Obviously hearing imaginary sounds is generally no fun, but it seems to me like its heavily implied (although I have found no clear source) that causality goes the other way around: being anxious and or depressed can make you hear imaginary sounds.
WTF?
Like no seriously under which model for the supposedly simple neurological process behind hearing does this make sense?
Hearing is not more simple of a neurological process than any other sense. All perception is a combination between sense data and priors. Clearly, anxiety and depression affect not only cognitive priors but sensory priors as well. We already knew this for the senses of vision and taste, and it's not surprising that hearing would be affected too.
"Transparent. We care less about telling our readers what we think than showing them why we think it. Every part of the process – from our reasoning to our raw data – will always be out in the open."
Generally, I think this is the wrong priority and clarifying what you think is more valuable. The recruited writers are better than most, but I think this is the wrong goal even for them.
It means they can reach a wider audience. I think these writers think in interesting ways and I'd like to read about why they think something even if I don't care about the topic.
I'd like to know why they think what they think, but that's meaningless without knowing what they think. Reaching a wide audience by not saying what they think, or, worse, not thinking anything at all is war.
Anybody know of any good literature discussing the effects of low-skilled immigration in advanced economies?
Emil Kierkegaard's claim that low-skilled immigration is only good for the immigrant made me curious, and Caplan's rebuttal didn't seem that convincing.
1) Why does methylphenidate work immediately contrary to SSRIs despite that both serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons have autoreceptors that inhibit the recapture of their respective neurotransmitters?
2) Why hasn't anybody seriously tried to combine MAOIs with drugs that would prevent these side-effects from happening?
3) Why don't we prescribe exocytosis-promoting molecules such as MDMA when initiating SSRI treatments?
4) Why don't we prescribe autoreceptor antagonists such as pindolol when initiating treatment to make patients respond faster to the treatment and augment SSRIs?
Unfortunately I couldn't follow the more mathy parts. but my key takeaways are:
Memorization is easy but it can't predict unseen data. Generalization is hard but can often predict unseen data (or sometimes just predict seen data more efficiently).
The memorization circuit tends to grow in proportion to the amount of data it can predict. Generalization circuits scale better with large amounts of data.
Models may initially get "stuck" with memorization circuits but this can usually be overcome by increasing the amount of data. (Perhaps over-parameterizing the model helps with this?) There are pathways or interpolations between the two regimes. This allows partial generalization circuits that can't yet outdo the memorization circuit on their own, to get a toe hold.
They reverse engineered the algorithm the model uses to perform modular arithmetic. It's not what I would have predicted. It involves trigonometry and Fourier transforms.
But also they reverse engineered it! From the inscrutable list of parameter weights! What are the implications for interpretability?
Anyway there's a bunch more. They go into a lot of detail.
I don't think this causes much in the way of updating on interpretability because of the already existing articles on Distill about reverse engineering CNNs (and those were with actual models not toy ones).
I think the main takeaway from this article is a candidate explanation of the grokking effect. (With more data you wouldn't see the sudden grokking since you'd just learn the generalizable method way directly, and with the same data and less regularization you would just forever stay at the memorization minimum.
It's now required by law that you watch this video before you claim "Jan 6 USA was a miltiary coup". I passed this law, its domain of jurisdiction is all internet arguments that I see or hear or read about.
"Coup" and "military coup" are two different things. And for military coups, I'd say Luttwak is your source, not Polymatter.
Luttwak goes to great lengths to define the circumstances where a military coup can succeed, and the contemporary United States does not qualify. But he's only talking military coups. And the circumstances that make military coups impractical, can open the range of possibilities for other sorts of coups - whatever it is that controls the military, if it's not your wannabe coup plotter, you need to seize *that*. If the United States Army (and the rest of the bureaucracy) is always going to follow the orders of the guy who is the official winner of the latest Presidential election, then seize control of the election machinery and you've got a perfectly good coup without ever having to send a tank brigade into the streets.
January 6 was not a military coup, and it was not a well-planned coup, and arguably it wasn't a "coup" at all because due to the crappy planning it failed. But it was an *attempted* coup, however pathetic, targeting one of the weak points of the American government.
I read Luttwak a few years back, and I recall an extended discussion near the beginning of different types of coup-like events (revolutions, putsches, pronunciamentos, etc), with proposed definitions for each. The rest of the book focused mostly on one of his categories, the coup d'etat, which Luttwak defined fairly narrowly as the use of a small but critical part of the machinery of government to seize control over the rest.
This link appears to contain a reproduction or close paraphrase of the section I'm remembering:
Of those categories, 1/6 seems to me like a sloppy hybrid of an attempted coup and an attempt to incite a revolution, with auotglopic aims (which are mostly orthogonal to Luttwak's categories).
Yeah, I don't think 1/6 fits into any of Luttwak's categories, because I think he pretty quickly dismissed the possibility of coups in modern western democracies as ludicrous. Which is a shame, because I think he'd have been a good man to tackle the question, "granted it would be very difficult to pull off a coup in a modern western democracy, but if someone were to attempt it this is what it would have to look like and so this is what we should look out for".
I also think that his category of "really this is a coup" was too focused on the case of military coups, or at least coups in which the military is not reluctant to participate.
I’m reading Luttwak’s book now. I also recommend OP give it look. The PolyMatter video seems to be the Cliffnotes version. It leaves out a lot and contains nothing that’s not in original.
Luttwak’s definition of Coup D’etat is a bit broader than “military coup,” but I agree it would not extend to an autogolpe or to whatever Jan 6th was.
In this case, I'd say that the source of the attempt and the risk of more competent repeat attempts matter as well, not just the competence of the attempt.
As for source, an outgoing President inciting a mob to help him try to illegitimately retain power after he tried and failed to stubborn enough state officials and members of Congress to fix the election for him is definitely cause for concern, no matter how inept it was. Particularly if there's any reasonable possibility of him getting into a position to attempt a more competent coup in the future.
I don't think I've every seen that claim. I see Jan 6 was a coup attempt pretty frequently. Are you *really* seeing claims it was a military coup somewhere?
I may have made the claim stronger than its usual forms because the video featured footage of military coups a lot, but even non-military coups has to go through all the steps mentioned in the video (that's part of the video's point, the 'military' part of a coup isn't there because coups necessarily require or need military force, the military just happens to usually have the coordinaton and networking necessary to make a successful coup), steps and goals which Jan 6 didn't even try to think about.
Substack need to fix their comments. I can click on a comment and have no hope of finding it if its merely a sub thread of 3 deep. The app doesnt even try. Reddit has solved this, its not technically that difficult.
So I'm attempting to calculate the plausibility of nuclear war causing prompt human extinction due to radiation alone.
est total global nuclear stockpiles: 5000Mt. Assume the war uses all of those but destroys the capability the manufacture more.
est total energy of radioactive decay of fallout: 10% of the energy of the blast
10% of 5000mt divided by the surface area of earth to a thickness of 1m is 4J/L or a dose of 4 grays versus the 5 gray LD50 for an instantaneous dose. But that's with the very unrealistic pessimistic assumption that the fallout spreads perfectly evenly over the earth before any of it decays, and then it all decays simultaneously. Realistically it'd be unevenly distributed and it'd take weeks for the winds to carry a small percentage of the dose to remote areas that didn't get nuked. Much of the fallout would decay before that. Also the dose would be spread out over time, making it less lethal. A dose of 1 gray is only a 5% chance of eventual death, so those remote areas are probably not dying off. A weakness in my argument is the arbitrary choice of 1m thickness for converting radiation per m^2 into radiation per litre or kg. Another weakness is not considering specific isotopes that get concentrated in specific organs, like iodine. The nuclear winter will suck but the San or amazon rainforest hunter gatherers will probably cope just fine with the collapse of the civilization they didn't depend on anyway and several degrees decline in temperature won't stop those areas from being habitable. So I'm ~95% confident that nuclear war wouldn't directly cause human extinction. Maybe it kills us in some other way like preventing coordination on AI or bioweapons.
Destruction of industry: can be rebuilt in ~20 years. Buying the world 20 years is probably less value than the nuclear war destroys.
Soft errors: fallout fucks with computers which would make computers more expensive for the next 300 years or so. A big attraction, but it's questionable whether computers could be made sufficiently more expensive to stop the tech-company profit loop.
Civilisational collapse: only actually happens if nuclear winter is really, really bad, and probably isn't an actual "de novo humanity" - there was like one major technology lost in the fall of Rome (concrete). Probably not more than a 300-year setback, which doesn't stack with the fallout (it keeps decaying away while you're going all Mad Max).
Political results: removing the PRC alone would partially deal with the whole "race dynamic" issue Scott brought up in "Why Not Slow AI Progress?", but removing the PRC *and* the USA would leave things pretty multipolar again. Hard to predict this one even as far as sign.
Chance of success: very low if you're trying to start a nuclear war for no reason or commit nuclear terrorism, although not quite so low if you merely advocate hawkish policies.
Second-order effects: actions very far from the Overton Window, such as attempted nuclear terrorism or outright "we should have a nuclear war" rhetoric, harm the "stop AGI" movement in obvious ways (we get accusations of doomsday cultism as it is), so this is an increase to AGI X-risk of magnitude proportional to said movement's chances of success without doomsday schemes and to your chances of failing this scheme.
Possibility of being wrong: We might be wrong about AGI X-risk. I don't think we are, but everyone thinks that about his own beliefs. Starting a nuclear war unnecessarily would suck.
Overall: sticking with "be more of a China hawk than you otherwise would" is a much better cost-benefit than outright going "Nuclear War Now" or being a terrorist, but whether even the former is justified depends on how you calculate.
Wait until you think about which regional, non-nuclear war with relatively few casualties would delay chip production for about a decade, and _then_ you have a real moral dilemma on your hands.
Full-scale nuclear war wouldn't delay AGI in a helpful way. It would result in a society even less capable of carefully evaluating risks and cooperating to reduce them, and more-willing to take risks for short-term advantages.
The analogy I used when this came up on DSL was, the arsenals and magazines of Napoleon's France (probably, by BOTE calculation) held enough powder and shot to put one ball through the heart of every human then alive, but Napoleon was not an X-risk because the real-world delivery is so far from 100% efficient and uniform that "start with an assumption of perfect efficiency and then apply a fudge factor" doesn't even get you into the right order of magnitude.
Which unfortunately means the math that matters is too complex to fit into a blog post. But back in the early 1980s, not far off Peak Cold War, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published (in dead tree format, alas) a study with the math done right. They came up with a median estimate of twenty million dead from global fallout in the event of a full-court match of Global Thermonuclear War. Mostly long-term cancer deaths.
This didn't include local, short-term fallout immediately downwind of targets, but that is necessarily local and also fairly easy to mitigate.
Even if you up SIPRI's numbers by two orders of magnitude, that's not an X-risk. And that was peak cold war, when there were roughly five times as many nuclear weapons in service as today, and they averaged roughly five times as powerful.
Also, since I see someone brought it up already, "cobalt bombs" don't work nearly as well as people thought they would be in the early 1950s. They're modestly dirtier than ordinary hydrogen bombs, of similar size, if you're into that sort of thing, but not orders of magnitude dirtier.
A similar study from a similar time was the US Office of Technology Assessment's 1979 report The Effects of Nuclear War (available here: https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf ). It's an entire book presenting different scenarios and estimating casualties. 20 million dead sounds pretty close to their middle-of-the-pack scenarios, though that might have been just American casualties. I don't think they estimated effects for anywhere but the US, but don't remember now; I read it about 40 years ago.
I think you also need to consider the case where all the bombs are cobalt-jacketed. To kill EVERYONE, you would probably need the US or Russia to be ruled by a psychopath who is deliberately aiming for human extinction, and it's feasible that such a person would have heard about cobalt-60.
Basically, it's feasible to exterminate half of all Russians and Americans with the weapons we have, because you just have to blanket all of the big cities. But it's quite impossible to kill all Russians and Americans with those weapons. Just note that the US is 4 million square miles, while Russia has about 6000 warheads. Each warhead would have be able to kill everyone in an area of 670 square miles, but IIRC few, if any, warheads can even kill everyone in 1 square mile.
It's my understanding that nuclear war doomsayers focus on nuclear winter rather than direct radiation. Not only will remote areas not get nuked, but nations not involved in the conflict will not get nuked. But if nuclear winter is somehow as bad as the Chicxulub impact, then everyone starves, because everyone depends on plants regardless of whether they depend on civilization.
It's probably worth bringing up the Toba Supervolcano eruption. Bottom line, ~70,000 years ago we had a once in 25 million years supervolcano eruption which coincides with a massive die off of homo sapiens, according to genetics potentially down to ~10,000 survivors. Subsequent research has thrown those results into doubt but it's probably the best comparison point.
Chicxulub impact was 20,000 times more energy than 5000Mt. I think even a repeat of chicxulub probably wouldn't cause total extinction of humans but I am less confident about that than the nuclear war. I've heard estimates of 20% dimming and 8 degrees of global cooling. But humans are smart enough to adapt agriculture to that by sending seeds much closer to the equator than they usually grow. Plenty of people will survive the initial fireball by being in their basement on the opposite side of the world, and some of those will figure out how to adapt agriculture to not starve.
I don't know if someone has already brought this up, but ACX posts are extremely slow to open from my phone, much more than other substacks, and comment threads give even more trouble (slow to load, slow scrolling, "expand full comment" button doesn't work). Sometimes it's slow on laptop as well.
This may be caused by the ACX theme or special settings (no likes etc) or possibly by the size of the comment thread.
I imagine it's not only me with this problem, if so I thought Scott should know about it.
Yes, I asked Substack not to collapse comments on ACX because I hate having to press "show comments" a bunch of times to see comments; this makes most other Substack comments sections basically unreadable to me. Mobile users are second-class citizens here and I'm happy to sacrifice their convenience.
I have looked at Yglesias' substack and it seems not all comments are loaded automatically below the post, only a few (one extra click to see the rest). That might be the reason why it works smoother than ACX.
The TLDR is that we used to have a mind split in two. One half generated social commands (eg. 'share', 'build a pyramid to store the chief's body') and the other half executed these commands. There was no introspection or rumination. Scott rejects both the timing and completeness of our psychological change, but gives Jaynes credit for unearthing quite a different psychology in the past.
I wrote a post speculating on what could have caused the development of a bicameral mind. When we had outer speech but not inner speech, I think the most fit subsequent adaptation would be to access reciprocal altruism. Something to remind us to play nice and fit in. Auditory hallucinations of societal demands--a bicameral mind--would be such a mechanism. https://vectors.substack.com/p/consequences-of-conscience
I had been moving in that direction for quite a few years previously - I had committed to being as fair-minded as possible; to avoid ad hominem criticisms; to try to speak of others in such a way that, had they inadvertently overheard what I'd said, I would not be ashamed; to accept justified blame for my errors graciously; and to try to restate an opponent's argument in non-pejorative language such that they could hear me state their case and agree that I had presented their beliefs fairly.
This is all somewhat aspirational, but I think Scott's post helped confirm I was on the right track.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have mentioned him at least a couple times on their Dark Horse podcast. I recall Ben Shapiro cited him on Joe Rogan's podcast, and given the size of that audience, I'm a bit surprised no one's named him yet.
Neither was how I discovered ACX, however. For me, it was Bryan Caplan praising Scott on Econlib.org back around 2015-ish, while also critiquing him. I noticed Caplan's article was the type of anti-tribalist writing I preferred to read online, and went to SSC and found even more of it.
I think I found the link to the Moloch post on a blog somewhere, some 5-6 years ago. It sounded interesting but a bit too esoteric for my taste. Then I clicked over to the Die By the Sword one. At that time, I was greatly disillusioned with the online left (I was an avid reader of New Atheist communities until the New/Plus schism tore them apart -- for that matter, I still think they were right on more things than not) but not any more attracted to the right, either, so I felt politically homeless.
I found the story in Die By the Sword cathartic and schadenfreudy, but to my surprise Scott's commentary did not turn callous and detestable like I had come to expect from most "anti-SJW" spaces. So I trusted it enough to move over to Niceness, Community, and Civilization, and it blew my mind. It was the first articulated, rigorous defense I'd ever seen of the concept of being nice, something I had needed to read for years without realizing it.
I came back to the Moloch post, read it with more attention, and since then I was hooked.
I started following him back in the Livejournal days, having been introduced to him via common friends( one of my real-life friends having met Scott via micronations stuff).
I'm also one of the two non-SIAI friends mentioned in the "Study Seven: In-Group Bias as a Schelling Point" section of Scott's "Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory" post on LessWrong. Contrary to Scott's opening line about the setup being a mistake and the game being one of the worst he'd ever seen, I had a great time: it was and is my considered opinion that if you can't have fun despite losing because everyone ganged up on you for BS reasons, then you have no business playing Diplomacy.
Had we not had friends in common, I probably would have gotten linked to SSC articles eventually via Bryan Caplan or Arnold Kling's blogs.
A socialist Very Online progressive friend of mine linked me to The Anti-Reactionary FAQ, as a "checkmate, conservatives!" wall of text argument.
This did not go as intended, since reading SSC/ACX over the years has only further eroded what shaky faith I ever had in left politics, and now I'm my friend group's (relative) Token Conservative Crank. I'm grateful for the intervention though; it would have been so easy to just socially conform and go along with the very leftwards flow of San Francisco. Thinking of that counterfactual life full of strongly believing Incoherently Incorrect But Locally Convenient Things makes me...very sad. That which can be destroyed by the truth...
Someone on "Marginal Revolution" - not Tyler or Alex, one of the commenters - was talking about what a hopeless loser nerd this "Scott Alexander" fellow was, and how we should all mock him. This did not work the way they intended.
I was reading the comments section of a NYT article on nursing homes, and someone linked to the SSC post "Who By Very Slow Decay." I was sufficiently impressed that I started reading other SSC posts, and then I followed Scott to ACX.
Somebody linked me to one of the "big" posts, probably Meditations on Moloch because I remember reading all the other home runs of the latter half of 2014 as they came out. The blog never really recovered from that kind of unmatchable streak, but despite not living up to itself (and despite the one massive goof of claiming the categories were made for Man – Man was made for the categories, Scott!) it was still the best writing on the internet by a handful of orders of magnitude. So I kept reading it.
I read Yvain (Scott's nick in those days) on Lesswrong, and followed him to his own blog during the diaspora. I read Eliezer on Overcoming Bias before he emigrated to Lesswrong.
IIRC, someone I followed on Dreamwidth used to sometimes signal boost post SSC he found interesting. I liked many of them, and SSC supported RSS, so I subscribed to its RSS feed. Eventually I wanted to comment on a few posts, and started reading them at the SSC site, for convenience responding.
After watching the YouTube channel of Sabine Hossenfelder, where every video seems like an advertisement for her paid courses... it seems to me that every controversy about this "brave female provocative contrarian physicist" is just a part of a marketing campaign.
I mean, she seems to be an expert, and her lessons are probably good. It's just all this supposed controversy that feels purely manufactured. She is bravely fighting... where no one is fighting back. She challenges the scientific establishment... by saying exactly the same things the scientific establishment was saying. Which is good, because it means she is promoting the established science... except for the part where she pretends that she is the only one doing so.
She is obviously trying to start a second career/income steam. Having said that, most of her videos were made before her current partnership and she does say things antithetical to the gee-wiz-I-Fucking-Love-SCIENCE crowd. Such as some mainstream physics is bad-faith hype machining for tax dollars
She often focuses on "everyday-physics" where she does a reasonably decent job. However, she has some very crackpotty ideas on quantum mechanics (super-determinism, which basically entails that our entire current understanding of quantum mechanics is only an approximate description of some magic deterministic process, you can look around on Scott Aaronson's blog for some rebuttals).
Additionally, she makes very strong claims about the invalidity of some theoretical arguments which are used to motivate the search for physics beyond the standard model. On this ground she loudly demands to defund various efforts in that direction which indeed makes her anti-establishment and hated to some degree in the high energy physics community.
On a side note, I sometimes find it weird that (at least as it appears to me) large parts of the rationalist/rat-adjacent community often seem not really interested in deeper physics/math concepts (except statistics) like quantum field theory, general relativity, quantum information theory, string theory, ... or maybe I just lack a better understanding of this community since I only read this blog and occasionally LW.
A question for other hypersensitives (I mean susceptible to sensory overload more than extra-sensitive senses, though I'd suspect they're correlated). I am curious if anyone else employs the same One Weird Trick: I'm nearsighted, and need glasses for things like driving or classroom learning. (What is the deal with overhead projectors being so much harder to read than black/whiteboards?) But sight unaided is enough to mostly navigate the everyday environment, minus some occasional squinting for roadsigns and other small-font-at-a-distance. So I just...don't wear glasses unless strictly necessary. Everything gets kinda fuzzy more than a few feet out, and that's comforting, cause there's significantly less visual data to (over)process. One small fragment of sensory deprivation, that most comforting of states...
I am the opposite. I am also nearsighted and I enjoy very much the crisp vision brought by my glasses. It is a physival pleasure to me to see the details so well, which I can compare to the sad blur of my uncorrected vision. I am a bit overly sensitive to noise and touch, but vision is almost always a pleasure for me.
Interesting - I find that I end up *seeing less* with more clarity. Partly due to information overload, but also due to overactive pattern-matching. It feels like the reason I can still "see" stuff tolerably fine despite it being objectively fuzzy is that my brain's gotten really used to extrapolating, filling in the gaps between broad-strokes boundaries and colours. With glasses on, I start getting visual artefacts...not exactly literally like "seeing stars", but pattern-matching inappropriately to generate false signal from noise. Like it actually is a problem being able to see every leaf on a tree...then it becomes something other than "tree". It becomes "huge mass of individually differentiated leaves". A category confusion error. Maybe if I'd worn glasses for majority of life, this would be reversed...hard to know.
Very interesting, and very surprising for me! It would make sense that your brain is indeed so used to work with fuzzy data that it is confused by too much information.
The example of the trees is especially strange for me, because I love nature in general and trees especially, and frequently look at them for pleasure, with the details of leaves part of this enjoyment. In my case, I think that one of the resaon I love my corrected vision is that I really like the sensation of depth, and the one of seing at a distance. I love to have a view and imagine myself wandering in the farway landscape, as I really dislike being in an enclosed space. I wonder if this is the same for you in the opposite direction? I mean do you prefer being inside than outside for example?
On the subject of fuzziness being comforting, there was a children book that I loved on this subject (from a French author who rencently got the Nobel prize in litterature!). A central part of the plot is that being nearsighted gives you the possibility to choose being a crisp and a fuzzy vision. Here is a translation of the summary below.
Catherine Certitude by Modiano
Like her father, Catherine Certitude wears glasses. And a pair of glasses sometimes complicates life: for example when she has to take them off at dance class. Because Catherine dreams of becoming a great dancer like her mom who lives in New York. But her glasses offer her the advantage of being able to live in two different worlds: the real world, as she sees it, when she wears them, and a world full of softness, blurred and without asperity if she takes them off. A world where she dances like in a dream...
Surprised that this has, in fact, been turned into a book. Certitude is a good name for the concept. Although I take issue with glasses representing "the real world"...the map is not the territory! Maybe that's too complicated for children to understand though. I am reminded of how certain patterns and visual illusions require intentionally unfocusing the eyes to "see correctly". There is a kind of tunnel vision associated with increasing magnification and clarity...like, a magnifying glass or microscope allows for much better sight. But it can only perceive so much at once. I suppose someone with natural 20/20 or better vision, or one corrected via laser eye surgery, maybe has a different visual processing algorithm in their head that's accustomed to a holistically crisp picture at all times. It is hard to imagine, really. Even when I imagine scenes, it's in a fuzzy non-crisp state, cause I'm not used to seeing things any other way...I am pretty sure my dreams are the same? Many fantastical nonsensical things happen, but physics mostly operate the same as real life. Only being on psychedelics really alters this. (Psilocibin makes my vision go fish-eye-lensed, which is terribly disorienting for depth perception. Dangerous to try walking around or manipulating objects.)
I am not really agoraphobic or claustrophobic, exactly, but have some PTSD related to not being able to locate exits/defensible positions. Being inside, being in my room, is comforting cause I know every inch of it very well...minor discrepancies are easier to catch. (I have recurring fears of a certain Really Bad Figure from my past returning to ruin my life again.) It's definitely objectively nice to be outside - how bright the sun is, compared to pitiful artificial lights! how rich the colours, how alive the wind, the sensation of rain, the smells of a hundred different cuisines wafting through the air. (Still waiting for technology to advance far enough to produce accurate artificial scents. If I could buy the scent of a lively Chinese kitchen for my own home...nostalgia.)
But outside is full of Variables, and that's deeply threatening in its own way cause I can't account for or control them all. I was just starting to get sort-of comfortable with wandering around the city on my own by the time covid hit. After that...the virus, the virus countermeasures, the fear and anxiety, the general surge in anomie and crime and distrust...I mostly don't leave the house anymore unless I have to. It's frustrating, because I don't even care that much about covid. It's other people that scare me now. Makes being extraverted quite difficult. Home is safe...but also boring and isolated.
I'm 79. My right eye is developing a cataract. My left eye has astigmatism due to a blow. I keep a pair of glasses in my backpack which I put on when I enter a store. I wear normal sunglasses outside. I walk a lot. I don't own a car.
I live in the Dominican Republic where there are lots of "moto" drivers wanting to give me a ride for 50¢ or a dollar. Mostly I just walk.
Are all claims of AI bias (to do with e.g. race) baloney?
Nearly all of the ones I've seen are basically complaints that AI is characterizing reality accurately in a way that is incongruent with left-wing narratives.
A system that disproportionately associates criminality with black people (compared to white people) is called "biased", even though this is a correct description of reality. And we know that this is 100% what is happening, because literally none of these people have ever complained about e.g. men being considered men more associated with criminality than women (and before anyone interjects here, the black/white crime ratio is about the same as the male/female crime ratio - and in the most recent data it was higher for homicide).
We saw this earlier with policing algorithms that kept saying police should be in black neighbor hoods (and then when this was forbidden, it kept saying police should be in neighborhoods with things which are a proxy for being black neighborhoods). This is because that's where a majority of the crime is, and yet the left were furiously proclaiming that these systems are "racist"
It's really funny when you think about it. When conservatives would complain that CNN, MSNBC etc had a liberal bias, the epic comeback was that "reality has a liberal bias". Well, terrabytes of data have shown us that reality actually has a...non-woke bias? But no, I'm sure its the machines that are wrong.
If this is the kind of nonsense that is stealing so much attention in the AI space, any chance on genuine problems like alignment being solved seem like a demented pipe dream at this stage. The prospect of humans being wiped out is literally less alarming to people than an accurate characterization of race crime rate differences.
Im with you in that I don't think reality should be ignored, and even if such a system leads to more black people being in jail, that's perfectly fine with me provided it produces a notable reduction in crime. Also, I think people who use the "biased algorithm" are too short-termist. If the data says certain demographics are committing more crime than others then turning a blind eye to it doesn't help anyone. Especially when most of the victims of those crimes these to be from the same demographics!
That being said, there are two strong technical arguments about biased algorithms worth considering. The first is about training on past data to predict future results. Machine-Learning (ML) algorithms get trained on past data which is then used to predict the future, but there are a lot of cases where this breaks down. One way is the Garbage-in, Garbage- out argument (which I don't think is a particularly big issue here). The other way is when criminal behaviour has changed or when dealing with rare/special cases, so a lot of our past data becomes obsolete.
The 2nd argument has to do with judging the algorithms success. For crime, if we're trying to classify who is a criminal and who isn't, we probably want a strong Recall (how many True Positives have we found relative to what's out there?), so we find as many criminals as possible. We'll also want a strong Precision (what proportion of what we predicted as True Positives are REALLY True Positives), so we aren't incarcerating the wrong people.
The problem is, there is often a trade-off between the two. For instance, if we optimize for Recall, and we assume you're right that most homicides are committed by black men, the algorithm could easily just infer every time that the black man is the homicide perpetrator every time and achieve a very high accuracy. The downside? It will also incarcerate an extraordinary amount of innocent black men in the process.
That sounds pretty bad! So maybe we should prioritise Precision? Well if we do this, the algorithm wont predict a person is guilty unless it is really confident its prediction is correct, so we probably get a lot more criminals roaming free.
Obviously the goal is to try to get the best of both worlds, but assuming it's impossible they will both be perfect, what kind of tradeoff should we be willing to take?
Following AI bias gets you better short-term results, but closes a catastrophic feedback loop - the more an AI is biased against a person, the more society will reject them, and the more antisocial they will become. If "person" is instead an ethnic/cultural group that process doesn't even end when any singular person dies, and becomes self perpetuating until the only solution left is the final one.
This is the exact same reason why racism in humans is individually helpful but socially extremely harmful.
The most charitable interpretation of these claims I can muster is that they are an unhelpful distraction from an important problem by unhelpful people.
They seem like examples of AI with racial bias against darker-skinned people. I hope we can all agree that these ought to be fixed, rather than ignored.
When I read about traditional policing practices like stop-and-frisk, traffic stops that escalate to searches, or shootings where the officer says that they (thought they) saw a gun, I have the same questions: what is the false positive rate? And especially in the US context, is the false positive rate higher for blacks? If so, then it sounds like racial bias.
I don't see much moral significance to the involvement of AI. It's just another way that the police can go about their age-old business. So I would like the same two false-positive metrics to be important parts of evaluating AI-driven predictive policing.
Re: ending remote learning. One of its benefits is allowing students to study for the degree most relevant to them while holding a job far from their nominal campus. Ending it might reduce student employment. On the other hand, there would most likely be less cheating. I have no overall opinion.
I don't think you understand the point often being made in opposition. It's not about denying 'reality', but rather it's about taking active control of our decision making processes and not letting them implement unjust laws rather than hiding behind claims of 'well, it's just what the data says.'
I mean, you illustrate the perfect counterexample: men are more likely to commit some crimes than women, and this is not disputed. So imagine if a future gun control regime creates an AI to assess whether someone should be allowed to own a firearm, and feeds it crime data. That system would reject men from owning guns at a much higher rate than it would for women. It would effectively be sex-based gun control, and saying "hey, it's just the data" is a cop out that lets you avoid answering the tough questions.
I don't see many people arguing that statistics around crime rates and ethnicity are incorrect. But a statistic can mean many things. It can mean a correlation, or it can mean a causation, and stomping on the distinction can lead to bad conclusions. If you build an AI that concludes "you have black skin, thus you are more likely to commit a crime," you have just obliterated a lot of nuance into what that 'thus' means. And if you're taking it a step further with "therefore action X should happen," then you risk compounding that bias into an unjust world in which people are judged based on nothing more than the color of their skin.
I wouldn't say *all*. If reality is biased, and the AI is reflecting reality, then the AI is propagating bias, even if it is 'correct'. So really, I think it depends on the application.
A part of that is what you said, sometimes we just don't want to hear certain facts.
But another part is the old "garbage in, garbage out" principle, where the quality of output coming from a computer depends on the quality of its input. Giving the AI a position of authority allows you to feed it whatever data you want, then take the outputs and say "see? the Science agrees with me".
Now of course, when the former happens, people will argue that it's the latter, and vice versa.
As an example, imagine a parallel reality where cops really hate gingers. Whenever cops see a ginger driving a car, they will pull the car over and search it thoroughly. The rest of the population, they only check when something suspicious happens. Now in this parallel reality, many gingers serve prison sentences because a marijuana joint was found in the car, or something like that. And you ask "hey, do gingers really smoke marijuana more often, or is this just a consequence of being searched more often?". But everyone says "just look at the statistics, dummy, gingers are 1% of the population, but 99% of imprisoned marijuana users, stop pretending that you don't see it".
Now a machine learning program is fed these statistics, you connect the program to a camera and ask it which cars you should stop and search, because you don't want to stop too many cars, only where the probability of crime is higher than average. Unsurprisingly, the program tells you to stop cars with gingers. Now you can be sure that there is no prejudice involved, because machines obviously do not have prejudices.
>Unsurprisingly, the program tells you to stop cars with gingers.
Not if you ask "what gives the highest chance of arrest per search" and put the records of who was searched into it. *Then* it tells you to search a lot less gingers than you're doing, because it notices that *given a search occurred* the gingers are less likely to get arrested.
(If you don't have enough points of reference to point to the truth, it'll actually claim you should search gingers less than they deserve, because it notices that gingers are unusually likely to be false alarms, and can't distinguish between DWG and gingers actually doing suspicious things.)
Yeah, depends on what exactly you measure and what is the bias. If you do the searches correctly, then yes the algorithm will push you in the correct way. If you plant the evidence (or if you are more likely to look the other way when you see non-gingers with marijuana), then the algorithm will support you. If people of certain group make the same amount of crime, but less likely end up in prison, because they have better lawyers, the answer depends on the question; is it "how likely is this person to do crime?" or "how likely will stopping this person lead to a successful arrest?".
No: it just means you wouldn’t vote for GEoD because spoilers. Vote for whichever one you liked best that you did read. Remember, the finalists were mostly chosen that way: not many people read all 130+ entries
I realize this may be too unspecific a question, but does anyone have strong recommendations for print magazines that are not highly political (insofar as that’s possible), ideally just good, long form writing on subjects that would be interesting to read on a Sunday afternoon?
I’m asking because: (1) I’ve been through several of the mainstream mags but find myself disappointed or uninterested (Paris Review, etc.) in the content and (2) I like reading things in the physical world rather than on my phone.
You might try Lapham's Quarterly, which excerpts writing from across all of history on a given topic, like friendship, scandal, or trade. Since it consists largely of historical writing, you avoid tropes of contemporary discourse
I see the “women are less happy now” argument brought up in the comments section regularly as if women’s rights advances were a mistake. In my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce, so the burden of life for women is heavier than it used to be when a majority of women were homemakers. Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives. (I have often joked that I need a wife.) Is there a seriously held belief in the community here that the answer to “women are less happy now” is a return to the midcentury housewife model? Or am I misinterpreting?
If you want to simplify it to barebones, it's simply Chesterton's Fence: we saw the fence of sexual restrictions and that it was bad, took it down and 50+ years later we find quite a few surprises in the meadows beyond it.
And I think it's useful to focus on sexual liberation specifically, even though it's probably the least discussed. There's a lot of focus on equal rights or education or workforce participation, but let's remember that the previous traditional system was a very direct response to the fact that you need two parents to successfully raise children, and the best way to convince a man to do that is to convince him they're his children. Everything came from that.
So, how did sexual liberation came to bite us in the ass? Well, there's the funny episode where AIDS is literally God's punishment for homosexuality, at least if you interpret God in a slightly impersonal way (there's a SSC post on that, but I can't find it quickly). We changed the status quo by assuming previous sexual taboos were obsolete, and it upset a very old and delicate balance between our immune system and its threats.
There is also a persistent association between a certain lifestyle and, well, unhappiness for women. Hookup culture would be a good name for it, but usually there's some alcohol involved. For some reason it just doesn't sit well with long term satisfaction. Fortunately the research I've seen suggests it's temporary. Sorry, but I don't have the links - last time I did a deep dive in this was a long time ago, when I first started asking myself the same questions. Ah, another thing I found back then: surprisingly enough, number of partners does not affect later capacity to pair bond. I still can't wrap my head around this one, but well, that's what I found when I looked for an answer. It seems that there's no big moral reason for why promiscuity is bad - it just very directly makes you unhappy.
Another perspective I recently found in Sadly, Porn. It's a bit cynical (unsurprisingly). It says if you look at the incentives, the common social narrative is written by the Media. And individual actors in the media, from journalists to companies, will steer women towards a career path rather than a family path because... yes, I know it's cynical... single working women consume more media than mothers of several children. I don't think it's the literal truth, but it does point one to look a bit more at incentive structures and wonder if maybe small individual steps led us in a direction we didn't control.
And speaking of career - the vast majority of the women I know actually have this choice: still be free, still be educated and equal, but get married early, work for a few years to build a nest then do less paid work and raise a couple of kids instead. It's the classic success recipe, and there's literally nothing stopping them... except the above-mentioned Media that keep telling them since pre-puberty that it's the wrong choice, that children are something that you do Someday, and better yet, that it's something the Future You may want to do, but definitely not something you actually should plan on doing. And god forbid not anytime soon.
I'm tempted to speculate and say that the cognitive dissonance between this official message and their biological impulses leads to the very unhappy compromise where so many women get pregnant "by mistake" instead of rationally planning for it. A critical part in the classic success recipe above is getting married first, then building a nest and only then having children. The delay doesn't need to be that long, but the order matters a lot.
What we have instead for the typical modern women is a focus on career, and then hitting the doubly sour reality that you can get a higher quality of guys in bed, than you can in marriage; and also you can get better guys before 30 than after. Which is an ugly enough shock to paralyze at least some women for a few extra years, and ... yeah, it's a feedback loop.
So, to conclude. Is returning to the midcentury housewife model a solution? On an individual level, probably, yes, that model would still work for many. But on a society level no - it's definitely not as universally applicable anymore, and it's also not as desired. A proper solution should start from accepting that we removed fences without knowing the full consequences, admitting there were unpleasant side-effects, and start working on a new equilibrium where we fix each problem.
And yes, this sounds obvious but it's also very different from the current situation where traditionalists are saying we should go back in time, and progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong. Neither is accepting that we both have a problem, and that the old solutions aren't viable anymore.
> There is also a persistent association between a certain lifestyle and, well, unhappiness for women. Hookup culture would be a good name for it, but usually there's some alcohol involved.
I suspect that this is a part of a more general problem. I mean, even ignoring sexuality, many people are lonely, and have a problem to make new friends.
I am not sure how exactly this happens, and I don't even have a good guess. Some places are obviously not great for socialization for various reasons: alcohol-oriented, too loud, too nerdy, too expensive. But it still seems that there are also many good social places, but... the lonely people just don't use them for some reason.
It just somehow happened that the pub is the Schelling point. :(
> still be free, still be educated and equal, but get married early, work for a few years to build a nest then do less paid work and raise a couple of kids instead. It's the classic success recipe
I know some women who married young, raised their kids, and focused on their careers afterwards. They say they like it this way; first they could fully focus on their families, now they can fully focus on their careers.
But popular wisdom says that this is extremely dangerous. For example, what if you happen to marry an asshole who will divorce you after your first child is born? Now you have no family, no job experience, and you are not in a great position to look for either a new partner or a job.
This seems like a happiness-security tradeoff. The happy life path has a great risk of going down in flames. The safe life path makes you less happy but helps you survive if things go wrong.
Another aspect is that it takes some time for people to become psychologically mature. Maybe more time these days than it took in the past, because university is an extended childhood. People change profoundly when they get their first serious job (not just for extra pocket money, but one they need to keep in order to pay their bills). So maybe marrying right after university is bad for similar reasons we wouldn't want 15 years olds to marry. (And, as usual, people are different; there are always ones who can do this successfully, but those are the exception, not the rule.)
> A proper solution should start from accepting that we removed fences without knowing the full consequences, admitting there were unpleasant side-effects, and start working on a new equilibrium where we fix each problem.
Agreed.
> progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong.
I think the more accurate framing is that progressives believe society is moving in the right direction but that it has not yet reached the goal. It is experiencing growing pains along the way, because progress is messy. Traditionalists believe we are moving in the wrong direction. (Correct me if this is a straw man.)
A more accurate framing would also be a lot less charitable. Both sides (and I do mean both) are flaming messes of pattern completing tribal automatons, without much in the way of original though or capability of actually changing their minds. Because both sides are made of humans, and humans don't do well with politically charged issues.
As for progressives specifically (did I mention I'm not singling them out as being awful?), they're definitely not assuming any responsibility for the problems we're facing, and I don't really see anything in the way of actually trying to fix them other than "run faster" and "it's the other guys fault".
A particularly stark and raw example: progressives took the right to abortion and turned into celebrating it. And I fully blame them for the current mess, btw - this shouldn't even have been a culture war topic in the past 50 years. BOTH sides should have been 100% aligned: let's make sure there's as little need for abortion as possible. No matter how much I squint I can't find a real disagreement here. But no, they had to rub it in and promote abortion as a lifestyle out of _spite_. And now traditionalists have this victory on their hand most of them didn't need nor want, but can't renounce because, well, in a war you cannot look weak.
Why am I using this particularly gory and CW example? To illustrate that society is not in a "fixing problems" mindset. Here was a piece of the system that worked fine, and we managed to move a step back because everybody is a conflict theorist (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
Solution? no idea. Just dump as many useful concepts in the water supply and hope enough of them catch. And try to keep and value spaces that are not a flaming mess, I guess.
I wouldn't call myself a traditionalist, but I agree with Rebelcredential about progressives: I'm entirely unwilling to take it on faith that you know where we're going or that that place is good, if you do know. Not only is the "yes it's worse now, but just wait until we hit the Promised Land!" rhetoric inherently dangerously utopian and anti-human (in the same way as many have recently criticized long-termism for being: "who cares about suffering NOW?!"), every other time for the last century or so that progressives have been allowed to lead the way all the way to one of these places it's been an incomparably hideous hellscape. My suspicion that current progressives won't do any better is compounded by the fact that those setting the direction of this mystical journey openly, proudly believe in a whole bunch of Flat Earth-level ideas, like blank-slatism and that whole trans business discussed in another subthread. It's like being guided to the Big Rock Candy Mountain by the population of Dayton, Tennessee circa 1925, and they react the same way to criticism as those townies did. I'd rather stay home, thanks.
In short, I'm much less sure about what ought to be done than that we shouldn't do what you guys want. Does that count as centrism?
> every other time for the last century or so that progressives have been allowed to lead the way all the way to one of these places it's been an incomparably hideous hellscape.
Hmm. I get to own a house and make money and have/raise children on my terms, travel freely, socialize on my terms, be selective about my partners, do interesting work that pays, save for retirement… I’m not really seeing a hellscape? Without 20th century progressives, my life as a nonwhite woman would be objectively worse. If I were born a hundred years earlier I’d probably be living in servant’s quarters or die in childhood or die in childbirth or be stuck in a marriage to a drunk scumbag or be beaten on a regular basis or whatever. If I’m one of the really really lucky ones, I have physical and emotional safety through my life.
I don’t want to strawman the position but it’s hard not to see traditionalism as rooted in resentment from people who probably would have had more money and more sex had they been born a hundred years sooner. Maybe that will lend some insight into why the progressive left can sound rabid in its anger.
In addition to what Anonymous wrote, anyone who's not a fellow progressive is going to read your "If I were born a hundred years earlier..." passage and just think, horseshit.
Russians are taught in school that America secretly planned Pearl Habour against itself, North Koreans believe Kim Il-Sung summoned swallows and rainbows, and Feminists believe that life was a hellscape for women for thousands of years before Emmeline Pankhurst rode in on a white stallion to save us all.
There are a bunch of problems with the formulation you give here. The first and most glaring one is that you're begging the question again – the whole conversation here has been about how these *apparently* good things which *allegedly* made your life better have nevertheless led to a *reduction* in women's happiness, so just pointing at all those things again and declaring them good a priori lacks convincing force, to say the least.
Secondly, most of those things – reduced child and childbirth mortality, standard of living raised to the point of servant no longer looking like an attractive gig – have nothing to do with progressivism, with the feminism/women's lib movement, or indeed with politics at all, they're just apolitical products of technology. You can't claim points for progressivism on the basis that a Scottish freemason invented a machine that runs off water and charcoal and makes manual labor obsolete.
Third, to the extent that politics did play a role, the reason the west was successful in the 20th century is that conservatives and moderates *thwarted and held back* progressives, not that they were given a free hand; wherever they did get it, various repugnant moral and humanitarian disasters ensued – the Soviet Union, the various awful eugenics programs in numerous western nations (the classic example here being the Catholic traditionalist Chesterton arguing against the Fabian socialists Wells and Shaw, who were vigorously endorsing eugenic purification of the breeding stock in pursuit of a new and better mankind), the Great Leap Forward, the Nazis etcetera were all based on the implementation of some Grand Transformative Vision for society which promised utopia tomorrow but only offered genocide today – and the argument is that indulging second-wave feminism is another case of progressives making things worse to the exact, limited extent they're enabled to – obviously nowhere near genocide in this instance, but we should still be very reluctant to just let the reins slip. (Socialism probably didn't *mean* to kill all those kabillions of people initially either, it just became a tragic necessity once that stupid recalcitrant human nature refused to conform to the Plan, the beautiful Plan...) You don't have to agree with this argument, and I'm not sure I do, but I can certainly see the pattern which they're pointing at, and it's a real thing that caused untold, unparalleled quantities of human misery. In comparison, somebody who just says "let's just stay right here and try to figure out how to repair this damage, at least it can't get even worse if we don't move from this spot" seems like a shining saint of wholesome reasonability, and if he adds that he thinks the best thing to do would just be to rewind all the social mores to 1880, well, maybe that doesn't sound optimal or feasible to me, but at least we've already been there once and it was much less bad than the Red Khmer, so he still wins in terms of the amount of backing he has for his promises.
If we aren’t using metrics like wealth and health in addition to self reported happiness to measure well being, what is the point of effective altruism? I guess that’s not your bag?
You’re right about the rising tide of technology lifting all boats, so we should cross childhood death off the list. Being a servant might be replaced with run of the mill poverty. We can nitpick line items, but is there really a dispute about it? I would not be able to be prosperous without a change in social attitudes and policies pushed by progressive social movements.
I shouldn’t have left the question of my own well-being unstated. I am happier in the current context I described than I am reasonably certain I would have been in a context predating the women’s and civil rights movements. I mean, duh. Probably should have mentioned too that I have a strong social network which matters just as much to happiness as things like safety and autonomy. I am thankfully not a victim of the loneliness plague in the modern West.
Reasons for falling unhappiness across modern society are speculated (loneliness plague?), not known, and we should not act like the cause-effect in the case of rates specific to women IS known. “Women are less happy now” is, as I’ve said before, a rhetorical device used by people trying to dunk on feminists. I’ve encountered some thought provoking ideas here, but nothing to challenge that one.
Also agree with you that progressive movements - any ideological movement - needs to be met with skepticism. I am also skeptical of contemporary far-left progressivism which I guess these days we call being woke.
Thanks for engaging. I appreciate seeing others’ value systems in a reasoned way.
> progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong.
> I think the more accurate framing is that progressives believe society is moving in the right direction but that it has not yet reached the goal.
It's definitely the cotton wool thing.
It would be one thing to say, we've got to get there from here, and along the way there'll be a period of chaos and transition, but bear with because it'll be worth it when we get there.
But that implies that *you know where you're going*.
