can't get decoherence out of the Schrodinger equation alone.
It seems intuitively appealing if you're trying to explain its natural habitat of two-slit experiment, which is the environment in which it is always introduced. But the moment you take it out of that context and start asking it to explain a non-toy system the intuitive appeal goes away and you're still left with all the downsides.
Pilot wave theory seems to me like a bit of special pleading which is designed to give an intuitively satisfying explanation for one particular phenomenon that happens to be popular in beginner-level textbooks, but doesn't mesh well with a whole lot of other stuff (relativity, quantum field theory) in ways that is hard to explain to a non-physicist.
If you're going that way, put a wall along the sunward-facing side of that line of skyscrapers, and cover it with solar cells. Having much of the city in shadow should cool things a lot. You could even build the wall *first* and then build the skyscrapers in the shade. Interconnect the skyscrapers every some-many floors. Do the skyscrapers in a double line, with internal bridges. Then you can claim it's one large building.
To be fair, a city that is a row of skyscrapers, with desert on either side, really *would* be unlike anything else that has ever existed (though probably just a more extreme version of something that Dubai and Australia's Gold Coast are approximating).
“Show me the levels”
“I don't *want* the levels!”