Progressives don't. They didn't expect the problems they're facing now, they don't understand why they're happening, and they can't predict what's going to happen next.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that progressives don't have a good model of reality, they don't really know what success looks like, and they're not leading us anywhere good.
Traditionalists believe we're moving in the wrong direction, yes, because what we're actually doing is following a leader who keeps saying, "trust me guys it'll all be worth it" while very obviously not having a clue what she's doing.
And the further we follow her, the worse things get for - in this case - women.
> the worse things get for - in this case - women.
No. Somehow, you have turned “research shows that women are becoming unhappy at a slightly faster pace than men are becoming unhappy” into this statement.
It would probably help if you could give some definition to how much you want to roll back the clock. Do we just want to pull back on the you-go-girl rhetoric in society enough to ensure there are adequate attractive young family-focused women in the population for the men looking for that? Or do we want to roll back all the 20th century legal rights granted to women? I’ve seen a lot of people here say they are not traditionalists and don’t want the old model, but I still don’t have a sense of what actual traditionalists are proposing.
> the worse things get for - in this case - women.
> No. Somehow, you have turned “research shows that women are becoming unhappy at a slightly faster pace than men are becoming unhappy” into this statement.
I raise my eyebrows pointedly at you for taking exception to this.
What do I want? For a start:
Championship of the masculine and feminine virtues. Girls raised wanting to be wives and mothers. Boys raised to take pride in being strong providers.
The widespread understanding that a high IQ woman serves society better by creating multiple future physicists and statesmen than by becoming a single one herself.
The widespread understanding of society as a well oiled machine, with men and women the finely engineered moving parts, who create the miracle of civilisation by working together just so; if the roles break down, the machine cannot magically keep working.
Seen in that light, it should be obvious there must be some relegation of homosexual and nonstandard gender roles to a lower status than traditional roles. We don't try to forbid or persecute anyone, because we are Westerners and we adhere to the ideals of classical liberalism. But promoting and celebrating LGBTQ to stop at once, especially to children.
I would also like more widespread knowledge of history, and that means historical narratives that progressives absolutely do not share (hint: it doesn't read like it was written by Margaret Atwood.)
In particular I would like everyone to have a much wider perspective on what "bad times" can actually look like, in order that people can look at being screamed at at work or slapped on the bum, and see those things as the tiny trivialities they are.
The same goes for complaints like "having to do emotional labour and please a man". Bitch you are being offered the precious chance to do emotional labour for your children and please a man who loves you. Check your privilege.
You'll note that I haven't hearkened back to the Old Days and I'm not interested in "rolling back the clock". I am aware of history but my beliefs are not based on any kind of romanticism or nostalgia.
I am talking about accepting an accurate model of human nature, and adopting roles and virtues that make the best of it.
It doesn't matter to me which previous eras did the right things, only that we start doing them now.
Different angle: What would you say goes into happiness, and how optimised is a given lifestyle for producing it?
Off the cuff, I'd suggest some important factors:
- having dependents who rely on you (isn't this supposed to be one of the single biggest contributors?)
- having a daily dose of status-affirming positive interactions
- having a daily dose of little wins or opportunities for Csikszentmihalyi-style flow.
- having material comforts.
I think material comforts are the smallest contributor in the list. I think you need just enough to get off the bottom of the Maxwell Needs Heirarchy, and any benefit from more possessions after that is actually from their enabling status- or flow-based behaviour.
Having dependents who rely on you is self-evidently a point for the mid-century housewife (in her ideal form, whether or not she actually ever existed).
By "daily dose of positive status-affirming interactions" I'm saying that a lot of people giving you the feeling that they're pleased with you, or impressed with you, or that you're better than them at X and everyone can see it, is likely to leave you in a better mood than a day full of the opposite. Your mileage may vary on this but I think it's fair to call it a major contributor of most people's happiness.
If status is dimorphic for men and women, and women get positive status from the things you suggested upthread, then the status-yield a modern woman gets at her job is in a sense "empty calories". You're scoring in Man-points but getting graded in Woman.
(Your words upthread were, "their value is to be beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers.")
If this is true, your job could put you in a position of great power, wealth and authority, but it wouldn't result in people being more awed by you on a level deep enough to really make you happy. You'll get superficial respect and nothing more.
If at the same time you're watching men doing exactly the same job but getting a truer, more genuine reaction from those around them, then your status-affirmation score is probably well into the red by the end of the day.
(Under the dimorphic model, the successful professional man and the mid-century housewife are both entitled to genuine appreciation and respect for what they are. The modern woman and the guy who focusses on caring and nurturing find that, on its own, that work counts for nothing.)
So of the four things I randomly decided should make up happiness:
- material comfort falls off quickly
- both status and family choices favour the housewife and immiserate the modern woman.
- only Csikszentmihalyi's flow/engagement process is gender neutral. (At least, I don't remember him ever saying otherwise.)
So for a modern woman there are two steps you can take to become happier:
- Repent your wicked ways and embrace tradwife life.
- Increase your time in flow by building sandcastles and learning to play the guitar.
-I do want to nitpick the idea that women were merely supposed to be " beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers." This idea totally flattens historical notions of womanhood. For example, look at Gervais Markham's 1615 handbook "The English Housewife". A "complete" woman prior to the 20th century was supposed to know how to cook, clean, raise children and act as nurse practitioner. She was supposed to know how to identify literally hundreds of adulterated or spoiled food items for sale in a market, grow and preserve meats and produce, and know when and how to harvest what she grew for maximum output. She might spin or weave, and could almost certainly sew and embroider, and chose fabrics and constructed the family's wardrobe. She also probably managed the household's money, servants and farmhands. The early education of the children was largely in her hands as well, regardless of whether the family was literate. There was A LOT to know (and she might not even be able to write any of it down.) A "good" woman, someone who was wife material, had vast stores of domestic, horticultural and social knowledge, and the lives of her family depended on it. A pretty wife was a bonus; a stupid, lazy wife could easily kill you and your children.
-As soon as I became aware of Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow/engagement, I realized that this is what I get out of housework. I get flow from cleaning and home maintenance, and cooking is both a flow and creative outlet for me. This is a major reason why I am a happy housewife; I get a lot of flow out of my day. Also, as challenging as kids are, I definitely get a wonderful "daily dose of positive status-affirming interactions" from my small children. Oxytocin is literally a drug, and the hugs and kisses and myriad shows of love and affection I get from my kids is absolutely making me happier on as many social, psychological and chemical levels as you care to count. My husband is appreciative, affectionate and helpful, too. I got flow and appreciation from working as a data manager, too, but nothing like this.
I also get something else from Maslow's hierarchy of needs: mastery. Our meals are tasty and healthy, our house is reasonably tidy, and my husband and kids regularly tell me how nice things are at home. Therefore I must be pretty good at this. That's really all the status I need, too. Domestic life is much more of a closed system with fewer people to please, and if the above is true I've fulfilled the outside world's expectations for my role admirably as well.
There is A LOT of reward built into my day as a homemaker that would be hard to match at any job, but that largely has to do with being the kind of person who experiences flow and mastery and has a family providing positive feedback. You can't universalize the idea that homemakers are happier because there are plenty of women who, beyond not experiencing flow, hate cooking and cleaning with the burning of 1000 suns and have a family that derpily extracts the benefits of her labor without acknowledging the work. Those women SHOULD spend the majority of their time out earning money. But besides money, they might not be able to cash in what they get at work for the same kind of immediate reward feedback cycle happy homemakers experience. And they'd be way more miserable at home. My point earlier is that these arrangements are temporary; I'm not going to be as happy to stay home in 5 years when my kids aren't babies anymore. We need more flexibility.
-I do believe status works differently for men and women, but I think the "man points" metaphor isn't quite right. I would propose that men and women are both getting status, but we can't cash it in for the same rewards. I've personally felt respected and appreciated for my professional work, but at the end of the day the status was more symbolic than useful, at least outside of the workplace. It's a bit like men are paid in status cash while women are paid in status Bitcoin (with the added assumption that Bitcoin is worth what it says). You're rich, but you can't buy a pizza.
And there may not even be pizza; a big part of social dynamics is that men seeking status largely want to cash it in for female attention. Rich women might enjoy male attention, but men aren't instinctively drawn to female wealth and power. It might not matter at all for a woman whose real goal is to find a desirable man, so unless she really loves the job itself, there's one less reason to chase the brass ring.
I used the OP's words, not my own, for what a woman was supposed to get status from.
I personally think both your stated requirements and her facetious ones could definitely stand to get more exposure. The practical skills you mention are worthy of respect in their own right and most modern women just don't have them.
Meanwhile the idea of a woman wanting to be affectionate, pretty, and make her man happy is something you couldn't even bring up at a dinner party these days. I think we need more of it.
Regarding status, there's a much longer spiel between me and DinoNerd below where I've tried to flesh out how I'm using the term.
From what I can tell, status isn't entirely dimorphic by gender. It probably varies depending on who you have in your environment, and to an extent who you listen to. It may also depend on what you personally believe. But I definitely see women with status as managers, engineers, etc. (I'm less personally sure of status in roles I don't interact with as often.)
I'm not sure any woman in the modern US gets to experience quite as much positive feedback for career etc. as an otherwise identical male might, because there are always some who react in gender-dimorphic ways. But career success doesn't produce entirely empty - or even mostly empty - calories either.
We're trying to explain an effect seen across a large number of people. Noisy data and local variation is to be expected. All that matters is if, in aggregate, women have moved from a steady source of status-affirmation to an impoverished one. If they have, we should expect that women on the new sauce are less happy.
The difference, perhaps, is that my approach offers an alternative for women who want to improve their happiness, other than trying to live a probably-no-longer-economically-viable female lifestyle.
You assume that this "support for family care" us just a free lunch that will come out of nowhere. If you assume that it will just replace "unaffordable" daycare with "unaffordable" taxation to fund said daycare, it doesn't seem like so great a deal.
"Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives."
Most people (men and women) don't particularly like their jobs. They like getting paid, which shouldn't be confused with liking work itself.
High quality child care is child care provided by people who have the temperament for interaction with young children and are educated in early childhood development. It can be provided on an individual level or at child care centers that have funding for good infrastructure.
Come on, this is uncharitable. Childcare can *be* a career. Someone can specialize in teaching two year olds (say), and do it for fifty years instead of one. Specialization, continuous improvement, and economies of scale, applied to childcare.
Early childhood development is arguably one of the most important fields of work that exists. I am a hundred percent in favor of it being rewarded with the pay and prestige of a career. It is not the kind of work that increases shareholder value, and work done primarily by women has historically been considered low status, so the free market leaves us with low quality. I would love for people who choose this field out of a passion for the work to be spending all day with my kid rather than me. Many mothers and fathers are not cut out for the tedium of 24/7 time with young children.
I fully agree with the first part and disagree with the second. If mothers and fathers are not cut out for spending time with children, maybe they just shouldn't have children?
Pretty much everything that was available to provide happiness for women in the 1970s, is available to women today if they want to live like women of the 1970s. And there have been many positive improvements on top of that. So *if* women are less happy today, it is because they have chosen poorly, or it is because they are unavoidably jealous of the women who put their children in mediocre child care while they go off to high-profile careers to earn money to buy material comforts, all of which are more visible to outsiders than the internal rewards of family.
Alternately, the premise is false and women aren't less happy than they were fifty years ago. It's plausible that they are, but the quality of the data doesn't inspire confidence in the conclusion.
This is actually part of why I suspect changed sexual mores are the core of the explanation. They're the *only thing* that I can think of that's changed where you more or less have to follow the herd if you want to have a good chance of getting a good partner, making it significantly more difficult to opt out than e.g. opting out of having a career.
Changed sexual mores would definitely tilt the balance against women who want children more than they want good sex. But they're a boon to the women who want good sex more than they want children, and I *think* those roughly balance out for the female population as a whole. But it's worth considering as a hypothesis, I agree.
The way I see it, the same type of objection applies even more strongly to the other proposed explanations, e.g. all the work-related ones fail to account for the fact that as Erusian pointed out, the labor force participation of women only increased by about 20% post women's lib; thus it shouldn't be able to account for a society-wide and general drop in women's happiness since only 1/5 were affected. Since changed sexual mores apply to effectively all women who want a relationship *and* all women who want to *keep* one, it's much more pervasive.
But the other thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a well established fact that women on average find casual sex less satisfying than sex in a relationship, with one-night stands showing the lowest satisfaction of all; also women typically have less interest in "pornified/extreme/pick-your-own-unsatisfactory-adjective" sex acts (the clearest example being norms around oral sex AFAIK). In other words, the sexual revolution militates *against* women's sexual satisfaction on the whole both by them having to put out early in the relationship and by normalizing more extreme sex acts. Those are broadly things *men* like.
Temperament, certainly. Educated in early childhood development seems like a red herring, I think degrees in early childhood education (if that is what you mean) are probably uncorrelated with quality of childcare provided.
But also: the ratio of care providers to children should be not too large. (What too large is depends on how old the kids are. Obviously you can get by with much larger ratios in high school than in daycare. But if you have fifty toddlers per care provider in a daycare then it doesn't matter how good the providers temperament is, or how many degrees they have, or how good in infrastructure is, it *cannot* be high quality child care).
You probably need a ratio of no more than 1:3 (maaybe 1:4) at the earliest ages. Rising to, say, 1:30 by high school age.
> Educated in early childhood development seems like a red herring, I think degrees in early childhood education (if that is what you mean) are probably uncorrelated with quality of childcare provided.
I did not mean degrees specifically. Early childhood development is a well researched field. The education can come from a degree, certificate, or training program designed by the educated founder of a center but however you slice it, the caregivers should have knowledge of the research.
> But also: the ratio of care providers to children should be not too large.
Minimum ratios are regulated by the state, and 50 toddlers per adult is illegal. I don’t think of it as a bar for quality because it is regulated, but you’re right that it matters.
>>>Early childhood development is a well researched field
Is it? Or is it full of the same wish fulfillment junk as young adult education?
And even if it is good education research, on what do you base your supposition that highly political child care departments will actually follow the science?
I am not credentialed in that field and can only speak as a science literate parent who very selfishly cares about what works in early childhood. The research I am referring to is the kind not subject to culture wars, in other words researched claims like “pretend play is good for cognitive development.” Early childhood research should be approached with the same skepticism that is applied to all social science research.
"the temperament for interaction with young children"
I wonder if an application of this standard would end up with feminists who refuse to submit to gender norms around femininity getting excluded.
"and are educated in early childhood development"
That would substantially drive up the price while making it ever harder for working-class people to find jobs. Here's an idea: if you think it's worth it, you make the choice as a consumer to pay for it? And others who don't think it's worth it don't have to pay for it.
> if you think it's worth it, you make the choice as a consumer to pay for it?
A primary goal of making high quality child care a public good is to combat falling fertility rates in industrialized nations. If you aren’t concerned about that, then I understand the belief that it’s free lunch.
Last I noticed, women were individuals. My memories of the 1960s involved miserable homemakers, isolated in suburbs with no adult company, self-medicating with alcohol, if they weren't using drugs prescribed by their doctors.
I doubt all the women on our suburb felt like that - but my mother did, and so did most of her social circle.
OTOH, I've certainly encountered women who want to be housewives, and who *might* not even mind being stuck in a suburb with no transportation. Assuming they are correctly predicting how they'd react to the experience, they would presumably be happier, in conditions that destroyed my mother.
I've also encountered posters in SSC-derived forums (mostly not this one) prescribing all women being primarily child producers and tenders as the optimum human society. And I don't think *all* of them were male.
Looking at things from the other side - no one can do it all. A single person can fully dedicate themselves to their career. A married person who wants to stay married probably needs to spend some time with their spouse.
A sufficiently prosperous person can hire out tasks that interfere with their all-consuming career focus. Obviously, having society make it easier/cheaper to get hired help allows more people to use this method.
And having friends or family members, or even a long term employee, take up the slack in a responsible fashion allows even more career focus, provided you have some way to motivate those friends etc.
One way to get that kind of support person is to marry them. Their career then becomes enabling your career, and you have the chance to go even farther than a single with only casual hired help.
Men are individuals too. Many of them aren't made happy by an all-consuming career. Ditto for women, only perhaps even more so at a statistical level. If that's not your bag, enabling you to give even more of your life to your career probably won't make you happy, though it might make you richer.
For myself, now retired, I find I'm sorry that I put so much into my career for so long. The money was great, and will enable me to have a comfortable retirement. But I'm heartily sick of the rat race.
I appreciate your sharing this personal account, and my heart aches for women like your mother. There is a lot to be gained from moderating traditional views of the “best” life model for men and women.
I wonder how much about happiness is about expectations. Like, two people could be in exactly the same "meh" situation, but if one expected horrible things and the other expected great things to happen, the former will probably report more happiness.
If you are a man, you are socialized to work hard and stop complaining. Your worth as a human being depends on how much you succeed to fight for yourself. Don't expect any help. If you are not a part of the small group of winners, you are a loser.
If you are a woman, you are probably told that you are awesome, and that you can have it all.
And then both grow up and realize that the reality is somewhere in between. The life sometimes sucks but sometimes is okay; most of you will never become CEOs, but most of you won't starve either. The men celebrate, the women complain.
> If you are a woman, you are probably told that you are awesome, and that you can have it all.
Oh boy. Not sure how to respond to this. Maybe I will try.
From birth, women receive the message that their value is to be beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers. The other stuff (talents, hobbies, quirks, accomplishments, brilliance, etc) is bonus and should not come at the cost of self beautification, wifely duties, and motherhood.
The “you are awesome” messages are an attempt to combat the “you are a second class human” messages that are so pervasive, you are not even seeing them.
No traditional housewife, hypothetical or not, ever thought of herself as a "second class human being". Neither did her husband, nor any man or woman in the society around her.
I think this exposes the edge of a bubble. It's either around you or me, but the worldview inside has vastly drifted from the world outside. Because seriously, only feminism and the incel movements it gave rise to could actually consider women to be second class human beings.
I wonder if the 19th century version of housewives in question who do not consider themselves to be second class human beings would have supported the 19th century movements that led to women achieving property ownership and the right to vote. Those women were probably confident that women do not have the intelligence or emotional disposition for these manly responsibilities. This is just how God made women, after all.
How respectful of you to show deference to the education I received from my pastor!
We don’t seem to be on the same page about civil rights and moral progress in general, which I would venture to guess is not a disagreement we can resolve here.
During the last several thousand years, keeping points 1 through 3 was the best path to a comfortable existence and the rest was, indeed, a bonus. Compare and contrast with men, who are considered by society to be basically worthless outside of their accomplishments, and need to constantly prove their worth.
It remains to be seen whether the rules of the game have truly changed, or is the current insistence they have changed just a short-lived fad.
Is there not also a message of "you need to go to college" and "you're kind of a loser if you don't have a career" that women also receive? These messages may not come from the same sources as the BE A MOM and BE HOT messages, but they are there, and have been for at least a generation or two.
College/career expectations are second order messaging that start in adolescence and might come from a family or social bubble. Beauty/motherhood messaging comes at every woman from every angle starting from birth.
What about in the huge number of liberal families out there in every western country who will teach their daughters "You don't have to be a mother, you're just as capable of having a career as boys" etc? I really don't think there is just one message that any girl hears anymore about what she is supposed to do based on being female.
To be sure, messaging about career towards both girls and boys is strong in higher income and/or liberal circles. I am talking about subliminal messaging - the insidious stuff that is socially programmed into how adults interact with babies and young children on autopilot, how marketing is aimed at girls vs boys, how female and male protagonists in stories for children are written, etc.
Asked my wife for a third opinion, she said that the part about "keeping the men in their lives happy/satisfied" is obsolete, but the rest is correct. :D
(I guess it also depends on local culture and the bubble you build around yourself.)
>I see the “women are less happy now” argument brought up in the comments section regularly as if women’s rights advances were a mistake.
It's a replicated research funding, and a pretty damning one at that. Because feminists consider women's "rights" (an overly broad term that is used to describe things that aren't actually about rights) as so crucially important, it's bizarre that women are less happier since the time when they started getting what they want. Because let's be clear, the finding is not that women are no happier now than when they got their rights (and non-rights).
They're *less* happy. Which means whatever little hypothesis you have for this, you're saying that thing is enough to *more* than entirely cancel out any of the happiness they got from their rights. Whatever thing they're unhappy about now is worse than whatever terrible thing from the past we got rid of, which is a really weird thing for a feminist to believe.
>n my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce
Okay, well, I don't think you should describe your in-group's position on a contentious political topic to be self-evident. If it's so obviously true, there should be a wealth of data for you to prove this. And you should be proving (or at least supporting with data) it instead of declaring it self-evident.
>women are dissatisfied because
allegedly
>they want high quality and affordable child
Okay...so? I want a lot of things too. It doesn't make them rights. Nobody said its a right to be able to have a white collar career and have children and have free time.
>they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives.
You mean, back when only 30% or less of jobs were white collar (around half as many as today)? So you're saying that women are dissatisfied because they supposedly don't have things as good as a minority of men did in the past? I don't know what kind of understanding you have on pre-1960s America, but the vast majority of men did NOT "enjoy professional careers". And how many women today have "professional careers" (or would if they had better childcare)? Not a majority. Are the minority dragging down the overall happiness? Or do you have another "self-evident" theory for why the majority have become less happy?
And why exactly do you consider it some great injustice that white collar women supposedly have all these household burdens, but it's fine that large numbers of men cannot hope for a professional career at all (and do the vast majority of dangerous work)?
And just stop and think about what you're saying: Having a career is so important to these women that they're willing to it despite supposedly having excessive household burdens, and yet the difference in happiness between carrer+burdened & career+unburdened is somehow greater than the gap between no-career & career+burdened. The implication of your argument is literally that women would happier not having careers.
>Is there a seriously held belief in the community here that the answer to “women are less happy now” is a return to the midcentury housewife model? Or am I misinterpreting?
If it's true that women's rights have (directly or indirectly) made women unhappier, it's true. The fact that you think that this is the logical implication of that claim has absolutely no bearing on its truth value.
Dude, you're reading way too much into the way she phrased jobs. She didn't say professional careers, at all. She said professional lives. That just means work life.
Like, calm down. There are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing.
If the data is out there somewhere, it would be interesting to know whether or not working women in countries with good childcare are happier. It's not like this is some mystical otherworldly thing, there's a couple of dozen of our peer countries that have just what the OP is wishing for. NYC / Toronto would be a pretty good comp, or Seattle and Vancouver.
GDP per capita in the US is 64k. In France it is 38k. Figures from Google. The difference (26k/yr) is more than the cost of full time daycare at our local Bright Horizons, even for the smallest kids.
Mind, I'd be happy to see childcare in the US more subsidized. But if you are arguing that `French parents making typical French wages are better off financially than American parents making typical American wages' then the math doesn't seem to add up.
I presume it is shorthand for `countries where the state subsidizes childcare provided by non-parents and non-relatives to a significantly greater degree than does the United States.'
Free daycare centers operated by the state (does this exist anywhere?) might be one way to do it, but I am sure there are others.
Yep. This. Free or easily affordable. Also, like, good quality care. Not a warehouse with TVs where the kids re-enact Lord of the Flies.
I was thinking specifically of what I heard about over lunch a few years back when vacationing in Montreal. I looked it up for the conversation in the other thread, and apparently the cost is capped at 181 bucks / month, CAD. Assuming I read the chart right.
Instead of massively subsidizing daycare specifically, would it not be better to simply make an equivalent cash payment to parents? Then they can choose either to use the money to pay for daycare, or one parent can stay home and they can use the money for something else.
I think Sweden has that. Not coincidentally, Sweden also has either the world's highest taxes or the world's second-highest taxes depending on whether Denmark beat them that year.
I'll dispute that there are decaffinated brands that are as tasty as the real thing (assuming you are talking about coffee, don't know what else you would be talking about).
But certainly, it would be interesting to have cross country comparisons. You'd want some unbiased way to do it though, because if you allow me to cherry pick the country to compare to I'm sure I could come up with whatever sign of effect you want.
>I'll dispute that there are decaffinated brands that are as tasty as the real thing (assuming you are talking about coffee, don't know what else you would be talking about).
Movie quote, and yes, it's probably not true. Real Genius. Great movie. Strongly recommended.
That's sorta why I suggested the comps. Vancouver and Seattle are right next to each other and (I am told anecdotally) have similar cultures. If moms in Vancouver are significantly happier than in Seattle (or vice versa) that should be meaningful. Likewise w/ Toronto, though more of an asspull. I just had a friend tell me that Toronto was great, like the Canadian NYC.
Vancouver vs Seattle could be interesting yes, although one would have to wonder if those two cities were representative of the broader societies. You would also have to somehow adjust for the confounder where sneering at America is de rigeur for American urbanites (Scott even identified it as one of the identifying markers of the Blue tribe) whereas `Canada is the worst' is not an important part of Canadian urbanites self-identity.
Ah, never mind. I was going to say that since the cities are similar to each other, it doesn't matter if they're representative of their larger societies, we could simply compare moms' happiness between the counties to see if good affordable daycare makes a difference, since they have it in Vancouver but not Seattle.
But it turns out that's not true. My wife and I had a long lunch with acquaintances of hers in Montreal some years ago, and they told us all about how this worked and how they had good and very cheap daycare and preschools. But upon further examination, it turns out to be a provincial benefit, so you'd have to find a comp for Montreal. Unfortunately, Montreal is simply incomparable.
The discussion in all those comments was thoughtful and interesting. I've not much else to bring to it directly but I recommend Leah Libresco's substack "other feminism" which generally focus on these kind of questions.
Erusian et al have already responded pretty well but I think it's worth clarifying that we're probably not discussing a return to the midcentury housewife model. At the meta level, I think a lot of people are desperately searching around for a functional model
Historically, the midcentury housewife is kind of an aberration. It wasn't the standard before WWII and it passed out of common usage at least by the 70's. To the extent that housewives were ever widespread, it only lasted a generation. If you were looking for stable family structures, you'd probably need to go back to the early 20th century extended family structures for something that seems stable but...that's so different from modern society it's difficult to imagine adopting any of those norms.
At the same time, internationally, just about everyone has been hit with similar collapses in family formation, or more specifically birth rates. Birth rates aren't a perfect measure of family formation but they're passable and it's worth looking at a global map of birth rates because it's declining everywhere with a reasonable standard of living (1). They've collapse in Japan, in China, in Russia, in Hungary, in France, even in parts of Latin America like Chile. Whatever is happening, its affecting vastly different cultures with little in common. The best predictors we have, as far as I know, are female literacy and economic development which...there are not tons of supporters for rolling back.
But the long and short is that returning to the 50s is...politically catchy but not a serious policy position. Realistically, we have very few models of high birth rate cultures (again, sorry, birth rates are not a super-accurate statistic for family formation but we need simple, cross-country stats to track and it works) that seem like they scale at all. Probably the best example is that the Mormons, pretty famously, fell below replacement birth rates a few years back. If either Hungarian marriage benefits or Scandinavian child care could fix these issues, a lot of people would have jumped on it already.
Does "good" mean "provides a significant benefit over what we have now"?
Or does "good" mean "reaches a utopian standard", which may or may not be possible?
Or, does "good" mean "something that works well enough to pass muster without contradicting our ideological principles"?
If it's the middle one, we might be in the position of children who wish they could fly by defying gravity. We just have to learn more about how things work and realise that what we want is physically impossible. That may mean ultimately accepting that the aeroplane, though big and uncomfortable, is already a very, very good solution over what there was before.
If it's the third one, then what we have is a request for someone to just make (in this case) Feminism work. What does it imply, if other times or countries are outcompeting the best Feminism can offer.
If it's the first one... then don't we have a moral imperative to restore the state of affairs that made more people happy?
> Does "good" mean "provides a significant benefit over what we have now"?
> If it's the first one... then don't we have a moral imperative to restore the state of affairs that made more people happy?
I don’t follow? Happiness is not the only significant benefit that society can provide. It is one in a list.
> Or does "good" mean "reaches a utopian standard", which may or may not be possible?
> If it's the middle one, we might be in the position of children who wish they could fly by defying gravity. We just have to learn more about how things work and realise that what we want is physically impossible. That may mean ultimately accepting that the aeroplane, though big and uncomfortable, is already a very, very good solution over what there was before.
“Good” means that it allows all individuals to make the choices they need to achieve self actualization while also securing the best interests of humanity as a whole. There is an inevitable push-pull between the two. It’s fair to argue that this is utopian/impossible, but I don’t think it’s obviously utopian/impossible. It will require deep investigation and experimentation over the span of generations before I think humanity is morally justified in doing something like… returning women to pre-modernity norms. (?)
> Or, does "good" mean "something that works well enough to pass muster without contradicting our ideological principles"?
> If it's the third one, then what we have is a request for someone to just make (in this case) Feminism work. What does it imply, if other times or countries are outcompeting the best Feminism can offer.
What is the metric to determine outcompeting?
Yes, feminism is based on an understanding of natural rights that is currently not shared by all humanity. If you really want to get into all that, we can. I haven’t found it productive to try to debate anyone about natural rights, and I don’t think it’s necessary. The change is spreading through W.E.I.R.D. societies at a rate that shows it resonates with a majority.
"“Good” means that it allows all individuals to make the choices they need to achieve self actualization while also securing the best interests of humanity as a whole... It will require deep investigation and experimentation over the span of generations before I think humanity is morally justified in doing something like… returning women to pre-modernity norms. (?)"
This paragraph feels like a thought-stopping response to me. It's a mash of words with what I suspect will be vague and changing definitions, recommending a lot of vague activity with a long time horizon and no concrete actionable suggestions anywhere.
Basically I think it's, "we need to go and do this long shaggy dog train of busywork before we know for sure - oh and in the meantime let's carry on doing what I want to do."
On the contrary: feminism is failing. It is making women less happy, it has had its chance, and now its results are clear.
If you would like to change the focus of feminism to something other than improving the lot of women, or you have new and better ideas about how to do it well, then by all means, go ahead.
Do your deep investigations and generation spanning studies, and get back to us.
In the meantime, we need to solve the task at hand using immediate, non-utopian means.
And you are ruling out a potentially superior solution, one that evidentially made women happier than what we do now, simply on the grounds that it doesn't fit with your ideology.
Also, I don't know what W.E.I.R.D is but I could note that rapid ideas spreading quickly through societies haven't always, historically, lead to the best outcomes.
Say 19th century women are at point A on the “women’s happiness over time” chart. We are now at point B, which is lower than point A. My belief is that point B is a valley on the way to point C, which is a higher peak than point A. The hypothesis is that steps required to get from B to C include things like affordable high quality child care. Hopefully this logic is easy enough to follow. Testing many possible routes from point B to C is what the generation-spanning experiments will accomplish.
The anti-feminist preference is to return to point A rather than forging ahead to point C. I am happy to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate this one.
I’m mostly a homemaker, and I think the answer here is more homemakers, though not necessarily women.
It should be noted, as Erusian already said, that a considerable percentage of women always worked. If you were middle class or poor, there was an excellent chance you worked outside the home or, just as likely, in it. My great-grandmother and her children spent many hours sewing buttons on cards in their Harlem tenement, earning a few cents a day.
If you were wealthy, running a household was an equally complex endeavor to running many businesses today. If you were a farmer, as 90% of Americans were just over a century ago, you were part of an economic unit right along with your kids. But we tend not to include all of this in our mental picture of life before the 70s. The key element, though, was that you were *home*. Modern suburbs can be so alienating because for most of the day they’re largely empty of functional adults, and weren’t meant to be.
There’s also a curious maximalism we apply to this whole question of women in the workforce. It sometimes seems like people assume you’re either a career woman or chained to the stove, and that once a path is chosen there’s no variation over time. My grandmothers were office workers and homemakers in various proportions over the span of their lives. So was my mother, and so am I.
Millions of women around the world work part-time while raising kids and find this quite agreeable, but there’s no shortage of people trying to “fix” this and get them all working full time. This is because more women than men do tend to choose this path, and thus it perpetuates gender inequality and suppresses the number of c-level female executives.
What we removed from the landscape since the 70’s, especially the US, was some critical number of able-bodied, high-functioning people whose primary concern was the well-being of their families, homes and neighborhoods. We also move around more in our 20s, leaving many of us with almost no local social support just as our child rearing years begin.
As anyone raising kids now can tell you, unless you live very close to lots of family, you have very little slack when it comes to childcare. Paid care *does not fix this*. Nothing makes up for the presence and availability of sane relatives and neighbors, people who are not at work all day. Anyone I know with more than two kids has at least one retired or underemployed grandparent, sibling or cousin providing those resources. But how many people do I know with more than two kids? Not many, even among those who could theoretically buy their way out of the problem. Social support is incredibly important, and it’s usually reduced to “affordable childcare” in every discussion. It is so much more than that, just as homemaking is more than just cooking and cleaning.
It’s worth noting that I really wanted to be a homemaker. Finances permitting, I wanted to take time off to raise kids and just be domestic for a while. I deliberately chose a career that wouldn’t punish me too hard for that, but also had modest ambitions to begin with. The worst thing I faced was a very successful female friend who, when I told her I wanted to be a homemaker, made barfing noises at me.
There’s long been an undercurrent of disdain for homemakers in a lot of feminism, partly because it’s “where we’ve been.” I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said women would need to be dragged out of choosing to be homemakers even against their will. It’s become much more of a privileged role as well, but what made my friend barf was the assumed backwardness and small dreams it implied to her. The fact that I didn’t *want* to be CEO was a sign that “there’s still work to do.” In her view, if feminism had really reached me, I would never entertain the idea of being a homemaker.
I think part of the unhappiness women experience is the malaise of no good choices. More women than men will, I think, always want to be homemakers because as much as we downplay the demands of pregnancy and nursing these are real factors in how you want to spend the first few years of parenthood.
We feel bad about the stress on ourselves and our families if we work full time, and we feel like losers who are propping up the patriarchy if we don’t, regardless of whether we’re gunning for CEO or just want a steady job. Some of us handle all this better than others, but I think the negative trends we see in anxiety, depression and obesity stem in part from the fact that humans were not made thrive in situations where *no one is home.* Remote work, a UBI or maybe subsidies for people to relocate near family might mitigate this, but I can’t say for sure how much difference any intervention would make. I favor anything that helps homemaking an attainable position for more people.
I don’t think 1950s-style June Cleavers are the cure to our social ills, but I do think it would be good for society if we figured out how to accommodate more people taking a step back from paid work, especially while raising kids. If feminism is supposedly about women living more productive, fulfilled lives, it should try a little harder to make room for homemakers *of any gender*.
More specifically, we need to account for the decade or so when there’s a good chance someone in the household will prefer to limit paid work and focus on domestic life. We work to build our homes and families, then treat actually living there with them like an afterthought. That was never how it was supposed to be.
All of this was thoughtfully stated, and I agree with just about everything. Thank you. A shift across all society to family-focused living is the ultimate goal, but it needs to address the financial and political disempowerment that results. Care giving in all forms - home, child, elderly - is not valued by markets forces. I think of it as a basic problem of modernity that causes all these effects to float to the surface, from declining happiness to birth rates to inequality.
Plus, there’s the bare fact that there are plenty of women who do not want to be homemakers for long periods of time. (I did it for a couple years with my young child, and it was not for me.)
I don’t know the answer. But as important as it for parents to have the resources to be homemakers at alternating phases of their lives, which will require an attitude shift for many men, I think it is equally important to create pathways for ambitious and talented women to rise into leadership without giving up on having a family.
> You might consider that *nobody* can be both maximally focused on work and maximally focused on family.
Men have been able to maximally focus on work for decades thanks to having wives they trusted to take care of all things related to their children.
I’m saying is that women should have a pathway to focus on their work for long intervals - the kind of focus required for major, not creeping, professional advancement - without feeling that there is serious penalty to their family. This is doable with a stay-at-home-dad model. In a dual income household, other resources are needed to achieve a similar confidence that the family is well taken care of for the duration of your focus elsewhere. I would like those resources to… exist.
More specifically, you would like those resources to be paid for by someone else (presumably multiple someone elses, via state subsidy). Full time daycares already exist, you just have to pay for them (an arm and a leg). Free (i.e. taxpayer supported) public schools also exist, as do after school care programs (which you have to pay for).
I wouldn't mind. Additional state subsidy to parents of kids would put money in my pocket too, and I'm generally in favor of pro-natalist policies. But lets be clear about what we are asking for.
ETA: I would prefer a subsidy to direct public provision, because realistically, not every daycare will be good, but a subsidy would leave me the option to choose which daycare to use.
I suspect that this will not matter to you given your incoming beliefs, but for the sake of argument:
A benefit of having women represented at all levels of leadership is that woman-specific perspectives are taken into account in decisions that directly impact the entire US population. This applies in politics, tech, medicine, architecture, law… everywhere. It is not simply about stroking the egos of ambitious women.
Well all right... but once we've admitted gender essentialism to the discussion, we have to at least consider the possibility that one of those "woman-specific perspectives" is that women have a special dislike of being separated from their children for the length of a working day even if someone else is paying the bill, and that this is one of the things driving their loss of satisfaction.
I am most definitely not advocating for gender essentialism. I am referring to examples impacting the female sex such as these:
Health tracking apps should include metrics for menstrual period and basal body temperature tracking.
Female bodies have a higher average thermal comfort temperature than male, so building comfort cooling systems should be designed for both male and female bodies.
Infrastructure to support breastfeeding women should be mandated by law.
Research should be funded to appropriate levels for diseases of female anatomy, such as polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis.
> women have a special dislike of being separated from their children for the length of a working day even if someone else is paying the bill, and that this is one of the things driving their loss of satisfaction.
“A special dislike”? This claim applies to some women, applies to some men, does not apply to some women, and does not apply to some men. I am troubled by the idea that a sweeping statement like this may be used to inform policy by decision makers who believe it. We need women in the conversation to push back on these generalizations.
In this instance I was at least one of the people bringing it up, but I did so specifically to dismiss the financial argument; "I think we can posit as a null hypothesis that this is probably *not* because they can open bank accounts now". Rather, my position is that it's the effects of the sexual revolution that have made women less, and men more, happy. Although this was pitched as a way to liberate women, in practice men effectively gained something at women's expense by the loosening of these mores. (On the group level, of course. There will always be individual exceptions.)
"In my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce, so the burden of life for women is heavier than it used to be when a majority of women were homemakers. Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives."
You don't strictly say otherwise, so don't take this as combative or anything like that, but do you realize that this is an actual mathematical impossibility? Even if we take the fantasy version of this where all women were homemakers (a falsity, as Erusian points out), going from 50% of adults being out of the work force to ~0% out of it means there's simply *nobody left to be the childcare workers*, unless your idea is just that all women take jobs as paid childminders for each other's kids or something, which is obviously just an economic and social net loss. Either the quality or the quantity of child care has to decline precipitously, unless you just accept that individual workload increases significantly instead (the solution which I'd say we de facto broadly opted for as a society). This is arguably the whole reason homemakers became a thing to begin with.
> You don't strictly say otherwise, so don't take this as combative or anything like that, but do you realize that this is an actual mathematical impossibility?
High quality child care can be achieved at economies of scale that don’t require mom to be home with 1-3 kids for 20 years. Pay child care workers well and fund child care facility infrastructure. The people who are skilled at child care and who genuinely enjoy spending time with children will gravitate to the jobs.
"High quality child care can be achieved at economies of scale that don’t require mom to be home with 1-3 kids for 20 years."
Obviously this is to some extent a matter of personal values, but from my point of view, it self-evidently cannot. Handing the kids off to a non-relative is *immediately and inherently* a precipitous loss of quality; going by my own childhood I'd say worse than just letting the kid run outdoors and play unsupervised all day. (And not, to be clear, because my particular minders and schoolteachers were spectacularly awful: they were just regular small-minded middle-class women.) The fact that, as Moosetopher already pointed out, economies of scale can only be realized by each adult taking care of numerous children means another inevitable drop in quality. The shift from being taken care of by your mom to daycare is like going from being a beloved household pet to getting crammed in a chicken factory farm.
Emily Oster is a good resource on the relative benefits of different types of child care based on behavioral and academic outcomes. After 18 months, the socialization available in a classroom of other children can be more beneficial to development than full time one-on-one care from an adult. (I would bet that conversation with parents of young children bears this out anecdotally.) It makes sense if you think about child care centers simulating a village with many young children. Excellent child care workers are loving, fun, patient, and educated in research on early childhood development. To be sure, there is a lot of awful child care out there. I consider excellent child care to be a public good worth big tax dollars, like excellent highways, libraries, and health care. It’s hard to understand the point of civilization if it doesn’t create conditions for everyone’s quality of life to rise across the board.
> After 18 months, the socialization available in a classroom of other children can be more beneficial to development than full time one-on-one care from an adult.
Rolling to disbelieve. Three years old kids often don't know how to play with each other, they just stay there silently or compete for the adult's attention.
(I think there was a research about how kids 3 and younger have significantly increased stress levels from kindergarten, but I don't remember the link.)
> It makes sense if you think about child care centers simulating a village with many young children.
In a village, little kids hang out with their older relatives (who are annoyed by them a lot, but the parents tell them to take care of the little ones). In a kindergarten, children are typically separated by age, so it goes completely against their instincts.
Research parsed by Emily Oster suggests that the positive effects of one-on-one care dominate under ~18 months and the positive effects of daycare dominate over ~18 months. By no means is this based on RCTs of course.
> Three years old kids often don't know how to play with each other, they just stay there silently or compete for the adult's attention.
The type of play you’re referring to is called parallel play and is well understood as developmentally normal under 3. There is observation and learning happening at that stage when children share a play space even though they are not playing with each other.
> (I think there was a research about how kids 3 and younger have significantly increased stress levels from kindergarten, but I don't remember the link.)
Would be helpful to see the research. In the US, (optional) preschool starts at 3 and (mandatory) kindergarten starts at 5.
> In a village, little kids hang out with their older relatives (who are annoyed by them a lot, but the parents tell them to take care of the little ones). In a kindergarten, children are typically separated by age, so it goes completely against their instincts.
Both of us are speculating. If a village is ~150 people, you’re going to have a lot of young kids approximately the same age hanging around together simply based on their abilities. Infants are strapped to moms. Toddlers corralled because of shared danger and mobility. Older kids watch younger kids as you said. Younger kids play together. Some older kids assist with work that isn’t child care. Adults are all around either doing child care or their own thing or both. Would love for an anthropologist to jump in so we can stop guessing. Child care centers sound a lot more like this to me than 1-3 children at home alone with mom.
See, this is clearly informed by your personal values about other things. I don't consider *anything* to be worth big tax dollars, except the military and the cops. I don't think you have the right to legal-plunder other people just because you want more stuff than you can actually afford, and painting it as altruism is a bit rich. So, consequently I obviously can't agree that providing free childcare is worth big tax dollars.
"It’s hard to understand the point of civilization if it doesn’t create conditions for everyone’s quality of life to rise across the board."
Not at all. Civilization would be adequately justified if even just *one* person's quality of life rose while everyone else's stayed the same.
>The shift from being taken care of by your mom to daycare is like going from being a beloved household pet to getting crammed in a chicken factory farm.
Hard disagree. Starting at about the age of three, kids love being with other kids. Going to daycare is a desirable enough option that even when we had a grandparent available to do full time care we made a point of getting our kids into a preschool a couple of days a week at that point. Not for the grandmother, who was perfectly willing to have them all week, and not for us, it cost a decent chunk of money and grandma was free, but for the kids themselves.
"Starting at about the age of three, kids love being with other kids."
Speak for yourself. In my childhood having to put up with kids whose company I hadn't explicitly chosen myself stood for easily 60% of the negatives, maybe more like 70%. (The obnoxious child minders were the vast majority of the rest.)
Well, we're both speaking from our experience and projecting general preferences, no? My kids, and the kids of most of the parents I know, all enjoyed being out of the house with other kids. I'm sorry it didn't work out that way for you, but I strongly suspect you're the outlier here.
Is this the kinda thing we have data on? Does someone survey four-year olds about their life satisfaction?
Child care workers, by definition, work longer hours than the person paying them. Therefore the only way they can be "paid well" while charging their clients a sufficiently low rate to make child care economically viable is for them to have multiple kids in their care. The more kids in their care, the lower quality that care is going to be.
If it's so darned important to their happiness, these women should be paying for it themselves. If they can't afford it, then you're literally asking everyone who isn't a white collar female professional to subsidize their economically unprofitable (as in, being in this career yields them so little money over the alternative they can't afford extra expenses) jobs for the sake of...what? Some sense of career satisfaction?
The mid-century gains to women's workforce participation are often overestimated. The main thing feminism did was not increase female workforce participation but open up longer careers with higher pay and in more fields. There's been a less than 20% increase in women's labor force participation since the 1960s, mostly upper middle or upper class women. Dual income households increased by about the same amount. But the majority of households already had women contributing some degree of income already. And the drop in women's happiness is not solely among the well off. Likewise the decline in happiness and increase in employment do not co-vary. The decline in happiness began in the 1970s while female labor force participation has been increasing for much longer. So your theory, that it's due to wanting subsidized childcare so they can live fulfilling professional lives, seems unlikely.
(You may note, of course, that this also means the idyllic conservative 1950s where "women stayed home" was a fantasy only a minority of wealthy families ever enjoyed. And you would be correct.)
I'm not sure a purely gendered explanation works at all. Happiness has been declining across the board and from roughly the same historical point. Women are merely getting unhappier faster than men. I'd find it very surprising if it wasn't roughly the same cause but simply something that affected women more or perhaps due to gendered differences in reporting. Male and female complaints over why they are unhappy are broadly similar.
To take your specific theory and glancing at the original study men and women are both slightly dissatisfied with the amount of leisure time they have. (And yes, leisure time excludes time doing chores etc.) But men report they are both having more fun and are more satisfied with how they spend their leisure time. Women also report less satisfaction with their siblings/parents and their friends which might tie in. I wonder if it's as simple as men and women having the same stressors and women not having as many options for blowing off steam.
Thank you for taking the time to do a detailed explanation of happiness data. It’s helpful to me to see the actual research separated from the rhetorical device used to dunk on feminists.
Yeah, you don't get to act like the reasonable one here considering you came in here, used offense and incredulity alone to dimiss an argument, and then declared your position is "self-evidently true".
Dude, shut up. This is like the fourth time in this thread you've popped up to sneer at her. You're hunting down every one of her comments and bagging on her. Stop being an ass.
"I'm not sure a purely gendered explanation works at all. Happiness has been declining across the board and from roughly the same historical point. Women are merely getting unhappier faster than men."
I don't think that this is accurate. Every version of the curve or table for these figures (for the US) I've ever seen has shown women's happiness dropping and men's happiness rising significantly over the same period.
I'm fairly well read in happiness data. Whether it's the GSS or BLS or polling organizations none that I've seen show a net gain in happiness for men over the same period. Where are you getting your data?
I genuinely don't know of the exact source, the US CDC or something, I think. To my mind it's "the one that always gets bandied about in these cases". I suppose it's entirely possible that it's just some weird but widespread canard.
My apologies in advance if I've dropped you into a rabbit hole that's also a dead end. Cursorily googling I can't bring it up now either, now all I find is variants of this one: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/happinessgender.jpg , a curve where men start out at just above 50% being very happy (AIUI), spike in the mid-'70s, then nosedive along with women but pass them in the '90s to return to a near-50% level. It seems I'm indeed off on the part of this argument relating to men, but it's odd because I swear I've seen one many times where men's happiness just crawls gradually upward from WWII (presumably a significant low point in male happiness).
My guess (for both women and men) would be the increasing atomization of society and associated decline in communities. Also declining birthrates and family sizes, which is sort of a related phenomenon. I could imagine that women would be more affected by this, being (on average) more social. As for what to do about it, beats me.
The decline in community institutions, most notably marriage and church attendance, definitely has had a negative effect on happiness. Whether that's due to something specific to that lifestyle or a proxy for general connection and social capital is a debate I'm not going to dive into right now. I'm not sure if it has more of an effect on women or not. It would be possible to run the numbers by gender. And the fact women report having less fun, feeling less happy with their friends, etc all gesture towards it being at least a solid hypothesis.
I wouldn't - I don't think there is a way to meaningfully measure happiness; the best we can do is make plausible guesses (and that's not good at all).
And those guesses are probably going to be even less use comparing people in different cultures or eras or demographics than they are guessing which of two similar people is happier.
A lot of the gap in happiness between conservatives and liberals is explained by religiosity, income, and marriage rates. All three tend to correlate strongly with happiness and the median Republican is more religious, wealthier, and more likely to be married. Perhaps not the entire gap but the differences in median demographic means you wouldn't expect them to be exactly the same.
I was specifically talking about the US but it does generally hold. Happiness data outside the US tends to be significantly lower quality. But what data we have tends to point towards the same trends at least in Europe.
I'm not Erusian but I believe it does. Income in particular correlates very well with being fiscally conservative, since you're one of the ones paying for all the "freebies". Also, speaking more to Integer's claim, you'd just generally intuitively expect "desire for change" to correlate strongly with "dissatisfaction with the present state of things (i.e. your life)".
>Income in particular correlates very well with being fiscally conservative, since you're one of the ones paying for all the "freebies".
That one really doesn't play for me. It just seems like things are harder here, in a way that's directly traceable back to policy choices, and that we could make everyone's life better if we raised taxes a bit, cut the military a lot, and did more social spending. Having more money seems like it would make you more willing to spend more. I make more than double what I made when I started working, and if my taxes go up a couple of percent it'll be noticeable, but much more livable than when I was young and starting out.
I don't know. Demographically I should be a Republican, but I literally can't imagine voting for that party ever again. I guess I'm an outlier, but most of my friends are like me. Bubbles I guess.
Many European countries spend under 2% of GDP on the military, with some as low as 1%. Taking 1% as the absolute minimum [a false economy that would likely cause several wars that the US would eventually get dragged into], that's only 2.7% of GDP freed up for social spending. The gap between Europe and the US is almost entirely higher taxes -- government spending as a % of GDP between Europe and the US is 8.7% of GDP, so at most 2.7% military spending, 6% higher taxes.
Income predicts Republican votes only for folks without a 4-year college degree. This is especially true in the US but the phenomenon by which education becomes a strong predictor of politics is happening almost everywhere in the West (minus some outliers like Ireland).
The best predictor is when education does not match income: low education + high income = right votes; high education + low income = left votes.
Yeah, obviously you have the right and agency to make up your own mind and any individual can exit the norm for any number of reasons, but it's a practical fact that on the group level attitudes to taxation track level of contribution – for example, women being more in favor of high-tax regimes and socialized services is probably not connected to some essential trait of their sex but just to the fact that women as a group are still net tax recipients. It's observable that among poor people who strike it rich there's a group-level alignment with their new economic class even though assuredly many individuals cleave to their old values, and so on.
Piggybacking on this question - what do the Republicans here think is going to happen in the primary? What is DeSantis' plan for going up against Trump? Could he win?
2) He probably won't run unless some kind of emergency comes up, e.g. Dems somehow manage to disqualify Trump, or Trump is in such bad health that everyone agrees he needs to be replaced. He's just there biding his time until 2028 and ready to step in in 2024 if it's absolutely necessary.
2. What the hell kind of polls give us definite, 100% answers to these questions? He literally cannot win? My god man, let us know of these magical polls that will allow us to become rich through prediction markets!
Alright, "current polls say he can't win if the election was held today".
True, I can absolutely see polls changing and DeSantis winning if, for example, Trump had a stroke, resulting in him being unable to walk and speaking only with difficulty. I'm sure there are other possible future events that can result in DeSantis looking a lot more attractive than Trump, but I'm not ready to try to assign odds to any such events happening.
Trump wasn't seriously primaried in 2020. I would hazard the guess that from the point of view of an average Republican voter his status as the previous president and his popularity haven't changed so much since 2020 and, barring something catastrophic, wouldn't change much by 2024. (If I'm wrong about the current situation, please correct me on this.) Really, the only new thing now is the existence of DeSantis, and I'm having a hard time imagining that that alone would be enough.
Not a Republican, but I do live in Iowa. I don't think Trump will run ... but I spent the first three months of 2019 saying Biden wouldn't run. Anyhow, for arguments' sake I will assume he runs.
My read is that Trump's support is a mile wide and an inch thick. People will flock to someone new and charismatic once they declare. Perhaps, once Trump realizes he will not have an inevitable coronation, he will back out "for the good of the party". (ok, that is a joke) Perhaps somebody will "out-Trump" Trump (that is not a joke).
Unlike 2016, where the Republican Establishment looked at a two-person race between Trump and Ted Cruz and decided they would prefer Trump <example ref. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/20/cruz-gop-establishment-dumping-rubio-trump/ >, the Establishment will pick the other candidate in 2024. Unless it's someone too moderate like Larry Hogan. Or it is actually Ted Cruz again.
Not a Republican but I am from Florida. I'm not even sure there's a conflict. Trump and DeSantis have traditionally been friends and they've been campaigning together this week. The only people who say they're feuding and secretly hate each other are liberal outlets who neither of them actually talk to. Both have directly brushed off comments saying they're fighting. They both still say nice things about each other in public.
DeSantis is up for re-election this year and Trump has his slate of candidates. That will probably be a better signal for 2024 than anything we've got now. But it's already notable that DeSantis has asked to not be endorsed by Trump (apparently Trump offered) but simultaneously has endorsed Trump's picks and campaigned for them. Even the ones not in Florida.
I think it's a real possibility that he doesn't run. If he doesn't he'll be governor until 2026. So he'll be able to stay relevant throughout most of the Trump presidency and then run into term limits just as the 2028 election cycle starts. At which point Trump would be ineligible and would presumably endorse him. (Honestly, election cycles are long enough that beginning to campaign immediately after the midterm is possible.)
I also think it's a real possibility that Trump endorses DeSantis (as he has before) and doesn't run. Trump is old and divisive in a way that DeSantis isn't and if Trump is primarily worried about getting prosecuted then he might value the more electable candidate who's a political ally. DeSantis has already condemned the raid and called the whole thing a witch hunt. Besides, stamping his name on something and then retiring to Mar A Lago is a pretty classic Trump play. Though I think this one is less likely especially after the raid.
Or they could run together. Or they could run against each other in the primary. Or in more outlandish scenarios Trump could be arrested or DeSantis could lose his election. It's too early for me to think any of these are likely. In particular I want to see the aftermath of the midterms for Trump's candidates, the Republican Party, and for DeSantis personally. But realistically possible? Sure.
In what sense is there a conflict? DeSantis spent the last week physically with Trump campaigning alongside him in order to get Trump's slate of candidates elected. The Trump loyalists in Florida and Trump endorsed candidates have been praising both of them. DeSantis's strongest early supporter was Trump and DeSantis has remained a political ally and was key in pushing Trump's narrative around covid. They could have a rupture in the next two years but it hasn't happened yet. And DeSantis is notably closer to Trump than, say, Abbott.
The main reason DeSantis and Trump are thought to be fighting, as far as I can tell, is that DeSantis comes second in a lot of polls. That's literally all the reason I can find discounting unsourced statements from liberal outlets.
I'm not a conservative or any other relevant thing, but I want to second this. I think Trump effectively ended several prominent Republicans' chance at the big chair. Not just Jeb, but also Rubio and IMO Cruz. DeSantis wants no part of a fight with Trump. He's young. He can wait for 2028 if he needs to. Or 2032 for that matter, if the political environment doesn't look good.
According to Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/president-vp-different-states/), "Nothing in the constitution bars presidential and vice-presidential candidates from the same state from running, being elected, or holding office together; it only bars the electors from their home state from voting for both of them."
Oh, right, I forgot Trump is a Floridian now. Florida's a largish state, so running two Floridians isn't a good idea. It could theoretically create a result where Trump wins but Desantis doesn't.
The standard workaround is for one of the candidates to establish legal residence in a different state shortly before the election, e.g. Dick Cheney selling his house in Dallas and registering to vote in Wyoming in 2000 (where he owned a second home that had previously been his primary residence) to ensure Texas electors could vote for both of them. This got challenged in federal court, which ruled in Cheney's favor.
I don't think it would be hard, but would he want to? (1) He would then be subject to NY tax, and (2) ego wise, why should he have to change residence, the VP should.
He could try, but Hochul and James would declare by executive fiat that he wasn't one, and Lawrence Tribe, Ken White, Elie Mystal and the entire Twitlaw-o-sphere would declare this totally within the NY Governot's powers.
He can, but would he? I dont think he would, seems like it should be the VP who has to move. But Desantis has more of a connection to FL than Cheney had to TX, and... might not move?
why would he do that if he didn't want to? He seems to enjoy his place in Florida, and not paying taxes in other states. And again... I would think the presidential candidate would get to dictate the terms of who has to move.
"The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves."
Looking at online tide data, I noticed that the peak high tides in my area are always higher when the high tide occurs at night than during the day, and the later the peak, the higher it is. Anyone know why this might be? Is it a general phenomenon or something unique to my local geography?
You say "always"--does that pattern not vary over the course of a month? Or summer to winter?
For some reason I always get nerd-sniped by thinking about tides. It sounds like you're describing a diurnal component, one of which is explained here, about the tilt of the earth relative to the plane of orbit of the moon/sun: https://noc.ac.uk/files/documents/business/Diurnal-Inequality.pdf But that would vary over time corresponding to the direction of the earth's tilt relative to the moon/sun.
You can see other diurnal components in this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_tides#Diurnal But if it's *always* higher at night, I'd assume that would be a diurnal component with a period of 24 exactly. There's one of those in the table, but it's got extremely small amplitude.
Where is this? If this is true for a long period of time something fishy is up, and I'd be very interested in knowing more!
Because it shouldn't be generally true, though it (and the reverse) is often true for a few days or weeks at a time. Most places have two tidal cycles per day, though some places have only one. This is known as Semidiurnal or Diurnal tides. Many places have a mixed tidal cycle, where Diurnal and Semidiurnal tidal cycles interfere, creating one higher tide and one lower tidal cycle per day, sometimes with flat periods. The tidal cycle is about 50 minutes out of faze with the day-night cycle however (because the moon orbits the earth slightly slower than the earth rotates around its own axis relative the direction towards the sun, and the tides follow the moon), so after a few weeks you'll have morning and evening tides instead, and a little while later you're back to night and day tides, but now the day tides are higher. It gets a lot more complicated than this too, with whole series of secondary and tertiary tidal components and local geological effects, but that should explain your observed phenomena :) If you're interested I warmly recommend the Wikipedia article on tides, even just scrolling through and looking at the graphs and pictures: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tide
(Source: I'm an (occationally) professional skipper, and really ought to know this stuff :P )
Yes, we have two tide cycles per day, they advance 50 minutes a day, etc. My point is that the peaks are always higher when in the evening and at night and I'm wondering why. E.g. right now we have a morning and afternoon high tide. But the *height* of the afternoon high tide is higher than the morning one, and every day as it advances 50 minutes into the evening and night, the peak is slightly higher than the day before. The high tides are always highest when it falls right around midnight, and then as it continues advancing 50m/day into the early AMs, the peak starts going back down again, etc.
So there are secondary and tertiary waves too, some of them ought to be from the much weaker solar tidal forces, and would be synced with the day-night cycle... Though this is beyond my knowledge! Check out this graph for some example location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#/media/File:Tidal_constituent_sum.gif
I think it's possible - a sophisticated enough text transformer AI would pass tests for a theory of mind, the same way it can be said to have a theory of anything else.
There are also some thought-provoking fictional examples in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia.
Yeah ok, I did some reading. The vocabulary is a bit like jello. I apologize for that. Theory of Mind, and consciousness.
I don’t know but it seems to me that some equate consciousness with sentience. That’s a whole different ball game. I don’t really buy into that definition personally.
You're right that some people use those terms as synonyms. Those who make a distinction apparently are talking about how the smarter animals have something in common with humans, brain-wise, which allows them to subjectively experience living in the world, as we do. It's like a proto-consciousness, a baseline over which consciousness can develop.
The more I am pondering this, the more inclined I am to think that the “hard problem of consciousness“ is a problem better addressed by biologists and chemists rather than computer scientists and philosophers.
For what possible reason would you want to define it that way? It's not what the vast majority of people mean by it, including those in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and it does not appear to have any usefulness whatsoever.
The remarkable thing about consciousness is the having of subjective experience at all, not one very particular kind of conscious experience.
Discussions of the idea are muddled enough as it is without these highly idiosyncratic definitions.
That’s what I’d consider a pretty high level of consciousness. There are more basic levels - like being barely conscious or dimly conscious. Which usually involves just noticing that you are noticing stuff.
In your thoughts, do you never bring other people on stage?
And which version of yourself are you bringing on stage? Different ones perhaps; the version that will handle the imagined situation best, or the version that will create quite a stir, or others.
I propose that a mental construct of yourself (that you imagine) is the same as “someone else”.
Unless of course you know yourself perfectly in which case other people can be dispensed with. For purposes of this discussion.
I look at it as "consciousness is imagining what it is to be yourself" with your reference group defining what "yourself" actually means in a way that is different from a direct sense of being provided by your own senses.
Reference group provides you a framing within which your consciousness operates.
Imagining yourself doing "kid things" if it thinks of you as a kid, imagining yourself doing criminal things if it considers you to be a criminal, thinking of jokes if they think you are funny, trying to work things out rationally if you think you belong to rationalists and so on.
You could also hold multiple reference groups and switch between them - using different frames for work and family, for example.
I imagine you to be a thoughtful person with good technical knowledge around this issue. Some part of my mind is trying to conjure up a physical avatar for you in my mind space.
Suppose a person has a brain injury that prevents them from imagining what it would be like to be someone else. Is it morally acceptable to torture this person, since they aren't conscious?
The only thing I can say is you were dealing with a hypothetical person who lots of people assumed was conscious and that kind of puts a finger on the scale in this discussion.
I think the advantage for me is, it is a touchstone that helps keep me honest. It helps me remind myself that I’m watching a movie in my mind when I think about other people. It also implies that when I am thinking about myself I am also watching a movie. I could think, oh why doesn’t so-and-so do this instead of that? Or I might think so and so is doing that because this.
As someone else in this thread has pointed out it really does come down to thinking about one’s self because other people in this mind space are really just characters that I am generating and not the actual other people. But the same can be said for the versions of myself I imagine. It helps me navigate the boundary between justified belief and opinion.
On the contrary, I'd argue that conciousness is the ability to imagine that you are the thing that you are. (but that both capabilities are intertwined)
How is this contrary? I don’t really disagree. It’s just that the “thing that you are” has now become a mental construct and as such, I will argue, can be considered someone else. I have lots of versions of myself kicking around and I’ve made them all up out of...whatever I have to work with... But none of them are me in totality. that is the gift of consciousness.
I don't know what it means to be not conscious. But most of the day my inner monologue is turned off and I am experiencing my life not choosing the next steps in it. There is a meaningful sense in which I am conscious only when introspectively reflecting. When I emphasize/imagine I am someone else it feels much more like experiencing their life, i.e. the less-conscious default way I live life.
It seems unrelated to me. When I am 'conscious' I hear a sequence of thoughts in a language in my head that I believe I am actively generating and have feelings of evaluating if they are true or not and why I think so. When I am not conscious I experience five senses things like temperature food etc. When I imagine what it's like to be someone else it's the five senses thing. It would be not weird for me at all to imagine myself not being able to empathize with other people (feel what I think they feel) and also to be able to be conscious (think philosophically about myself). Or vice versa. I go hours of not being conscious, and frequently feel what others feel at some point during that time.
I thought it was very convincing (tho' to be fair I didn't need much in the way of convincing) and would be interested to hear a response from any EAs who want to mount a defense against the criticism.
Although his repugnant consequences were already handled in Scott's Consequentialism FAQ, section 7.1 (if the outcome is horrible, it shouldn't be what utilitarians want, d'oh) and 7.5: I miss the term "Schelling point" in Erik's essay. A world in which fat people have to be afraid to be thrown under the trolley is not nice, so let's have a rule against that.
Well yes, Erik writes something like that and compares it to Ptolemy's epicycles. Although I wouldn't mind necrophiles having their way with dead dogs, because where's the victim?
I'm not sure whether there's a strawman or a real Scotsman here, but I like his recommendation to "dilute" utilitarianism, just do whatever cool things you want and call that utilitarianism. There's always a reasoning why you may give your surplus money to poor rock musicians in your neighborhood, instead of to starving children on the other side of the world?
I don't think "well-ordered" is the right mathematical concept for the author to reference. Well-ordered means that there are no infinite descending sequences, but I would expect utilitarians to agree that such sequences of goods and evils do exist (for example: having toothache for 0.9s, having toothache for 0.99s, having toothache for 0.999s...)
And a well-ordered set doesn't necessarily come with addition and subtraction defined.
If there are a million starving African kids I am less motivated to sacrifice the only national park in existence to feed one of them, than if there was one starving child. Effective altruists say the value of saving one child shouldn't depend on the number of other starving children. Whether this essay persuades you or not really seems to reduce to whether you agree with that proposition.
The dust speck example is similar. If I could choose between living N+1 lives, N lives with dust in my eye and 1 life of torture. There is an N large enough I'd pick being tortured. But notions of fairnes move me to be unwilling to choose to torture 1 person to save N people from dust in their eye for any N.
I'm sure if you lock me in a room with Elizier Yukowski he'd convince me I'm wrong. I'm also reasonably confident I wouldn't change my preferences to be coherent in response.
There's still a lot of moral improvement the EA movement helped me achieve within my preferred framework. There are a lot of low hanging fruits to pick on this planet before running into repugnant conclusions or impossible values handshakes.
I'm pretty sure if it was called the Low-Hanging Fruit Movement and confined itself to that instead of jabbering about the machine god it would be a lot more successful, or at least a lot more palatable to normal people.
The link in the mail and in the article (curently) seems to send me to the http (instead of the https) version of Asterisk mag. http is generally frowned upon, especially when you ask for information such as email. The usual practice is to redirect all http traffic to https. I have no idea what kind of control you have over the Asterisk website itself, but you should be able to edit the Substack link by putting "https://asteriskmag.com", which should redirect to the https version of the website. Cloudflare has an article on why it matters https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/why-is-http-not-secure/, and I'm sure lots of people here can explain way better than me why it's necessary. In shrort: it's about protecting your users.
I'm excited about this magazine. I have a personal bias for orange and your writing, which is already a good start, but more than that, I can feel like the authors behind were smart, and dedicated to the readers. The desaturated colors are easy on the eyes, the headline is short and impactful, the "We are" part delves deeper on what I can find without overstaying its welcome, and saying what people will write about instead of who they are (achievements, stuff like that) while leaving a link for the curious is proof that you put your money where your mouth is: it's a space where people are judged on their actions rather than on who they are, that you're already applying the principles that you stated before. I also love the favicon.
That's why I think taking care of the https stuff is important. I'm being dramatic here, but without it it kind of ruins what you've built up until this point. I personally don't fear much outside of a few more spams than usual if my email addresss ends up somewhere I didn't want to, but not everyone is in this situation.
I'm very confused. Your link redirected to https://www.asterisk.com which doesn't match your description. It's selling something, probably sports equipment. Or maybe it just devotes 2/3 of its page to ads that somehow bypass my adblock. No "we are" link.
After reading Slime Mold, Time Mold's "Chemical Hunger" series and following their ongoing potato study I was reminded of the saying "Any diet works as long as you stick to it" (or maybe that was just the name of the meta-study that demonstrated this result: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1900510)
In psychotherapy there is a similar hypothesis—the "Dodo bird verdict"—that says that all legitimate forms of therapy produce about equivalent results. If we look around further I'm sure there are similar phenomena in e.g. weight training, software engineering (the "how to best develop software" flameware probably predates the Internet), etc.
If you squint a bit it looks like it's the same phenomenon repeating itself—following a protocol produces the desirable result, no matter what the protocol actually is. Given this I have two questions:
1. Is there a more general name for this phenomenon? I personally like the "Dodo bird verdict", so if you broaden the definition it could be applied to subjects outside of psychotherapy
2. Is there something else going on here? Given that the chosen protocol doesn't seem to matter, could it be that the positive effects are a result of being more mindful of your actions? E.g. if you've committed to a Paleo diet you start checking whether your meals follow the Paleo protocol; but maybe any weight loss you experience is not a result of eating like a troglodyte but simply because you're more mindful of what you're eating?
People consume many more calories than they realize or remember. Being aware of what they ate, either by following a diet, writing it down, etc often makes then eat less and lose weight. You could rightfully call this mindfulness.
Thanks for sharing, I think you came up with some really good examples. Child rearing in general also seems to follow the same pattern where the primary deciding factor is how much parents care for their children.
Perhaps all approaches yield similar results is due to (modern) human beings being consistently lame in their execution of all approaches. Meanwhile, the outliers who display excellence in their execution of given approaches show outsized "returns", but are filtered out in any group studies.
I think a possible issue with the diets is that lots of different diets work on different people, but it's rare to test lots of different diets on one specific person. A possible explaination would be that people stick naturally to what works for them. Some will work well with keto, some with the potato diet, some with a vegan diet. I frequently hear people say, when promoting a diet, "I tried lots of other diets before this one", which makes sense because once a diet works, people will stick with it. The goal of a diet is, for most people, to lose weight/get in better shape. It's not a journey in self-discovery. It then makes sense that the last diet you will try is the one that worked. Rare are the people going carnivore for one year, omnivore for another, and then vegan for a third, all the while trying to keep everything else the same. If we lived 1000 years it might make sense to take 10 years to properly figure out your diet, find the "most optimal", but with our current lifespan, "good enough" is what makes sense.
I think the same would apply to physical activity: the advice I hear the most is to try to find something you enjoy, because that's what will make you stick with. That's a lot of words and not a lot of data, I don't know how much data is collected about "failed diets" but if there are some it might be interesting to take a look at it.
I think it's correct to call this a somewhat random walk until you find a local maximum/optimum, but I prefer your Dodo bird verdict.
Hyperprocessed foods = bad, whole foods = good. The exact reason(s) hyperprocessed foods are bad is unknown and understudied. That is my conclusion after reading a lot of (mostly) terrible nutrition studies. Whatever diet works in eliminating hyperprocessed foods from your diet is the right one.
Do you know of a place I can read about the history of various countries but in a format that is shorter than a book ? Like 30-50 page summary of the history of various countries instead of 400 or 600. Basically long blog posts. If you know a history blogger that does this let me know. Also if you know similar history youtubers I'd be down too !
There are tons of great history podcasts and lectures.
History has long been an ideological battleground, so be aware of the biases and agendas of whoever you are reading, or find a historian with a similar worldview to yours.
All of the advice given here looks more or less worthwhile to me. One thing I haven't seen covered yet, is pushed a fair bit by science historian James Burke.
At the end of his book _Connections_, Burke lays out multiple ways in which history is organized: history of a country or a part of the world; history of a certain time period; history of a type of thing (e.g. war, agriculture, theater, civil rights). The connections(!) within each are fairly obvious. Burke's thesis is that in real life, the connection is much more meandering - there isn't some narrow lineage of people focusing on nothing but how to build houses better, for example; rather, someone comes along with an idea for smelting a certain type of metal, say, which makes that metal very plentiful, which causes other people to try all sorts of things with it, which leads to the invention of a new style of cooking. Or someone invents the loom, which raises several subproblems, one of which is solved by a version of the loom that uses cardstock with a carefully designed pattern of holes to produce a particular type of weave in great quantity, and someone else applies this idea to the simultaneously emerging field of electronics to create a programmable computer. In general, one can model history as this organic flow of earlier phenomena into later. It's history by causation, by contrast to history by category.
The downside to this perspective is that it's often hard to tease out the causations, since a lot of the relevant information isn't indexed that way today. One upside is that the product stands a good chance of being more accurate - this problem really did arise because a previous solution made that problem more important, etc. - and with enough information like that, one can recognize patterns that could predict interesting possibilities about the future.
It's also great for learning, I find. Describing events by causation this way is putting the "story" back into "history", and stories are perhaps the most ancient of human learning tools.
It probably matters a lot what you want to know about history. Traditional history texts often focus primarily on the history of governments, focusing on wars and revolutions and changes of official state organization. But they tell us a lot less about how most people lived, in terms of the history of economic and technological organization, and things like household structure and gender relations and level of urban or rural focus. I believe there are more people these days focusing on the latter sort of thing, but they tend to be newer.
The quickest way to get a basic overview that's practically useful, in my experience, is to read high school textbooks. This gives you a basic overview and, more importantly, lets you know what the median person from that country knows. If you're interested in history beyond the basics you really need to pick something you're interested in to study. No one really studies history writ large because it's too wide and varied. It's all history of western medicine or history of the Roman military or whatever.
And as a bonus the text book may include questions and answers about the text or possibly be accompanied by a test. Testing your knowledge will also help increase your retention.
I recommend getting the Penguin atlases of history (Ancient, Medieval, Recent,..). They offer an overview from the end of the Ice Age to the 1950s. They are "atlases" because the format is a map on the left-hand page and discussion about what's happened since the previous map on the right-hand page. In the deeper past, the intervals between maps might be centuries, but the time steps get shorter as it gets closer to now.
These books don't take long to read and they will give you a big picture to which you can attach more detailed history of specific times and places.
Honestly I find history youtubers like Kraut to be very good, time investment wise.
To some extent though history is just something that cannot be learnt quickly. There is a huge amount of it, but what is the really important stuff, the macro trends? The best I've found for that so far has been Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay, which is unfortunately a 2000 page slog. Maybe try to look for an in depth summary of that.
I'm only a casual when it comes to history though, I only read it in order to better understand politics/sociology and how the world works.
Has anyone ever successfully purged an earworm infection?
I mean of the auditory variety. Irritating unpleasant songs you heard once (or are made to hear often, thanks to low variance in ambient radio setlists) and can never truly purge from the brain's cache. That sometimes arise unbidden like not thinking of a pink elephant, and then must be consciously chased away by flooding the senses with other music, to much consternation.
This is the one thing I'd use the Pensive artifact for (from __Harry Potter__ universe). If the technology/therapy actually does exist to selectively suppress or erase unwanted memories, I'd like to...hear about it.
...wait, really? It's that simple? Okay, this seems totally and easily worth testing irl For Science(tm). Thank you. Gonna feel incredibly stupid if this One Weird Trick solves a years-long sufferance in one fell chew.
Well, one way that can work is to get a different earworm. Preferably one that has deep connections with your earlier life. I can usually get either "Pepsi cola hits..." or "Hearts of Stone" to work. Then you branch from that one into associated memories. ("Pepsi" was used in Alfred Bester's "Demolished Man" as the type name for this kind of thing.)
I guess I didn't grow up with music this way - it's always been an important source of nourishment in my life, and plays in some form in my head most of the time. (I autodidacted whistling as a child specifically to be able to give voice to music playing in my head, cause I can't sing for shit, but The Music Wants To Be Free.) But all of growing up was, like...listening to the radio, maybe hearing family play their vinyl records sometimes, parents' CDs. Nothing I could replicate on command, or necessarily name the song/band. I didn't actually own any music of my own until, like, 18 or so. (Thanks, Guitar Hero 3 OST!) By that time most life milestones had passed, and things that have happened since then...not really appropriate to hook music onto. Mostly negative things, more losses than victories.
Or, I dunno, I guess maybe I experience music as its own separate information-category, with no external referents. A few obvious exceptions for, like, stuff I've heard in live concerts - you don't forget those memories easily, those songs will always sound extra amazing forever after! But in general I seem to not link "mood" to music...I don't have a "Spotify mindset". Like, there is never not an appropriate time for metal, at least internally. I'll shift what I play publically based on the calculated reactions of others - but that's social heuristics, not acoustic evaluation. (If the entire world ran internally the same way my ear did, I wouldn't have earworm problems! Unless it's just a *really shitty* Nash equilibrium where no one actually wants to listen to crap, but somehow we all do anyway because bad incentives.)
For me, listening to the song I have stuck in my head will usually work.
This may be an issue if you find the song unpleasant; for that, you could try replacing it with a more infectious song that you don't find unpleasant. Note however that the sensation of a song being unpleasant may entirely arise from your not wanting to hear it, as opposed to you not wanting to hear it because it is unpleasant; we humans often reverse causality in then particular way. So picking a song on purpose may solve the problem.
Start a Fire, Heroin, and Crucifying Jesus by The Tiger Lillies are some of the highest-grade earworms I've encountered. They may or may not be the most annoying songs you have ever heard, though. (Personally I rather like them.)
There's also Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Tiny Tim, if you like living dangerously.
I feel like I've got a good sense of "unpleasant because I don't want to hear Song at this exact moment" and "unpleasant because I *never* want to hear Song, it's like chalkboard-on-nails and/or employing Dirty Audiological Tricks that I'm opposed to". In the same way that junk food is claimed to be irresistably hyperpalatable, I feel lotsa post-Autotune pop skips right past the brain's discernment process to just instantly hit reward buttons, against my will. This is unnerving both from an agency point of view - being made to "like" things against my will, that I don't actually like - and from an acoustic palate point of view. That is, I don't want my appetite spoiled by the empty ear-calories of pop. Sometimes in fits of weakness I'll somehow decide that *this* one pop song is Actually Good...then later after the insanity passes, I'll listen to it again and be like "the fuck is this crap? how did I ever like this." That's the sure sign of Dirty Audiological Tricks - listener's remorse.
(There are also just certain particular bands whose sounds drive me up the wall, for unclear reasons - I can't stand ABBA, for instance. It's like some sort of music allergy. The same way I'm a picky eater, not due to fussiness, but like "I can't eat this cause it'll literally trigger my gag reflex, sorry". Autistic hypersensitivity~)
C.f. taste refinement, where one is unable to perceive poor quality without first experiencing better quality. Videogame music is illustrative for this concept: yeah, there were a lot of catchy Formal Constraint-inspired melodies from past eras. But boy are they rough to listen to now, compared to modern remixes of same melodies. I still like some of those, but have the social decency to listen in private rather than inflict the harshness of chiptunes on other people unwillingly, heh. And who's to say how much of that is just nostalgic rose-tinted earbuds...
So, yeah, I guess it just comes down to fighting bad fire with good fire.
Eh...I think it's like any other form of aesthetic preference. If you only ever know of [X..Z] music/food/beer/whatever, then it's easy to think Basic McThing is hot shit. But expanding one's horizons to the rest of [A..W] things often means finding out the hot shit you used to like is, actually, quite bad.
There are still some Basic McThings I'm very fond of, despite having experienced supposedly fancier versions...McDonald's makes the best fries, totally-plain Cheerios is the best toasted oat cereal (quite possibly the best cereal fullstop, I love eating it right outta the bag, no shame), I'm not ashamed of enjoying Metallica despite that being the stereotypical know-nothing-else-about-genre metal band.
But like...my first ever experience with alcohol was Mike's Hard Lemonade. I used to really dig that stuff, buy it in party pack x36 sizes and drink the whole thing myeslf! Then eventually friends introduced me to better stuff, and...now I favour hard kombucha/cider. I did try to drink a Mike's like a decade after the first, and - holy shit, wow, I can't believe I used to like this paint thinner cheap malt liquor. That's "taste refinement". I just didn't know any better at the time, cause I was a broke-ass college student and that's what everyone else drank. (C.f. White Claw etc.) I don't drink fancier stuff to signal status, I drink it cause my actual revealed palate preferences have shifted too far to enjoy the basic stuff anymore.
Music is the same way. I've come a long way since first experiencing the Guitar Hero 3 soundtrack. Still contains some great timeless hits - "Welcome to the Jungle" is just solid classic rock, cross-generational. But most of those tracks I've pared down over the years...they aren't inherently bad, I might listen to them on my own rarely. However, given a limited listening budget (there isn't actually Time Enough At Last, sadly). I'd prefer spending it on music I enjoy a lot more. Even within the same bands - like okay yeah everybody made a Big Fucking Deal about "Through the Fire and Flames", but DragonForce has put out so many __better__ synecdoche songs for the speed metal genre. E.g. "Fury of the Storm", "Cry for Eternity". This, too, is "taste refinement". It's low-status and not worth socially signalling regardless, but damnit, I'll take superiour shit over mediocre shit any day. Elegance is required in all things, even embarrassing music.
The qualities are still there, but I do not (cannot?) find them pleasurable anymore. Think of it a little like being immunologically naive to covid: a brain that's never experienced alcohol before at all, and also very little of pure added sugar and bullshit flavouring (I eschew sweets and "junk food" just generally, for whatever reason palate has never much liked it). Suddenly it gets this huge novel rush of malt liquor backed with a ton of additives designed to be addicting, and...well. Combine that with a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, and *of course* I got hooked like right away. Those were some Bad Times.
Years later, of hard painful struggle and hitting rock-bottom more than once...I can't put that genie back in the box and forget what alcohol is like entirely. Total sobriety isn't impossible, exactly, but there's a recurring itch to drink that gets increasingly more challenging to hit snooze on. (Living with two alcoholic roommates doesn't help at all.)
And a big part of building up this self-defense against liver mortification was realizing that stuff like Mike's is, in fact, mostly lousy and "cheating" by directly pushing reward buttons in my brain with minimal work. I was being made to like things without much say in the matter, having a weakness exploited. Now, if I want a drink, I make myself buy nicer stuff...and the cost helps a lot with keeping that itch in check. When a can costs $5 instead of $0.50, it is much less affordable to drink in bulk. Even better is nursing a nice bottle of $75 Scotch over months or years. I get more enjoyment per milliliter, can feel honest about said enjoyment, and overall end up with less cost to both health and dollar (due to not having more than 1 drink a day tops). So whether it's subjective perception all the way down, or I somehow altered the reward circuitry in my brain, stuff like Mike's just tastes really objectionable now...harsh, artificial, unpleasant. Obviously the alcohol is still there - even White Claw still gets people drunk eventually - but I don't drink mainly for the incapacitation.
American Civil War Reenactment was 8th-grade history for me...a bunch of unruly unmotivated kids made to sing marching songs. I got assigned to the Union side; we did "John Brown's Body". The Confederate half of the class got "Dixie".
Ngl, I liked the South's song way better. Purely from a musical standpoint.
I think you ended up being it, ironically, so thank you for your sacrifice. And here I was about to just start listening to anti-earworm recommendations willy-nilly. It's dangerous to go alone!
Not that this helps - I'm the audio equivalent of aphantasic so don't get them. Sometimes I remember songs and sing them to myself, but they never stick for very long.
I've developed a mental process for getting rid of them because I'm extremely susceptible--there have been periods in my life where I woke up with a new song stuck in my head everyday for months on end. Basically, I compose an 'end' to the loop that keeps playing (usually a dramatic, exaggerated finale with cymbals crashing, etc.) , and then visualize things like curtains closing, lights going off, people clapping and falling silent, anything that signals the end of a performance, and then as soon as possible involve myself in a complex thought.
This is similar to what I do, though perhaps more dramatic. I play through the whole song in my head to the end, imagining it in as much detail as possible.
I am also extremely susceptible to earworms, and I wish I understood why! I'll have one verse of one song stuck in my head for days until I remember that I can try to evict it.
The best I've been able to do is replace it with another earworm, which I like better, and have memorised such that I can play it in my head start to finish (I find this is less likely to result in infinite loops). If I do this often enough the bad earworm automatically transitions to the 'good', finite one.
This is essentially what I would have said, had you not beaten me to it. The easiest replacement for a bad earworm is a more enjoyable earworm.
As a side benefit, I find good earworms also serve as excellent sleep aids. I often can't finish one once my head's on the pillow, and if I get through about 30 minutes, it's a good way to tell there's something external I need to take care of (a looming deadline or a problem that demands a solution) or avoid doing in the future (drinking coffee too late in the day; skipping a workout).
I do wish there was a better or more permanent solution than an earworm arms race - was honestly surprised not to get a "have you tried meditation?" answer from at least one person. It's not costless to consciously Build a Better Earworm, so ideally one would simply become insensate to earworms in the first place. (It'd be some fun woke hyperbole to claim that "earworms are acoustic violence".)
Making a point of running through longer songs/albums does tend to burn out lower-strength earworms, I agree. But even good earworms that I find pleasant can be somewhat distracting...like it's generally a bad habit if I listen to music before bed, cause that's just stimulating more brain activity, and I already have trouble wrestling that manically defiant beast into slumber submission. "can't turn off the shitty music while trying to sleep" is a majority of my unwanted earworm infections.
Hmm. Even upbeat, jazzy earworms don't keep me awake (I currently hum Rhapsody in Blue to myself, and rarely get past the 1/3 point), but maybe that's just me.
Before that, I was humming some of the Starcraft Terran music to sleep. It's also pretty low-key energetic. (I like videogame music.)
Don't you hate how Terran Theme 4 also includes Terran Theme 3?
My current effective High-Grade Earworms are from Hammers of Misfortune ("The Locust Years", "Trot Out The Dead", "A Room And A Riddle") and Diablo Swing Orchestra ("Gunpowder Chant/Infralove", "Porcelain Judas"), which are...uh...stimulating. They work too well, so I've been trying to calibrate downwards to just-sufficient-to-burn-out-the-shitty-pop.
I was recently reading something of Scott's and Google prompted me with a related search for "scott alexander author". It was accompanied by a thumbnail of a guy who was clearly not "our" Scott - tanned, mustache, big grin - so I was curious enough to click through.
This guy apparently writes self-help books with a rhinoceros theme, like "Rhinoceros Success: The Secret to Charging Full Speed Toward Every Opportunity", "Advanced Rhinocerology" and "Rhinocerotic Relativity". I hope "rhinocerotic" is just an adjective from "rhinoceros", and not a portmanteau of "rhinoceros" and "erotic", but I'm not certain.
The whole thing is bizarre enough that I wondered if "our" Scott had created it (the Amazon and Goodreads pages, etc) as a joke, or as a distraction during the NYT doxxing debacle.
I'd never heard of this guy before - but presumably, in some specific niche and/or in terms of absolute numbers, he is the better-known Scott Alexander...?
Oh that's an excellent read, thanks for the recommendation. Lars has quite the talent for writing. I don't know many other authors that would keep me happy through 10,000 words on a subject I've little prior investment in.
That's hilarious. The 'Rhinoceros Success' book is from 1980, so I imagine it's a different Scott Alexander. But maybe our Scott was having a fling writing self-help books as a kid? It COULD be true!
If you *were* a highly precocious child writing fake self-help books with a rhinoceros theme, it makes sense that you would pick some ridiculous moustache guy who looks A) adult and B) like he might really mean it about the pachyderms as a fake author portrait. Also, kids like big, weird-looking animals like giraffes and rhinos. It all checks out!
FAO Scott and anyone else who likes traditional art, dislikes modern art, and is rich:
I came across this thread https://mediachomp.com/spite-patronage-and-cringe-commissions/ about how tech nerds could be commissioning their own operas, sculptures, etc - and how the Renaissance happened because of newly-rich merchants commissioning the type of art they wanted to see.
I gotta say, I've been wondering for a while how expensive commissioning a painter would be (and, if the answer is "a lot", then an art student, I bet the little buggers are cheaper & quite able at imitating classical styles) for a personnal, vanity-driven portrait.
Honestly anywhere from a few hundred dollars upwards. Most painters will happily accept commissions (within the boundaries of the styles they're comfortable with) for a similar price to what you'd normally buy one of their paintings for.
Thanks to that fourth image, I'm now imagining a high-vaulted cathedral decorated with furry art. I wonder if anyone does fursona commissions in stained glass...
100k yearly salary is not unheard of in FAANG. Senior positions with senior responsibility can a multiple of that. The author asks to use 10%, so lets say, 10k USD.
I happen to remember Beethoven was commissioned to write the 9th symphony by London Philharmonic for £ 50 in 1817 (though he had some other sources of income). According to https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ , 50 pounds in 1820s was approximately 4 horses, or 10 cows, or one year wages of skilled trade labor, or £2,871 in 2017 currency according to a formula of theirs.
I don't think one can one year of skilled tradesman in a developed country with 3,000 GBP today, so the currency conversion hides some important changes in economy. But 10k USD is several months' pay already (for regular people). Get a dozen or such to pool their 10% commission, maybe call it "Society of Hacker Friends of Music or something ;) and you have 100k, more than yearly wages in many skilled trades that are not FAANG programming.
The best way to actually with out inflation is to compare that money to the median wage then, work out the ratio, and multiply it. Id put that at £60k or so.
True. I merely wanted to share an anecdote about Beethoven.
And for the cost of commissioning artworks today, it is more relevant to look at on-going rates. (Whoever is the prestige musician today ... How much Hans Zimmer is paid to compose a score?)
Isn't this already happening, to some extent? Angel funding is a modern form of patronage, and lots of stuff has come out of Patreon/Kickstarter, some of which I think will qualify as art in future. Sure, these are mostly not operas or symphonies, but every age has its preferred art forms.
Patreon, Kickstarter, and angel investment are artist-led, AFAIK. An artist says "I want to make X; who will fund me?"
This article is suggesting a patron-led model where a rich person says "I want Y to exist; who will make it?"
I think it's more like Fiverr or Upwork than Kickstarter or Patreon, except that Fiverr/Upwork are usually smaller-scale: they might provide the soundtrack or a sprite for a computer game, but this is more like a whole game, or a whole opera or building.
The only difference I can see is if the type of art the hypothetical rich person wants is a type that borderline _no one_ is making. Yes, Patreon is artist led, but the market decides what they pay for. A rich person can be their own market, funding only people who make art that they want.
And presumably during the patronage heyday, artists were advocating for patronage, which seems sort of similar. I'm sure that not every rich person _actually_ knew what they wanted, they just wanted the panache that came with having artists on retainer.
My proposed operationalization of this is that on June 1, 2025, if either if us can get access to the best image generating model at that time (I get to decide which), or convince someone else who has access to help us, we'll give it the following prompts:
1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
We generate 10 images for each prompt, just like DALL-E2 does. If at least one of the ten images has the scene correct in every particular on 3/5 prompts, I win, otherwise you do. Loser pays winner $100, and whatever the result is I announce it on the blog (probably an open thread). If we disagree, Gwern is the judge. If Gwern doesn't want to do it, Cassander, if Cassander doesn't want to do it, we figure something else out. If we can't get access to the SOTA language model, we look at the rigged public demos and see if we can agree that one of us is obviously right, and if not then no money changes hands.
Dave Karpf writing on his difficulties with Longtermism:
"If we take the Longtermist/Long Now perspective seriously, then it is absolutely true that when we cure cancer just isn’t that important. 500 years from now, it simply won’t matter when the breakthroughs occurred. Every life saved will have long since ended.
But I have friends and loved ones who have died of cancer. I’d like there to be a cure sooner rather than later thankyouverymuch. Our world—the world you and I inhabit today—will be much more improved by potential breakthroughs in cancer research than by a fucking art project in a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos."
Hmm. just for the record, life 'cured' cancer. It's called aging (and with it eventual death, which I think is mostly a good thing.) We are developing treatments for cancer, which is also a good thing to do.
As sorta a side thought, if we could give AI cancer, (make it up from lots of little parts each of which might go rouge and take over the AI), then AI could invent aging (and AI death) to control it's cancer and this might be a solution to any future AI problem.
I could argue that concentrating too much on curing cancer right now has not been very productive. We have spent really a lot of money with only modest gains. Who knows, if we had just spent this money in fundamental cell research without clear purpose, we might have already stumbled upon more serendipitous discoveries to cure cancer much better than we do now.
We do both, and a lot of fundamental cell research can be easily funded by saying "but caaancer". I'd say if anything, we're not focusing on cancer research enough.
Also, cancer research provides tools for non-cancer research (e.g. immortalization for cell cultures).
It would be a bad argument. The most common variety of kids leukemia used to be a death sentence. Now the five-year survival rate is north of 90%. This is not a modest gain.
It is only in this one kind of cancer, and some others. But overall the progress is much more modest.
Someone else might say that treating Alzheimers is more important and approve Aduhelm. In my opinions, all these examples serve that long-termism is more important.
That's exactly my point. If we concentrate too much on one single target and give a lot of money to this cause, we try to pretend that we have solutions.
Solving all cancers is an extreme goal on the same level as solving all infectious diseases. We made decent progress on both, but manage your expectations.
While we can now save 90% of kids with cancer, other progress is modest is still not a strong argument. The death of a child is one of the greatest tragedies that can befall a person. We provide extra care and protection for children in our society for good reason.
I might be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like the argument is basically, well, they would have died eventually anyway. Which is of course true, but besides the point. Everyone dies eventually. In the meantime, the world is a much better place if sometimes your kid can survive cancer.
Agreed. Healthcare in Afghanistan spends about $10 per person per year. Cheap vaccines and basic medicines, antibiotics, greatly reduced child mortality.
I am not against cancer research per se. I am just thinking that it would be good to work on long-term projects too and let serendipity do its work as it always had in drug research. You need environment for penicillin to be discovered like labs working with different molds. But also enough slack that you occasionally mess up and then look and notice that something unusual is going on. If we try to concentrate on one single task – create a cure for cancer – it doesn't seem to work. Maybe in engineering it is important. Or creating another vaccine just for a different pathogen with incremental improvements but not for breakthrough discoveries.
Well, just recently we had children locked up inside for 2 months in a futile attempt to save some elderly who were to die soon anyway. I really wish politicians would have listened more to your suggestions to care more about children.
Children rarely get cancer comparatively to elderly. Thus the question is: how much have we actually spent in researching childhood cancers compared to all other cancers?
I also remember from my studies that childhood cancers yield better to treatment. The 90% success rate is maybe just the reflection of this fact and not that researchers have paid any special attention to these treatments. Why don't we try to achieve 99% now? I mean, I am all for better treatments especially for children but if I had billion dollars to donate to a good cause I doubt that I would give them to childhood cancer research fund because it is very hard to predict that this amount of money will make any difference. Most likely it will not and the money will be wasted.
I would instead give money to some project that tries to improve the science in general, make it more efficient, maybe disrupt the current system of “publish or perish” in lie of better publishing system that facilitate distribution of scientific knowledge. Or maybe in a clinical trial system that is easier and cheaper and where all general practitioners are involved by default. It might not solve any immediate problem but could work better in long-term.
> give money to some project that tries to improve the science in general, make it more efficient
There's a lot of initiatives like that, and lack of clear metrics of success and even a coherent approach makes them a huge money sink. Meanwhile saved children are saved children.
I really don't think I get what you're getting at. Yes, we're still working on cancer. Since cancer is a bunch of different things and some forms are prevalent in kids, some cancer research is kid focused and some isn't. Yes, all the things listed in your last paragraph sound like worthy funding targets and I hope they get money.
A is good, but B is also good? A isn't good but B is? Like, what are we talking about here? Or, if it's getting old bouncing this off my thick skull, feel free to stop. I was really just reacting to the claim that we haven't done that well in cancer research. I think we've done amazing work in cancer, and getting cancer now is better than getting it 10 years ago, which is better than 30, which is better than 60. We've made a lot of progress and extended a lot of lives, many for decades. If cancer isn't a science success story I don't know what is.
Longtermism should focus on solving problems that cannot be solved in the future. For example: English spelling reform is impossible now but in the past it could have been solved and saved a heck of a lot of people (possibly trillions) a lot of inconvenience. They should look for problems like that.
Problems that will be solved in the future will be solved in the future so it doesn't matter to someone with a long time horizon.
It obviously matters when we cure cancer because the descendants of the people saved, and their work, will be present - possibly with compounding interest. Consider that it's mostly old people who get cancer, and losing someone with multiple decades of experience in a specialized field is a huge setback.
Sigh. "Long termism could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting wealth inequality". I too can pretend that if you think about anything but the Current Thing, it might prevent you from solving the Current Thing. "Wealth inequality could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting trans people!" "Trans rights could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting Bodega bro!" Get a life.
In terms of the particular quote linked, three things:
If a million people die of cancer a year, then curing cancer in 2050 saves uncounted millions of lives, and curing cancer in 2025 saves uncounted millions of lives plus an extra 25 million. The latter is obviously much much better. "It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
Obviously it's natural to want to save our friends and loved ones. But you start having to deal with this awkwardly just for normal questions about charity before you even confront long-termism. Why cure malaria in Africa when it doesn't help my friends and loved ones? Why help black people gain civil rights if they're not my friends or loved ones? Eventually people with functioning consciences have to admit that some of charity is about helping people other than our friends and loved ones. But all of this is irrelevant to long-termism because most charity beneficiaries aren't our friends and loved ones anyway, plus you can already get "save our friends and loved ones" by agreeing that curing cancer 25 years earlier would save 25 million extra people!
Finally, the last sentence gets all of its oomph from a stupid analogy that has nothing to do with long-termism. Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain is stupid, and curing cancer is good. If we compare Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain today (maybe as an art project) to curing cancer in twenty years, obviously curing cancer in twenty years is better. This doesn't mean you should always do things twenty years from now instead of doing them today, it means you loaded your analogy by including a stupid thing (Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain) and you should unload it before doing anything else.
>"It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
To quote Zvi:
"Recall that when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we *by default* actively optimize *against* Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources."
Dave is arguing that because under longtermism existential catastrophe is of value ~-∞, longtermism implies prioritising avoiding X-risk over curing cancer or alleviating global warming, to whatever degree avoiding X-risk and curing cancer/alleviating global warming make incompatible claims to the same resources. This is correct.
He also claims that this is self-evidently an incorrect morality, which seems... like something a fool says in a cautionary tale?
>If a million people die of cancer a year, then curing cancer in 2050 saves uncounted millions of lives, and curing cancer in 2025 saves uncounted millions of lives plus an extra 25 million. The latter is obviously much much better. "It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
Neither "saves" any lives. We all die. It may prolong millions of lives by some arbitrary number of additional years. One of the things that lead sot a lot of sloppy medical thinking and medical policy making is assuming someone "saved" is somehow worth "one human life". I know you know that and mostly adjust for that, but I think avoiding the language entirely is best.
My point is that all "life prolonging" is not the same. Instrumentally, or "ethically", and often people use "saves lives" language to refer to pretty disparate situations so it is best to avoid it when discussing health policy.
That new drug that allows people about to die on ventilators to last an extra 6 weeks "saves" tons and tons of lives. That doesn't mean it is a good idea or worth it.
If you want to avoid colon cancer, the most important thing is to get sufficient fiber in your diet, and the second is to get your proctological exams. This isn't sufficient if you have certain genetic lines, of course, but in those cases the basic problem is a metabolic abnormality that should be treated (if we only knew how to do so). Waiting until the cancer shows up and then curing it is really sub-optimal.
Well sure but it is sloppy thinking that really causes A LOT of bad policy in this exact area "medical policy".
So many things that "kill people" often kill people who are just about to die anyway. So you will hear that a heatwave of hurricane or whatever "killed 50 people". And then if you actually dig into it 35 of them were people who were going to be dead in the next 6 weeks anyway who were 85 and just pushed over the edge, or lost it when their power went out and the devices that keep them alive for a few more weeks/months stopped working.
You saw this with COVID and so often the last several years of people's lives (particularly once they hit their late 80s) are not of very high value to almost anyone. Yes saving 9 year olds and 43 year olds from premature cancer death is a huge win, but it is important to remember what the real distributions are.
The point seemed clear to me. It's about the difference between people alive now, whether or not they are friends and loved ones -- whom presumably some other people care about -- and people who are gone in the distant past or who may be in the distant future.
Well future people for sure don’t have the same moral worth as current people. That much is undebateable.
That said I think there is a lot of benefit to long term thinking. We spend a lot of resources chasing in circles trying to solve/mitigate transient problems or things which may not even be problems.
Did you accidentally negate the sentence? It seems that it is undebatable that future people *do* have the same moral worth as present people, though we have less knowledge about how our actions will affect them (and whether they will even exist) so it sometimes makes more sense to think more about how your act will affect present and near term people than far term people.
No. People in the future absolutely matter less than people here now. Just as people far away matter less than people close by. These biases are core parts of human psychology for good reason, and there is no reason to suspect they are wrong.
Imagine you have a magic remote. With it you can press a green button to save a child who is drowning right this exact second, or a red button to save child who is drowning in 200,000 years.
Do you really have any confusion about which button you would press?
Morality doesn't exist outside such things. Morality is a cobbled together concept that is approximating our psychological and instinctual decision making and urges, social contract theory considerations about how best to mutually operate society, leftover social taboos and norms, consequentialist/utilitarian considerations, and 15 other things.
Attempts like "utilitarianism" to somehow systematize it ALL into one grand scheme are both wrong headed and doomed to failure.
I think you’ve replaced “matter” with “it’s useful for me to care about”.
Also, your thought experiment with the buttons has a clear answer because I am much more certain that the person who the green button saves actually exists. Even beyond the science fiction of a button that saves a drowning child, we would need a *massive* science fiction to have confidence about something 200,000 years in the future, let alone certainty.
If we actually had the ability to be certain about things in the distant future, and got used to coordinating with people in the distant future the way we do with people in the distant present through Zoom, then we would count people in the distant future equal to people in the present, just as we care equally about people in the distant present as close by.
No that is wrong. I DEFINTELTY (and people generally) don't think people in Zoom meeting on the other side of the world/country have the same moral value as my neighbors/family.
You are importing a huge assumption about the value of people being disconnected to your relationship proximity to them that is not justified by any actual huge behavior, impulse or functioning society.
Literally no one behaves as though random stranger four blocks away is just as important to them as their neighbor. And while you might dispassionately say "yes from the moon they are the same", no actual person is a disembodied god mind sitting on the moon observing people as though they are ants.
If your cousin is drowning right now and a random stranger from a suburb 20 miles away is drowning right now which one would you save?
I wasn't comparing a random stranger on a Zoom call to a neighbor you know - I was comparing your friend on a Zoom call on the other side of the world to a random stranger who happens to live next to you. The fact that the person is physically distant is irrelevant - it is their social closeness or distance that matters. No one treats the random stranger who happens to live on the same block as significantly as their friend who lives in another country, and my claim is that the same is true for time.
Social connections determine how much we care about people, and better knowledge and abilities to intervene often mean we are more likely to work towards helping people who are nearby in space and time, even if we care about them less. If a random stranger from a suburb 20 miles away is drowning right in front of me and my cousin is drowning on the other side of the country, then of course I'm going to save the random stranger, because that's the one I can save, even though I might care more about my cousin.
I think you're taking all this stuff about what we personally care about, and our abilities to know and to act, and building it into whether or not someone matters, when that's a different thing (which is, of course, related to these in systematic ways).
If you'd like a great intro to more recent Chinese history, particularly from the rise of the People's Republic of China to around the 1990's I would suggest the graphic novel "A Chinese Life." It's an autobiographical reflection on life in China under Moa, Deng, and the economic success that Deng brought with him. Very good reading.
I recently listened to "From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History" one of the "great courses" audiobooks, and liked it quite a bit. It's a good chronological, high-level introduction to Chinese history.
Not exactly what you're asking for, but I'm currently enjoying a podcast called The History of China by an American living in Shanghai. Should be the first hit in your favourite podcast search tool.
I enjoyed reading The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. It is more readable than the typical undergraduate textbook on the history of a country. As I recall, he starts toward the end of the Ming Dynasty.
Imperial China: 900–1800 by F.W. Mote is on my to-read list, because I see it recommended again and again.
How to know? - Putting the "easy" answers into practice may be tough. E.g. "open borders" - i.e. simply STOP keeping people go to work and live where they want, seems like the easiest answer to the HUGE question: How to quickly double world GDP and erase mass-poverty. - But Bryan Caplan has a hard time even to convince Tyler Cowen: "The US would turn fascist if you tried". People from NY can move to Austin and work there, why not people from France, Sweden, Singapore? Why not from Mexico? From Nigeria? From India? - Whatever happened to “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Worked like a spell for the US of A. - It always seems to me that not "sorry" but: "let people do as they choose" are the hardest words. No wonder: French (laissez-faire).
Its pretty clear to me that such an action would increase poverty in the US, at perhaps - an intial gain to the first immigrants. After that open borders would equalise world wages, probably destroying the consumer demand necessary to maintain works growth. If we could find a better solution that impoverished billionaires i would be all ears.
I'm curious how that's "clear" to you when essentially all the available evidence (which is admittedly limited!) disagrees. It _could_ be true, but there is borderline no evidence to support the idea.
Wages will continue to fall until they by and large equalise across the world, with differences no greater than the kind of differences you see across countries today. Not everybody needs to move to equalise wages.
"Will continue to fall". Evidence that wages are falling please. Wage _increase_ is not as fast as it has been in some time periods (although also _much_ better than is usually reported), but I have never seen evidence that real wages are falling across more than very short time periods
Even _if_ wages fell (which...again, the available evidence suggests this isn't he case), then it will come with a matching drop in prices. Labor is literally the reason that prices are higher in the west. If labor falls across the board, then so will prices.
And there isn't anything inherently better about a given wage, as long as the "lower wages" buy the same amount of stuff (or more!) then people are better off.
So, A) The evidence disagrees with you and B) if you were right, that alone would not be a bad thing, you'd need a drop in wages _and_ a drop in productivity or a drop in wages/prices, but a huge increase in wealth inequality or something. Dropping wages alone is not a negative in this context.
Easy and correct may not be correct and complete. Most answers that are correct require lots of nuance, caveats, and context. In my view this leads to true knowledge/wisdom.
Strikes me as a matter of hitting the right balance given the context. Arguably no answer is ever "complete", one reason we get thousands of books on say, WW2, or Churchill, or the Civil War. Someone famous (Einstein?) supposedly said, "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler".
Or they may be right. As Billy Joel might put it. - To state the obvious, "easy" is also a very lazy(!) word to talk about or even judge solutions. E.g. Bryan Caplan has a handful of - seemingly - relatively "easy" answers to improve the life of billions, even mine and yours:
Open borders. Build, baby, build. Leave it to the markets, cuz politics just aggregate stupidity. Have more than one kid if you like kids (it is more fun and less work than you think).
Ignore "equality issues" coz the distract you from the far more impactful "growth-questions". https://betonit.substack.com/ (The Zvi links to Caplan, Scott did in the era of star slate codex . ) Those easy answers comes with books attached and (easy to follow) suggestion how to do steps in the right direction if you are afraid. ("keyhole solutions"). Based mostly on the insights of Adam Smith. - But all too easy for the EA crowd. For "altruism" another "too easy" answer would be: Give normal people in poor countries some regular money. They know best how to spend it. https://putanumonit.com/2016/04/27/more-power-less-poverty/
Not sure I believe in the true knowledge/wisdom thing. I do like solutions that work. Even more if E.A.S.Y.
When you reduce an argument to just it's conclusion you get an inaccurate version of "easy" vs "not easy".
For all of these 'obvious' solutions, you still need to defend the position as actually correct. That defense stops being 'easy' and reveals it's complexity when you have to stop and explain the mechanisms that they work by, when you have to identify the 'near-miss' versions of them that should be avoided. Completely untracked borders with no highway patrol seems like it's not quite what you intend by 'open borders' for example, there are still nuances and complexities to be tracked and studied.
By your own admission there are entire books written to defend their position, that strikes me as being medium answers at the least.
Any WW2 buffs here?: Is there a map of the population density in Eastern Europe just before WW2? My understanding is that most of the Soviet population was in the west, but then I don't understand how the Soviet Union could send millions and millions of people to the front in WW2 if most of their population were occupied? And wouldn't their industry suffer catastrophically (I know they sent it east of the Urals but how did they have time for that if it was all located in the west, as I presume)? Also, how did the Nazis occupy and keep control over such a large area and population: just through sheer brutality (I guess they didn"t have much of a plan)?
The Nazi theory of victory was predicated on a few things. Firstly, they assumed (correctly) the USSR was unpopular. They thought they could "kick the door in" and things would collapse. However, there were two issues with that. Firstly, a core of hardcore Communists proved willing to keep fighting and forcing other people to fight more or less indefinitely. Basically, the bureaucracy didn't collapse and if there were any disloyal elements they were removed which meant conscription etc could continue. Secondly, being Nazis and killing large numbers of people made them even less popular than the Communists.
Secondly, they assumed (again correctly) they could take out a lot of the key industries needed to sustain a war machine in the initial strikes. Mainly chemical industries needed to make weapons, gas refineries, high precision equipment, etc. They succeeded at most of these and the evacuation of Soviet industry was only a limited success. But the US just replaced those industries with lend lease aid.
Thirdly they expected blitzkrieg tactics could work iteratively. France was small enough they succeeded basically once and the country collapsed. And it worked on the USSR once too. They hoped they could do it repeatedly but the USSR adapted and ultimately stopped their breakthroughs before ultimately shattering a lot of their tank corps at Kursk.
The Germans largely couldn't keep control of large rural areas. This was part of why partisan attacks were so common. There was not a continuous line of contact along the entire front (though that's fairly normal). The goal was to seize key industries and cities and break armies such that formal resistance ended. But in general the Germans who were charged with logistics and occupation and the like were against the invasion because they believed it would be difficult and, even if successful, probably a net negative. As a result they were sidelined from planning with ultimately bad results.
Thank you so much for the map! It do seems like a large percentage of the population would have been under occupation (or internal refugees). I have to dive deeper into the Soviet industry during the war: how much was captured/destroyed, moved east or kept in non-occupied territory. Thanks again!
You'll also want to look into American supplies through East Asian ports (and how Japan affected those), the Arctic Convoys (and how Finland affected those), as well as the invasion of Iran and the Turkish straits negotiations.
Russia's economy was devastated by the German blitzkrieg and they would have lost hard if not for Lend Lease, a lesson they are currently re-learning from the opposite perspective.
Wouldn't the German army have been moving faster than the civilian population, especially early during Barbarossa? I guess I have to find numbers on n.o. civilians that fled vs remained.
Tanks and halftracks moving cross country, against enemy resistance, and having to wait for fuel to be trucked in from Germany every time they run low, are much slower than trains running through friendly territory. And if you're not important enough to merit a seat on a train it's not out of the question to outrun them on foot, if you have a bit of a head start and again are walking through friendly territory. The Germans averaged maybe 15 km/day in their 1941 advance on Moscow.
For the first couple hundred miles, but Russia is BIG, and the Russians really were doing some actual scorched earth and presumably not everyone is sticking around after seeing that and are following the retreating soldiers burning/confiscating/destroying what they can.
I know if the army rolled through my town grabbing everything that wasn't strapped down and burning some of the rest, some portion of people (possibly including myself) would be inclined to follow them.
It was a quick advance, but wasn't instant, it took the Germans a month to get to say Kiev, and another 2 months to finish encircling it.
I don't know about population density, but population density is not the same as troop density. The Soviet union had troops in Siberia and at the Eastern border to defend against Japan. When the Germans headed for Moscow, Stalin moved large contingents of troops from the Eastern border to defend the city. He speculated correctly that Japan would not attack in the East.
For the industry, from wikipedia:
In one of the greatest feats of war logistics, factories were evacuated on an enormous scale, with 1523 factories dismantled and shipped eastwards along four principal routes to the Caucasus, Central Asian, Ural, and Siberian regions. In general, the tools, dies and production technology were moved, along with the blueprints and their management, engineering staffs and skilled labor.
Also note that Germany only occupied part of what is considered the Western part of Russia (it's huge). You can compare "Siberia" (which may or may not be considered the Eastern part of Russia) with a frontline map from 1941. For example, in the south, Germany captured roughly what is nowadays Ukraine, but hardly any of Russia's today territory. If you look at this map, then in the north they never came further East than Moscow (and even that only for a short time), and that is still pretty far West *within* the Western part of today's Russia. (Look for Rostov, Voronezh, Moscow, St. Petersburg to get an impression for the frontline in 1941.)
https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated list of small websites that are only searched if manually added and approved.
There's also https://search.marginalia.nu/ , which also lets you filter by sites that have/don't have JavaScript and gives options for several searching algorithms.
It's manually curated and leans very heavily towards software and tech, the search is kinda bad, but the corpus it's searching is so much better than google's corpus that I think it's still worth trying
One year is too early yet to call it a trend, but maybe?
The U.S.A. had a spike in births (after a long general decline for over a decade) in 2021 that appears to be lead by college educated women working remotely.
It’s long been noticed that higher IQ’s (and educational attainment) increases the likely number of children men have, but decreases the likely number of children women have.
For me, any data from 2020 and 2021 (and maybe 2022) on almost every topic has to be considered an outlier/exception until there are at least 5 more years of data to back it up as a trend. The pandemic was just too big of an event.
I've been remote for what is now the majority of my career. Anecdotally women and women having kids are much more common where I work than they are among my in office peers. There's also a lot of women who that works on as a selling point for the job. So I think the rise of remote work has something to do with it.
Sounds like work-at-home allowed women a lot more flexibility to have children while working, although looking at the chart it appears that the trend is back in decline again as of early 2022.
Good to know. I have this fear that maybe there is no zero bound for fertility and that in the future couples who today would have no children will need to hunt and kill the children of others in order to have even fewer.
I see some such tendencies in Scandinavia: People hold other people's parenting to extremely high standards and almost delight in moving children into foster care.
I think the fact that higher education leads one to hold parenting to higher standards is a large part of how increasing education decreases birth rates. That is, one doesn’t hold others to high standards because one has fewer children; rather one has fewer children because one holds others, and oneself, to higher standards.
It is not primarily highly educated people who like to complain loudly about other people's parenting. At least not in Scandinavia. It might be different in more socially segregated societies.
Oh my. A less charitable explanation is that the childless adults are envious of other people's children, and they instinctively coordinate to take them away under plausible pretexts. A more charitable explanation is that the childless people simply have unrealistic ideas about what it is like to have children, they live in bubbles that reinforce their opinions, and then they vote for setting the legal bars unrealistically high.
One problem with this hypothesis, though. Looking at the age pyramids of various countries, some have a worse shape than Scandinavia, and yet they do not have similar policies.
A possible explanation is that just looking at the age pyramids of the Scandinavian countries is not enough; you would need separate pyramids for the native populations (who made the laws) and the immigrants (who probably have more kids). I wonder if such data can be found anywhere, because this is probably a very sensitive topic, politically.
There are millions of people involved, so probably all explanations are valid for someone, from the least to the most charitable and everything in between. But for most people, the most charitable explanation is probably also the most correct: People have too high expectations for the efficiency of social work. Social workers need to deal with a reality where they can do much less to help children than people expect, so they wreck children's lives in order to do anything at all.
I think uncharitable attitudes against parents lowers fertility because it makes people err on the side of not having children. If a very strong social stigma is attached to "failing" as a parent and no social stigma is attached to not having children, socially anxious people will err on the side of infertility.
However, as you point out, this is not the main explanation behind low fertility levels because Scandinavia has higher fertility levels than for example Eastern Europe, where standards for parenting are not at sky-high.
I have seen Swedish data for the average number of children immigrant women from different countries have. So those statistics should exist.
I've heard a number of social conservatives say regarding the overturning of Roe something to the effect of "men who pretend to care about this passionately are phonies; it doesn't affect them directly".
I've also heard, over the years, many social conservatives argue that the sexual revolution was better for men than women because it allowed more men to have sex outside marriage, which, according to the arguments, tended to hurt women in the long run.
I, a man, tend to believe the latter. The sexual revolution was much better for men than women, and legal abortion, along with the pill, was a big part of it. The notion of having sex for pleasure and without consequences was great for men who like having casual sex. But men are the gender more worried about the immediate consequences of sex: babies and such being a negative if it's a casual hookup; women are the gender with all their eggs in their ovaries.
As such, it makes sense to me, a libertine, that men should care more about legal abortion than women.
This isn't the direction you're going in with your post but let's not forgot that one can care about Roe v. Wade and its overturning because one has a principled position on the law's constitutionality.
In principle yes; in practice it's odd how mere legal interpretation so routinely just so happens to match up with ones politics. It's much like interpreting the Bible that way - isn't it a happy coincidence that people 2000 years ago didn't mean what the text seems to say but instead what you already believe?
I have a pretty typical position on abortion: After a certain point in a pregnancy--I can't tell you the exact day--I intuitively recoil at abortion. Hence I find it acceptable that the answer be determined democratically and locally. Under the U.S. Constitution, "locally" means state by state. Roe v. Wade imposed a central, i.e., Federal solution by fiat on the part of unelected judges. It was neither democratic nor local. Hence overturning it seems right both constitutionally and on the principle that democratic solutions are preferable to solutions imposed by a tyrant--whether consisting of a an individual or a small group of "judges".
It's hard to make a solid argument for abortion=infanticide at conception + one second. It's hard to make a solid argument for abortion != infanticide at birth - one second. There is not an obvious place where abortion clearly switches over from being approximately tardy birth control to being approximately early infanticide, and so people draw that line all over the place for reasons that are quite hard to justify to anyone else.
We draw arbitrary lines all the time, because it's utterly unavoidable. Surely there's no *particular* reason why an 18 year old can vote but someone who's one day shy can't, apart from the line having to be drawn *somewhere*?
Not only can we, we *have* to draw those lines. It seems like there inevitably will be some kind of line on when abortions can happen or can't, whether that's "Not one second after conception" or "Right up to the second before birth" or some fuzzy place in the middle. But there's not an obvious place to draw that line other than conception (hard pro-life stance) or birth (hard pro-choice stance). Most people aren't happy with either of those lines, and there's no obvious other place to coordinate on. If I say abortion is fine until 12 weeks and you say it's fine until 24 weeks, how would we decide which of us is drawing the line in the right place?
I think this is one reason this is such an endlessly contentious issue. Schelling had a chapter in one of his books about the situation where two armies are advancing toward each other, don't want to fight, but don't want to give up too much ground, either. If there is a river in the territory, that's the natural place for them to end up stopping, and it will be easy for each one to see whether the other side is pushing too far or not. Without such a natural boundary, it's hard for them to coordinate on where to stop.
If this is about the yick factor and that it has nothing to do with fundamental rights, do you also think think the states should have the right to, for example, decide on whether homosexuality should be legal?
(Not saying you have this response, but others demonstrably do.)
I think there's a constitutional/legal question (should abortion or gay marriage be decided at the supreme court) and also a "what's the best public policy" question. For my own part, I think legally recognized gay marriage is a good policy, but I don't think the supreme court was legitimately the place to decide it. I feel the same way about antisodomy laws--I'm glad they were thrown out, but I don't think it was a reasonable thing for the supreme court to decide. I'm libertarian and think what you do with your body is 100% your business, FWIW.
When you're talking about abortion, it seems like the critical question is about a balance between the rights of the prospective mother and the baby, and it seems very hard to come to any satisfying conclusion on the right balance point. This seems quite different from birth control, drug use, homosexuality, etc., where you can legitimately say "this is between consenting adults, none of your business what we do with our bodies."
But in either case, it's very hard for me to see how the constitution somehow is supposed to have dictated that abortion must be legal and nobody who wrote it or read it ever got around to noticing until Roe was decided, just as it's hard to believe that gay marriage was always required by the constitution but only just a few years ago did the justices notice. Or that antisodomy laws (commonplace in the whole country) were forbidden by the constitution, and the supreme court first found that they were permitted and a few years later somehow the meaning of the constitution had changed and they were forbidden. The dodge about an evolving constitution seems to me to basically be a justification for the justices deciding whatever they want on major policy questions. If we get another Republican in 2024 and he appoints a couple more Republican justices, perhaps the constitution will turn out to require banning abortion and forbid the states from recognizing gay marriage. What principled argument would there be against such a decision, if the supreme court is basically allowed to just decide that the constitution has changed its meaning whenever they rule on a case?
You only have to look at passionate disputes about star wars canon to see that plenty of people care a lot about things that not just don't affect them directly but don't affect anyone.
This doesn't seem reasonable - at these levels in society, you can surely safely secure abortion, either legally (other state, Canada) or securely illegal.
Women have more immediate consequences from sex by potentially needing to be pregnant for 9 months. I'd imagine that consideration drowns out all the others when it comes to caring about legal abortion.
According to recent polling, *dads* care quite a bit more than men in general. Whether this is because they have experience of kids in the first place, or some more specific idea that it's bad if their daughters get denied abortion.
Although the idea that men get affected *more* by an unwanted pregnancy than women seems unreasonable.
Hmmm. Maybe something to do with the thing that most abortion recipients are moms? Though for me personally, learning what was happening and how precarious it was when my wife got pregnant, lost the first one in the early weeks, then got pregnant again was the occasion of a significant choice-ward move on my part. Could be some of that too.
That wasn’t even the argument I responded to. Quoting:
”As such, it makes sense to me, a libertine, that men should care more about legal abortion than women.”
This strikes me as silly - the woman *clearly* gets affected more, up to and including the risk of death, and hence has more interest in legal abortion.
I am talking about how legal abortion affects the sexually active portion of society not how an individual pregnancy affects that pregnant individual.
My argument: If the absence of legal abortion raises the risks of pregnancy to women, women will have less casual sex. As a consequence, men will have less casual sex.
My assumption/belief is that having more casual sex makes men happier than it does women.
Right, but you need to compare numbers. How many people engage in more casual sex due to legal abortion compared to how many people get abortions? If the ratio is 100/1, it is possible that legal abortion affects those who don't get abortions more than it affects those who do.
I think the legal consequences of a man abandoning a pregnant partner (or just a woman he'd knocked up) have generally been less severe than the consequences of a woman abandoning a baby, and it's obviously logistically much easier for the man to leave - in a one-night-stand scenario, the woman would have to actively look for him! Social consequences have varied over time, but unmarried pregnant women have often been ostracized, or even imprisoned (Google "Magdalen Laundries"). Men, on the other hand, have much more plausible deniability. So while I agree that men *should* welcome legal abortion (in part because it widens the pool of women willing to consider premarital sex), I think it genuinely is a bigger deal for women.
However incidentally I have been tindering pretty hard in Texas recently and women don't actually seem to be altering their behavior (unless I've just gotten better at this).. I think abortion is still functionally available for 99% of them and at the moment this is still mostly political/abstract
Men had plenty of sex outside of marriage before the sexual revolution, not least because brothels and sex workers were extremely common in the past before a lot of urban renewal and police corruption clean-up.
One of the things that bolstered the sexual revolution was effective treatments for STDs. As Greg Cochran noted, the AIDS epidemic couldn't have happened much prior to antibiotics as syphilis would get in the way first:
Not sure those times match. Sexual revolution was 1967+. Crack down on inner-city sex-workers was around 1990 according to my perception.
Fucking prostitutes was never that big in post-war USA, at least not compared to the sex that could be had after the Sexual Revolution. Young single men usually prefer to fuck women who aren't literal whores, and the availability of such women increased dramatically in the early 1970s (circa Roe).
I think also women who want children have reasons to care about legal abortion. Restrictive abortion laws seem to make health care providers a bit nervous in a way that sometimes have fatal consequences when something goes wrong in a pregnancy.
Women who have given birth know the sense of physical vulnerability that often accompanies pregnancy. Men probably don't experience a partner's pregnancy the same way.
Statistically, restrictive abortion laws aren't correlated with higher maternal death rates. Ireland, for example, managed to have a slightly lower maternal mortality rate than the UK during the period when abortion was outlawed there.
You say "statistically" and then give a single example. Here are some actual studies on the subject:
"Reducing the proportion of Planned Parenthood clinics by 20% from the state-year mean increased the maternal mortality rate by 8%...States that enacted legislation to restrict abortions based on gestational age increased the maternal mortality rate by 38%"
Another study showing that states with restrictive abortion policies (specifically, requirements for licensed physician and prohibitions against use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortion care) have higher maternal mortality rates:
Here's a study of 162 countries (looking at data over the 28-year period from 1985 to 2013) that found countries with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal mortality laws. They also found that countries whose abortion laws became more flexible over time saw a correlated decrease in maternal mortality.
As of 2017, the last year for which I could find data, the US, which has more permissive abortion laws than virtually all of the EU, also has a higher maternal mortality rate (12) than almost all the EU countries. (The only EU countries with higher maternal mortality rates are Romania and Latvia, both of which have 19.)
Incidentally, Malta, which has the tightest restrictions on abortion of any EU state, has a maternal mortality rate of 6, which is also the rate of the European Union as a whole. Ireland, which until recently had tight restrictions as well, outperforms the EU average, with a maternal mortality rate of 5. Back in 2000, Ireland's rate was 7 vs. an EU-wide rate of 10, so it's not like Ireland was lagging back when abortion was restricted.
I think the evidence I've shown is much stronger. The studies I linked show that maternal mortality rates increase when abortion restrictions are passed and decrease when abortion restrictions are loosened, within individual states and countries (which controls for many potential co-variates). And the studies I linked which show correlations between abortion laws and maternal mortality rate are looking at a much larger sample (either all 50 states or 162 countries) than the examples you cherrypicked.
But hey, as long as we're cherrypicking: it's funny you should mention Romania, because Romania is pretty much a case study in how strict abortion laws are correlated with higher maternal mortality rates. Abortion was heavily restricted in Romania starting in 1965, and then legalized in 1989. The maternal mortality rate started rising in 1965, reached as high as 170 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1989, then immediately plummeted when abortion was legalized.
Here are a couple of figures showing the Romania data:
Probably care providers get the most nervous in times of transition, before it becomes clear what to do in different situations.
My sense of unease is mostly not based on statistics. It is more basic that that: As a pregnant woman I prefer if care providers side with me. And like most women in history, I value my older children and my own life higher than my unborn child (which I indeed also value, especially in later pregnancy).
I'm a mother of five and I would welcome more children. I hope I will never have an abortion. Still, I would like to have an abortion if I got to know that I carried a fetus with serious malformations. Laws that allow abortion are not only for people who don't want children. They are also there to make life a little less difficult and worrying for us who very much want children.
The specific example you give is slightly misleading, because the UK is really bad on maternal mortality for reasons which are a bit hard to parse (it is currently about 50% higher than Ireland). Do you have a source for the more general claim that abortion laws are uncorrelated with maternal mortality?
Plumber mentioned the US happiness data that shows that women were significantly happier than men as late as the mid-'60s and have crashed while men's happiness has risen, until men are now slightly happier as a group than women. I think we can posit as a null hypothesis that this is probably *not* because they can open bank accounts now.
The other thing is that IIRC for a long time a majority of US women opposed legal abortion, but men were in favor of it by a sufficient margin to make a majority of US citizens pro-abortion. This changed fairly recently, but before that pro-choice activists really didn't want to talk about this as it implied exactly what you just said, that both sexes saw it as a way for men to get the milk without having to buy the cow.
Happiness is a subjective experience, how would you measure it except by reported self-assessment?
Also, you seem to be suggesting that women for some reason were always miserable, but used to be so scared of anyone finding out that they lied en masse even to anonymous statistical surveys, then stopped doing so, not all at once, but little by little, in a way that looks exactly like a gradual decrease in happiness over time. All the while men were apparently getting sincerely happier, or else they had *also* been lying to the official statistics, but to artificially decrease their happiness for some reason, and equally gradually stopped doing *that*.
You say the statistics are weak evidence, but this motivated reasoning is orders of magnitude feebler.
I completely agree with you that there are no other good ways to measure happiness, but my conclusion from this is "there are no good ways to measure happiness", not "and therefore this must be a good way to measure happiness".
What I'm actually suggesting is that how people respond to questions about how happy they are is massively influenced by all sorts of subtle expectations that change in impossible-to-understand ways over time, and may well be strongly correlated with sex. "Lying" doesn't come in to it, because these are subjective, undefined terms.
While I certainly agree that men should care about legal abortion, I don't think there's any reason to expect them to care about it more than women do. Children can ruin lives regardless of your gender.
I'm not sure why you related this to libertine sexuality either? Access to contraception and abortion has a pretty major impact on sex for pleasure regardless of whether it's casual or committed.
I think most men would rather have children in a committed relationship than from a one night stand, even men who would prefer not to have children at all.
If women are more willing to have casual sex if abortion is an option, then of course this affects libertine sexuality.
You sometimes see arguments about ”judicial abortion” because of this, the right to disavow yourself of fatherhood up until a certain point (typically earlier than the abortion limit).
The existing system is a kind of risk-sharing between males and females. If males had the unconditional right to opt out of parenting, sex would be almost risk-free for them.
The status quo is not perfectly fair in any way. But it transfers a few of the risks of having sex from females to males.
Why do Americans get so much spam / scam calls? It seems that this is such a widespread problem that people have generally abandoned the practice of picking up phone calls from unknown numbers.
Is it a technological problem in that we don’t have the technology to fight number spoofing?
Is it a legal/procedural problem that we don’t have the resources to adequately punish scammers from other countries?
Is it a political problem in that telecom companies don’t want to invest in technology/practices to reduce spam calls?
It seems like something that annoys everyone and devastates a small number of people who get scammed. Given that the median voter and politics are older, it seems like they should care about phone calls being trustworthy and not annoying. Why isn’t there more pressure/movement to defeat spam calls?
Because we have a media-political culture that is focused on idiotic overly abstract ideological debates and posturing rather than tackling problems that actually affect people's lives.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the first amendment is somehow involved. There are probably technical solutions, but they violate some sort of free speech norm, or possibly even something that has been enshrined as a right.
No. The phone companies get paid for every call, so they don't screen out calls. They don't even make it difficult for forge the number the call is coming from. (Well, this info is a year or two old. It may have changed recently.)
As far as I know cold calling a mobile number is illegal here in New Zealand. I've not experienced the problem and no-one I know talks about it. Cold calling of landline numbers does happen fairly often.
It reminds me of the US penny problem: everyone hates 1 cent coins but the government wont get rid of them because it's dysfunctional (the one company that supplies the Mint with metal hires a lobbiest).
A point of anecdata: I'm in the UK, my phone number is on the national Do Not Call register (https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/register), and I hardly ever get spam or scam calls despite (grudgingly) giving out my mobile number whenever a form asks for one. I get spam texts rarely enough that's it's a surprise when I do (I got one this morning, and on the 25th July, and I can't remember the last one before that). So it is technically possible to solve this problem.
The US has a similar list. The spam callers ignore this list and its difficult to track them down quick enough to enforce the fines (they just "go out of business" and pop up somewhere else).
This is a topic that interests me also. I will tell you what I have heard but I don't know this for certain, so I would love if someone with higher quality information than I could chime in here.
1) Caller ID is on the honor system. The phone network is old, built on old technology, and does not have a built in way to verify caller identity, so it is extremely easy to spoof numbers and would require a rebuild of telephone network hardware to solve.
2) Phone companies charge money to complete telephone connections, and have agreed to share the fee collected for each connection among every company that participates in forming the connection. So a small, local, shady phone company can offer super cheap, low quality service to a small group of scammers who place an extremely large volume of calls starting on the shady company's network but ending on the networks of large, legit phone companies. Because of the traffic cost sharing, the shady company can make a profit from the fees it receives from the large legit companies for placing lots of traffic on their networks, money that ultimately comes from the phone bills of the scam victims. Thus the shady local phone company is actually incentiveized not just to protect the scammers, but to work with them to help them place as many calls as possible.
How can this ignorance of caller identity co-exist with long-distance charges?
I can see there could be coordination problems for international calls, but within, say, Canada, the telecoms industry is highly regulated. It's hard to believe the shady local telephone company scheme you outline can exist given such regulation. Unless the regulators are in on the scam?
Is is (or at least, was, decades ago) very easy for hackers to place free long-distance calls by spoofing their caller identity. I have heard that the frequency pulses sent by phones were so low-bandwidth that it was possible for skilled individuals to mimic the tones with their voice. I am sure it is much harder to do these days. But a lot of the US phone infrastructure is still either legacy hardware, or designed to be backwards compatible with legacy hardware, and so still vulnerable to various exploits.
It's a mystery, seeing as it can easily be solved, with only a moderate amount of technical work, by adding 25 cents to the caller's phone bill if the person they call presses "7" during the call.
I don't have detailed knowledge of the telecom industry's commercial and regulatory state, but this doesn't strike me as a serious issue, if regulators and/or major telecommunications companies actually want to solve the problem.
Spam is a problem because it has so many potential sources. In contrast, there can't be all that many phone service companies. I think they can hire someone to check them out. Once scammer companies have been identified, one can just not cooperate with them.
Note that once scammer phone companies are being identified and blocked, there will be very few of them. It's sort of like if everyone's house were being broken into once every few days, one could say "how can the police possibly investigate so many crimes?". But there's an equilibrium in which the police do investigate them all, and consequently there aren't very many.
Yeah, I agree re: the different equilibria, I'm just not sure how to get from this one to that one.
A particular issue is cross-border scamming where most of the telecom companies on the other side allow scammers - somebody trying to implement this would have to be willing to basically block all calls from that country until a non-scam company appeared on the other side.
Same in Russia, btw, - once you have used your mobile number in ANY sort of registration, it will be leaked straight away, sometimes it takes less than hour for you to start receiving daily calls (multiple times a day at random times) forever. Some of them will be ad robocalls, but a significant portion - scam calls from "your bank's security dept.".
I had to spend a nonzero amount of time and effort to educate my elder relatives and install a spam call blocker on each and everyone's Android phone.
Anybody here making money as a freelance writer or translator? If so, I would appreciate some tips on how to start. I have some technical papers to my name (low double-digit Google citation indices), but no other published text that I can put on a resume.
My experience is that translation houses *love* having as many competent freelancers as possible to call upon, because workload likes to come in clumps and sometimes it can be hard to find anyone to do the work if they're busy with other stuff. This means that if you contact as many as possible, you have reasonable chances of getting work at times. If you can show that you can deliver quality on time, you're likely to get more.
When you can show that you've done documentation work before, this should also help to move you forwards in the line.
You’ll have to Google for this. Prioritize those that you have experience that fit (and of course, those that actually look for the languages in question).
For instance, I have translated for Apple, IBM and Microsoft into Swedish.
Get back into writing, and preferably get paid this time. I've done a lot of unpaid (and sometimes uncredited) writing and editing in my life. I loved it, and I believe I was quite good at it. I used to pride myself on finding just the right words, just the right way to say things, and just the kind of line to put on a T-shirt to make everyone react. However, this was all 5 years ago, and in another life. Recently, all I've had is technical gigs.
I'm open to many things - translating websites, blog posts, videos, manuals, documents. I won't work with technical text that's completely outside my field of expertise and completely incomprehensible to me.
I don't have so many hours available, so I can't take on anything approaching a full-time job.
If any of that sounds like what your business hires people for, may I ask what languages you might be looking for?
I'm a freelance technical editor and writer. I got started on Upwork, and used my experience and good ratings there to land better and higher-paying clients. I also have a website with a blog, so some clients find me that way.
I'm currently doing some work for a technical writing / technical content marketing agency called Wizard on Demand, and they're looking to hire more tech writers. They're great people to work with, and working for an agency means I get a steady stream of work and don't need to spend time hustling for clients. (I was going to post this on the next classified open thread, but this seems a reasonable place to bring it up.)
If you've written some papers, maybe you could write about those topics in the form of accessible guides for non-experts. That would give you some portfolio pieces for relatively low effort on your part, and demonstrate that you can make complex concepts accessible.
I used to translate various texts, not commercially, but for my friends who don't speak English... but recently I don't bother, I just use https://www.deepl.com/ and check the results, it often does a better job than I would. Much better than Google Translate.
OK, maybe in short term you could make some nice money by translating things automatically and reviewing the results. But soon everyone will realize this, and the prices will adjust accordingly.
Same, DeepL is amazing. It needs a bit of correction but it cuts the amount of work needed by an order of magnitude.
> maybe in short term you could make some nice money by translating things automatically and reviewing the results
I know at least one person who translates things as a significant part of his job description, and this is exactly his process. The AI revolution already happened, if you know where to look.
Here's how that particular AI revolution works in practice:
1. Client offers you MTPE (machine translation post editing) work
2. You send back a few screenshots of how terrible the MT is and explain you'll have to bill it as translation
3. Client usually agrees
4. You throw away the MT and do it properly
DeepL is pretty good for stuff that nobody would have paid to have translated in the first place, and it's an impressive technical achievement, but most professional translation work
a) is obscure, highly specialized technical stuff,
b) CONFIDENTIAL EMPLOYEES ONLY DO NOT DISTRIBUTE,
c) comes with some liability that Globocorp X needs to have clearly assigned to a third party,
and usually all three combined.
Everybody we work with updated their contracts to expressly disallow the use of MT, and after a big wave of MT a few years ago when DeepL impressed everybody, things have settled back into "maybe it's good for boilerplate T&Cs but that's pretty much about it". Maybe Amazon is using MTPE to have millions of words of product descriptions localized - but that's not work they would have paid professionals for anyway.
My sister is a freelance translator. She got started by people she taught English to asking her to do translations and then did work experience at the main English language newspaper in the country and they paid her more to do translations than to actually write pieces (which she also did freelance for quite a while). She eventually got a translation qualification and uses agencies mostly these days. Reckons it has become a less good career to be in with the advent of AI - a lot of work now is asking translators to 'check' poor AI translations which is harder in many ways than translating from scratch. She reckons it is worth having a 'niche' for translation if you can. So if you have technical knowledge, definitely go for technical translation. If you have technical knowledge then agencies may be happy to have you on their books without translation qualifications.
Not sure - she is registered with several. I asked her about it a while ago for a friend interested in going in that direction and she said to register with agencies you either need a translation qualification or a technical niche (legal, engineering etc). I should probably also add that although she professional translates three different languages these days, that she started with Hungarian and there is a scarcity of native English speakers who are also fluent Hungarian speakers which probably made it easier to find work.
Is anyone else having the issue where Astral Codex Ten does not show up in the Substack Inbox on desktop? And is the only one which does not? I've gone through all my settings to try and find out if I accidentally changed something, but I didn't see anything.
It seems to me that usage of reflexive pronouns has become incontinent over the past 20 years. People used to say or write, for instance: "James and I robbed the bank." whereas now they will say "James and myself did it."
Now maybe I just don't know what proper grammar is. I never really paid attention in school, so maybe I misunderstood what I thought I learned. I thought one should only use "myself" in cases where the subject is also the first person, such as: "I accidently shot myself while James and I were robbing the bank."
Today I read that "James is greater than myself." I really, really thought "I" was the appropriate pronoun in that case.
I also notice that public speakers use "myself" like it's going out of style. It would apparently kill them to say either "I" or "me", so it's always "James, Irene and myself" never "James and I" or "James and me".
Or am myself wrong about this over-usage of reflexive pronouns these days?
I'm almost 70 and started my career as an editor, so I've seen how linguistic mannerisms have developed over time. Part of the reason for the overuse of "myself" is a general fear of using "me", because we defaulted to "me" in toddlerhood and got scolded for it in elementary school. Hence the ubiquity of locutions like "between you and I", "it was a surprise to my wife and I", etc.. (The object of a preposition takes the objective case.) What makes it more complicated is that the rules of English, like those of all languages, are determined by users, so when a usage becomes familiar and comfortable, it becomes acceptable. So we say "it's me" even though grammar books say it should be 'it is I", but you'd sound like a dork saying that. Still, saying "between you and I", or "James is greater than myself" raises the suspicion that you haven't read much, and that you never got over what you mis-learned in grade school, because it's not language you'll find in good writing of any sort, fiction or non-fiction.
I find "between you and myself" actually worse that "between you and I", because it signals (at least to me) that you know there is a rule but are too lazy to figure it out and want to pretend that you aren't making a mistake.
I have never figured out why people know how to use "he and him" and "she and her" and "they and them" but can't figure out "I and me".
But that doesn't explain the corresponding overuse of "yourself" (because "you" is the same whether subject or object, and no one's been scolded for saying "you").
Mark Liberman has a recent post about the phrase “including myself”, but he was focusing on how it interacted with negations, and not commenting on the fact that it’s a reflexive without the standard binding rules: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50701
Mark Liberman has a more relevant 2015 post discussing something more like the observation you’re making, but also finding instances of the constructions dating back centuries: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22979
Arnold Zwicky has a post from 2008 on what he calls the “recency illusion”, which is the tendency of people to note usages and then think they are more recent than they actually are: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463
I’m not entirely sure where that leaves us on this, but those are great entries to read to think more about this.
I agree with the observation. My theory is that people think that more stilted and unnatural-sounding usages must be more correct or more formal. The overuse of "myself" and "yourself" mostly happens in business contexts; I tend to encounter it from call-centre people, but I doubt they use it at the pub with their friends. They're trying to sound formal and professional. (See also overuse of "whom" in contexts where it's not grammatical.)
I don't think they understand the grammatical difference between "you" and "yourself", or between "who" and "whom". They just think "yourself" is a more "fancy" way of saying "you", and "whom" is a more "fancy" way of saying "who".
It used to be understood that 'James is greater than I' was a shortening of 'James is greater than I am great.' 'Than' was not to be used as a preposition, so 'than me' was bad grammar. (This despite the fact that the people who claimed this kept getting caught out using 'than' as a preposition, even in serious writing, from time to time.) More recently, this is a case where the old strict grammarians have given up the fight, and say that 'than' can be used as a preposition. If you are using it as a proposition, you need the objective case, so 'James is greater than me' is correct.
Ah, thanks. I knew that "...than I" was short for "...than I am", but it really sounds wrong to me - like the kind of hypercorrection that was made up by Latin-inspired grammarians, like "don't split infinitives" or "don't end sentences with prepositions". I see that Bible translators have been using it from 1526 right up to the present, though: https://biblehub.com/parallel/john/14-28.htm . In Greek, the "is" is explicit (https://biblehub.com/text/john/14-28.htm), but my Latin's far too rusty to know what would be correct in Latin.
I just checked Strunk and White for this, and, as I thought, correct usage of -self pronouns is not discussed there at all. This suggests that the usage you quoted is a recent invention, as it would have probably been sorted out there if it was problematic or confusing at that time. Unless something officially changed about these pronouns recently, I'm inclined to think that this kind of usage is very wrong. (It does stick out like a sore thumb, doesn't it?)
Definitely a "new" thing, in my opinion. By new I'd say creeping in over last 20 years.
It's "wrong" but language evolves. But it sounds bad to my ears and to me it signals - well I'll refrain from making a comment that would be susceptible to "not necessary" and "not nice" interpretation.
In Scottish English, "Himself bought the car" would probably be understood as "my husband bought the car", particularly if said car were expensive or unsuitable and the speaker had not been consulted about the purchase.
I visited it for 5 weeks, and I love the vision & the team behind it!
I decided to start a VC fund focused on startup cities, because I think we can build great startups there enabled by better regulations (e.g. peer country regulation, 3D on-chain property rights).
If you're an entrepreneur or innovator, I'd like to show it to you:
Interested to hear your thoughts… I’m going through a breakup. I initially thought this person was my soulmate. However, after a year of dating, we realized we were incompatible and we broke up. I went through the five stages of grief in less than a week, and I now feel completely fine, and if anything, relieved… People who’ve heard about the breakup have said that they’ve never seen someone handle a breakup so rationally. (I.e. since I know him and I aren’t compatible, I feel no need to be sad about the relationship ending.) That being said, why do you think I’m so indifferent to the break up? When most people make a logical decision, they still battle the emotional aspects of their decision.
This is going to be pretty individual to the situation. It sounds like you did a lot of your processing of the break-up and preparation for it while you were still in the relationship, and it sounds like you also had the benefit of it being a mutual decision.
I'm still not over my boyfriend dumping me five months ago, but I was completely blindsided by it (we'd just bought expensive tickets to a live show ten days before - at his suggestion!). I thought we were really happy, and super compatible aside from a few political-type things.
But in retrospect, it was clear from his attitude on the call and his unusually distant behavior a week before it that he'd completed any grieving / sense of loss *before* initiating the break-up conversation. I'm pretty sure he felt fine once that chore was done and didn't think about it again. If that attitude is mutual, I don't think there's anything to worry about there.
Yeah I had one end that way when I was ~25. A 18 month old relationship with a woman I was living with and very into. Suddenly our sex life dried up for a couple weeks, but it didn't seem that big a deal. Then one day she wants to talk about something and just springs it on me in the kitchen. I was not prepared at all, though to be fair to her I wasn't pulling my weight that spring, so it is really clear why it happened.
Dumb thing was she left me for this just absolute loser. Talk about a wake-up call.
Specifically, when did you process the realization that this person was not, in fact, your soulmate? I would think that should have been a more crushing blow than the breakup.
My generally rule of thumb is the pain lasts 10% of the relationship. But the main thing that really kills it is a new partner. Particularly one you like better.
I’ve had breakups from insignificant relationships feel unbearable, and breakups from significant relationships feel almost completely fine. Each break up has been different and it think it depends on what other supports and structures there are in my life at the time.
this is normal. I remember breaking up with my boyfriend from undergrad I was with for five years and just feeling relief not because anything was bad but because he lived too far away (Bothell vs downtown Seattle) and I wanted for focus on work (cancer cell therapy).
I didn't go through any grief. Like sometimes you're just done and it's good.
Think having a balanced social network also makes the frequency of pain free breakups higher.
I had a similar experience with my breakup. One difference is that I did NOT think this person was my soulmate, at least not at first. We had attended a school for young adults with learning disabilities together, and at the time were not attracted to each other. We reconnected a few years after leaving said school, and started dating. She was really into me, and I grew to be into her, but our lifestyles were not compatible. Like you, I went through the five stages of grief pretty quickly, and am now mostly relieved that it's over.
From what you described, I imagine if HE thought you weren't compatible but you were positive you were, that disagreement would've made you take the breakup harder.
How well one is able to handle a breakup may be correlated with things like individual temperament, experience, how significant a relationship was, etc. But I think there will always be outliers, and we might not be able to explain them anymore than we are able to explain why only a small percentage of people who experience a similar trauma become depressed.
What I mean is, there will be outliers among a group of people, but also among a group of experiences of an individual.
Can anyone explain in technical terms why catecholamine testing isn't part of ADHD diagnosis? I read a study where they tested dopamine levels of kids before and after exercise and Richard Saul claims he diagnosed kids by having catecholamine tests done by mayo clinic so testing dopamine seems possible? I've asked a number of drs and psychiatrists and they all say haha that would be nice but it's impossible and I just want to understand why.
As far as I know, the only tests that can be done are serum levels of catecholamines, which tells you nothing useful since they don't cross the blood brain barrier. At best it might be indicative of levels of the enzymes in the catecholamine synthesis pathway—tyrosine hydroxylase, aromatic amino acid decarboxylase, and dopamine beta hydroxylase. I have heard that blood levels of phenyethylamime might be a marker for ADHD, but even that is kinda sketchy.
Even if you do have an accurate measure of brain dopamine levels, things are still more complicated. Is it striatal or prefrontal dopamine? Tonic or phasic dopamine signalling? Maybe dopamine levels are fine, but D1 receptors are underexpressed in the PFC. Maybe the D4 receptor has the 7-repeat polymorphism, causing oversuppression of NMDA signalling. Maybe the alpha 2a adrenoceptors are lacking, causing too much cAMP, opening up HCN channels, and inhibiting working memory.
Basically, it's not at all clear that the group of people with behavioral issues which are alleviated by stimulants is the same as the group of people with dopamine levels below some population percentile. Despite how elegant it would be if that were true
So in layman's terms are you saying that the catecholamine tests we currently have can only tell you how much dopamine is produced and that probably most ADHD symptoms are caused by defects in the transportation and handling of dopamine in the brain, we don't really know how, we just know amphetamines solve whatever issues these are?
That makes sense to think of it as a dopamine transport or uptake problem in prefrontal cortex rather than a deficiency. That explains the differences in symptoms from PD which affects dopamine production and thus whole body.
Because ADHD symptoms can be due to lots of other causes, from lead poisoning to ASD, which will remain untreated and stimulants will only make worse. Because some people with ADHD are untreated because the process is pretty arbitrary and depends on the judgement of a human. Because it would probably be cheaper than paying for the time of a psychiatrist to analyze behavior and try to guess what root cause of symptoms is. Because it would take away stigma from having ADHD, which many people believe is over-diagnosed because everyone has ADHD symptoms sometimes in our very complicated world and it would become something less judgemental like an iron deficiency, which is what ADHD is--a dopamine/norephedrine deficiency. If there's a chemical cause why make it into a psychological judgement call? Also could help with dosing and knowing what medication would be best for individual patients instead of trial and error.
Yep you got right to the heart of the problem, stimulants aren't going to help our lead poisoned friend very much are they? It would be much better to be able to categorize dopamine deficiency as a neurological disorder.
Although it's not strictly speaking *true*, if you treat all mental disorders in the DSM as "categories with criteria that only exist so insurance companies can make billing decisions", you're at about a 90% understanding of how the names of disorders correlate to the actual mental states of people who "have" them.
I've got a data-gathering question that will be simple for many of you. But I'm not too proud to ask it: I am gathering reports people make on sites that provide a covid PreP med called Evusheld. Will be compiling reports and making them available to later Evusheld-hunters, to help them find the best sites quickly.
I've made a form for people to give a report on. It comprises about 8 questions, followed by a spaces for people to write in answers. Some answers might be a paragraph long. Some items will not apply and people will leave them blank.
How can I collect these reports? There will be links on the site where people hunt for providers saying, "To leave a report on this provider click here." I could have the link go to a google drive document that's in suggestion mode, so that people's answers appear on the page as edits. The problem is that if 2 people try to report simultaneously, I don't know what will happen, but nothing good. Also, each new reporter needs a fresh document. They can't make a report on the one that somebody else just used
What's a simple way to do this? I do not need a system that compiles results for me some fancy way. This will work fine if I just end up with a bunch of separately filled out report forms. But how do I do that?
Please so not make any suggestions that involve hacking, writing code or anything on that level. I won't be able to implement them. I think I either need a clever idea about how to do this using google drive, which I'm comfortable with, or else an app or a site that will host the process and present a new report form to each new reporter.
Yes, Google Forms would (as I understand it) save each report as a new row in a Google Sheet, which would let you filter reports, sort them by date, or even plot them on a map: https://youtu.be/tJ3hDmefaI0
I've written a blog post on when the COVID pandemic should be officially over: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/the-many-definitions-of-a-pandemic. Most interesting learnings were that the WHO changed their official "pandemic" definition in 2009 for the sake of H1N1 and that monkeypox is somehow not officially a "pandemic" yet. Feedback and more datapoints are welcome.
I’m pretty sure the WHO does not consider HIV to be a “pandemic” but rather a “global epidemic”, because most regions of the world have many large demographic groups with low risk of getting it.
Do you know if the WHO ever declared HIV to be a pandemic? I can find academic articles referencing to it as such starting from 1987 but can't find any official WHO declarations.
I don't know for sure! After I wrote my comment I clicked through to your blog post and found that you already said as much as I know, which is that the WHO doesn't officially call it a "pandemic". I would be surprised if HIV has had its status lowered.
But one other thing I noticed is that you didn't obviously talk about "endemic" as an alternative to "pandemic" or "epidemic". I think they usually say "epidemic" or "outbreak" is when a disease has R>1.0 in the absence of seasonal factors, while it's "endemic" if R=1.0 or it is in a relatively stable seasonal cycle
Yeah, yeah, very cute. In reality though, straight people getting HIV actually reduced the hysteria around the disease. Once the narratives around oppressed, disease-stricken gay men weren't as predominate, the "epidemic" lost a lot of its kick.
What you really ought to be cynical towards are the people on the left who have spent the past year gleefully mocking anti-vaxxers who have died...and who are now losing their minds over """stigmatization""" around gay men and monkeypox. Because apparently, people being virtually imprisoned in their homes and having their jobs and small business destroyed to contain covid was perfectly legitimate, but even so much as suggesting that gay men temporarily cut back on hooking up with strangers until they vaccinated is absolutely unthinkable.
I thought HIV lost its edge once the safe sex message got out. Once it became clear that your were basically safe as long as you took simple precautions, people chilled out. I was a kid a the time, but that's how it seemed to me.
Of course, that's my assumption around monkeypox too? What, a new disease? Already? Yikes! . . . Oh, it's spread by touch and all you have to do to avoid it is not touch strange people, probably really just avoid fucking around? Whew! Why didn't you say so?
I mean, if we'd gotten this instead of covid people might have gotten worked up about it. But after covid it just seems very chill.
I don't know who counts as a serious artist among people who know about art, but I'm on the mailing list for Tim Cantor's events, and I've enjoyed every single e-mail I got (I'm on the wrong coast, so can't come to see his stuff in person often). I realize I probably exposed my total lack of education by admitting this.
Longtime rationalist/weirdo here! I write short fiction and post it on ashkie.com (and eventually I’ll stop being neurotic and get around to cross-posting it to my substack)
ashkie.com/nowhere-man is my fave story I’ve done recently — & the themes of agentiness, difficulty connecting with others, power of knowledge, etc make me think ACX readers would enjoy it! check it out, let me know what you think :)
I read Nowhere Man and enjoyed it overall. I found the introduction of magic to be very confusing, and it left me feeling like I was missing something.
People used to be squeamish intensely judgmental about sex. We had the virgin/whore dichotomy. Active sexual desire was seen, in popular culture, as a kind of deviance to be judged.
Now we are squeamish about power. We have the victim/privilege dichotomy. Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
In what ways is this true? In what ways is this false? Am i wrong that there're an American tribal valence to this pair of dichotomies?
Is there any evidence that people are more squeamish about power than we used to be? I think we try more to punish people who abuse power (and in recent years, particularly if they abuse power to get sex), but there’s always been a squeamishness about people seeking power.
The victim/privilege thing is a long-standing obsession of humanity, so much so that we have an Old Testament shorthand for it, in David and Goliath.
Attributing the David and Goliath story to "the victim/privilege thing" seems like projecting modern values onto a text that doesn't really have them. Goliath wasn't part of a privileged class within David's society, he was part of the same social class within a different society that David's was at war with. Goliath is "privileged" in the narrow confines of a combat situation because of his size, but I think the point of that is to make David's victory seem more miraculous, rather than to make Goliath seem more evil.
A stronger Old Testament precedent for the "victim=good, privilege=evil" idea would be the conflict between Moses and the Pharaoh. But in that case, the problem isn't that Pharoah seeks power per se, but specifically that he defies divine command in order to do so. I don't think you can point to anywhere in the OT where seeking power is portrayed as intrinsically evil, although such instances do exist in other ancient texts.
>Now we are squeamish about power. We have the victim/privilege dichotomy. Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
I actually don't think this is true either. It used to be considered gauche to campaign for president, either for the nomination or for the office. You had to have intermediaries do that for you, as doing it yourself was unseemly. That concept is completely gone now.
Um . . . can you explain the rest of this point a little more fully? I'm not sure how victim/privilege relates to seeking power. Maybe an example of popular culture showing desire for power as deviance can link those ideas and demonstrate what you're talking about?
>People used to be squeamish intensely judgmental about sex. We had the virgin/whore dichotomy. Active sexual desire was seen, in popular culture, as a kind of deviance to be judged.
I think this one is really gendered. It used to be that *women* were judged intensely about sex and subject to the virgin/whore thing. But I think men were judged the opposite way, and judged to be losers if they were virgins. Hence the whole stereotypical thing where guys would lie about having had sex with a girl, ruining her reputation.
Hence virgin was an insult for a boy while at the same time being a complement for a girl. I don't think this is true any longer, and I'm not sure if it faded at the same rate or if there were separate trends for boys and girls. My sense of it is that the virgin/whore thing hung on longer. Women were having a whole campaign against slut shaming fairly recently, whereas back when I went through high school and college it was fine not to have had sex yet. Spillover from AIDS making male virginity more acceptable, maybe?
Well, IdPol is about little else than the passive-aggressive search for power. Indeed, since the first stirrings of the ideology the 70s, I've been struck by its obsession with re-interpreting the most mundane aspects of human life as power relationships, claiming to speak for the "victims" of such relationships, and turning that status into power, through the relentless exploitation of rights ideology. This enables you to both present yourself as "marginalised" and "powerless", and your opponents as "oppressors" and "powerful" whilst in reality the opposite is true. I've written about this, for example:
Aurelien, did you link the article you meant to link? What's there is a long discussion of rights. As a quick criticism of the linked article, it seems not to see the difference between negative and positive rights, and then criticises the concept of rights by criticising the way in which positive rights can impose obligations on others. (Maybe you got to this later, I was looking for the IdPol content and skimmed more and more as I got deeper into the post.)
Anyway, can you specify what you mean by IdPol? It seems to me that in my context IdPol goes back to the founding of my country (USA), in yours, surely the relationship between the English and the Welsh, or Irish, or Scottish all center around identity. Or the Indians, or the Catholics, or just class in general. Special privileges for special born is long term norm in a lot of societies, including, I think, both of ours.
Good point, and sorry for not being clear. The result of having two minutes to do what I should have spent at least ten on.
I was particularly commenting on the "victim" issue, and how people who manage to successfully portray themselves as victims then parlay that into the demand for rights, which they then seek the power to enforce. This is not the traditional, overt concept of power, and actually enables those who exercise the power to continue to present themselves as marginalised and powerless. In the essay, I was suggesting a connection with the modern tendency to use rights as offensive weapons, and to subsume everything to an essentially market-economy model where those with the best media and PR support and the most resources, wind up having the most rights. I wasn't addressing exactly the point of this thread, though it's something touched on in the link, and in the immediately following essay as well. But I think the two are profoundly connected, because "rights" provide a discourse which enables the exercise of power in ways that are largely invisible, and indeed anyone who resents or challenges your power is implicitly an aggressor and an oppressor. In Steven Lukes book on Power (and in the experience of anyone who's ever worked in politics) power does not have to be overt and stated. Indeed, you really have power over someone when they don't even consider doing something you might take exception to.
By Id Pol I meant simply the usual collection of -isms and anti-isms, because this is the fundamental mechanism that such lobbies use to acquire and manipulate power. I am so weak and have historically been such a victim that I need to have power over you to stop you hurting me further. The reduction of everything to power is, in my view, a profoundly dangerous development.
It is and it's not, but it's probably linked in with my general problem in understanding his second point. I don't get what he's saying when he says that we're now squeamish about power, the whole privilege/victim dichotomy. I'm not clear on what he's getting at there, but it could well just be bitching about woke in a somewhat opaque formulation, in which case you're probably understanding him and on point.
On your second to last point I do have a question. It seems like you're identifying things like feminism and the anti-racism movements of the 70s as IdPol. Is that right? If so, is there a reason why that's IdPol, but, say, the racial policies in the American South (and north!) in the 19th century aren't? Or, trying to take it back to your country, didn't Elizabeth remove a bunch of native Irish from Ulster and colonize it with English? Isn't that IdPol? To me it's kinda IdPol all the way down, and bitching about the modern version as something different and new seems weird.
OK, obviously many political movements throughout history have tried to mobilise people with appeals to victim status, some more successfully than others. Irish nationalism is one example, where, interestingly, a number of the original leaders were Protestants.
That said, since the dawn of time, states and opposition groups have made policy and challenged policy on identity grounds, often for strategic reasons. So in your example the English Protestant Crown was worried (reasonably) about Catholic Ireland being used as a base by the Spaniards to attack the country. The solution, then and afterwards, was to encourage emigration there by Scottish Protestants, and try to keep a grip on political power in the country. At the other end of Europe around the same time, the Hapsburg Empire moved large numbers of Serbs to the military frontier with the Ottomans , because the Serbs had a reputation as tough fighters. centuries later those areas were part of Croatia. And let's not even get started about the mass forced population movements after the two Wars of the twentieth century.
Here, we are concerned with something quite different, I think: the political cultivation and manipulation of grievance as a way of gaining power and advantage. The message is: you are a member of Group X, you may not see yourself only as that, or even primarily as that, but we have identified you. You are oppressed or disadvantaged in ways Y and Z whether you would express it that way or not. The answers is to vote for me, put more people like me in positions of wealth and power and support the initiatives I propose, otherwise you are a bad member of Group X.
This isn't new. It is essentially the same technique used by the Left to mobilise support among industrial workers, and nationalists (both anti-colonial and reactionary) to maximise support. But you can see modern IdPol as a degenerate form of this technique, based more on promoting access to power and wealth than addressing legitimate grievances.
A good, if surprising, early example of this technique is, ironically, South Africa. The Afrikaners, the Dutch and Huguenot settlers in the seventeenth century, considered the country to be theirs by divine right. But since the nineteenth century, British settlers attracted by commercial opportunities, had come to dominate the country, although they were a numerically smaller community. English was the standard language of government and education, and all the important positions were held by English speakers. Afrikaners were looked down on, discriminated against for jobs and generally laughed at, as stupid and uneducated. From the 1920s, this produced originally cultural, and then political movements, designed to recover Afrikaner dominance, and mobilise the Afrikaans-speaking population against the dominating British, who had tried to subdue them militarily, and put their women and children in concentration camps. Not all Afrikaners were convinced, but enough were that the National Party squeaked out an election victory in 1948. English speakers were purged from government and the public service, and Afrikaans became the language of power. The apartheid system of racial classification then followed, but it wasn't the original motive.
Ok, I think I've got more of a handle on what you're saying here.
Elizabeth sending the Scottish Protestants into Ireland (didn't know that was the sourcing, btw, thanks) isn't IdPol, because neither Elizabeth nor the Scots immigrants would have considered themselves victims. Likewise, the Habsburgs putting the Serbs on the border isn't IdPol, same reason.
Irish nationalism would be IdPol, because it involved (involves?) both identity and victimhood, likewise the Afrikaner movement before it gained power, and presumably Mandela's movement after the Afrikaners used their newfound power to institute apartheid. Also the civil rights movement under MLK, the Indian independence under Ghandi and the women's suffrage movements would qualify.
Do I have that right?
That just leaves me here:
>But you can see modern IdPol as a degenerate form of this technique, based more on promoting access to power and wealth than addressing legitimate grievances.
Is there anything there other that in this case you disagree with the movement, thinking its grievances are mistaken, and that makes it bad IdPol, rather than good IdPol? I mean, wouldn't someone who believed in Afrikaner self-determination and also that blacks had no business being in government have drawn the same line you're drawing here between his movement and Mandela's?
Seems to me that in the past people were judged for their sexual *behavior*, now they are judged for their sexual *preferences*.
In the past, "having many sexual partners" was a violation of the norm. You were not supposed to behave this way, regardless of your desires. Everyone can have sinful thoughts once in a while, but acting on them is problematic.
These days, "having a preference for a partner who didn't have many sexual partners" is a violation of the norm. You are not supposed to feel this way. As long as other people's behavior is acceptable politically, expressing your feelings about the things they do is problematic. (Remember, personal is political, therefore your private feelings are a matter of public debate. Even if you never talk about them in public, what if they cause you to have some kind of unconscious bias?)
Partially this is about what is socially accepted and what is not. Partially this is a consequence of the way we communicate: if we usually talk online to/about people we have never met in person, of course policing their words is easier than policing their actions.
With power, I supposed it could be similar. In the past, people resented you for abusing your power. Today, in most cases, no one knows whether in real life you abuse your power, so you are judged for having it. Actually, in most cases, no one even knows whether you actually have power, so you are judged for... uhm... looking like someone who might have power (either based on your gender or ethnicity, or the way you talk and the opinions you express).
>Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
Huh?
There's nothing wrong with power per se in the current zeitgeist. It's just that the """victims""" want to have it instead of the people they don't like.
Genuine question, have you considered the possibility that there are people out there that *actually* think that there should be less disparity in power, and aren't just lying to try and get themselves on top? That some people *actually* believe something different?
I ask because the most convincing argument I ever saw comparing the differences between Conservative and Liberal thought was that liberals in generally make that mistake in the other direction.
Yes, they exist. But its not a reflection of the majority today. He didn't say "some people believe X", he said "Now we are squeamish about power", and in a way we used to be about sex. So big, massive, societal trends. Not a small but literally finite number of people. "Sqeuamishness about power" is just not in any way an accurate description of modern American *society*.
This strikes me as true on the face, but something seems a bit off. When people express the desire to matter, change the world, have an impact, etc etc, these seem to me like expressions of desire for power (rather than just preferences for certain types of outcomes). But these expressions (when they are thought to be sincere) are typically applauded as a sign of engagement.
As a first approximation to a resolution, I guess I would say that people are squeamish about desire for power that is obtained outside of certain processes. Not necessarily the processes prescribed by law—some illegal processes for gaining/using power are considered fine, and some technically-legal processes are considered immoral. But I guess this is where the tribal valence comes in—determining which methods of getting and using power are acceptable. The trick here is that when people speak about power in a non-squeamish way, they typically avoid using the word power and related terminology
Both are just examples of leveraging guilt and social pressure to modify behavior. It’s just one well proven mechanism to gain power over another person.
Entire social hierarchies and religions are built around this mechanism.
I just got a job at a small (~20 ppl) tech-startup! Check out airforestry.com if you're interested. Located in Uppsala, Sweden.
Does anyone have any tips or thoughts? Either about working at a startup in general, about their idea or that company in particular, anything is welcome :)
I will be working mostly in the workshop with physical prototypes, though I understand that in a small team everyone needs to do a bit of everything. I have a life-long burning interest in all things tech and have had several relevant jobs over the last decade, though never at a startup specifically. I don't have any formal education, but impressed them during the interview by showing some prototypes and projects I've done in the past. I start in a few weeks!
Huh, never saw that hexapod before, very cool! I'm not a forester myself and most of the specifics in the following are from the pitch I received at the interview, but it lines up with what I do know about how forestry is done in Sweden. Conditions in Sweden are quite different from many other places. Most forestry here is planted Pine (Pinus sylvestris), with a harvesting cycle of 80 to 120 years. The trees are quite small even when fully grown (~40, 50 cm diameter * ~30 m tall at harvest), and usually grow very straight.
Elevator pitch:
Traditional harvesters are 15+ tons, uses lots of diesel, and leaves terrible scars on the forest floor both from an ecological point of view, but also harming the productivity of the trees you want to keep after thinning. The working conditions in the cockpit are quite terrible, with jerky movements, off-angle work, noise and isolation. You also need to leave paths for the harvesters, which reduces effective land use by ~20%. After harvesting, transporting the timber to the closest logging road is a large part of the challenge, which means that hard-to-reach areas are effectively unusable, and that the network of forestry roads needs to be very extensive.
The basic idea is to hang a light-weight version of an ordinary harvester head from a cable underneath a huge drone. The harvester head gets lowered to the top of a selected tree, attaches, slides down the trunk while cutting all the branches off, and then cuts the tree close to the ground while the drone lifts it all straight up. The top of the tree is held to the cable by a claw that remains attached to the top of the tree with the cable running through it when the harvester head descends.
By using drones instead of ordinary harvesters all the land can be used for planting, the forest floor is literally never touched, only electricity is consumed (which may or may not come from a diesel generator depending on location), drone pilots can work from a comfortable and safe virtual cockpit (eventually overseeing several automated drones, but minimum viable product is quite manually flown), the harvested trees can be flown directly to the nearest logging road (distance subject to battery life). Drones also allow a much more economically viable way to do selective logging, something talked about a lot but seldom practiced. Once the drones are developed they should be much cheaper than a full harvester too, as drones are quite simple devices with essentially just six electric motors on a frame with a battery and some electronics.
I can see the hexapod harvester make an impact on some of these issues, but hardly all of them, and they do look frightfully complex.
The drone and harvester head are both in an early-to-mid prototyping stage at this time.
Most if not all of this info can be found on the website, beyond that I feel like I need to be careful what I say as I haven't even started yet :) Any mistakes here are mine etc.
It is usually the case when working for a startup that the time will come when you need to put in extra hours to get the job done. Do not work late. Do not work from home. Instead, go to work extra early and put the hours in then. This is especially true when the problem is 'my co workers are distracting' or 'god, another meeting'. You can coast along for quite a long time putting extra hours in the morning like this, but the 'work until you drop' alternative is the fast path to burnout.
(It didn't work, until we made some new adjustment rules, when my friend who taught me this and I decided to start a company in Göteborg and both started coming in at 6.00 and distracting each other. :) )
If your company doesn't do the 'everybody goes out to eat lunch together at noon' thing, set an alarm in winter so you can go outside, if only to walk around the building once, and see the sun.
Depending on the work and your social situation, extra hours from home could also work, although you have to be careful so that it doesn't get out of hand.
Night owls need to take this advice more than morning people as they are the ones that most easily burn out this way. (The morning people have all fallen asleep already.)
If the problem is "god, another meeting", then *fix that*. As an early-stage startup employee, you have more leverage than most employees to influence the company's culture and ways of working. Push back on unnecessary meetings; ensure meetings stick to time; ensure that every meeting you're involved in has a clear agenda and a chair, has only necessary people present, and produces actionable outputs that are followed up on. Your colleagues will thank you (and if not, you're in the wrong company).
This is Sweden. Our culture already does these things. And meetings *still* take more time than you would wish and happen when you would rather be doing something else.
Working at startups can be intense, but very rewarding (certainly intellectually and emotionally, and financially if you're lucky). Twenty people is a good size - I'm glad I've had the experience of being Employee #1, but don't think I'd do it again. Make sure you take care of your physical and mental health - AIUI the major cause of burnout is chronic stress caused by problems you have no agency to fix, and at a startup you should have plenty of agency, but burnout is still a possibility. The company looks cool - good luck!
No problem! One question - doesn't stripping the branches and leaving them in-place increase the amount of fuel on the forest floor and thus the likelihood of wildfires? Or do you calibrate the fuel load so that you get frequent small fires rather than a few big ones? I am not a forester...
This i an excellent question! I have no idea. That part isn't significantly different from how it is usually done currently however, and wildfires just aren't that big of a problem around here, not really sure what the difference is really. I guess just the balance of latitude, average temperature and moisture. We don't usually do controlled forest fires.
Good point, though I guess climate change may make wildfires a bigger problem? I see that Finland (who I think do do controlled forest fires?) had some bad wildfires last year, and Sweden had bad wildfires in 2018.
Yeah, I remember that in 2018, but even then it was a matter of a few dozen square km's in total. Scary when no one's used to it and we (probably?) lack robust planning for it, but ultimately not that big a deal.
I appreciate the concern! As it happens I'm already a Swedish citizen, and will actually be moving almost 600 km south for this job. I always make time for the Auroras :)
A Swedish friend of mine once took a university job in Minneapolis, and was very amused that the welcome pack was full of advice like "we're very far north here, prepare yourself for the short days in winter and watch out for SAD." Even as a Stockholmer he was moving fifteen degrees south :-)
Hahahaha that's hilarious :-) As for Minnesota, I understand it gets cold enough there for ice-fishing to be a common leisure activity, so yeah, pretty chilly.
I prefer to call it hard water fishing if you don’t mind. <joke>
With improved electronics it’s become like a video game. You can see your jig on the sonar and every once in a while something much larger comes to look at the lure.
I think the record low in Minnesota is around -62 F. I was working with a guy who grew up in Novosibirsk when that happened. Even he was impressed.
1) "Johan Domeij" is a quite central-Swedish name. Knowing nothing else about the user, I'd say it's quite likely he was born and raised in either Uppsala or nearby Stockholm.
2) The skyfires are not frequent or intense at the latitude of Uppsala. Even significantly north of there all you really see is an occasional smear of green fog in the night. You have to go up into Lapland before you have a decent chance of seeing the upper air blaze.
We do get good Auroras in Umeå where I currently live, at least several times per year. The trick is to get out from the city lights and really let your eyes adjust.
The name "Domeij" is originally from Domsjö, close to Örnsköldsvik, so your deduction of central Sweden is spot-on :)
I suggest reading this post before taking the job: http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/. Though it might not apply directly for your specialty or location.
I've had the most fun jobs of my life in startups. Not, mind you, the most remunerative, or the longest lasting, but most fun. Enjoy it, but keep an eye on how you're positioned for your next job because the truth is, most startups fail and, even worse, some limp along forever without really getting to the next level.
(Advice is from the Bay Area, Sweden may be different!)
This is good advice I think, and reflects much of what was said in the link posted above (though it also talked a lot about fun jobs at big companies). I am indeed more motivated by the work itself, rather than the compensation.
What makes GMU economics department so special? How did it happen that so many greats (Tyler Cowan, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, maybe Garrett Jones) landed there?
I think the GMU strategy of turning their Econ department into an ideological libertarian haven has paid off, and it also makes their law school and other related fields distinctive in similar ways.
I think Tyler Cowen took over and decided to select for exciting-thoughtful-and-popular instead of has-published-the-most-articles-in-top-journals. Since nobody else was doing this, he could get a lot of exciting/thoughtful/popular people, but nobody feels like replicating this or competing against him because it would mean they have fewer people who publish the most articles in top journals, which would make them lower status among academic peers (and the most ambitious students).
Plus the libertarian aspect that other people mention.
Obviously a big part of the story is that Tyler Cowen used blogging to become a public intellectual and encouraged other people to do the same. But did he recruit people who were different, or just encourage ordinary professors to act differently? Did he have the power to recruit? This is an unnecessary detail. Maybe the person who steered the department did not become a public intellectual, let alone the most famous one in the department. Don Boudreaux seems like most relevant chairman of the department, 2001-2009.
Cowen did have some power. In 1998, he took over the Mercatus Center and convinced the Koch brothers to donate $30 million the next year. Presumably they are more interested in public intellectuals than in top journals. But Bryan Caplan was hired in 1997 and Robin Hanson in 1999, before Boudreaux and maybe before the Kochs. But maybe TC had informal power before that. Presumably he got the Mercatus job because he had indicated an interest in power, such as an interest in hiring.
I think they went to the trouble of deciding to be the non-liberal university and were able to build up a bunch of economists and other people of that ilk before it became impossible. You couldn't do that now.
There’s nothing impossible about that now. It would just be a contrarian move, as it was when they decided to do it. You have to choose to privilege a particular ideology, rather than going for broader area coverage, as most academic departments do. But there are departments in other fields that have done self consciously similar things: UMass with Marxist economists, Duke with Bayesian statisticians, Carnegie Mellon with mathematical philosophers. The fact that the George Mason choice interacts with electoral politics makes it slightly more edgy, but carving out a niche is a known move in academia.
The full university is not thought of in that way. Its just a good, not great state school in norther virginia. Its the econ and some law only that have this reputation.
Libertarians mostly, but yeah, everyone you hear about from GMU leans libertarian. It's more in the blogging world than real academic papers from what I hear, but it has raised their profile. I am not the expert here.
I asked my gf, who's an econ PhD student, and she hasn't heard of GMU being special from an econ insider perspective. Still I'm wondering what the story is behind the rationalist hero confluence.
Rationalists have their own criteria for selecting experts , which mean towards controversialism over conventi onalism, blogging over paper publucation, and.so.on. It all.ends.up being rather circular ... experts agree.with rationalists, because rationalists read experts disagree with them.
Does GMU actually have better economists, or just better bloggers in it's economics department? It's pretty easy to stand out if you're optimizing for something slightly different than everyone else is.
I don’t know whether they reward blogging, but they are definitely not using the same metric to judge performance as “mainstream” departments. Brian Caplan’s CV, for example, would not have gotten him tenure anywhere in the top 50 US departments. Even top 100 I’d say. Still, he, and most people at GMU, punch way above their weight in terms of influence in the profession.
Whatever they reward, they are not optimizing for their ranking, and, IMO, it has paid off.
How seriously are people like Caplan taken? I've heard mainstream academic economics can be quite dismissive of GMU, they'll call them "ideologues", lacking in credentials etc.
Also do you have any idea what kind of incentive structures cause academic economics to be so credentialist/orthodox and why GMU seems to be able to ignore them?
On how seriously they are taken, I'd say most people don't even know about them. Also, for many academic economists, if you are not playing the publishing game in mainstream journals, then you are not a real academic. These people are dismissive of anything heterodox economists such as Marxists, Feminists, Austrian, Georgists, and the fellows at GMU, and are prone to call them ideologues and the like.
For what it's worth, I am an academic economist very much in the mainstream, trying to publish in the mainstream journals, being evaluated for tenure on very standard publication metrics, and I think they (people at GMU) do serious and interesting work. Many mainstream economists agree, so GMU is more influential than what its ranking alone would lead one to predict.
As for credentialism in economics, my theory is that most economics departments' objective function is their ranking. To maximize their ranking, they need to publish in top journals, which are primarily controlled by academics in the top 5-10 departments, which are very much mainstream departments. As a result, the current system strongly incentivizes departments to be in the mainstream. In other words, most Econ departments aspire to be Harvard (and fail).
I don't know this for a fact, but I guess that Tyler Cowen made a conscious decision to ignore GMU's ranking (i.e., he decided he did not want GMU to be Harvard). Hence they do not give tenure based on how many top publications you have and use other metrics to evaluate promotion. If they wanted, I think they could become a top 50 department, but that would require playing the mainstream game, giving up their differentiation, and becoming "just another top-50 department." In the end, they'd likely be less influential.
Why don't more departments do this? Ignoring your ranking is not easy, if nothing else because most academics are status conscious and want to work in highly ranked institutions. I doubt that, within the current system, there could be many other GMUs. There aren't that many highly intelligent, non-status-driven people out there to fill in those positions.
Imagine you have these two alternatives: (A) eat half of a medium-size pizza, and (B) eat a whole medium-size pizza. Pizza is not a healthy eating choice, so both alternatives are bad, but obviously, B is worse than A. Also, for the sake of this question, let's say this is a one-off thing. Otherwise, you have pretty healthy eating habits.
I have the idea that option B is not twice as bad as option A, even though it involves twice as much pizza, but I don't have much theory or evidence that this is the case. Intuitively, if you eat half a pizza your body will process it normally, but if you eat a whole pizza your body will pass a lot of it relatively quickly. As a result, a whole pizza is worse than half a pizza, but not twice as bad. Is this roughly right?
(Note: I chose the half pizza/full pizza dilemma to keep things within reason. I imagine eating 10 pizzas is more than 10 times as bad as eating one pizza.)
I don't think your intuition is right. A healthy body can metabolize a moderate amount of high glycemic food without a huge spike of glucose, but a lot of high glycemic food will spike it to unhealthy levels. In economic language, marginal costs rise. The sixth slice is harder to metabolize than the first. I discovered this for myself using a CGM (continuous glucose monitor). My impression is nutrition and longevity mavens are converging on the view that swings in bood glucose, and therefore insulin (in fact especially insulin), are a major cause of metabolic stress and therefore aging.
I think that a lot of the reason that pizza (and many junk foods) are seen as harmful has three important factors (probably more, but these are the two that come to mind)
First they aren't very nutritious. Probably most people would say that eating a pizza with a bunch of veggies on it is healthier than eating a pizza with no veggies, even though you're eating the same amount of pizza. Basically, pizza (and potato chips, soda, etc) can often displace your other important nutrients. If you were going to eat the same amount of other healthy foods as the pizza/supplement very well, this point wouldn't be an issue. But, you probably won't, so it's probably slightly worse.
Secondly, they have a lot of calories. A small pizza at a place I like has about 1000 calories. That depends, as others have said, on how many calories you burn in a day, whether you need to gain/lose weight, etc.
Thirdly would be cholesterol. I don't think pizza is going to be low in it. But, neither are eggs. So once again, it depends how it fits into your diet (are you eating lots of other high cholesterol foods) and your activity (are you in great cardio shape).
In terms of marginal effects, my guess would be that it's small when you're close to being healthy (less than a 1:1 badness ratio), but high when you're far away. If you're prediabetic and you try to live off pizza, you're probably going to get diabetes and that's pretty bad.
Just to clarify my credentials: I don't have any beyond that I recently had to pay a fair bit of attention to these sorts of things, so I'm at least ok informed for my personal situation
This is not exactly the right question. The amount of pizza is only unhealthy if it is out of sync with your activity levels. It might not be healthy for a sedentary office worker. For a runner or cyclist it might be just the right amount. For a professional wrestler or construction worker it might be dangerously low.
Depends on why pizza is considered unhealthy in the first place. For simplicity, let's assume it provides excess energy to the body, leading to weight gain. From a caloric perspective, it would depend on whether the pizza replaces any other (healthier) food one would have eaten. If the pizza is just on top of a weight stable diet, I would assume that the weight gain scales more or less linearly with the amount of pizza you eat. If either (A) or (B) can replace lunch, but even (B) is not filling enough to replace dinner as well, then (B) might be slightly more unhealthy per unit of pizza?
OTOH, if pizza is considered unhealthy not for what it contains but for what it does not contain, the situation would be reversed. If either (A) or (B) can make you skip a vitamin-rich salad at lunch, that would make them equally bad, so (B) is just half as bad per unit.
Personally, I would be somewhat skeptical regarding general statements of some food being unhealthy. Depends on the BMI on the eater and what their alternatives are. Getting your energy from pizza is probably still be vastly better than getting it from sugar.
This strikes me as a pretty weird question. Why would your body process half a pizza 'normally' but a whole pizza quickly? Also, what's so bad about pizza?
I chose pizza as an archetypical example of junk food. Feel free to switch it with fries, burgers, etc.
My experience is that when I eat excessively, I use the bathroom sooner and, let's say, more "intensively" than when I eat normally. Perhaps that is not generally true.
I know the question is weird and poorly phrased. I'm just trying to see if there is anything to this intuition of mine.
Okay, it helps to know that this is about your personal experience, because it might be specific to you. I don't know of a reason why eating more would necessarily cause you to go to the bathroom sooner than eating a normal amount, even if it's junk food.
However, I've seen enough memes about American junk food that I can believe some of that stuff has an immediate impact on your digestive system. I just haven't heard of anyone having that experience with junk food where I come from.
If I had to guess, I'd say that if the quantity of unhealthy food you eat in one sitting provokes a digestive system reaction, there's probably something about it that negatively affects your gut in any quantity. There's just a threshold for your body to have a strong response to it. So, even if you don't have a digestive system reaction to that amount of food, I suspect the negative effects would still be there, even if you're not aware of them.
>I don't know of a reason why eating more would necessarily cause you to go to the bathroom sooner than eating a normal amount, even if it's junk food.
Torso has limited volume.
I've experienced the same effect myself, although eating a pizza in one sitting wouldn't be enough (the time I remember best was from eating two full piled-high plates of curry+rice; note that that's not really junk food). Basically, if you eat several kilograms of food in one sitting, that's litres of volume. Your belly can expand somewhat to account for it, but only somewhat, and the pressure rises. So your body decides "hey, better dump some stuff" in the form of large-intestinal contents.
I think Calcifer's mistaken, though; I don't think this implies a lot of nondigestion (it should be mostly the stuff already in the large intestine that gets dumped; I think it's just salts and vitamin K that get absorbed there).
Excuse me? Several?? Kilograms?? Admittedly I'm built like a twig and I'm stuffed after eating a single 500g pizza, so I find it hard to relate, but is it even physically possible for a healthy weight individual to eat two kilograms of food in a single sitting?
I mean, I'm healthy-weight* and I think the biggest meals I've had would have been somewhere around 2-2.5 kg (hard to be completely sure, as I didn't weigh them, but it sounds about right). Obviously, I don't eat that much very often, or I would be a balloon (my normal dinner+dessert would come out to ~800-900g), but at parties and stuff I tend to indulge.
*On the old BMI chart I'd be considered slightly "overweight" for my 6ft height, but AIUI that chart's out of date and that "overweight" band is actually the lowest-mortality. Certainly, my doctor wanted me to eat my way up to this sort of weight when I was under it. And I was in what that chart called the "healthy-weight" (or even "underweight") range when I ate most of the meals I'm thinking of.
Huh my intuition says the opposite. Half of a medium pizza isn't that much: depending on your body size and activity level it might not even be more calories than a normal dinner. Whereas a whole one is more clearly excessive.
If half a pizza is not excessive, make it seven slices vs. eight slices (i.e., a whole pizza). The question is: is the harm/unhealthiness of the marginal slice decreasing?
I expect harm of the marginal slice would increase. Your model seems to be that the marginal slice has less material absorbed because the digestive system is saturated. I would contend that marginal carbohydrate absorbed is worse because the ability to be sorted in cells is saturated it is floating around in the blood stream causing all the havoc that diabetics suffer.
Something that took me off guard in the last couple of years is the difference of my ability to remember things I've observed vs participated in. I used to listen to podcasts and be befuddled that I could remember details that the hosts themselves would forget or be hazy on from episodes that happened a year or so earlier. Similarly, as an aficionado of Diablo 2 speedruns, I'd be confused that streamers would forget that they had certain layouts in the map they were playing, or get details mixed up between different runs in the same day (D2 has randomised maps and items, so every run is different).
In the last year and a half I have begun doing both of these things myself (hosting and editing a podcast, performing D2 speedruns) and found that it's not that I had a better memory than the hosts or speedrunners, it's that my memory of events as an observer is far superior to my memory as a participant! This seems really counter intuitive to me, surely you should have better knowledge of what you yourself have done rather than what you've seen other people do.
When I watch a replay of a game I played (especially PvP shooters or rts games) many mistakes I made seem obvious that I missed while playing. Partly this is because that is the second time I see the game, but I think even more is owed to the fact that I can just watch instead of having to do it too (including planning what to do next which can be a big distraction!).
I've noticed what I think is a similar phenomenon: the days when you had someone zipping through TV channels in front of an audience, before on-screen TV guides and streaming. The audience just watching the screen virtually always caught the program they're looking for before the button-masher does (like in Toy Story 2 when they're trying to find the Al's Toy Barn commercial). The observers are able to give the screen their full attention, while the button-masher's focus is split between the screen and mashing the button as fast as possible. So like the others here have said, participation in an activity splits your attention between observing and doing, even if you aren't doing very much, any focus on any activity at all can distract from you noticing something a completely undistracted observer could spot and remember.
I see this all the time in Let's Plays; the player picks up an item, for instance, and then tries to find it in the inventory. He'll cycle around the whole list at some speed that's obviously too fast for him to notice what's on the screen, and zip past it two or three times, while I, the viewer, am yelling IT'S RIGHT THERE YOU MORON.
I like Laurence's explanation based on cognitive load, but I'm also reminded of a comment I once read that fans of a game often know the rules better than the game's designer, because the designer considered many different versions of the rules and can have trouble remembering which version became official, while the fans only ever see the final version.
Could be there's a thing where the person doing the activity is looking ahead to consider multiple things they could do, or multiple ways it could go, and these hypotheticals get mixed up with what actually happened. Meanwhile, passive observers only see one version.
This is commonly observed by the audience of let's-players, speedrunners and the like. Not actually having to do the thing (talking, playing) frees up a LOT of attentional resources which means that observers can often notice and remember more (or different) things than the people performing.
I attribute this partially to the pressure that the person is under: they're being recorded, which adds a certain amount of stress for obvious reasons. They're also the ones having to interact (with the game, or other people) which limits what they can attend to.
For example, you could have memorized a part of the map better than the speedrunner you were watching because you were free to direct your attention wherever you wanted, while the runner needs to keep an eye on their time, how they're playing, and what upcoming parts of the run to mentally prepare for.
There are certainly things that you remember better if you've done it yourself vs if you've watched someone do it, but there are many perks to being a passive observer too.
This is often referred to as the "streamer tax", where sometimes even "obvious" and large prompts on screen get unnoticed.
I think another aspect of this is that (the generic) you, as the passive observer are not penalized as much for making mistakes, which means 1) You're going to miss some mistakes you made, when the speedrunner + all of their viewers wouldn't because they clearly have a time loss 2) You're not going to remember when you made a mistake, unless you're judicious about recording when you're wrong. 3) Since you're a participant, you're automatically setting expectations lower for yourself than the "talent", so mentally any successes count as exceptionally positive and any negatives count as business as usual, whereas for the podcast creator / D2 speedrunner, successes count as business as usual and negatives count as exceptionally negative. 4) In the case of a chat talking to each other in real time, you're not really comparing one person's memory against your own, so much as one person's memory + a large percentage of chat's. If you had a hunch on something, and chat says it, you'd score it as correct whereas if you're actually playing, you'd have multiple possibilities in mind or have time pressure to decide when you're unsure.
I'd guess that OP is cognizant of the above to some degree, but unless they are relatively judicious with keeping track in a notepad, I'd guess a 30:70 ratio of the above selection effects to attentional bankruptcy.
So I just saw Garett Jones, a GMU economist, tweet this out- a proposed new system for selecting political candidates for office. The idea I guess came from Reddit, link below.
He proposes convening juries of randomly selected citizens to interview political candidates. It'd probably have to start at the very local level, so maybe 25-50 folks who are impaneled for a couple weeks for their local mayor, DA or sheriff's office. They review CVs, interview candidates, and have them do policy presentations, just like for a job. "Mr. Stewart and Ms. Jones, affordable housing is a major issue in our town. Please prepare a 20 minute presentation on your solutions, and then be prepared to answer questions afterwards." For transparency's sake all of this should probably be recorded/posted online.
You could have the jury then select the candidate, or you could have their selection go to a referendum, or at a minimum this process could be the new 'primary' with multiple winners and then the public could vote on 1 candidate from there. A new future jury could then examine their job performance at the end of their term and consider new candidates, etc. My guess is that having the jury select the winner would be fine for very local offices, and the higher up you go (state, federal office), it'd be more likely that this process serves as the primary instead. I would argue this process is about 100x more effective than current American political primaries.
Yes there are certainly some logistics to work out (it'd be tough for regular people to take such a large chunk of time off, though paying them could certainly help). I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts. Ideally the system could help avoid the demagoguery inherent in the current process. Being a legislator is a job, and it makes more sense to treat hiring them like a regular job interview than based on one's ability to give demagogic speeches or what have you.
Realistically, this would probably start at the hyperlocal level, maybe with District Attorney or sheriff elections (which really shouldn't be highly politicized/partisan). If it's proven to be effective, maybe it could work its way up the electoral ladder from there
Why break it up into 15 smaller countries? Why not 50? 50 smaller countries seems about the right number for me, for the United States.
It's a great idea. The only thing that could possibly foil it is if some of the countries (hypothetically, we'll name them California, New York, and Texas) were to become outsized. This would throw a wrench into the system. There needs to be a way to prevent the big countries from stomping all over the little countries.
Perhaps a common legislative body, one that is proportional representation, and another that is the same number per country, and make them work together?
Actually, I did think of one other downside. What if the governing body of all 50 countries became too powerful, effectively creating one single super-country, and all the 50 countries are just subservient to that super-country? This would probably be a problem. We would need some mechanism to prevent that.
Or, at the very least, if it happened, to have the citizens of the subservient countries be empowered enough to fix that actual core problem.
If the United States didn't already exist no-one would invent it. The way the state borders run, even the national borders (if the US broke up then so would Canada), the way the constitution is written and the electoral systems. These are all products of ad-hoc arrangements and piecemeal acquisitions.
Everywhere there are straight lines on the map there is tension, often to the point of war.
Everyone who wrote a constitution after the US only copied the good bits (and none of them had to accommodate slavery).
If the United States didn't already exist no-one would invent it.
The EU has been going through quite the growing pains. I'm all for confederations, but trying to make an effective continent-level government—that I am sceptical will work.
There are rich countries not rushing to join: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, UK; and mid-wealth countries that are holding out on adopting the Euro: Poland, Czechia.
All sorts of problems have arisen, from the migrant crisis to the euro crisis. Greece has certainly faired vary badly by being in the Eurozone.
And the rise of the Eurosceptic parties (soon to win in Italy, probably) does not seem to be going away.
I'd say the EU project has just about gone as far as it can in terms of integration. They could get tighter but that would probably come at the expense of loosing more members.
Not exactly on the same issue, but there's a revival of interest in direct democracy, where a professional political class and political parties are considered to be the problem rather than the answer. (Such developments in politics are actually pretty recent anyway). There's a good polemical tract on this by David Van Reybrouck, "Against Elections with lots of historical examples" Referendums are the best-known facet of this thinking, but other ideas include randomly-chosen assemblies to draft laws and single-term, non-renewable mandates.
This just means the candidate only needs to bribe the shit out of 25-50 people instead of promising massive pork-barrel stuff for his whole state. I guess you could see this as a net win, but I personally think that switching to a system where every political position is purchased from a small random assortment of citizens would likely be significantly worse overall.
If the identities are a secret, now we're handing off voting to a we-swear-it's-scientifically-random-trust-us group. Note how hard polling companies work, first to sample enough people randomly, and then to adjust that random sample to reflect what they think the final electorate with be like, for prediction purposes.
It seems like we could take care of this problem the same way we take care of the problem of rich defendants bribing juries of only 12 people, which doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
This is a good point, but I don't think the situations really match – for one thing, I assume that the juries are kept in line by a careful examination of their finances so that they don't suddenly show up with a yacht a week after deciding that Johnny Depp is not guilty of the crimes imputed to him? This sort of thing works because Johnny Depp does not control the levers of police power, but the prospective legislator does, or rather all of them do, and have a shared interest in making sure their client-electors get away with it. You'd end up with a chamber whose deputies' incentives are all aligned.
I interviewed candidates at Google for over a decade, I hated it, I never got better, and I still don't know if I did a better or worse job at interviewing people than anyone else. I seemed to be well-calibrated with other interviewers according to the statistics they kept, but maybe we all had the same biases?
Who would make a good software engineer? I'm not really sure, and it's a job I did.
If someone wanted me to choose who would be a good mayor of New York or California, I haven't the a clue where to begin. And I think most ordinary people haven't a clue either?
So I think it would we hard to say whether changing the selection procedure would do a better job when we don't even know what we're looking for in candidates. Figure out how to solve interviewing for ordinary positions, and maybe we'd have a chance.
The fact that you are uncertain about your ability to select the best candidates makes me trust in your ability more not less.
It's one of these things nobody can be certain to be good at due to poor feedback. Same as with judges (evaluating witnesses trustworthiness and other evidential considerations). But some people who have done this sort of thing develop an unearned confidence that they have really figured it out and KNOW what they're doing, mistaking noise for signal.
This seems like a perfectly fine idea for things that might be local and non-partisan...oh wait, now we're seeing all sorts of political fights over school boards (parents' rights, LGBT issues, selective schools & affirmative action), elections for district attorney (Soros-backed candidates, DAs effectively deciding not to enforce certain laws, etc.), and so on. Unfortunately almost everything is being hijacked by tribal politics and culture wars.
I suppose the easiest way to integrate that proposal would be for a political party (potentially even a third party) to agree to support a candidate that wins the support of the jury (which I suppose could be funded by donations to that party), either during a primary or in place of it.
If, as I understand the proposal from the reddit line, these "juries" will replace voters: no, I'm not interested in having some unknown group of people pick my elected officials, even if they promise to think really hard about it. Having said that, I suspect the whole thing relies on some shared assumptions about things that I'm not aware of, given the appearance of the jargon-y term "sortition".
EDIT: Actually, let's clarify: The phrase used was "a proposed new system for selecting political candidates for office". Do you mean selecting _candidates_ or selecting _officeholders_?
You already allow some unknown group of people to pick your elected officials, namely the voters. The jury should be no worse than the voters, since it’s a sample of the same group, and could be better, since they are given the job of actually thinking about it instead of being asked at the end of a long election campaign while they’re doing a day job.
Yeah, I assume he's trying to overcome the problem of incentives. If I am one of several million people choosing the governor, I have little incentive to bother looking into the candidates much because it won't matter very much how I vote. If somehow I found myself on a 13-person committee to choose the next governor, I'd figure I needed to pay a lot more attention to the decision.
How do you randomly select people? And make sure they show up and do what you want them to? Is there any reason to think they wouldn't just vote along party lines? Like, this seems to just be regular voting with with a vastly reduced sample size.
We have a system like this for jury duty already, and people don’t end up convicting or acquitting on the standard “party lines” of being tough or easy on crime - they end up caring about the case.
Sure, because neither someone that's hard on crime nor someone who's soft on crime want to convict someone who's innocent. But also, jury duty is about determining an objective fact. In principle, with perfect information, everyone should agree on the answer. That's not the case for a voting jury. I don't think we can just assume that the model of jury duty will transfer over.
This seems like a system where parties could potentially break down, actually. If you're appointing a single officeholder (not a member of a chamber), and the people doing the appointing have extremely-high information, there's very little advantage left for party candidates (as opposed to in chambers where party blocs have outsized power, or with low-information voters where the party endorsement itself gives you information about their policies).
This is a fair point. I was thinking about this more last night, and I think using the jury to replace party primaries (and then the general public gets to decide from the top 2, 3 or 4 candidates from there) seems more likely
You could figure out technical means to randomly select from a file of registered voters.
I'm pretty confident that the jury would take the job seriously for very local offices. I think the evidence we have now is that even in a hyperpartisan US, the more local the office is, the more voters are looking at actual credentials & policy over just party. (Bryan Caplan made this point in The Myth of the Rational Voter). There are a number of Republican Governors in blue states and Democratic Governors in red states, etc. I'm much less confident that the jury system would work when you get into House or Senate elections, but I think it's an interesting idea at least worth trying out
It may be true that these juries will take the job seriously, but I think you need to do more work to show that. I'm still not sure what advantage this is supposed to give over the current system though. Local offices may be less partisan, but that applies to regular voters just as much as it would to a jury. And now instead of having to at least nominally cater to the electorate, a politician just has to cater to 13-26 people.
This is my first time hearing about the idea, but presumably the advantage is that people have more incentive to make a careful decision when their decision carries more weight. The cost/benefit ratio for a regular voter doing detailed research is kinda dubious.
Presumably one could amplify this effect if the jury is given pay or other resources that help them to do a good job. (In fact, just being able to ask direct questions to the politician and get direct answers already seems like a pretty big research advantage.)
Seems similar to the idea of a bunch of friends pooling their charitable donations and selecting one random person to direct all of the money--it's more efficient than having each person do their own research, and the selected person has more incentive to do a good job.
I think the point would be to take out the cronyism of party politics, where climbing the political ladder tends to initially be more about impressing party insiders who can get you the right endorsements than appealing to actual voters. The broad majority of voters have no idea who they're voting for most the time except in the bigger important positions. Usually they just vote the party line for everything and only pay attention to primaries for President/Governor/Senate.
ETA: I should say I'm part of the majority of voters. I don't vote in primaries and I barely know the candidates for anything lower than Congress (though I might pay more attention to state/local politics if I didn't live in a deeply blue state with closed primaries)
We could call these random reasonable dudes "electors." Instead of voting for president, we could vote for electors, and the electors could put someone reasonable into office. We could then change the type of country from "democracy" to "republic."
It's pretty genius, actually. The only thing that could possibly foil it is if a two-party system were to come into the picture!
Philo Vivero is making a joke based on the current US presidential election system, under which you vote for electors and then the electors elect someone.
And apologies. I missed the random/lottery aspect of Fikisipi's suggestion. This is actually a big improvement, in my opinion. I have also often thought replacing an aspect of our current system with lottery would be a big win. My idea is simpler and not obviously as good (although I believe it's possible it would be).
My idea is to replace voting with lottery entirely. As in, anyone who's of the legitimate age, regardless of gender, race, IQ, education, or anything else, gets thrown into the elected positions.
The obvious critiques of my plan are things like: "What if someone of IQ=60 gets put into the position of president, or vice-president? What if someone super-evil becomes speaker of the House?" Or other forms of "What if someone unqualified gets to make the rules?!?!"
My counter is: we already have checks and balances. It doesn't matter.
But I definitely must entertain the possibility I'm wrong. If so, Fikisipi's improvement seems like a really good one, because it should weed out 90% of the problematic people (if there is such a thing) from participating in the legislative, executive, or judicial processes.
An interesting wrinkle: People selected for jury duty in the US often take it seriously - but these people aren't selected truly at random.
A random pool of jury candidates is chosen, but this pool is then filtered down by an adversarial & collaborative process of the judge, prosecution, and defense. A jury is intentionally, deliberately, and carefully chosen to be a pool of people that will take their duty seriously, and serve both as relatively neutral arbiters but also representatives of their society's unwritten values.
I'm not sure how directly you could apply that idea to a "political candidate jury", but I strongly suspect there's some fruit there.
There's an obvious benefit to filtering out prospective jurors who know the people involved in the trial or have an interest in its outcome, but what evidence is there that the other jury selection improves the outcomes of the trial? How would we know whether it does or not? It sure seems like a lot of the jury selection is pure gamesmanship--the prosecutor and defense each want to eliminate whomever seems the most likely to vote the wrong way. I have no idea how we'd tell if that makes the eventual verdict more or less fair.
> I'd like to think that means American society isn't as bad off as I thought.
It isn't and it is. To get a bit off-topic, I think U.S. society is kind of like one of those people who have a good life, well-paying job, stable relationship, etc., who is nevertheless cripplingly depressed.
It can't whole-heartedly celebrate its virtues and accomplishments, without someone from some side of the political aisle screeching indictments about the remaining injustices. But, neither can it put in the work of transformation and change to _solve_ those issues. I guess the USA needs a therapist?
On topic, I think the dichotomy is baffling at first, but makes a bit more sense on thinking. The USA's political process is fairly ad-hoc and unregulated, and within that framework, it selects for the most divisive and the loudest voices.
Jury Selection, on the other hand, exists within a very regulated and very regulatable framework, started with an intentional design, and intentional incremental & iterative improvements have been made to it, and it has the fairly explicit goal of selecting _against_ loud and divisive voices.
Since "solving these issues" necessarily means harming someone, there needs to be overwhelming agreement as to what the problems are, what the potential solutions are, and what the limits are in pursuing them.
This sounds like a ton more work than jury duty though. I'm not familiar with the US legal system but my impression is that people just need to show up, sit through the trial, deliberate, and come to a verdict. I can see how the legal system would be set up in such a way that this is doable for any random citizen, but reviewing CVs and preparing interview questions are skills the vast majority of people do not have. On top of that, I have to wonder if the average person has the degree of policy knowledge necessary to ask the relevant questions and understand when they're being given bullshit answers. Putting a professional politician in front of such a panel seems like asking fifty toddlers to wrestle down a gorilla.
I like the idea in theory, but even assuming every person selected for this job is highly motivated to do it, I can't see how you could escape the fact that the majority of them simply won't be qualified to.
I suspect that fifty toddlers will have an easier time wrestling the gorilla than 330 million bacteria, which is how it works when you ask people to do their voting as a side task on top of their regular job during an election campaign
This may be a dumb question, but in Singer's pond thought experiment, are there any arguments in favor of helping domestically versus internationally that aren't related to neglect or tractability?
On this page from Singer's non-profit, their argument for foreign aid is that 95% of American charity is already domestic. But assuming that a dollar spent at home could save the same DALYs as another abroad, is there still a case to be made for giving locally?
The simplest reason is people care more about locals. That is a perfectly normal reason.
Giving locally is also more likely to directly impact the quality of their life.
It is also more likely to be noticed and rewarded by friends etc.
You also are in a much better epistemically position regarding the need/effectiveness of your intervention.
The utilitarian premise that “all DALY” are the same makes fine sense if you are a disinterested policy maker on the moon. It is lunacy if you are an human person living somewhere, and not how ANYONE behaves.
If you son is starving should you think about whether the food you might give him might actually save two kids in some less expensive area?
No and if you claim to you are just a pretentious moron with a malfunctioning brain.
To take it to an extremely high level: You are a piece of genetic + mimetic information. Per Whitehead in Science & the Modern World, existence is a matter of persistent patterns recurring over time. So while you have subjective experience at an individual level, you also exist as part of a greater whole of your replicating information package. Preferencing your altruism locally helps more of your information package exist/persist both mimetically (people local to you are likely to have more shared experiences/produce similar cultural artefacts) and genetically (your future children are more likely to procreate with the descendants of those who live domestically vs internationally). There are a number of implications here that I won't get into, but generally absolves the need to rely on the veil of ignorance and other secular takes on philosophy that lead to the Drowning Child problem, but still ends in a morality that has concerns for others (although preferencing parochial interests).
For a less abstract take: your visibility of impact on domestic problems is likely to be far more reliable than your visibility to international ones. You may think there is a 50% chance that the local charity will fritter your money on a problem that you expect would have a 1 QALY impact, an international charity may present as much more impactful (say 10 QALYs for the equivalent money), but your personal ability to assess their efficacy will be much lower since you don't know the cultural considerations, possible negative externalities, etc. and it may be reasonable to reduce the estimate of your expected effectiveness per $ to something more like 5%.
Zvi touches on this a little bit here, where he identifies that his ability to assess the effectiveness of his impact locally (by giving a promising grad student money for a laptop) is much more reliable and thus can expect outsized returns compared to donating to GiveDirectly or something. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/06/06/transcript-of-a-twitter-discussion-on-ea-from-june-2022/
It's entirely possible that I'm misinterpreting Zvi's take, it was a couple of months ago that I read the post.
(1) A life in a rich country that generates technology is more valuable in terms of # of existing utils of humans in 2200 than a life in a poor country that doesn't generate as much technology
(2) The magic glue that makes rich countries the fonts of human flourishing that they are probably includes some non-zero amount of local co-ordination, which charitable giving helps foster and maintain
> But assuming that a dollar spent at home could save the same DALYs as another abroad, is there still a case to be made for giving locally?
I think that this assumption is likely wrong. Labor costs vary by orders of magnitude between countries, and I would assume that the ones with most absolute poverty (where the low hanging fruits wrt QALY per work hour are) also have low labor costs, so you can get much more work out of your dollar.
I think that an argument could be made for domestic charity if the alternative is spending it in a foreign country with a similar median income. American donors should probably not favor Norwegian or German charity projects over US projects, I think. But for absolute poverty, I would assume that well-managed project can offer a QALY payoff beyond anything you can get in the first world.
One obvious thought is that it solves a coordination problem. If there are a bunch of people that could benefit in the same way from aid, and a bunch of people who are willing to give aid, then having every donor aid the recipient closest to them helps avoid too many collisions.
But as you mention, there’s the tractability argument, that suggests the same resources can go farther closer to home because there are costs (not least, epistemic costs) in acting distantly, and the neglect argument, that suggests that if most donors are clustered in a different place than recipients, then focusing on the close ones will cause more collisions.
Scott mentions that the Pennsylvanian Quakers are the first historical culture to have recognisably modern moral norms, in regards to opposition to slavery/ treatment of women/child raising and other issues, in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
I'd like to know if this is a fair characterisation of their culture and if they really were so different to neighbouring cultures/every other pre-modern society.
Also he seems to speculate that we inherited modern norms from the 17-18th century Quakers, does that suggest our current attitudes aren't the product of some kind of historical progress and are just as arbitrary as any of the other moral system that have existed?
It does seem like the Quakers had more historically novel views than modernity in some regards, like animal rights and pacifism, so maybe they were on a Whigish trajectory but were actually ahead od modern society in some ways.
>our current attitudes aren't the product of some kind of historical progress and are just as arbitrary as any of the other moral system that have existed
I'm not sure what to think, but it seems like, whatever the right answer is, it would have big implications for the "realness" of moral progress and its causes.
Currently I'm leaning towards: moral progress is real and the Quakers were just ahead of everybody else for some reason (maybe genetics).
But it looks like a strong case for the "morality is is just cultural and arbitrary, Quaker views just became influential for contingent historical reasons " argument can also be made.
Prohibition is like eugenics and hardline communism in that it was unshakably popular among progressives right up until it was tried and entirely predictably led to a massive catastrophe.
If somebody could figure out how to cure the left of the need to *actually cause* the disaster before they'll accept that the plan is bad, he would do humanity a favor on the scale of Norman Borlaug.
Prohibition for drugs other than alcohol on the other hand is still the policy of the day. Why ban MDMA and Cocaine and not alcohol? I'd say that's a lot about path dependency, because alcohol was already extremely popular and entrenched while other drugs weren't. But that's the sort of argument that is inherently unlikely to convince progressives, because hardcore progressivism is all about identifying and smashing societal norms perceived as harmful, not compromising and accomodating them. Particularly in the "modern era" of the early 20th century with its focus on big ideologies and theories.
From what I understand it was eventually generally perceived as a disaster which was empowering organized crime, which is largely because it was. Also the widespread and increasing popular contempt for the law made the long-term enforcement of abstinence from alcohol look bleak; compare weed now.
I poked around in the dataset that Stable Diffusion is using as a corpus for training their model; LAION. It's basically constructed by scraping the internet, associating images with the text surrounding it, then providing a giant list or URL:s plus text snippets that anyone can download for themselves.
The first thing you notice by sampling random entries is how bad the text is. Picking something by random is likely to just be labelled "Funny images for laugh humorous HD wallpaper" than an actual description of the image content itself. I'm impressed that the model was able to suss out any content from this at all. The complicated queries people use to make the model create "good" images seems to be very much out-of-distribution!
There is also other AI-generated images in the corpus itself! Literally the first entry that contains the token decoded from "dragon" is this: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51363644206_c3e2880fa8_o.png - maybe this will lead to a future where the training corpus is "poisoned" by older models, leading to newer ones targeting the inferior output of older ones?
A solution for this that I can imagine is that people band together to curate content that they want generated; e.g. D&D people collecting all images of fantasy elves/dwarves/etc on the internet and writing detailed descriptions of them; which reasonably should improve images on that subject a great deal. You'd "just" have to create a website for it that people can use to collaborate and submit their work, and have the latest models regularly train themselves on on the output.
> A solution for this that I can imagine is that people band together to curate content that they want generated; e.g. D&D people collecting all images of fantasy elves/dwarves/etc on the internet and writing detailed descriptions of them
Gwern's insight is that groups of nerds will do this anyway, even if they're not trying to train an AI. You just have to find and tap into these corpi.
The technical plural of “corpus” is “corpora”, just as the plural of “genus” is “genera”. I don’t know what the Latin explanation for this is, but I know it from hanging out with computational linguists and evolutionary biologists.
That -us pluralizes to -i in Latin isn't a hard rule; "Corpus" belongs to a different word class (third declension) than the common -us words do (second declension).
I *think* the only other such examples where both the singular and plural is plausibly familiar to a well-read English-speaker would be "opus/opera", "genus/genera", and maybe "viscus/viscera". Not enough to establish a common pattern.
GPT-3 is already pretty good at generating "plausible text", and GPT-4 will likely be better, etc. So, as time goes on, aren't we likely to see an increasing percentage of all text on the internet being algorithmically generated?
Could there eventually be so much "artificial" text on the internet that it poisons the corpora of every language model and prevents further modeling? Either too much or too little entropy, depending on how you look at it?
I'm very curious if anybody else has thought about this.
“religions are attempts to define what 'good' means, and it's impossible for a person to live and function without some definition of 'good', either implicit or explicit.”
I don't think the definition works. Lots of things are attempts to define what good means, say Socratic philosophy. But philosophical attempts are by definition subject to discussion and refinement. You can disagree with Socrates and have a whole discussion about forms and caves and lights and shadows. Your best student can disagree with you and publish an integrated theory of ethics. And so on.
But nowhere is there a final authority. Religion (at least, to me) has a final appeal to a higher power or powers. Why do we have to do charity? It's a pain in the ass and I don't like it. Tough, God says so.
In philosophical attempts to define the good, all you have are your arguments. In religious attempts, you have an appeal to authority. I think that's a significant difference and can't just be skipped over to try to fit the two things into the same bucket. I think they are legitimately different things.
Unless you consider the higher authority to be the Good itself and to that appeal. The difference being that gods embody an appearance of exercising power directly. I want to know more about what these people were thinking and feeling. Were gods involved? Strictly practical in some way?
>Unless you consider the higher authority to be the Good itself and to that appeal.
I still don't think it works. If you make the Good your higher authority, you still have to reason your way to what an appeal to it should be. The Good is abstract, not an active intelligence.
If your highest authority is God (or the gods), you can still reason about Good, but in the end you need to check in with God (however your religion lets you do that - passed down teachings, holy books, intermediaries, ecstatic practices). It's conceivable that God wants something other than what you can see as Good, either because He sees further than you, or sees differently, or in the example of gods, because they're just different and sometimes Zeus just needs to get laid.
Practical example - I've either read or been told to stop giving to beggars on the street. It's supposedly not good even for them, as it makes their life on the street possible and stops them from getting real help. It's certainly not good for places they congregate, as it makes those places less pleasant and the more beggars you have in an area the more non-beggars will avoid it. But I still carry around small bills for them. (I like dollar coins for this.) And occasionally I'll still take one of them inside and buy them food. I do these things because I'm a Christian, and "Give to those that beg from you" and "Feed my people" are both things I'm supposed to do.
I think I am unavoidably Christian due to my upbringing where the p's never really did not comment on theology or make it part of home routine other than saying grace and faithful church attendance. (I have 7 years worth of perfect attendance) summer camp scholarship, BSA God and Country award. Just can't wash it put off my hair but early on I was rebelling inside against the robotic conformity of the thing. Why should I be singing these hymns if I was not authentically feeling it at the time?
I have a relative who's been sober for 35 years and still does AA and his position is he doesn't care if they are going to use it for drink, "they probably need it". I give on the streets because I see people who I believe are really in need in the moment. Keep bills on the console for for roadside beggars.
I'm open to what the Good is. It's a knowledge problem. I can't even say with confidence that it exists. Slightly more sure that nobody has infallible methodology for establishing their idea of it.
However humanity is the only place I know of in the universe where dialog about the issue can happen. Perhaps someday someone will have it. So I want to keep the question open. That entails humanity doing well, call it the viability of the whole.
Because I don't believe that anyone has demonstrated with sufficient rigor to justify imposing their version on others it's important to be in a position to say no.
And without a certainty about the good I dont do utilitarianism. Rather I prefer the least damage to the greatest number as a guide for my actions and my preferred social policies. I dont think these things can be put on a continuum that measures one against the other with a common unit of measure. They may not always be consistent. It's difficult.
The same would apply to any living thing. Which doesn't invalidate the concept. The implicit part flirts with circularity. And the explicit certainly doesn't require a god, or defined sacraments, or ceremony or priests, or meetups. I don't think the Supreme Court would give it standing as a sincerely held religious belief.
Yes, i agree. I think organisms all have to promote their own values to survive, where a 'value' is simply a mapping of world state -> real numbers. Single cell organisms promote values like 'keep my ph within this range, keep my salinity within this range, etc'. Cells promote those values by doing things lke activating ion pumps or opening selectively permeable membranes.
> . And the explicit certainly doesn't require a god, or defined sacraments, or ceremony or priests, or meetups
Agree, and i think the association of religion with 'these things' is unnecessarily restrictive. It's like saying 'it's only a religion if you have a sacred text that says a person created the world and we have to follow their rules while interpreting the sacred text literally'. Sure, LOTS of things fit that category. But the purpose of constructing categories is to simplify prediction making processes, and i think the behavior that 'religion' helps us predict is anything that's driven by the side of hume's fork that doesn't deal _only_ with predictions.
I think that is a bit limiting. Religion could also be seen as an attempt to impose a non-human supreme power in an attempt to keep human power in check. After all, what would limit the behaviour of an absolute ruler, if not some fear of divine judgement.
Modern constitutions could be seen as atheistic attempts to replicate that control of power.
> “religions are attempts to define what 'good' means"
I gather that some religions see the definition of good as one of their purposes, while some non-religions also try to define good behavior. Any community will form norms, "honor thy parents", "don't clean your keyboard on IRC", "don't talk to the police", etc. Some of these norms are pragmatic, while others have deep theoretical underpinnings (e.g. moral philosophy, theology).
> "and it's impossible for a person to live and function without some definition of 'good', either implicit or explicit.”
I would argue that clever sociopaths can thrive in many societies. Unless you are willing to stretch the "definition of 'good'" to also include naked egoism, that statement seems empirically false.
I think you'd get somewhat better discussion of the claim if you skipped the definition; the word "religion" brings in too much baggage that (based on your other comments) it doesn't sound like you want.
Honestly, this has a whiff of "Atheism is a religion too, gotcha" coming down the pike. Maybe that's not where you're coming from, or going, or whatever, but my antenna are up.
I don't think the first definition would apply to, say, ancient Greek religion? But I would agree that it fits most modern religions that I can think of. Maybe the other component is something about knowing one's place in the universe, and acting accordingly?
For the second claim, I would argue that "good" is a relative term: good for what purpose? I would certainly agree that people can't really function without knowing that things can be better and worse for particular purposes. I don't think people necessarily think that their lives have a purpose. But I think an argument can be made that we're happier if we do?
>I don't think the first definition would apply to, say, ancient Greek religion?
This is an interesting question which isn't as straightforward as one might think. As I understand it anyway, it's not clear from remaining evidence whether Greek religion in the form it's come down to us is a decadent form of itself, or if it was always like that. That is, it's possible that in say the Mycenaean period the gods were seen as straightforward avatars of virtue and vice, moral signposts, but that as sincere belief in them abated they became more like the characters in a comic play or frustrating novel that we know: more or less dickish yet unfortunately powerful meddlers. We do know that by the time of Socrates the Greeks had begun to question whether the gods existed at all or were just fables; several Romans also write in this vein (Pliny famously says the gods are metaphors for natural phenomena, for example).
TL;DR, Greek religion *might* have been about arete at some point before the classical period.
Perhaps a bad example. Maybe Roman? Or any of the extant "polytheistic" religions which are largely about performing the correct rites correctly, to produce good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes. ("Correct", "good", and "bad" being defined relative to the person's values.)
In other words, I suspect the idea that religion is intended to define some ultimate Good is relatively new and weird by human standards. And also I suspect that once we've tasted the fruit of Absolute Ethical Certainty, even just by cultural osmosis, we are corrupted and can never go back, and are doomed to keep reinventing it untill we achieve enlightenment and transcend beyond Good and Evil. Or something like that.
I'm interested in building a predictive model of how groups of people behave when they share a common definition of what 'good' is.
A psychopath is an interesting case, but i'd argue that their notion of 'good' is just an implicit belief in whatever they want in the moment. I suspect that the ability to empathize with other people is probably necessary for us to empathize with ourselves in the distant future.
If "a person's desires" count as an implicit definition of good, then I think your second statement is true, but not in a way that's interesting or relevant to a discussion of religion. Even the simplest animals have that sort of implicit definition (something like "food and sex are good, getting hurt is bad"), and I don't think we'd argue that animals have religion.
I think there's an argument in catholic theology that would say animals are mute angels; they don't have free will, i.e. the metalinguistic ability to define a 'good' concept.
Religion comes from Latin meaning 'to bind together', and i would argue that an individual's desires are like their own personal religion. The buddhist story of the chappana sutta ("the six animals") basically argues, "if your own personal religion hasn't stably converged, you'll be continuously suffering":
organisms like mammals aren't just simple machines that pursue pleasure and avoid pain; we are complex networks of machines, each of which seeks different kinds of reward and avoid risk, all of them tied together inside the same physical body. Effective religions tie these drives together in a way that stably satisfies them (i.e. generates predictions that lead animal upwards on a valence manifold). But since only humans (and maybe some other advanced primates) can actively anticipate the future, remember the past, and develop linguistic concepts that integrate memories to generate predictions, it's much harder for our religions to converge.
The first part seems trivially false, e.g. utilitarianism is clearly an attempt to define "good" which I would not define as a religion. The second part seems like some sort of motte-and-bailey where "good" is can generously be defined as any sort of goal of an agent, which they would indeed likely not survive without. Such a narrow observation wouldn't be very interesting though.
What what you say characterizes religion? I get the impression a lot of people have categories that require something like supernatural belief, but if Hume’s fork is a thing, shouldn’t all value-beliefs be “supernatural” since they can’t be empirically tested?
I'd say religion is a not-perfectly-defined category like many others; you can point to central examples (Islam, Hinduism,...) in a "i know it when I see it" fashion, but it gets unclear when you get to the corner cases (are the quasi-historical Hellenistic or Norse culture heroes religious figures or not?).
In any case, no matter how you define things it doesn't change any underlying reality. If you somehow proved that X should be put in the "religion" category, it doesn't mean that X is automatically bad, or that some religion Y is just as good as X since they are now both religions. Putting all value-beliefs into the "supernatural" category does not teach you anything about the truth or usefulness of such beliefs, it just at most weakens the concept of "supernatural".
Agree with this characterization; what i'm more interested in doing is understanding, in general, what happens when people share a conceptualization that unifies values beliefs under some framework.
There's a belief popular today which defines religion strictly in terms of 'supernatural beliefs', and i think this is ultimately coming from the perspective of "science as religion". If we define religion as "any beliefs about supernatural things", it allows for value-beliefs that don't involve supernatural claims to be thought of as being "fundamentally different" from value beliefs that do. This would be important if value beliefs are inescapable, and science as religion, like all religions, needs some explanation of why it's better than other faiths. "other faiths delve in the supernatural, we don't" is our superiority myth.
for example this line here:
> If you somehow proved that X should be put in the "religion" category, it doesn't mean that X is automatically bad,
Implies that religions is bad, or is popularly seen as bad. I agree that religion today is popularly seen as bad by white collar elites, but i claim that this belief is, itself, a religious belief that is incoherent. It says something like "it is bad to believe there is reality to good and bad."
The utility of any label is in terms of how it helps us make predictions. And what i'm interested in doing is compressing the similarities in _how_ people have, in general, when they share a bunch of value beliefs. Hardcore marxists clearly have a notion of what 'good' means, and i would claim that beliefs about 'bourgeoise coinsciousness' have an aura of the supernatural about them. But for most people they don't count marxism as a religion, and then fail to connect the dots to the massive damage done by other religious movements.
I find it hard to picture a religion without worship and belief of divine power controlling (or inspiring) everything as a basis for good conduct. Otherwise it's a philosophy or a code of conduct, in my opinion.
What I'm trying to do here is come up with a a predictive model for what happens when groups of people hold a shared definition of what 'good' is.
For example, i'm guessing that most people in this group don't consider AI risk to be 'supernatural'. But when viewed from an outside lens... yeah... it sounds like we are trying to prevent the summoning of a demon by casting the right mathematical incantations. I understand that there are far more complex 'inside view' arguments, and i know how to make them.
From what I can tell, all religions feel totally reasonable from 'inside of them', and the other religions seem silly from the outside. Well, that's how it was at first. Yet after years of practice donning the 'inside view' of a bunch of different religions, i'm noticing a lot of similarities in how people start acting once they have some notion of what 'good' means.
Having donned the 'inside view', as best i could, of so many different religions, i find it very hard to ignore how groups like EA act, in many ways, like a religion.
It's now hard for me to imagine an EA-style movement that doesn't end up being very interested in long term existential risk type arguments, just like it's hard to imagine a movement for improving the lives of workers that doesn't end up yearning for communist utopia, etc etc.
My conclusion is that values end up helping us compress our reasoning about events over very long timeframes.
Hm. I think I see what a bit of what you're getting at.
I'm tired, but when I think about this I'm coming up with 3 concepts: dealing with supernatural entities, beliefs that provide a universal ethical framework, and beliefs that regulate every aspect of one's life. These are analog, not binary. My intuition is that these aren't a clean Venn diagram, and that there's connections. My model of rationalism says that the 2nd logically implies the 3rd, and if it doesn't then one is not thinking about it enough. But I really don't like that 3rd concept.
I found your point about religious existential risk really interesting.
One thing that strikes me about rationalism and EA as religious-like is that they too purport to be fully general, ie provide an answer for every question big and small. "What should I do" (do what provides most utility for humans/sentient beings), "what is life about" (again, doing this), what is the universe/life/am I ("we don't have a codified answer but the ultimate set of rational tools to tackle it with").
I think any movement that goes beyond serving a specific purpose but becomes "vertically integrated" so as to fill all our meaning-needs has to also provide answers and goals that aren't concrete and achievable because we have learned that anything concrete and achievable was not enough to fully satisfy us. Thus we look to the stars (literally or metaphorically), so our one-stop-shop-religion/philosophy better does it too.
Also because true peace is formless but that's another discussion.
> The second part is hard to adress without first defining what "good" is.
Operationally, "good", seems to have some direct relationship with valence. Forgetting what a 'correct' defintion of good is (since this is, in some level, circular), i'm pointing out that, empirically, move towards what they think is good, away from what they think is bad.
So it then seems reasonable to me to say, ok, what 'good' means is just 'the top level concept that predicts valence'.
If hume's fork splits our minds into 'predicting' and 'valuing' portions, the kind of knowledge that encapsulates the predicting portion is called 'science' ,and the kind of knowledge that encapsultes the valuing portion is called religion'.
> but I figure that's not the kind of conclusion you're trying to reach
My goal here isn't to reach a conclusion but to compress and simplify the patterns in a bunch of existing observations, by presenting a compact conceptual framework for understanding values from a predictive perspective. So i'm trying to come up with a framework for answering questions like, Do all people have values? Do all people act in ways that promote their own values? Can people change their values?
> eople in society do not have an explicit *or* an implicit definition of how they should behave at a fundamental level, which in both cases would have to be learned
What about 'move towards pleasure, away from pain'? That's hardwired, right? What i'm interested in is understanding the relationship between "move away from scalding heat" and "move away from people who are frowning and shouting at you."
I can agree that "move away from people saying, 'kill the nonbeliever for their heresey'" is probably something learned, as is "move towards piles of green paper with the appropriate markings on them". My intuition is that what is being learned is a definition of a concept which unites all the innate drives and learned into a single predictive concept. So the reason people move away from "a group shouting, kill the heretics!" is because their brain has learned, that crowd of people is a predictor of likely pain and violence. The reason people move towards piles of money is that we have learned that a pile of money is a predictor of having other needs met.
If you then try to tie together all the concepts that predict 'satisfying needs' and don't predict pain, suffering, and death, what you end up with is some 'master predictor of positive valence', and i'm claiming this is what the word 'good' does inside people's heads: unite bunch of different drives into a single predictive model.
If you like the piece I'd love if you would consider subscribing -- It's free, and I'm at least 75% confident the median ACX reader will enjoy my writing.
(P.S., last I checked self promotion was cool in these threads, Scott, sorry if it's not)
Not having read your post, and responding just to "I think creative fields will lose jobs to AIs sooner and faster than other endeavors". I think that before Dall-e 2, maybe 5% would agree with you. But now, that figure might be closer to 50%. I think you may have just missed the contrarian boat on this one.
That's fair, I'm sure people are more open to the idea post dalle, but I haven't seen very much discourse about it much so I suspect the conventional wisdom still largely stands.
That makes sense, especially for the sort of art you see in publications and advertisements.
Graphic design, image manipulation, and stock photo sites seem most immediately at risk. This makes me slightly uneasy, since I've done work in that area before and wish I had it as a fall back skill, but there's already a bit too much competition anyway for dabbling. I also kind of like it, being tired of the visual atmosphere created by rampant stock photo use.
I would expect to see more installation and interactive art in museums or art spaces (for instance the new Convergence Station opening in Denver) and more textural home art that clearly isn't printed (along with, of course, a ton of interesting computer generated prints). As came up in another thread here, it would be nice if this leads to more interesting clothing and home decor prints.
i haven't seen anyone else using it for this purpose, which makes me wonder how much of a bubble we're still in with these tools⏤i.e. just based on midjourney's discord, it's still >99% nerds creating bland fantasy renders. so what happens when people with actual visual-cultural literacy get into the game?
I want blue #2 as a wallpaper. (#1 is intensely frustrating to me because it got about 80% of the way to a very classic style of chinoiserie, but then the little landscapes with houses and pagodas and stuff fail to resolve properly. Psychological torture wallpaper.)
A lot of that is the human factor I think. There's very few people who are both well connected fashionistas and tech savvy. I know someone who had a metallurgical innovation that could be hugely impactful for fine metals and he really resisted my pointing out the jewelry industry pays for a lot of expensive metallurgical stuff and might be a good target market. Not so much out of prejudice as simply that he knew nothing about it and no one in it.
Additionally, a lot of the labor is artisanal and not fully replaceable by an auto-generator which means there would need to be a concentrated effort at adoption.
silkscreen or sublimation printing might be your best bet for one-offs, or something like this maybe if you're wanting running yardage: https://www.contrado.com/fabrics
put another way: are the tech-literate in any position to capitalize as early adopters in the visual-cultural realm in the same way as say, knowing about bitcoin in 2012 gave you a huge advantage over most in finance?
Artists exploring new techniques, media, and styles can have massive influence by being early and producing good work consistently. Good luck, I look forward to a resurgence in patterned textiles!
Asterisk sounds interesting but not I'm willing to go through the bother of a mailing list- hopefully Scott will link to it again when there's actually something to read.
I tried to find out whether Asterisk has a Twitter account, or whether it's already being discussed on Twitter. I discovered that another Asterisk Magazine launched just last month. This is an unfortunate name clash :(
Their subject headings include "In Defense of Living", "On Kissing And Fucking Your Friends", "Hair Is Everything", and "Holes". It appears to be about pushing social boundaries to the extreme.
Luckily for Scott's friend, they have terrible formatting and the articles are unreadable.
It also evokes the fickleness of beliefs as one gets deeper into the details - the footnote to a seemingly-conclusive statement that makes it more complicated, sometimes flipping it on its head.
Disclaimer: please don’t turn this into a culture war thread. I’m asking this to try and find information, not get into a big debate over the nature/existence of gender. Thank you for your consideration.
I have been confused about the idea of “passing” vs many transgender people’s seeming openness about being trans. It strikes me that being open about being trans would be opposed to my understanding of what passing is.
Obviously, trans people are not a monolithic hive-mind, so maybe some people just care about one significantly more than the other. But is there some other interaction that I’m missing, or am I misunderstanding the meaning of passing, or is it some other thing? Thanks
Speaking As A Trans Woman(tm): passing is two separate but related processes.
System 1 Passing: this is a safety heuristic operating in the background. In the same sense that you might have a subconscious mental checklist for "did I lock the door, do I have my keys, whoa that dude looks kinda sketch let's locate the nearest exit, shit that car's muscling into my lane"...etc, trans people have one additional verification step of "is my gender presentation up to code?" Constantly fine-tuning one's mannerisms, body language, voice, etc. so as to be successfully perceived as one's desired gender more often than baseline.
Some trans people eventually get really really good at this, and adopt the new habits so hard that they're truly automatic and efficient; other struggle, especially when starting out (takes time for physical changes to develop, for example). But it's a process that'll always run in the background, perhaps only consciously dropped when alone or around trusted friends. This is part of what's poorly unhelpfully captured by "cis privilege": non-trans people run this process much less, and the stakes tend to be far lower. Getting "clocked" is awkward at best, and can mean death at worst. Constant Vigilance is a stressful way to live though...
System 2 Passing: this is the conscious act of being legibly trans, of being able to marshal one's subjective gender dissatisfaction into a coherent and communicable concept. So like what I'm doing in this thread, for instance. Or what happens in LGBT etc. spaces where everyone's pretty open about their standard deviations. This is where life experience comes into play; most cis people can pass a first-impressions Gender Turing Test if they put enough effort into it. But that's just a discrete action, not who they are/what they do continuously; it doesn't become an "identity", something central to the person. New trans people sometimes think they've got their identity all planned out before actually going through with major changes. These plans rarely survive contact with reality - you cannot actually plot out a new identity on paper and just follow it like a checklist. It's something that accrues with time and testing. A mature identity is one that can stand up to active criticism and interrogation, without having to hide behind paper shields like anti-discrimination laws*. As teachers everywhere say: "explain in your own words", "show your work".
If I randomly met you in real life, it'd be just another interaction with a stranger...time to shift voice, adopt extra-expressive mannerisms, be accommodating and submissively patient (I actually get angry pretty easily, so this can be grating sometimes, trying to squelch assertive aggression when it'd be a poor presentation fit). But here, you're asking a specifically trans question, so I choose to be open about my membership in that class for purposes of edification and authority. Basically, System 2 Passing is part of building and exploiting Everybody Knows-type common knowledge: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/
So to return to your original question, I think you're just observing the exceptions that prove the rules. Most interactions, most trans people aren't going around constantly reminding everyone they're trans. What would be the point? It's irrelevant information and not worth bringing up outside context. Sometimes trans people do prefer to make it explicit anyway - that is, identifying as a trans _____ rather than a _____, even in a situation where _____ would be a necessary and sufficient descriptor. But I notice that such cases are often aligned with virtue-signalling incentives. It'd be contentious to classify transgenderism as a disorder or disability, but I think Freddie deBoer sums up the mechanics nicely anyway: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability
For whatever it's worth personally, I'm at the point where I automatically pass well over 95% of the time and think little about it anymore (likely helped by the bar being somewhat more generous in SF, but that's hard to control for); the odd failures are growth opportunities to update on, adjust the algorithm. This has paradoxically been a bit lonely, though, because being clocked far less often means rarely having, well, interesting conversations like this! Because that sort of outcome is difficult to shoehorn into most dialogue trees. When it does randomly come up, people are usually like "oh you're trans? I didn't know" (and sometimes confused about the directionality too, which is extra amusing). I think for trans people that enjoy System 2 Passing, that might be one charitable reason they go out of their way to be open about being trans.
*These are still useful for other reasons, but "because The Law says you have to respect me!" is never convincing. It's not enough to build an identity out of. C.f. "you shouldn't be defined by statistics".
I don't have any close friends who are trans, but I do have a few distant acquaintances, and FWIW what you're saying makes sense... but... how do you explain the behaviour of the trans activist community ? They seem to be hyper-focused on making trans people as noticeable as possible, *as* trans people, and not just as whatever gender they feel themselves to be. Is this strategy valid, or somewhat counterproductive ?
I don't - I'm on the record as being deeply uncomfortable with modern trans activism. They picked several really contentious bridge-too-far hills to die on, much to social conservatives' delight and electoral success...which was unsurprising after Obergefell's fiat victory, but still very disappointing. I think the PMC activist class, and especially the bigger blob of "allies" which make up the actual bulk of trans activism (they have to - trans people are so rare, we just don't have the numbers to fully self-advocate), just couldn't settle for quietly incremental victories after getting a taste of major success. When one starts to enjoy the political fighting for the sake of fighting itself, rather than the battles won or lost...that's when things go off the rails, and activists make things actively worse for those they supposedly champion. Because it's about institutional longevity and delicious donor dollars, so The Fight Must Carry On. Not be won/lost and then wound down. (Basically: misaligned incentives.)
Me, I just want to be left the hell alone and never used as a political football ever again. This was a much saner and more comfortable identity when it remained extremely obscure and disconnected from all the levers of power. And I die a little inside every time social conservatives pull the matador act of waving the pink-white-blue flag...every time, *every* time, the Blue Bull charges blindly ahead. It's almost always been a bluff, bait set out to make the libs self-own! This seems completely obvious to me. Just like the harping about gay marriage largely went away when it became clear not too many actually cared + it wasn't election-winning, transgenderism could have just faded into obscurity. A quiet, dignified, no-fuss shift in social norms, with the magic of federalism ensuring people shift at the locally comfortable pace. Instead, we got put on the cover of TIME magazine.
I wanna be charitable and say The Movement Is Not The Ideology, but the corruption seems to run pretty deep in both ways now. Bad things happen when already-marginalized groups are driven into a defensive crouch, and then encouraged to double down even harder on a victim mentality. Friends of mine who are on board with the current direction of activism are Very Concerned about "it'll become/is already illegal to be [some aspect of trans], we must fight this!". And I wanna ask them, like...whatever happened to our storied history of grit, resilience, and thriving under a hostile society? I'll live my life the way I want and own the consequences, no matter if it's legally permitted or not. It's definitely *nicer* to not live in the shadows anymore, to be accorded some basic measure of dignity for fulfilling radically altered utility function - that's a world worth fighting for, sure. But it's not so important that I think one gets to decide tradeoffs don't abound, that cost-benefit analyses are verboten. Sometimes you just gotta take the L for the greater good. And that's my True Objection: resources burned on this petty and trivial distraction of an issue could be put to so many better uses. Both on the right (shut up and do some actual governing) and the left (stop balkanizing minorities, a rising tide lifts every boat in big tent coalitions).
The disconnect comes from the different levels of social cognition people interact on.
Humans have some really really strong inherent wiring for the machinery of gender. You look at a person and before you can consciously take in any one specific detail, your brain has assessed a hundred things about them and made a snap judgement categorizing then as male or female (because you better know which it is to know how to respond)
It's the instant-snap-machinery I want to pass to. If you easily and casually categorize me as a woman, our interactions are going to be pretty easy and productive.
Telling you I'm trans doesn't really have much influence on that piece (usually) so it's not a big deal - and I'm not ashamed of being a trans woman because I (unsurprisingly) believe that being a trans woman is a subset of being a woman.
As an imperfect analogy, an immigrant with a different native language might simultaneously
(1) want to speak their new country's language without an accent, and
(2) be open about where they come from.
These don't seem like opposed goals, though of course someone who speaks English with a heavy German accent might be readily identified as German without having to tell everyone.
Not disclosing that you are transgender is called “going stealth.” Passing just refers to others assuming your gender identity correctly based on your appearance, voice, etc. Someone could pass perfectly and still choose to be open about being trans. Someone must pass in order to go stealth, but not all passing trans people are stealth.
By definition, you are going to know of a lot more trans people who are open about being trans than the trans people who are not open about being trans. If your coffeeshop barista is trans and passing, you'll have no idea about it. Many trans people are open about being trans to their friends/family/partners, or on the Internet (which can be a good place to find other trans people, and where the consequences of a bigot knowing you're trans are lower), but they still want to pass at their workplace or in front of people on the street.
I don't think it is obvious absurd. Can you defend that a bit?
To expand: I had this experience once (finding out a dude I'd known somewhat casually was, in fact, trans). Having the experience once was eye opening, as it showed me that you couldn't always just tell.
Knowing that this exists means that unless there's some sort of study, you can't know the percentages. I've only encountered the one passing trans person. But . . . there aren't that many trans people and the non-passers stick out. I had a trans waitress and trans counter girl in the last couple of months who were very much non passing. How many counter service or servers did I have who were trans and passing? Zero? Two? Four? Ten? I have, literally, no way to know. And neither do you.
Considering that the prevalence of trans people is on the order of tenths of a percent of the population, you should be able to come up with a fairly accurate estimate of the number of trans counter-people that you *didn't* notice by multiplying the total counter-people encountered by ~0.005, and then subtracting the number that were noticeably trans.
First of all, Integer's assertion itself is like claiming that "there are over four thousand Bigfoots living in New York City alone, you just don't see them because they're hiding." "Okay, do you have *any actual evidence* at all of these Bigfoots? Where are they?" "Hiding." In other words, this is one form of a fully general unfalsifiable claim (stone that repels tigers, god of the gaps, numerous others). It's too glib, a bit too obviously a clever bit of rhetoric, devised to persuade in the absence of evidence. If Integer had proof, surely he'd show it without needing to be prompted?
Secondly, if some form of it were true you'd expect there to be a pretty continuous distribution between massive failure and perfect success, with most people somewhere in the middle where, say, you'd be fooled for a few seconds or minutes but then identify the person as a man, or there would be some single specific feature that gave the game away, but this isn't the case. Virtually all identifiable transsexual men are visibly, obviously, instinctive-split-second-ID men despite their best efforts to look like women (and nor, from experience, do they behave as a reasonable facsimile of women), and then supposedly there's this other cluster of wholly unnoticeable ones. Isn't it a weirdly convenient circumstance that apparently the appearance distribution is binary? (And do I need to point out the irony here?)
Thirdly, there just aren't that many transsexuals. There simply *can't be* tons of them hiding in everyday life because there aren't tons of them full stop.
Define "lots". Most openly trans people I see online do not really pass at all (and that's without actually seeing them in the flesh, and presumably the obviously not passing ones would likely be less willing to show what they look like) and I don't know why there be a vast overrepresentation of those sort of transpeople online vs transpeople I happen to meet out in the world.
The basic problem here is that if someone is convincingly enough trans, I could easily walk past them in the coffee shop or something and never notice, which means I can't count them.
I have an old and dear friend who is trans, and she went through a couple of years where she was *jarringly* not aligned with either gender--you'd interact with her in person and the gender-ID neural net in your brain would keep switching between male and female and throwing occasional error codes. Wheres now, she generally comes off as female, albeit with a few unusual physical features that are a tell if you are looking closely. But I think if I ordered coffee from her or sat across from her on a train or something, I would probably not guess that she had XY chromosomes.
Three major reasons come to mind, some applicable in different arenas, and not mutually exclusive.
1) Because sometimes one can pass at a casual level, but might not in closer situations, and being open now is a good way to head off drama later.
2) Because acceptance of trans people is still low, and thus there is a benefit in general (to themselves and to other trans people) of reminding the world that they exist. Same reason many gay people still make a big deal out of Pride - because it is seen as necessary for now even if one hopes it may not be some day.
3) Because people like having an Identity, for a myriad of reasons that can apply to any category of people: trans people, Irish people, the disabled, goths, etc. (Discussions of identity and the pros and cons thereof are obviously a very large topic that I'm not trying to get into here.)
"Passing" means that individuals who do not know you assume you are the gender you identify as by visual/audio cues. So, if you passed as a woman, even though you were born with a penis, then people would say "ma'am" automatically, even if they were huge transphobes (because they would see you and think, "woman"). If you could not pass, you would *have* to be open about being trans, since anybody looking at you could identify you as either transgender or a crossdresser/etc, so you would have to make it clear you were the former.
Even if you can pass, you might choose to be open about being trans. For the most obvious case, if you are someone like Buck Angel, who passes as a man but worked in the adult film industry as an actor, he passes - anybody looking at Buck Angel wearing clothes would assume he was born a man - but it is not a secret at all that he is transsexual.
As people generally find it much easier to identify people based on what sex they pass as, than their sex at birth (e.g. there's a clip where Ben Shapiro stumbles on the gender of a trans person, identifying them as their apparent sex rather than their natal sex like he intended), passing is highly desirable.
Do you know a lot of trans people? I know more trans people who pass than trans people who don't. I suspect you might have it backwards, because most of those who pass are not interested in advertising that they are trans.
More or less squares with my extended circle, though it's complicated by the fact that some people face financial and bureaucratic barriers to physical transition and have kind of given up.
On the other hand, in recent weeks I've run across two false positives: people (youtubers, specifically) who I assumed were MtF, but turned out to be cis.
Seconding this. I know several trans people who pass, and who I would not have known were trans if they hadn't mentioned it in front of me. But of course their names aren't going to be brought up in random Internet arguments over how well trans people can pass, because they aren't celebrities or activists.
There's a handful of transmen here at work, and they could pass in some circumstances, particularly if they were photographed. It's the particular combination of speech/movement that IDs them as AFAB.
Likewise, "famously passing" trans people (Blair White?) are presented from a limited POV/camera position/angle.
We *can't* prove nor disprove that a miniature black teapot is behind a rock in the Oort cloud, because there's no reasonable experiment we could actually perform today to test the claim one way or the other.
On the other hand, it would be very straightforward, and not at all expensive, to test the claim that "a significant percentage of the people attempting to present as a gender other than their birth sex do so successfully enough that they're not recognized as doing so." As a straw proposal, whenever interacting with any new person, you can record your first impression of their gender, and then straight-up ask them.
Will you get 100% truthful answers 100% of the time? no.
Is this polite? probably not
Would this pass an ethics review board for formal study? Has that stopped anyone?
Is there a better version of that experiment that could show comparable results? certainly.
The claim that started this thread is only "unfalsifiable" to the degree that we keep the conversation within the bounds of thought-experiment in a blog comments section. The base claim is _very_ provable or falsifiable.
Before you start accusing others of Russell's Teapot, remember that you started this conversation by making an empirical claim ("the amount of genuine passing is relatively low") without providing evidence. Unless you can find a study with quantifiable evidence about what percentage of trans people are able to pass, showing that it's low, the only evidence either side can provide is anecdotal/from personal experience. If you have less personal experience with RL trans people, then I think it's perfectly justifiable to give less weight to your proclamations about trans people as a group.
I also think you are exaggerating the claims of the people disagreeing with you. Nobody has said you are "surrounded" by perfectly passing trans people: trans people are a relatively tiny percentage of the population, and depending on where you live, the percentage who are able to pursue medical transition may be even smaller. The claim people are making is that your perception of the number of trans people who pass is, by definition, actually the number of trans people who both pass and are out to you, and that those two may not be the same thing.
If the bet is aesthetic in nature, Stable Diffusion should suffice, which is publicly released soon (weights available to researchers already). If not then you probably want Imagen
The bet is on language understanding - I don't want to find the exact wording right now, but it's about whether it can do the "astronaut riding a horse" type stuff on its first try without complicated query engineering. Is SD known to be good at that?
In my experience, SD requires more prompt engineering than DALL-E 2 to produce good results, and seems a lot more likely to ignore parts of complex prompts.
Which prompts work well seems to differ a lot between models, however- and that plus the fact that DALL-E 2 generates much more varied results from a single prompt makes it hard to get an unambiguous comparison.
The two are shockingly close in quality given that one was made by an experienced company with a ton of funding and the other by a newcomer. Though DALL-E 2 still comes out a bit ahead on average, SD does sometimes produce the superior image- and also has the big advantage of being able to produce much sharper and more finely detailed images than DALL-E 2.
Astronaut riding a horse is a trope now, so a few examples of this are in the Stable Diffusion subreddit [1] and [2]. The second round of their beta has open signups and it sounds like invites may go out this week or the next https://stability.ai/beta-signup-form
Bayesian reasoning is a theoretically optimal way to live in a world of uncertainty where one gains partial information and has unlimited computational power. Trying to *do* the thing that is theoretically optimal isn’t always a great way to go - sometimes other heuristics that look very different will get you closer. Most of us probably shouldn’t try doing explicit mathematical calculations for our Bayesian reasoning. But there are many contexts in which being more explicitly aware of our uncertainty and thinking explicitly about which direction various evidence should push it, is quite helpful.
One really important criticism is that it's wrong as far as it goes, but that it's insufficient. Bayes' theorem tells you how to /update/ your preexisting beliefs in the light of new evidence, but for any posterior distribution and any set of evidence I can find a prior that will result in it.
That means that for many purposes, frequentist confidence intervals ("This is the range of values of the parameter being measured for which our observation would not have been a 1/20 outlier") are probably a better communication tool that anything bayesian.
"Bayes' theorem plus all the evidence you can eat" still gives you literally zero information about the world. To form any beliefs you also need a prior, which will inevitably require some other form of thinking.
This is kind of reflected in the problem of doing scientific communication in bayesian terms.
"Our prior distribution was X, in light of this evidence our posterior distribution is now Y" is wholly subjective and invites challenge of the form "your prior is wrong", while "here is the algorithm for updating your beliefs in light of our evidence" requires much more mathematical literacy and hard work to understand, and much more formalisation of beliefs, than it's reasonable to expect of an audience.
It is my impression that Bayesian Reasoning can be pretty dissuasive of paradigm-shifting/disruptive hypotheses. As such, it may not be innovation-friendly, and may have entrenching tendencies. But I can't really back this up.
I am not at all an expert in this, and maybe there exist mathematical solutions to these problems that I'm just unaware of them.
I don't think that Bayesian Reasoning plays well with infinity, in several ways:
(1) Bayesian Reasoning stops working when you put in zero or one and you no longer update on new information. A Bayesian's response is that no probabilities are actually zero or one. Which works, as long as you're asking questions about finite sets. But if you're dealing with infinite sets, you often deal with important subsets with zero probability. For example, the probability of selecting a rational number from the set of all real numbers is zero, as is the probability of selecting an integer from the set of all rational numbers. You need a different way of thinking about zero probability sets.
(2) Bayesian Reasoning involves updating in a discrete manner. You update each time you get new information. What do you do if information flows in continually?
(3) The space of possible answers is assumed to be finite. You update your beliefs over a discrete set of choices. You can probably make this work if you assign beliefs over a single continuous variable (like the graphs Metaculus shows), but I expect things stop working if you want to use a much larger space, or a function space, or a poorly defined space like the space of all possible ideas.
So we probably should not use Bayesian Reasoning when infinities are going to be important, especially if we have to deal with a continuum (aleph-1) or something more complicated. I'm not claiming that frequentist statistics will work better here: you'll probably have to do some sophisticated measure theory if you ever end up dealing with a functions space.
There are plenty of people in the rationalist community who think that we should be using Bayesian Reasoning for everything. I think that this comes with the assumption that infinities aren't really real. Spacetime is discrete, not continuous. The universe can be fully specified by a finite number of bits. [1] Computer scientists are more comfortable thinking of things in discrete terms than in terms of continua, and I think this is why Bayesian Reasoning has caught on more in Silicon Valley and adjacent communities than in mathematics more generally.
Suppose you are a scientist [year~1900] who is measuring the ratio of the masses of different atoms and particles. A priori, the ratio could be any positive real number. What's the probability of any of these ratios being a rational number? Zero. For example, you measure the ratio of the mass of the proton to the electron to be 1836.15267343. Although you can't measure any more digits, you are 100% confident that the digits will not terminate or repeat. Sometimes, you measure ratios that are close to integers, but when you check more closely, you always find that there is some decimals that don't seem to terminate or repeat.
Now, to mix things up, you decide to measure the ratios of charges of variable particles and ions. Once again, the ratio could be any real number a priori, so the probability of any of them being rational is zero. When you measure the ratio of the charge of a proton to the charge of an electron, you find that it is -1.00000000. The ratio of the charges of all other pairs of particles or ions also looks like a rational number to within the accuracy of your equipment.
Should you believe that the ratios of charges are rational numbers? Bayes's Theorem says no. You started with a prior of zero. Your experiments had very good, but finite, precision. You plug this into Bayes's Theorem and it says that your posterior should be zero. So you continue to believe (with perfect confidence) that, if you kept on measuring with higher and higher precision, eventually there will be some deviation from being perfectly rational.
I don't think this is right. You should start to think that the charge ratios actually are rational numbers. The proton-electron charge ratio is exactly -1, not only close to -1. This is a very interesting result and tells you an important piece of information about the world. Bayes's Theorem precludes you from discovering it.
I think that the universe-with-finite-bits response is to say: The ratio of any two physical constants cannot be truly irrational, because an irrational number would require an infinite number of bits to describe, and the universe as a whole is only characterized by a finite number of bits. The mass of anything must be some integer multiple of some smallest possible mass, which is finite, so these mass ratios actually are all rational. Since we're dealing with finite possibilities now, none of these probabilities really were zero, so we can update using them.
This argument relies on a bold claim: "the mass of anything must be some integer multiple of some smallest possible mass". How are we supposed to get evidence for this? We have the smallest possible charge sitting right in front of us, and measurements with finite precision can't get tell us if other charges are actually integer multiples of it - and can't even cause us to update our beliefs in that direction. If we want to be able to pick a reasonable prior for a ratio being an integer (not off by orders of magnitude), we also need to know what the smallest possible thing is, a priori. I also want to say that we should start suspecting that a ratio is rational after only a few decimal places of measurement (say p > 0.1 after measuring two digits), even when the smallest possible thing is many orders of magnitude smaller. When 2.00 L of hydrogen gas reacts with 1.00 L of oxygen gas to form 2.00 L of water vapor [year~1800], that is an important result in favor of atomic theory and this being a simple chemical reaction (2 H_2 + O_2 -> 2 H_2 O, as opposed to e.g. 2004 H_333 + 999 O_370 -> 1998 H_334 O_185), even though we are more than 20 orders of magnitude away from the size of atoms. Bayes's Theorem would require a lot more precision before we can actually start concluding that these are integers.
Yes, they do. But they assign zero probability to the rational numbers. The region with nontrivial probability will narrow around the ratio = -1, but within any interval, there are always infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers. Even if you know that it's between -0.9999 and -1.0001, you'd still expect that it's one of the irrational numbers in that interval.
the rational part doesn't matter, right? any single number has probability 0. Is the evidence that it is exactly 1 based solely on measurement precision, or is there other evidence that suggests it is exactly 1? If it is just measurement precision, I see no problem in not favoring exactly 1. If there is other evidence, then I don't see there is a problem. Even if it is something like 'this is suspiciously close to 1', well then aren't your priors including that physical laws of the universe tend to favor unit ratios?
Bayesian reasoning is a super useful model / tool and I fully endorse its use in the right settings! I don't think it works as "a general theory of human reasoning" (nor is it supposed to) because there are aspects of uncertainty it doesn't quite handle correctly.
For example, suppose I tell you that a value x is between 0 and 1, but you know nothing else about it. You might say "well, I can model the fact that I don't know anything about x by using a uniform prior." But this isn't quite the same thing, because you also don't know anything about x^2! And if x is distributed uniformly, then x^2 can't be.
(I learned this example in a class, I don't know its source.)
This is known as “Bertrand’s paradox” and shows that there can’t be objectively correct priors for the zero information case, and I think therefore shows that even with information, there isn’t an objectively correct posterior. All Bayesian reasoning tells you is whether priors are correctly related to posteriors by particular evidence, and not which priors to have. Anyone who claims to tell you which priors to have is relying on you sharing some further back prior with them (like that some population is representative).
I don't have access to my notes on good critiques of Bayesianism at the moment, but the obvious cases are for logical uncertainty or when you don't know what your hypothesis space even is or don't have any clue how to assign probability mass to your hypothesis space or when your hypotheses are physically impossible to reason with.
The middle two tend to occur when you are confused about a topic so thoroughly that your hypothesis can't produce crisp predictions (e.g. me about consciousness, questions about the nature of "reality" etc.) They can't really be resolved without deconfusing yourself, which is sort of about making things clear enough that you could see how to be Bayesian about them? Not sure how to describe it because I don't have a general procedure of how to deal with this stuff. No one does as far as I can tell, so it is a criqitue of every style of reasoning I guess.
The others can be dealt with via variations on the uncomputable Bayesian paradigm e.g. logical induction, Jeffrey's work on generalising Bayesianism, infra-physicalism by Vanessa Kossoy. Though these are incomplete research agendas.
I think those are the best critiques I can think of at the top of my head.
There are three fairly common reasons to prefer Frequentist reasoning to Bayesian. I make no comment about whether these are the best critiques, but they are fairly persistent in the literature and so at least clearly hard to refute.
The first is that Bayesian reasoning is more computationally intensive, and many techniques that are trivial in Frequentist frameworks are either fiendishly difficult or unsolved in a Bayesian framework. For example as far as I know there's no Bayesian equivalent of a Kaplan-Meier curve, and I know for sure no sane person would try and do non-parametric statistics in a Bayseian framework. Since in theory both frameworks should usually produce similar answers, reinventing the wheel is often not sensible
The second is that priors are both philosophically and practically challenging. On the philosophical challenges I'm not best placed to speak, but on the practical challenges it is hard to usefully use Bayesian statistics in a discussion with a bad faith actor, because they can get to any conclusion they want with a sufficiently motivated prior. Even a good faith actor might be bringing weird background beliefs into the discussion which has the same sort of effect. I use Bayesian stats all the time at work and I've literally never seen anyone use an informative prior for this reason. Note that Frequentist stats has an analogous problem with p values, but at least there's some consensus on what sensible values for these are.
Finally, Bayesian statistics is not preferred in fields where almost all of the insight comes from the data and the prior is likely to be uninformative - particle physics used to be the classic example, but I've no doubt there are some Bayesian techniques applied there nowadays. This is because the value of the Frequentist toolset - especially making definitive judgements about the findings of well-specified experiments - outweighs the value of a prior in those situations
I agree with much of this, but here are a few comments.
There are indeed problems where a frequentist approach is much, much simpler than a Bayesian approach. But plenty of sane people do Bayesian non-parametric modeling (for some definition of "non-parametric"). In fact, there is a huge literature on this. See, for example, my paper at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford/dft-valencia.abstract.html
It's also true that the intellectual challenge of formalizing your true prior beliefs can be immense. But I'm not convinced that unconscious bias is more of a problem for Bayesian methods than frequentist methods. In fact, Bayesian methodology has built-in checks, such as drawing samples from your prior and seeing if they look sensible, that aren't present in frequentist inference. In practice, you have to stop contemplating what is the right prior at some point and settle for an approximation, but checking the sensibility of the posterior can sometimes reveal that you should go back and think harder.
In my experience, what people call "bayesian reasoning" goes badly when they are trying to reason about a immensely complex problem and become overconfident in their ability to think about it clearly because they couch their thinking in bayesian language. Garbage in, garbage out type thing. This isn't a limit of bayesianism as a tool but rather is user error, and is also not unique to it; any sufficiently powerful tool will cause this effect as people defer to its usually awesome power and aren't worried enough about misusing it
Yes yes yes to "garbage in garbage out!" This is the most common misuse of Bayesianism I see -- taking a bad or misinformed argument and adding Bayesian words to it to make it seem more "technical" or "nuanced".
Yeah I've never understood this at all. If people are changing their mind in response to evidence then surely they mean they are 'adjusting their *posteriors*' (hehe). I think I agree with you that 'priors' is just a shibboleth people use to identify that they are doing Cool Bayesian Reasoning and not Boring Regular Updating Beliefs On Evidence
Compounding Pharmacies get a lot of attention from the DEA and the FDA. This is because the compounding is a lot like manufacturing. Making a lot of drugs that look like distribution (esp minors) will get attention.
Personally, book clubs are not really my thing, but a list of recommended books from beginner to advanced would be awesome! What would be even better would be a blog post or series of posts giving a surface understanding and overview of the field, though I totally know that is much higher effort.
Would second @a_real_dog in saying it is possibly related to hyperglycaemia, but your particular response to it might just be down to how your brain is wired.
In diabetes, acute hyperglycemia causes massive behavioral changes, looking like a mental illness to onlookers. With healthy hormonal regulation this shouldn't be that apparent, but some small disturbances are normal.
On the off chance that your comment was your way of saying, “well, duh. “ I assume that you also think the hard problem of consciousness is a made up problem. Something we have invented to perpetually baffle ourselves with.
is 'too much' enough to give you a sugar high? Basically all stimulants can cause anxiety at a high enough dose, it could be a similar mechanism though that is pure speculation on my part.
There can still be a step change from a feminine man and a masculine women. For instance there is a step change in testosterone levels with men at “300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) or 10 to 35 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L) Female: 15 to 70 ng/dL or 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/L.”
Gender only extremely recently came to mean what you're claiming it does. Before recently, it was just a way of saying 'sex' without using the word sex (because it has come to mean sexual intercourse too).
If we want to try an drag a definitional argument into the empirical, the conflation could be more or less justified based on how well the two concepts are correlated. I suspect ~nobody is willing to stick to a consistent principle for how sharp the factor analysis needs to get before it's defensible to split or merge concepts.
I admit to being math-stupid, as is stereotypically off-button for my gender, but I don't understand why positing gender as a "spectrum" grants the model any additional predictive power over the common consensus of a strongly bimodal distribution. It really is quite remarkable how wildly varying human societies across time and space rally around the same gender Schelling points again and again! Spectra seem to put too much emphasis on the tails and mushy middle, which really are quite uncommon. (Somewhat less so for the related model of sexuality, but I'm not gonna do the "conflating sex and gender" thing in this thread.)
All words are spectra, there's nothing special about gender. This is just the old psych insight about how people will say robins are more birdlike birds than ostriches.
Now this only makes sense with a definition of spectrum which does not work for colour, but does work for things like the so-called autistic spectrum. The colour spectrum is one-dimensional, linearly ordered. Red is closer towards one end and violet is closer to the other.
Different autistics have different proportions of the relevant traits. One person's strength of trait x doesn't predict their strength of trait y. You could casually refer to one person as "more autistic" than another, but you'd be summing up their levels of all relevant traits, or looking to at how much difficulty they (or those in their environment) experience because of their autistic traits.
FWIW, I don't consider autistic spectrum disorder to be a spectrum, because if it were, the colour spectrum (rainbow) would need a new term. The two meanings are too far apart, and I don't recall uses of "spectrum" similar to autism until the DSM introduced their new combined name for autism, "high functioning autism" (HFA), and Asperger's syndrome.
> The colour spectrum is one-dimensional, linearly ordered. Red is closer towards one end and violet is closer to the other.
This is true of "color" meaning electromagnetic radiation within the visible spectrum. This is not true of "color" referring to the human visual perception, which has at least three different independent axes (chromaticity graphs are complicated!) even before we get into edge cases like tetrachromats and impossible colors. I don't think this is a mere quibble; word having layers of ambiguity is more or less the whole point!
"however, the meaning of gender as "sexual identity" was not far behind, showing up in the 15th century already."
No, this is once again revisionism. Gender as a euphemism for biological sex showed up then. "Sexual identity" is not a real thing and certainly not a 15th century concept.
Attempting to steelman Cosimo Guisti's point, there is a difference between a word being used to mean roughly the same thing it has been used to mean for centuries, with relatively little semantic drift, and that same word being used in a way that has been invented only recently, to refer to a concept that may not even be coherent, or a thing that may not even exist, which is being imposed by fiat by activists who are clearly engaged in a project to radically change the way males and females interact, with goals that many people find objectionable. People are naturally going to be resistant to the second usage.
It's more than simple misuse; it's disinformation, 'progressives' favorite subject. When they complain about disinformation, though, they mean conservative disinformation, not liberal disinformation. Gender disinformation has cost billions, and won't be going anywhere for at least a decade. It wasn't until the 1980s that pop media finally gave up bell bottoms and mutton chops.
>The original 14th meaning of "gender" in English is "class, kind", with the meaning of grammatical gender closely following; however, the meaning of gender as "sexual identity" was not far behind, showing up in the 15th century already.
I'm always pleased (sic) to meet someone who is so self-confident as to assure me they know how I feel, and what I think, better than I do myself.
Claims that "everyone believes in" are among the most trivially falsifiable kinds that exist.
Of course your second paragraph contradicts your first, by suggesting that it's conceivable to you that some individual exists who does not in fact believe the same thing that "everyone" believes ;-)
As it happens, I'm on your side (I guess) in the US political debate. But wooly thinking and rhetorical tricks tend to set me off regardless.
I could critique farther. But other people have already made most of the points I'd have included.
I think the claim you meant to make my be that all societies regard gender as something more complex than two non-overlapping categories with all members of each category essentially identical on relevant factors. You may also have wanted to make the claim that the same applies to all individuals.
That doesn't mean they believe in a "spectrum". It doesn't define what you mean by "spectrum". If the belief is that there's no overlap in relevant criteria, but variance within each category, is that a "spectrum"? If the belief is that the traits are orthogonal, not opposite, such that they can imagine a hermaphrodite or a full neuter, is that a "spectrum"?
I don't see either of those as being a spectrum.
Even if they have "males", "females", and "rare unfortunates who fit neither category". I still can't see it being a "spectrum".
So two spectrums, one of masculinity and another of femininity seems the same(ish) to you as one spectrum, with ultra butch on one end, and ultra femme on the other, with or without all men closer to the butch side than any woman, and vice versa?
There are men who share *some* of the standard characteristics of women, and women who share some of the standard characteristics of men. But almost every human ever born shares enough characteristics with other members of their gender to unambiguously classify them as that gender.
To illustrate, an animal can be a cat or a dog, but never both. Catness vs. dogness is not a spectrum. But are there some cats that act doglike in some ways, for example by enjoying going on walks? Yes. Are there some dogs that act like cats, for example by wanting to stay home all day? Yes. But any animal is unambiguously either a cat or a dog, or neither.
I personally approach this from another angle. "Gender" is a classification that humans have created to make reasoning about people easier. In traditional bigender (is that a word?) societes, most people can be put in one or the other category, and you can use that knowledge to quickly know what you can/should do next. For example, reproduction through sexual activity. In traditional bigender societes (let's roll with it), if you are a male you look for a female, if you are a female you look for a male. This will work in most (not sure how much) of the cases. Now let's imagine a society of beings that for some reason can't create categories about gender and reason about it. The checklist would be something like: What are my chromosomes? How did my gonads evolve? Are they functional? Am I fertile? Does that person meets all the same criteria, except instead of having the same thing we have something different? My list is probably not exact, this is not my domain. But my point is that something that before took a fraction of a second in most cases now become something else entirely.
The thing that people forget is that we went from a low-information society (with 2 categories) to a high-information society (where in some cases categories are meaningless and you need a checklist to take your decision of "can I have children/sex/a nice movie night with them?". For example, I see from time to time people say that trans women aren't women because they can't reproduce, which would imply that infertile women are not women either, and in this case fall in the male category, which wouldn't make any sense. The truth is that you could never assume that someone can make children with you just because of their secondary sexual characteristics, clothes and way of being. To take an example on the male side, sperm counts have been dropping, and with them fertility. Just like not every person who presents as a woman may have a functional womb and ovaries, not every person that present as a male is fertile. I'd even say that most people have no idea of their actual fertility before trying to actually use it.
As for the variations on the masculine and feminine spectrum, I think one important thing is that not everyone may think of it as a spectrum from masculine to feminine. Not meeting up society's expectations on your gender won't always mean that you will meet the one of the opposite gender. For example, in most historical novels that I've read, a man that stopped working/providing for his family didn't suddenly start doing his share of housework, he would gamble, drink, sit at home doing nothing. Thus he's considered as less of a man, but not more of a woman.
>In traditional bigender (is that a word?) societes
Replying to answer that question: It is a word, but it mostly is used to refer to a specific flavor of genderfluid/nonbinary identity. It works alright here, but the most accepted term for what you're describing is either "binary gender societies" or "binary-gendered societies".
Losing fertility is part of the female lifecycle among humans. I suppose since a pre-pubescent is not a "woman" but instead a "girl" we could create a category for post-pubescent, but haven't done so. But over the entire lifecycle, the organism is still following one of the two strategies:
Well, you say abandoned, but there's not a whole lot of evidence that worship of any such entity/entities was ever terribly widespread. That motif (with many others that neopagans now regard as ancient) was mostly made up in the 19th and early 20th century by the likes of Graves and Yeats.
I don't see any hostility, I think it's more of a reflections of the people we've talked with. I don't live in America, and most of the people I talk to are not very online and not very aware of all the discussions about gender. 90% of the time where I mention infertile women, people are genuinely surprised because they didn't think about that specific case. My argument that many people have very vague notions of what gender is is based on my experience. I can absolutely see that in different spaces people have been over this already and it's considered common knowledge, in which case your reaction in warranted. But here in Europe talking with 30 something people that are not very online in general, talking about fertility opens the discussion in ways they haven't considered.
My goal when doing this isn't to shut down the discussion or force a definition/opinion on people, it's to bring new things that they may not have thought about, because I usually have more exposure to that than them. That usually leads to interesting discussions, anecdotes, and exchanges where we generally all learn some new things and generally don't change much our initial positions. It's a good way to defuse an incoming shouting fight between people that don't agree on definitions into a more calm discussion.
Speaking about definitions, your point about overanalyzing a casual remark is important too. Some people use words in a precise manner, others in a fuzzy way, with some people it depends on the word used, the context. I don't know where you "pick up" the discussion when you consider something like that as overused and understood by everyone taking part in the debate. In any case, thank you for taking the time to say this nicely, I'll keep it in mind if that subject comes up again online.
A woman who can not bear children is still a woman. She does not become male/a man via not bearing children.
A 'trans woman' is not a woman. That person may prefer to dress and act as a woman does in their society, use female pronouns and use chemicals and/or surgery to modify the normal, non pathological function of their male body. But they can not make that body female, nor will they become a woman via this process.
I get that people want the ability to own their bodies, their abilities and their fates. If I could change some things about myself I would. But not all of our wishes are possible and not all of them are good for us to achieve or even desire.
I think that you're not wrong, on your own terms, but you're using the word 'gender' in a far more bailley-ish way than modern gender ideologues. Under your terminology, even the most effeminate man can still be a man if he meets the biological criteria for maleness, whereas under standard modern gender ideology, (roughly,) the more effeminate the person is, the more likely they are to actually be of female gender, and thus to actually be a woman, regardless of their biology. It's that latter claim - that whether you are a man or a woman - or to what *degree* you are a man or a woman if you are really going to take the spectrum seriously (I assume there must be some people out there who would claim to be, say, 70% a man, 30% a woman, though I'm not sure I've come across any) - is in principle not coupled to your biology, or at least, your biology is trumped by psychological considerations ... it's that sort of claim that people who are gender-skeptical are skeptical about.
"...under standard modern gender ideology, (roughly,) the more effeminate the person is, the more likely they are to actually be of female gender, and thus to actually be a woman, regardless of their biology."
I can't begin to speculate on what standard (!) modern gender ideology says, but that's certainly not how it works in practice. If a biological female who is quite masculine (the hackneyed stereotype of the butch lesbian springs to mind) nonetheless identifies as a woman, no "modern gender ideologue" I've ever met is going to insist that she's actually a man.
There is a tension between the parts of gender ideology that insist that gender, or even sex, is a spectrum, and the parts of it that, in practice operate on an implicit ... 'binary' isn't exactly the word, maybe 'discrete categorization', in which you are either definitely a man, definitely a woman, definitely a non-binary, (...add however many categories you want to run with). But the part of it that operates on the principle that if a biologically male child is into, say, ponies, tiaras and ballet, then they are probably trans, is presumably instantiating something like 'the more stereotypically female traits you exhibit, the more probable it is that you are a girl'.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently : the more effeminate a man is, the more likely some prominent parts of modern gender ideology are to want to encourage him to identify him as a women (and, having done so, the less taking-the-implications-of-the-idea-of-'spectrum'-seriously parts are to simply accept that identification and agree that that person *is* a woman, just as much as any normal female adult.
Various internal tensions and tempest-in-a-teapot internal politics do arise in trans and genderqueer circles, sure. No group of people with strongly-held views is perfectly harmonious, not even trans rights activists.
But if there is one unifying general courtesy that's observed, it's that of self-identification. The whole idea of assigning someone's gender for them is anathema - which is a handsomely libertarian notion, isn't it? You'd think it'd get better press around these parts.
In practice, if a child exhibits stereotypically other-gender behaviour *and* insists they're the other gender *and* is consistent about this, then eventually and ideally the child, the parents, and a gauntlet of counsellors, child psychiatrists, etc. end up grappling with the issue. At the end of a long, winding road, the child might get treated with GnRH antagonists to defer the decisive impact of puberty until they're competent to make the decision.
Sometimes parents hate the idea while the child remains adamant, courts get involved, the child wins the case, and culture war happens, to the tune of The Woke Will Trans Your Kid Without Your Consent. I suspect that merely insisting on the validity of the option feels like pressure in the direction of that option to people who are extremely leery of it in the first place.
The problem with just accepting what people identify as is that it's self-defeating - it destroys any meaning that the thing they're identifying as previously had. If you define a woman as "someone who identifies as a woman," that's a circular definition that begs the question of what such people are actually identifying as. At that point, you could just as well call men "foo" and women "bar" and have people identify with whichever collection of symbols they prefer, because the referent has no meaning.
Gender ideologues should be able to articulate a difference between a tomboy and a trans man other than "it's just whatever someone identifies as." If they can't, that means there's no actual semantic content to those words, just a phonetic and symbolic difference.
"The whole idea of assigning someone's gender for them is anathema - which is a handsomely libertarian notion, isn't it? You'd think it'd get better press around these parts."
By this line of argument letting people decide for themselves whether the Earth is round or flat is also a handsomely libertarian notion. It's an observable falsehood about material reality, that's what gets it the negative press.
"At the end of a long, winding road, the child might get treated with GnRH antagonists to defer the decisive impact of puberty until they're competent to make the decision."
The problem with this idea is that undergoing puberty is absolutely necessary to attain competence to make the decision.
"It's an observable falsehood about material reality, that's what gets it the negative press."
I don't think it makes any claims on the material reality of anatomy or karyotype. It does suggest a certain radical respect for personal autonomy in asserting one's social role and particular way of being human.
"The problem with this idea is that undergoing puberty is absolutely necessary to attain competence to make the decision."
I kind of agree with that, and perhaps in some perfect science-fiction world a person could test-drive both puberties and pick the right one without adverse consequences. But given the limitations of aforementioned material reality, we are reduced to letting people reach legal age and then decide to take their own shot at the puberty they think will result in a body that fits their psyche best.
You can have an "observable falsehood" about sex. I don't think you can have an "observable falsehood" about gender (except as a grammatical usage). If you think you can, I'd like to know you precise definition.
"Please don't do the thing where you make up a fictional vision of what other people believe and then drag them for not living up to it. It's extremely rude."
I do think gender self-id is more consistent with libertarian principles than is biological essentialism. Since libertarians are, in my observation, well represented among the ACX readership, I don't think I'm out of bounds with the reflection you quote. If you feel personally addressed and misrepresented by what I wrote, I do apologise.
"In practice, if any of those people say "nah, it's just social contagion, she'll grow out of these feelings like most always have and be a happy lesbian in five years with an intact reproductive system" they will be punished severely."
You seem quite sure that no one ever floats that possibility. Much of the point of the blockers is finding out in five years without foreclosing the possibility that it's not/she won't. Else we'd just start her on testosterone.
I don't think there's any part of the modern gender ideology, outside of the lizardman constant, that would encourage anyone to identify as a woman. They would affirm that if he identified as a she, but that would have to come from the kid in question. Boys who like to cook and watch My Little Pony are fine. Boys who like to cook and watch My Little Pony and want to be called girls are fine. No one should push the first kind of kid to become the second kind of kid.
>What if the kid in question says he's a robot? Would they affirm that, too? If not, why not?
I mean, yes and no. We humor kids when they play make-believe. We don't do anything drastic about it. Or about this, in the way that you're implying. Kids play. We leave them to it.
>This general attitude that small children know enough to authoritatively state that they are not their birth sex, and should then be hustled off to therapy and hormones, is very strange.
First, note that you're smuggling "small" in here. Second, that is very strange, which is why we don't do that. I won't re-iterate your discussion with Boinu, they seem to have this covered.
>a question that gets one punished for bringing it up.
I've brought it up several times over the last year. Right now I'm for the sort of compromise that let's them participate in high school or college sports but hedges them out of medals, records or things like playoffs. Let the kids play, but keep the records clean. I have yet to get into trouble, despite frank discussion in some fairly woke spaces.
>If only the Anglosphere's school systems, psychiatrists, activists, and politicians really did agree with you on this. :(
Again, outside of the lizardman constant, they do. A bare handful of possibly abusive cases, told in the most one-sided sensationalist way, are getting passed around your media bubble to convince you that the world looks very different than it actually does.
>What if the kid in question says he's a robot? Would they affirm that, too? If not, why not?
Sure, why not.
I've worked as a camp counselor, preschool attendant, and been a kid myself. I know kids that said they were princesses and kids that said they were dinosaurs and fairies and wolves and dragons and transformers (which are robots) and whatever, and some of them got very upset if you contradicted them. It did no harm to just say "okay, the dinosaur has to clean up his toys now" and let them explore their identity. That's part of being a kid.
"they still recognize that this man can be "more or less of a man" compared to another man"
You're just getting fooled by a figure of speech. The people who say this don't mean it literally, they mean "you suck at your job". As TGGP says, if you and I have the same job – engineer, say – but you're much better at it, that doesn't make me less of an engineer on the employment spectrum. I'm either an engineer or fired, it's binary, and if you tell me that "you know, you're not much of an engineer, Anonymous" this isn't understood to mean anything other than "you're pretty terrible at this, and it's a nuisance to me, your superior".
I'm not sure I agree. If an engineer is so bad that he literally does no engineering, and instead drinks beer with his coworkers all day, is he really an engineer?
This kind of argument is why I specified "on the employment spectrum". If you want to assert that "engineer" is a profession conveying some sort of metaphysical or inner nature, I suppose you could lose your engineer status by being shit at it; however, I still think it's clear that the modal person who believes this doesn't think that engineering is a *spectrum* where you can partake of eg. 56% of the Engineering Soul; rather, if you drop below some threshold of incompetence, you lose the Mandate of Brunel. You'll notice this is the way professional certifications work; you have to pass the bar to be a lawyer, and then if you prove to be a blithering incompetent you can be disbarred, but at no time are you accorded a partial status. You're either in or out. It's binary.
"But there are more or less talented and efficient engineers, *even* within the range that is considered 'good enough to remain employable'. "
Yes? That was literally my example.
"That's absolutely a spectrum."
A spectrum of *ability*, not of *engineerhood*. You either are an engineer or you aren't. The shoddiest bungler who still makes a living at it is just as much of an engineer as Brunel. He's just shit at it, not 35% of an engineer.
Because of the ability? I honestly can't tell whether this is playing dumb or autism. Ability doesn't correlate with state, especially not in a way where there's a spectrum so that someone who's 35% engineer is therefore necessarily 65% nurse.
Let's use a different example. A beautiful woman is preferable as a wife to a plain woman; this is fairly universal. Given the choice and all else being equal, any man would choose the beautiful woman. This doesn't *in any way* imply that the plain woman is not equally biologically female or maybe 40% of a man, *even though* our language is riddled with idioms and stock phrases like "Alice is just much less of a woman than Beth".
"Masculine" and "Feminine" would mean stereotypically male or female. Lots of categories can have stereotypes. Donald Trump was less stereotypically presidential than average in that he'd never previously held any public office or had any military command. Is there thus a "presidential spectrum" on which Ted Cruz was nearly as much of a president as Trump?
Are all quarks fungible? No: they can have properties like charge or "color". Does that make them a spectrum like the visual spectrum? No, they are much too quantized for that, you can enumerate every kind of quark.
If masculinity and feminity are social roles, is it more important which role you believe you are playing, or which role the audience believes you are playing?
I was an editor for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for a couple years. When I was brought on, along with some other editors, we had a meeting with some Springer Nature people in Amsterdam. At one point the representative said “we may be an evil empire, but we are a service orientated evil empire”, when discussing the various features they had for finding and managing referees, organizing databases, and so on.
I don’t know much about bipolar disorder, but I know about statistics, and this study is completely unjustified in its conclusions. First they cherry-pick some patients who show a period of a few weeks: they chose people with a “circular course of illness in which sustained episodes of mania of several weeks’ duration regularly alternated with sustained episodes of depression of similar duration”. Then they compared the data to a dozen different lunar cycles, on the order of a few weeks. Then divide the patients into ad-hoc groups, some as small as one. And what do you know, if you try hard enough, some of them matched.
This is the sort of thing the field of statistics was created to prevent.
Epistemic status: I am not a statistician, but I have written software for statistics and data analysis for over thirty years, and I’ve read lots of books and papers on the topic. This post is more snide than usual because I am writing it hungry.
It seems to be a commonly accepted medical fact that Tinnitus is associated with anxiety and depression.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus )
Obviously hearing imaginary sounds is generally no fun, but it seems to me like its heavily implied (although I have found no clear source) that causality goes the other way around: being anxious and or depressed can make you hear imaginary sounds.
WTF?
Like no seriously under which model for the supposedly simple neurological process behind hearing does this make sense?
Hearing is not more simple of a neurological process than any other sense. All perception is a combination between sense data and priors. Clearly, anxiety and depression affect not only cognitive priors but sensory priors as well. We already knew this for the senses of vision and taste, and it's not surprising that hearing would be affected too.
https://francisquinn.substack.com/p/utilities-and-utilitarianism?sd=pf
Asterisk:
"Transparent. We care less about telling our readers what we think than showing them why we think it. Every part of the process – from our reasoning to our raw data – will always be out in the open."
Generally, I think this is the wrong priority and clarifying what you think is more valuable. The recruited writers are better than most, but I think this is the wrong goal even for them.
It means they can reach a wider audience. I think these writers think in interesting ways and I'd like to read about why they think something even if I don't care about the topic.
I'd like to know why they think what they think, but that's meaningless without knowing what they think. Reaching a wide audience by not saying what they think, or, worse, not thinking anything at all is war.
Anybody know of any good literature discussing the effects of low-skilled immigration in advanced economies?
Emil Kierkegaard's claim that low-skilled immigration is only good for the immigrant made me curious, and Caplan's rebuttal didn't seem that convincing.
I'm looking for feedback on my ADHD/depression pharmacology questions and hypotheses:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rJW5TInpW2rvd6CFkKCdlPxv-IMefBJ4PdQuff1uo6U/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks!
CC @Scott Alexander
—————————
Outline:
1) Why does methylphenidate work immediately contrary to SSRIs despite that both serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons have autoreceptors that inhibit the recapture of their respective neurotransmitters?
2) Why hasn't anybody seriously tried to combine MAOIs with drugs that would prevent these side-effects from happening?
3) Why don't we prescribe exocytosis-promoting molecules such as MDMA when initiating SSRI treatments?
4) Why don't we prescribe autoreceptor antagonists such as pindolol when initiating treatment to make patients respond faster to the treatment and augment SSRIs?
I found this article, "A Mechanistic Interpretability Analysis of Grokking" fascinating.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6WM6hs7RQMKDhYjB/a-mechanistic-interpretability-analysis-of-grokking
Unfortunately I couldn't follow the more mathy parts. but my key takeaways are:
Memorization is easy but it can't predict unseen data. Generalization is hard but can often predict unseen data (or sometimes just predict seen data more efficiently).
The memorization circuit tends to grow in proportion to the amount of data it can predict. Generalization circuits scale better with large amounts of data.
Models may initially get "stuck" with memorization circuits but this can usually be overcome by increasing the amount of data. (Perhaps over-parameterizing the model helps with this?) There are pathways or interpolations between the two regimes. This allows partial generalization circuits that can't yet outdo the memorization circuit on their own, to get a toe hold.
They reverse engineered the algorithm the model uses to perform modular arithmetic. It's not what I would have predicted. It involves trigonometry and Fourier transforms.
But also they reverse engineered it! From the inscrutable list of parameter weights! What are the implications for interpretability?
Anyway there's a bunch more. They go into a lot of detail.
I don't think this causes much in the way of updating on interpretability because of the already existing articles on Distill about reverse engineering CNNs (and those were with actual models not toy ones).
I think the main takeaway from this article is a candidate explanation of the grokking effect. (With more data you wouldn't see the sudden grokking since you'd just learn the generalizable method way directly, and with the same data and less regularization you would just forever stay at the memorization minimum.
Watch PolyMatter's "How Coup d’états REALLY Work" :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7nIqdwhdqA
It's now required by law that you watch this video before you claim "Jan 6 USA was a miltiary coup". I passed this law, its domain of jurisdiction is all internet arguments that I see or hear or read about.
is this arguing by definition? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition
"Coup" and "military coup" are two different things. And for military coups, I'd say Luttwak is your source, not Polymatter.
Luttwak goes to great lengths to define the circumstances where a military coup can succeed, and the contemporary United States does not qualify. But he's only talking military coups. And the circumstances that make military coups impractical, can open the range of possibilities for other sorts of coups - whatever it is that controls the military, if it's not your wannabe coup plotter, you need to seize *that*. If the United States Army (and the rest of the bureaucracy) is always going to follow the orders of the guy who is the official winner of the latest Presidential election, then seize control of the election machinery and you've got a perfectly good coup without ever having to send a tank brigade into the streets.
January 6 was not a military coup, and it was not a well-planned coup, and arguably it wasn't a "coup" at all because due to the crappy planning it failed. But it was an *attempted* coup, however pathetic, targeting one of the weak points of the American government.
So, under your definition, any form of trespassing qualifies as an attempted coup?
I read Luttwak a few years back, and I recall an extended discussion near the beginning of different types of coup-like events (revolutions, putsches, pronunciamentos, etc), with proposed definitions for each. The rest of the book focused mostly on one of his categories, the coup d'etat, which Luttwak defined fairly narrowly as the use of a small but critical part of the machinery of government to seize control over the rest.
This link appears to contain a reproduction or close paraphrase of the section I'm remembering:
https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2013/07/edward-luttwak-coup-d-etat.html
Of those categories, 1/6 seems to me like a sloppy hybrid of an attempted coup and an attempt to incite a revolution, with auotglopic aims (which are mostly orthogonal to Luttwak's categories).
Yeah, I don't think 1/6 fits into any of Luttwak's categories, because I think he pretty quickly dismissed the possibility of coups in modern western democracies as ludicrous. Which is a shame, because I think he'd have been a good man to tackle the question, "granted it would be very difficult to pull off a coup in a modern western democracy, but if someone were to attempt it this is what it would have to look like and so this is what we should look out for".
I also think that his category of "really this is a coup" was too focused on the case of military coups, or at least coups in which the military is not reluctant to participate.
I’m reading Luttwak’s book now. I also recommend OP give it look. The PolyMatter video seems to be the Cliffnotes version. It leaves out a lot and contains nothing that’s not in original.
Luttwak’s definition of Coup D’etat is a bit broader than “military coup,” but I agree it would not extend to an autogolpe or to whatever Jan 6th was.
In this case, I'd say that the source of the attempt and the risk of more competent repeat attempts matter as well, not just the competence of the attempt.
As for source, an outgoing President inciting a mob to help him try to illegitimately retain power after he tried and failed to stubborn enough state officials and members of Congress to fix the election for him is definitely cause for concern, no matter how inept it was. Particularly if there's any reasonable possibility of him getting into a position to attempt a more competent coup in the future.
However, if he was the legitimate president and the presidency was being stolen from him illegitimately, then he didn't go nearly far enough.
I don't think I've every seen that claim. I see Jan 6 was a coup attempt pretty frequently. Are you *really* seeing claims it was a military coup somewhere?
I haven’t seen it either.
I may have made the claim stronger than its usual forms because the video featured footage of military coups a lot, but even non-military coups has to go through all the steps mentioned in the video (that's part of the video's point, the 'military' part of a coup isn't there because coups necessarily require or need military force, the military just happens to usually have the coordinaton and networking necessary to make a successful coup), steps and goals which Jan 6 didn't even try to think about.
Substack need to fix their comments. I can click on a comment and have no hope of finding it if its merely a sub thread of 3 deep. The app doesnt even try. Reddit has solved this, its not technically that difficult.
So I'm attempting to calculate the plausibility of nuclear war causing prompt human extinction due to radiation alone.
est total global nuclear stockpiles: 5000Mt. Assume the war uses all of those but destroys the capability the manufacture more.
est total energy of radioactive decay of fallout: 10% of the energy of the blast
10% of 5000mt divided by the surface area of earth to a thickness of 1m is 4J/L or a dose of 4 grays versus the 5 gray LD50 for an instantaneous dose. But that's with the very unrealistic pessimistic assumption that the fallout spreads perfectly evenly over the earth before any of it decays, and then it all decays simultaneously. Realistically it'd be unevenly distributed and it'd take weeks for the winds to carry a small percentage of the dose to remote areas that didn't get nuked. Much of the fallout would decay before that. Also the dose would be spread out over time, making it less lethal. A dose of 1 gray is only a 5% chance of eventual death, so those remote areas are probably not dying off. A weakness in my argument is the arbitrary choice of 1m thickness for converting radiation per m^2 into radiation per litre or kg. Another weakness is not considering specific isotopes that get concentrated in specific organs, like iodine. The nuclear winter will suck but the San or amazon rainforest hunter gatherers will probably cope just fine with the collapse of the civilization they didn't depend on anyway and several degrees decline in temperature won't stop those areas from being habitable. So I'm ~95% confident that nuclear war wouldn't directly cause human extinction. Maybe it kills us in some other way like preventing coordination on AI or bioweapons.
-Nuclear war will not cause human extinction (95%+)
-AGI will cause human extinction (some believe 50%+)
-Full scale nuclear war will delay AGI for a very long time (for the sake of argument say the probability is high).
...
You see where I’m going. I’m sorry for bringing it up, but it would like to hear the perspective of someone who believes AI is an existential risk.
Relevant considerations:
Destruction of industry: can be rebuilt in ~20 years. Buying the world 20 years is probably less value than the nuclear war destroys.
Soft errors: fallout fucks with computers which would make computers more expensive for the next 300 years or so. A big attraction, but it's questionable whether computers could be made sufficiently more expensive to stop the tech-company profit loop.
Civilisational collapse: only actually happens if nuclear winter is really, really bad, and probably isn't an actual "de novo humanity" - there was like one major technology lost in the fall of Rome (concrete). Probably not more than a 300-year setback, which doesn't stack with the fallout (it keeps decaying away while you're going all Mad Max).
Political results: removing the PRC alone would partially deal with the whole "race dynamic" issue Scott brought up in "Why Not Slow AI Progress?", but removing the PRC *and* the USA would leave things pretty multipolar again. Hard to predict this one even as far as sign.
Chance of success: very low if you're trying to start a nuclear war for no reason or commit nuclear terrorism, although not quite so low if you merely advocate hawkish policies.
Second-order effects: actions very far from the Overton Window, such as attempted nuclear terrorism or outright "we should have a nuclear war" rhetoric, harm the "stop AGI" movement in obvious ways (we get accusations of doomsday cultism as it is), so this is an increase to AGI X-risk of magnitude proportional to said movement's chances of success without doomsday schemes and to your chances of failing this scheme.
Possibility of being wrong: We might be wrong about AGI X-risk. I don't think we are, but everyone thinks that about his own beliefs. Starting a nuclear war unnecessarily would suck.
Overall: sticking with "be more of a China hawk than you otherwise would" is a much better cost-benefit than outright going "Nuclear War Now" or being a terrorist, but whether even the former is justified depends on how you calculate.
Thanks for your comment and perspective.
Wait until you think about which regional, non-nuclear war with relatively few casualties would delay chip production for about a decade, and _then_ you have a real moral dilemma on your hands.
Oh, I’ve though about it.
Full-scale nuclear war wouldn't delay AGI in a helpful way. It would result in a society even less capable of carefully evaluating risks and cooperating to reduce them, and more-willing to take risks for short-term advantages.
The analogy I used when this came up on DSL was, the arsenals and magazines of Napoleon's France (probably, by BOTE calculation) held enough powder and shot to put one ball through the heart of every human then alive, but Napoleon was not an X-risk because the real-world delivery is so far from 100% efficient and uniform that "start with an assumption of perfect efficiency and then apply a fudge factor" doesn't even get you into the right order of magnitude.
Which unfortunately means the math that matters is too complex to fit into a blog post. But back in the early 1980s, not far off Peak Cold War, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published (in dead tree format, alas) a study with the math done right. They came up with a median estimate of twenty million dead from global fallout in the event of a full-court match of Global Thermonuclear War. Mostly long-term cancer deaths.
This didn't include local, short-term fallout immediately downwind of targets, but that is necessarily local and also fairly easy to mitigate.
Even if you up SIPRI's numbers by two orders of magnitude, that's not an X-risk. And that was peak cold war, when there were roughly five times as many nuclear weapons in service as today, and they averaged roughly five times as powerful.
Also, since I see someone brought it up already, "cobalt bombs" don't work nearly as well as people thought they would be in the early 1950s. They're modestly dirtier than ordinary hydrogen bombs, of similar size, if you're into that sort of thing, but not orders of magnitude dirtier.
A similar study from a similar time was the US Office of Technology Assessment's 1979 report The Effects of Nuclear War (available here: https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf ). It's an entire book presenting different scenarios and estimating casualties. 20 million dead sounds pretty close to their middle-of-the-pack scenarios, though that might have been just American casualties. I don't think they estimated effects for anywhere but the US, but don't remember now; I read it about 40 years ago.
I think you also need to consider the case where all the bombs are cobalt-jacketed. To kill EVERYONE, you would probably need the US or Russia to be ruled by a psychopath who is deliberately aiming for human extinction, and it's feasible that such a person would have heard about cobalt-60.
Basically, it's feasible to exterminate half of all Russians and Americans with the weapons we have, because you just have to blanket all of the big cities. But it's quite impossible to kill all Russians and Americans with those weapons. Just note that the US is 4 million square miles, while Russia has about 6000 warheads. Each warhead would have be able to kill everyone in an area of 670 square miles, but IIRC few, if any, warheads can even kill everyone in 1 square mile.
It's my understanding that nuclear war doomsayers focus on nuclear winter rather than direct radiation. Not only will remote areas not get nuked, but nations not involved in the conflict will not get nuked. But if nuclear winter is somehow as bad as the Chicxulub impact, then everyone starves, because everyone depends on plants regardless of whether they depend on civilization.
It's probably worth bringing up the Toba Supervolcano eruption. Bottom line, ~70,000 years ago we had a once in 25 million years supervolcano eruption which coincides with a massive die off of homo sapiens, according to genetics potentially down to ~10,000 survivors. Subsequent research has thrown those results into doubt but it's probably the best comparison point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Chicxulub impact was 20,000 times more energy than 5000Mt. I think even a repeat of chicxulub probably wouldn't cause total extinction of humans but I am less confident about that than the nuclear war. I've heard estimates of 20% dimming and 8 degrees of global cooling. But humans are smart enough to adapt agriculture to that by sending seeds much closer to the equator than they usually grow. Plenty of people will survive the initial fireball by being in their basement on the opposite side of the world, and some of those will figure out how to adapt agriculture to not starve.
I don't know if someone has already brought this up, but ACX posts are extremely slow to open from my phone, much more than other substacks, and comment threads give even more trouble (slow to load, slow scrolling, "expand full comment" button doesn't work). Sometimes it's slow on laptop as well.
This may be caused by the ACX theme or special settings (no likes etc) or possibly by the size of the comment thread.
I imagine it's not only me with this problem, if so I thought Scott should know about it.
Yes, I asked Substack not to collapse comments on ACX because I hate having to press "show comments" a bunch of times to see comments; this makes most other Substack comments sections basically unreadable to me. Mobile users are second-class citizens here and I'm happy to sacrifice their convenience.
Fair enough, I also dislike pressing "show more" multiple times. But now I see the logic for it :D
I guess I will continue to read ACX through the email when commuting, and check the comments later if I feel the need for it.
I have looked at Yglesias' substack and it seems not all comments are loaded automatically below the post, only a few (one extra click to see the rest). That might be the reason why it works smoother than ACX.
A couple years back Scott reviewed Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
The TLDR is that we used to have a mind split in two. One half generated social commands (eg. 'share', 'build a pyramid to store the chief's body') and the other half executed these commands. There was no introspection or rumination. Scott rejects both the timing and completeness of our psychological change, but gives Jaynes credit for unearthing quite a different psychology in the past.
I wrote a post speculating on what could have caused the development of a bicameral mind. When we had outer speech but not inner speech, I think the most fit subsequent adaptation would be to access reciprocal altruism. Something to remind us to play nice and fit in. Auditory hallucinations of societal demands--a bicameral mind--would be such a mechanism. https://vectors.substack.com/p/consequences-of-conscience
How did you all discover ACX (or its predecessor, SSC)?
In my case, my son* sent me a link to this post, which I really liked, reread recently, and still find very profound:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
I had been moving in that direction for quite a few years previously - I had committed to being as fair-minded as possible; to avoid ad hominem criticisms; to try to speak of others in such a way that, had they inadvertently overheard what I'd said, I would not be ashamed; to accept justified blame for my errors graciously; and to try to restate an opponent's argument in non-pejorative language such that they could hear me state their case and agree that I had presented their beliefs fairly.
This is all somewhat aspirational, but I think Scott's post helped confirm I was on the right track.
* And I should ask him how he discovered SCC.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have mentioned him at least a couple times on their Dark Horse podcast. I recall Ben Shapiro cited him on Joe Rogan's podcast, and given the size of that audience, I'm a bit surprised no one's named him yet.
Neither was how I discovered ACX, however. For me, it was Bryan Caplan praising Scott on Econlib.org back around 2015-ish, while also critiquing him. I noticed Caplan's article was the type of anti-tribalist writing I preferred to read online, and went to SSC and found even more of it.
I think I found the link to the Moloch post on a blog somewhere, some 5-6 years ago. It sounded interesting but a bit too esoteric for my taste. Then I clicked over to the Die By the Sword one. At that time, I was greatly disillusioned with the online left (I was an avid reader of New Atheist communities until the New/Plus schism tore them apart -- for that matter, I still think they were right on more things than not) but not any more attracted to the right, either, so I felt politically homeless.
I found the story in Die By the Sword cathartic and schadenfreudy, but to my surprise Scott's commentary did not turn callous and detestable like I had come to expect from most "anti-SJW" spaces. So I trusted it enough to move over to Niceness, Community, and Civilization, and it blew my mind. It was the first articulated, rigorous defense I'd ever seen of the concept of being nice, something I had needed to read for years without realizing it.
I came back to the Moloch post, read it with more attention, and since then I was hooked.
I started following him back in the Livejournal days, having been introduced to him via common friends( one of my real-life friends having met Scott via micronations stuff).
I'm also one of the two non-SIAI friends mentioned in the "Study Seven: In-Group Bias as a Schelling Point" section of Scott's "Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory" post on LessWrong. Contrary to Scott's opening line about the setup being a mistake and the game being one of the worst he'd ever seen, I had a great time: it was and is my considered opinion that if you can't have fun despite losing because everyone ganged up on you for BS reasons, then you have no business playing Diplomacy.
Had we not had friends in common, I probably would have gotten linked to SSC articles eventually via Bryan Caplan or Arnold Kling's blogs.
Increasingly frequent links from Hacker News, both comments and stories.
A socialist Very Online progressive friend of mine linked me to The Anti-Reactionary FAQ, as a "checkmate, conservatives!" wall of text argument.
This did not go as intended, since reading SSC/ACX over the years has only further eroded what shaky faith I ever had in left politics, and now I'm my friend group's (relative) Token Conservative Crank. I'm grateful for the intervention though; it would have been so easy to just socially conform and go along with the very leftwards flow of San Francisco. Thinking of that counterfactual life full of strongly believing Incoherently Incorrect But Locally Convenient Things makes me...very sad. That which can be destroyed by the truth...
The blogger and critic Steve Sailer called him the greatest new public intellectual of the 2010s, which is high praise coming from him.
Someone on "Marginal Revolution" - not Tyler or Alex, one of the commenters - was talking about what a hopeless loser nerd this "Scott Alexander" fellow was, and how we should all mock him. This did not work the way they intended.
I was reading the comments section of a NYT article on nursing homes, and someone linked to the SSC post "Who By Very Slow Decay." I was sufficiently impressed that I started reading other SSC posts, and then I followed Scott to ACX.
Somebody linked me to one of the "big" posts, probably Meditations on Moloch because I remember reading all the other home runs of the latter half of 2014 as they came out. The blog never really recovered from that kind of unmatchable streak, but despite not living up to itself (and despite the one massive goof of claiming the categories were made for Man – Man was made for the categories, Scott!) it was still the best writing on the internet by a handful of orders of magnitude. So I kept reading it.
Many characters in the GMU econ blogging universe linked to SSC often in 2014-2015.
Someone linked the reaction to the NYT coverage in the last psychiatrist subreddit.
I read Yvain (Scott's nick in those days) on Lesswrong, and followed him to his own blog during the diaspora. I read Eliezer on Overcoming Bias before he emigrated to Lesswrong.
An older conservative friend linked something relatively positive about Trump. Maybe "You Are Still Crying Wolf", but seems like it was earlier.
I discovered it through Scott Aaronson's blog.
Me too, thanks to Scott Alexander's post after the comment #171 affair on Aronson's blog.
Me too.
David Friedman signal-boosted SSC on his blog.
IIRC, someone I followed on Dreamwidth used to sometimes signal boost post SSC he found interesting. I liked many of them, and SSC supported RSS, so I subscribed to its RSS feed. Eventually I wanted to comment on a few posts, and started reading them at the SSC site, for convenience responding.
After watching the YouTube channel of Sabine Hossenfelder, where every video seems like an advertisement for her paid courses... it seems to me that every controversy about this "brave female provocative contrarian physicist" is just a part of a marketing campaign.
I mean, she seems to be an expert, and her lessons are probably good. It's just all this supposed controversy that feels purely manufactured. She is bravely fighting... where no one is fighting back. She challenges the scientific establishment... by saying exactly the same things the scientific establishment was saying. Which is good, because it means she is promoting the established science... except for the part where she pretends that she is the only one doing so.
Her take on Bell's inequality is about as iconoclastic as you can get.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Youtube is superhard to succeed at and if the content is good, accept the "controversial" branding as the cost of marketing content on Youtube.
She is obviously trying to start a second career/income steam. Having said that, most of her videos were made before her current partnership and she does say things antithetical to the gee-wiz-I-Fucking-Love-SCIENCE crowd. Such as some mainstream physics is bad-faith hype machining for tax dollars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqEU1Q-gYE
And that super weird quantum mechanics really isn't that weird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQv5CVELG3U
She often focuses on "everyday-physics" where she does a reasonably decent job. However, she has some very crackpotty ideas on quantum mechanics (super-determinism, which basically entails that our entire current understanding of quantum mechanics is only an approximate description of some magic deterministic process, you can look around on Scott Aaronson's blog for some rebuttals).
Additionally, she makes very strong claims about the invalidity of some theoretical arguments which are used to motivate the search for physics beyond the standard model. On this ground she loudly demands to defund various efforts in that direction which indeed makes her anti-establishment and hated to some degree in the high energy physics community.
On a side note, I sometimes find it weird that (at least as it appears to me) large parts of the rationalist/rat-adjacent community often seem not really interested in deeper physics/math concepts (except statistics) like quantum field theory, general relativity, quantum information theory, string theory, ... or maybe I just lack a better understanding of this community since I only read this blog and occasionally LW.
LineLoop: Hyperloop for The Line
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
A question for other hypersensitives (I mean susceptible to sensory overload more than extra-sensitive senses, though I'd suspect they're correlated). I am curious if anyone else employs the same One Weird Trick: I'm nearsighted, and need glasses for things like driving or classroom learning. (What is the deal with overhead projectors being so much harder to read than black/whiteboards?) But sight unaided is enough to mostly navigate the everyday environment, minus some occasional squinting for roadsigns and other small-font-at-a-distance. So I just...don't wear glasses unless strictly necessary. Everything gets kinda fuzzy more than a few feet out, and that's comforting, cause there's significantly less visual data to (over)process. One small fragment of sensory deprivation, that most comforting of states...
Totally Crazy Unique Thing, or a well-known hack?
I'm not hypersensitive, but when I have a headache I often take off my glasses; I wonder if that's related.
I am the opposite. I am also nearsighted and I enjoy very much the crisp vision brought by my glasses. It is a physival pleasure to me to see the details so well, which I can compare to the sad blur of my uncorrected vision. I am a bit overly sensitive to noise and touch, but vision is almost always a pleasure for me.
Interesting - I find that I end up *seeing less* with more clarity. Partly due to information overload, but also due to overactive pattern-matching. It feels like the reason I can still "see" stuff tolerably fine despite it being objectively fuzzy is that my brain's gotten really used to extrapolating, filling in the gaps between broad-strokes boundaries and colours. With glasses on, I start getting visual artefacts...not exactly literally like "seeing stars", but pattern-matching inappropriately to generate false signal from noise. Like it actually is a problem being able to see every leaf on a tree...then it becomes something other than "tree". It becomes "huge mass of individually differentiated leaves". A category confusion error. Maybe if I'd worn glasses for majority of life, this would be reversed...hard to know.
Very interesting, and very surprising for me! It would make sense that your brain is indeed so used to work with fuzzy data that it is confused by too much information.
The example of the trees is especially strange for me, because I love nature in general and trees especially, and frequently look at them for pleasure, with the details of leaves part of this enjoyment. In my case, I think that one of the resaon I love my corrected vision is that I really like the sensation of depth, and the one of seing at a distance. I love to have a view and imagine myself wandering in the farway landscape, as I really dislike being in an enclosed space. I wonder if this is the same for you in the opposite direction? I mean do you prefer being inside than outside for example?
On the subject of fuzziness being comforting, there was a children book that I loved on this subject (from a French author who rencently got the Nobel prize in litterature!). A central part of the plot is that being nearsighted gives you the possibility to choose being a crisp and a fuzzy vision. Here is a translation of the summary below.
Catherine Certitude by Modiano
Like her father, Catherine Certitude wears glasses. And a pair of glasses sometimes complicates life: for example when she has to take them off at dance class. Because Catherine dreams of becoming a great dancer like her mom who lives in New York. But her glasses offer her the advantage of being able to live in two different worlds: the real world, as she sees it, when she wears them, and a world full of softness, blurred and without asperity if she takes them off. A world where she dances like in a dream...
Surprised that this has, in fact, been turned into a book. Certitude is a good name for the concept. Although I take issue with glasses representing "the real world"...the map is not the territory! Maybe that's too complicated for children to understand though. I am reminded of how certain patterns and visual illusions require intentionally unfocusing the eyes to "see correctly". There is a kind of tunnel vision associated with increasing magnification and clarity...like, a magnifying glass or microscope allows for much better sight. But it can only perceive so much at once. I suppose someone with natural 20/20 or better vision, or one corrected via laser eye surgery, maybe has a different visual processing algorithm in their head that's accustomed to a holistically crisp picture at all times. It is hard to imagine, really. Even when I imagine scenes, it's in a fuzzy non-crisp state, cause I'm not used to seeing things any other way...I am pretty sure my dreams are the same? Many fantastical nonsensical things happen, but physics mostly operate the same as real life. Only being on psychedelics really alters this. (Psilocibin makes my vision go fish-eye-lensed, which is terribly disorienting for depth perception. Dangerous to try walking around or manipulating objects.)
I am not really agoraphobic or claustrophobic, exactly, but have some PTSD related to not being able to locate exits/defensible positions. Being inside, being in my room, is comforting cause I know every inch of it very well...minor discrepancies are easier to catch. (I have recurring fears of a certain Really Bad Figure from my past returning to ruin my life again.) It's definitely objectively nice to be outside - how bright the sun is, compared to pitiful artificial lights! how rich the colours, how alive the wind, the sensation of rain, the smells of a hundred different cuisines wafting through the air. (Still waiting for technology to advance far enough to produce accurate artificial scents. If I could buy the scent of a lively Chinese kitchen for my own home...nostalgia.)
But outside is full of Variables, and that's deeply threatening in its own way cause I can't account for or control them all. I was just starting to get sort-of comfortable with wandering around the city on my own by the time covid hit. After that...the virus, the virus countermeasures, the fear and anxiety, the general surge in anomie and crime and distrust...I mostly don't leave the house anymore unless I have to. It's frustrating, because I don't even care that much about covid. It's other people that scare me now. Makes being extraverted quite difficult. Home is safe...but also boring and isolated.
I do the same thing.
I'm 79. My right eye is developing a cataract. My left eye has astigmatism due to a blow. I keep a pair of glasses in my backpack which I put on when I enter a store. I wear normal sunglasses outside. I walk a lot. I don't own a car.
I live in the Dominican Republic where there are lots of "moto" drivers wanting to give me a ride for 50¢ or a dollar. Mostly I just walk.
Are all claims of AI bias (to do with e.g. race) baloney?
Nearly all of the ones I've seen are basically complaints that AI is characterizing reality accurately in a way that is incongruent with left-wing narratives.
A system that disproportionately associates criminality with black people (compared to white people) is called "biased", even though this is a correct description of reality. And we know that this is 100% what is happening, because literally none of these people have ever complained about e.g. men being considered men more associated with criminality than women (and before anyone interjects here, the black/white crime ratio is about the same as the male/female crime ratio - and in the most recent data it was higher for homicide).
We saw this earlier with policing algorithms that kept saying police should be in black neighbor hoods (and then when this was forbidden, it kept saying police should be in neighborhoods with things which are a proxy for being black neighborhoods). This is because that's where a majority of the crime is, and yet the left were furiously proclaiming that these systems are "racist"
It's really funny when you think about it. When conservatives would complain that CNN, MSNBC etc had a liberal bias, the epic comeback was that "reality has a liberal bias". Well, terrabytes of data have shown us that reality actually has a...non-woke bias? But no, I'm sure its the machines that are wrong.
If this is the kind of nonsense that is stealing so much attention in the AI space, any chance on genuine problems like alignment being solved seem like a demented pipe dream at this stage. The prospect of humans being wiped out is literally less alarming to people than an accurate characterization of race crime rate differences.
Im with you in that I don't think reality should be ignored, and even if such a system leads to more black people being in jail, that's perfectly fine with me provided it produces a notable reduction in crime. Also, I think people who use the "biased algorithm" are too short-termist. If the data says certain demographics are committing more crime than others then turning a blind eye to it doesn't help anyone. Especially when most of the victims of those crimes these to be from the same demographics!
That being said, there are two strong technical arguments about biased algorithms worth considering. The first is about training on past data to predict future results. Machine-Learning (ML) algorithms get trained on past data which is then used to predict the future, but there are a lot of cases where this breaks down. One way is the Garbage-in, Garbage- out argument (which I don't think is a particularly big issue here). The other way is when criminal behaviour has changed or when dealing with rare/special cases, so a lot of our past data becomes obsolete.
The 2nd argument has to do with judging the algorithms success. For crime, if we're trying to classify who is a criminal and who isn't, we probably want a strong Recall (how many True Positives have we found relative to what's out there?), so we find as many criminals as possible. We'll also want a strong Precision (what proportion of what we predicted as True Positives are REALLY True Positives), so we aren't incarcerating the wrong people.
The problem is, there is often a trade-off between the two. For instance, if we optimize for Recall, and we assume you're right that most homicides are committed by black men, the algorithm could easily just infer every time that the black man is the homicide perpetrator every time and achieve a very high accuracy. The downside? It will also incarcerate an extraordinary amount of innocent black men in the process.
That sounds pretty bad! So maybe we should prioritise Precision? Well if we do this, the algorithm wont predict a person is guilty unless it is really confident its prediction is correct, so we probably get a lot more criminals roaming free.
Obviously the goal is to try to get the best of both worlds, but assuming it's impossible they will both be perfect, what kind of tradeoff should we be willing to take?
Meant to say "extremely high Recall" in the 4th paragraph*
Following AI bias gets you better short-term results, but closes a catastrophic feedback loop - the more an AI is biased against a person, the more society will reject them, and the more antisocial they will become. If "person" is instead an ethnic/cultural group that process doesn't even end when any singular person dies, and becomes self perpetuating until the only solution left is the final one.
This is the exact same reason why racism in humans is individually helpful but socially extremely harmful.
The most charitable interpretation of these claims I can muster is that they are an unhelpful distraction from an important problem by unhelpful people.
Makes me think of this:
https://peterlevine.ws/?p=18730
Here are two articles from last year:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57192898
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22374386/proctorio-racial-bias-issues-opencv-facial-detection-schools-tests-remote-learning
They seem like examples of AI with racial bias against darker-skinned people. I hope we can all agree that these ought to be fixed, rather than ignored.
When I read about traditional policing practices like stop-and-frisk, traffic stops that escalate to searches, or shootings where the officer says that they (thought they) saw a gun, I have the same questions: what is the false positive rate? And especially in the US context, is the false positive rate higher for blacks? If so, then it sounds like racial bias.
I don't see much moral significance to the involvement of AI. It's just another way that the police can go about their age-old business. So I would like the same two false-positive metrics to be important parts of evaluating AI-driven predictive policing.
Re: ending remote learning. One of its benefits is allowing students to study for the degree most relevant to them while holding a job far from their nominal campus. Ending it might reduce student employment. On the other hand, there would most likely be less cheating. I have no overall opinion.
I don't think you understand the point often being made in opposition. It's not about denying 'reality', but rather it's about taking active control of our decision making processes and not letting them implement unjust laws rather than hiding behind claims of 'well, it's just what the data says.'
I mean, you illustrate the perfect counterexample: men are more likely to commit some crimes than women, and this is not disputed. So imagine if a future gun control regime creates an AI to assess whether someone should be allowed to own a firearm, and feeds it crime data. That system would reject men from owning guns at a much higher rate than it would for women. It would effectively be sex-based gun control, and saying "hey, it's just the data" is a cop out that lets you avoid answering the tough questions.
I don't see many people arguing that statistics around crime rates and ethnicity are incorrect. But a statistic can mean many things. It can mean a correlation, or it can mean a causation, and stomping on the distinction can lead to bad conclusions. If you build an AI that concludes "you have black skin, thus you are more likely to commit a crime," you have just obliterated a lot of nuance into what that 'thus' means. And if you're taking it a step further with "therefore action X should happen," then you risk compounding that bias into an unjust world in which people are judged based on nothing more than the color of their skin.
I wouldn't say *all*. If reality is biased, and the AI is reflecting reality, then the AI is propagating bias, even if it is 'correct'. So really, I think it depends on the application.
If people are biased in whatever domain you are applying the AI to.
A part of that is what you said, sometimes we just don't want to hear certain facts.
But another part is the old "garbage in, garbage out" principle, where the quality of output coming from a computer depends on the quality of its input. Giving the AI a position of authority allows you to feed it whatever data you want, then take the outputs and say "see? the Science agrees with me".
Now of course, when the former happens, people will argue that it's the latter, and vice versa.
As an example, imagine a parallel reality where cops really hate gingers. Whenever cops see a ginger driving a car, they will pull the car over and search it thoroughly. The rest of the population, they only check when something suspicious happens. Now in this parallel reality, many gingers serve prison sentences because a marijuana joint was found in the car, or something like that. And you ask "hey, do gingers really smoke marijuana more often, or is this just a consequence of being searched more often?". But everyone says "just look at the statistics, dummy, gingers are 1% of the population, but 99% of imprisoned marijuana users, stop pretending that you don't see it".
Now a machine learning program is fed these statistics, you connect the program to a camera and ask it which cars you should stop and search, because you don't want to stop too many cars, only where the probability of crime is higher than average. Unsurprisingly, the program tells you to stop cars with gingers. Now you can be sure that there is no prejudice involved, because machines obviously do not have prejudices.
>Unsurprisingly, the program tells you to stop cars with gingers.
Not if you ask "what gives the highest chance of arrest per search" and put the records of who was searched into it. *Then* it tells you to search a lot less gingers than you're doing, because it notices that *given a search occurred* the gingers are less likely to get arrested.
(If you don't have enough points of reference to point to the truth, it'll actually claim you should search gingers less than they deserve, because it notices that gingers are unusually likely to be false alarms, and can't distinguish between DWG and gingers actually doing suspicious things.)
Yeah, depends on what exactly you measure and what is the bias. If you do the searches correctly, then yes the algorithm will push you in the correct way. If you plant the evidence (or if you are more likely to look the other way when you see non-gingers with marijuana), then the algorithm will support you. If people of certain group make the same amount of crime, but less likely end up in prison, because they have better lawyers, the answer depends on the question; is it "how likely is this person to do crime?" or "how likely will stopping this person lead to a successful arrest?".
If we don't want spoilers for Dune, does the inclusion of God Emperor of Dune as a review contest finalist mean we're not allowed to vote?
Just hurry up and read the Dune series before the end of the competition. :)
No: it just means you wouldn’t vote for GEoD because spoilers. Vote for whichever one you liked best that you did read. Remember, the finalists were mostly chosen that way: not many people read all 130+ entries
I noticed a typo in your melatonin article from a couple years ago (https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/): "When a this kind of late sleep schedule"
I realize this may be too unspecific a question, but does anyone have strong recommendations for print magazines that are not highly political (insofar as that’s possible), ideally just good, long form writing on subjects that would be interesting to read on a Sunday afternoon?
I’m asking because: (1) I’ve been through several of the mainstream mags but find myself disappointed or uninterested (Paris Review, etc.) in the content and (2) I like reading things in the physical world rather than on my phone.
Thanks in advance for any recommendations :)
I like Philosophy Now, although the general standard of ACX is higher.
You might try Lapham's Quarterly, which excerpts writing from across all of history on a given topic, like friendship, scandal, or trade. Since it consists largely of historical writing, you avoid tropes of contemporary discourse
I always loved Wired. I see they offer an introductory year for $10.
Oh, too bad.
The Economist magazine is a less bad option than most...
I see the “women are less happy now” argument brought up in the comments section regularly as if women’s rights advances were a mistake. In my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce, so the burden of life for women is heavier than it used to be when a majority of women were homemakers. Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives. (I have often joked that I need a wife.) Is there a seriously held belief in the community here that the answer to “women are less happy now” is a return to the midcentury housewife model? Or am I misinterpreting?
If you want to simplify it to barebones, it's simply Chesterton's Fence: we saw the fence of sexual restrictions and that it was bad, took it down and 50+ years later we find quite a few surprises in the meadows beyond it.
And I think it's useful to focus on sexual liberation specifically, even though it's probably the least discussed. There's a lot of focus on equal rights or education or workforce participation, but let's remember that the previous traditional system was a very direct response to the fact that you need two parents to successfully raise children, and the best way to convince a man to do that is to convince him they're his children. Everything came from that.
So, how did sexual liberation came to bite us in the ass? Well, there's the funny episode where AIDS is literally God's punishment for homosexuality, at least if you interpret God in a slightly impersonal way (there's a SSC post on that, but I can't find it quickly). We changed the status quo by assuming previous sexual taboos were obsolete, and it upset a very old and delicate balance between our immune system and its threats.
There is also a persistent association between a certain lifestyle and, well, unhappiness for women. Hookup culture would be a good name for it, but usually there's some alcohol involved. For some reason it just doesn't sit well with long term satisfaction. Fortunately the research I've seen suggests it's temporary. Sorry, but I don't have the links - last time I did a deep dive in this was a long time ago, when I first started asking myself the same questions. Ah, another thing I found back then: surprisingly enough, number of partners does not affect later capacity to pair bond. I still can't wrap my head around this one, but well, that's what I found when I looked for an answer. It seems that there's no big moral reason for why promiscuity is bad - it just very directly makes you unhappy.
Another perspective I recently found in Sadly, Porn. It's a bit cynical (unsurprisingly). It says if you look at the incentives, the common social narrative is written by the Media. And individual actors in the media, from journalists to companies, will steer women towards a career path rather than a family path because... yes, I know it's cynical... single working women consume more media than mothers of several children. I don't think it's the literal truth, but it does point one to look a bit more at incentive structures and wonder if maybe small individual steps led us in a direction we didn't control.
And speaking of career - the vast majority of the women I know actually have this choice: still be free, still be educated and equal, but get married early, work for a few years to build a nest then do less paid work and raise a couple of kids instead. It's the classic success recipe, and there's literally nothing stopping them... except the above-mentioned Media that keep telling them since pre-puberty that it's the wrong choice, that children are something that you do Someday, and better yet, that it's something the Future You may want to do, but definitely not something you actually should plan on doing. And god forbid not anytime soon.
I'm tempted to speculate and say that the cognitive dissonance between this official message and their biological impulses leads to the very unhappy compromise where so many women get pregnant "by mistake" instead of rationally planning for it. A critical part in the classic success recipe above is getting married first, then building a nest and only then having children. The delay doesn't need to be that long, but the order matters a lot.
What we have instead for the typical modern women is a focus on career, and then hitting the doubly sour reality that you can get a higher quality of guys in bed, than you can in marriage; and also you can get better guys before 30 than after. Which is an ugly enough shock to paralyze at least some women for a few extra years, and ... yeah, it's a feedback loop.
So, to conclude. Is returning to the midcentury housewife model a solution? On an individual level, probably, yes, that model would still work for many. But on a society level no - it's definitely not as universally applicable anymore, and it's also not as desired. A proper solution should start from accepting that we removed fences without knowing the full consequences, admitting there were unpleasant side-effects, and start working on a new equilibrium where we fix each problem.
And yes, this sounds obvious but it's also very different from the current situation where traditionalists are saying we should go back in time, and progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong. Neither is accepting that we both have a problem, and that the old solutions aren't viable anymore.
> There is also a persistent association between a certain lifestyle and, well, unhappiness for women. Hookup culture would be a good name for it, but usually there's some alcohol involved.
I suspect that this is a part of a more general problem. I mean, even ignoring sexuality, many people are lonely, and have a problem to make new friends.
I am not sure how exactly this happens, and I don't even have a good guess. Some places are obviously not great for socialization for various reasons: alcohol-oriented, too loud, too nerdy, too expensive. But it still seems that there are also many good social places, but... the lonely people just don't use them for some reason.
It just somehow happened that the pub is the Schelling point. :(
> still be free, still be educated and equal, but get married early, work for a few years to build a nest then do less paid work and raise a couple of kids instead. It's the classic success recipe
I know some women who married young, raised their kids, and focused on their careers afterwards. They say they like it this way; first they could fully focus on their families, now they can fully focus on their careers.
But popular wisdom says that this is extremely dangerous. For example, what if you happen to marry an asshole who will divorce you after your first child is born? Now you have no family, no job experience, and you are not in a great position to look for either a new partner or a job.
This seems like a happiness-security tradeoff. The happy life path has a great risk of going down in flames. The safe life path makes you less happy but helps you survive if things go wrong.
Another aspect is that it takes some time for people to become psychologically mature. Maybe more time these days than it took in the past, because university is an extended childhood. People change profoundly when they get their first serious job (not just for extra pocket money, but one they need to keep in order to pay their bills). So maybe marrying right after university is bad for similar reasons we wouldn't want 15 years olds to marry. (And, as usual, people are different; there are always ones who can do this successfully, but those are the exception, not the rule.)
> A proper solution should start from accepting that we removed fences without knowing the full consequences, admitting there were unpleasant side-effects, and start working on a new equilibrium where we fix each problem.
Agreed.
> progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong.
I think the more accurate framing is that progressives believe society is moving in the right direction but that it has not yet reached the goal. It is experiencing growing pains along the way, because progress is messy. Traditionalists believe we are moving in the wrong direction. (Correct me if this is a straw man.)
A more accurate framing would also be a lot less charitable. Both sides (and I do mean both) are flaming messes of pattern completing tribal automatons, without much in the way of original though or capability of actually changing their minds. Because both sides are made of humans, and humans don't do well with politically charged issues.
As for progressives specifically (did I mention I'm not singling them out as being awful?), they're definitely not assuming any responsibility for the problems we're facing, and I don't really see anything in the way of actually trying to fix them other than "run faster" and "it's the other guys fault".
A particularly stark and raw example: progressives took the right to abortion and turned into celebrating it. And I fully blame them for the current mess, btw - this shouldn't even have been a culture war topic in the past 50 years. BOTH sides should have been 100% aligned: let's make sure there's as little need for abortion as possible. No matter how much I squint I can't find a real disagreement here. But no, they had to rub it in and promote abortion as a lifestyle out of _spite_. And now traditionalists have this victory on their hand most of them didn't need nor want, but can't renounce because, well, in a war you cannot look weak.
Why am I using this particularly gory and CW example? To illustrate that society is not in a "fixing problems" mindset. Here was a piece of the system that worked fine, and we managed to move a step back because everybody is a conflict theorist (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
Solution? no idea. Just dump as many useful concepts in the water supply and hope enough of them catch. And try to keep and value spaces that are not a flaming mess, I guess.
Well said. I agree with you.
I wouldn't call myself a traditionalist, but I agree with Rebelcredential about progressives: I'm entirely unwilling to take it on faith that you know where we're going or that that place is good, if you do know. Not only is the "yes it's worse now, but just wait until we hit the Promised Land!" rhetoric inherently dangerously utopian and anti-human (in the same way as many have recently criticized long-termism for being: "who cares about suffering NOW?!"), every other time for the last century or so that progressives have been allowed to lead the way all the way to one of these places it's been an incomparably hideous hellscape. My suspicion that current progressives won't do any better is compounded by the fact that those setting the direction of this mystical journey openly, proudly believe in a whole bunch of Flat Earth-level ideas, like blank-slatism and that whole trans business discussed in another subthread. It's like being guided to the Big Rock Candy Mountain by the population of Dayton, Tennessee circa 1925, and they react the same way to criticism as those townies did. I'd rather stay home, thanks.
In short, I'm much less sure about what ought to be done than that we shouldn't do what you guys want. Does that count as centrism?
> every other time for the last century or so that progressives have been allowed to lead the way all the way to one of these places it's been an incomparably hideous hellscape.
Hmm. I get to own a house and make money and have/raise children on my terms, travel freely, socialize on my terms, be selective about my partners, do interesting work that pays, save for retirement… I’m not really seeing a hellscape? Without 20th century progressives, my life as a nonwhite woman would be objectively worse. If I were born a hundred years earlier I’d probably be living in servant’s quarters or die in childhood or die in childbirth or be stuck in a marriage to a drunk scumbag or be beaten on a regular basis or whatever. If I’m one of the really really lucky ones, I have physical and emotional safety through my life.
I don’t want to strawman the position but it’s hard not to see traditionalism as rooted in resentment from people who probably would have had more money and more sex had they been born a hundred years sooner. Maybe that will lend some insight into why the progressive left can sound rabid in its anger.
In addition to what Anonymous wrote, anyone who's not a fellow progressive is going to read your "If I were born a hundred years earlier..." passage and just think, horseshit.
Russians are taught in school that America secretly planned Pearl Habour against itself, North Koreans believe Kim Il-Sung summoned swallows and rainbows, and Feminists believe that life was a hellscape for women for thousands of years before Emmeline Pankhurst rode in on a white stallion to save us all.
There are a bunch of problems with the formulation you give here. The first and most glaring one is that you're begging the question again – the whole conversation here has been about how these *apparently* good things which *allegedly* made your life better have nevertheless led to a *reduction* in women's happiness, so just pointing at all those things again and declaring them good a priori lacks convincing force, to say the least.
Secondly, most of those things – reduced child and childbirth mortality, standard of living raised to the point of servant no longer looking like an attractive gig – have nothing to do with progressivism, with the feminism/women's lib movement, or indeed with politics at all, they're just apolitical products of technology. You can't claim points for progressivism on the basis that a Scottish freemason invented a machine that runs off water and charcoal and makes manual labor obsolete.
Third, to the extent that politics did play a role, the reason the west was successful in the 20th century is that conservatives and moderates *thwarted and held back* progressives, not that they were given a free hand; wherever they did get it, various repugnant moral and humanitarian disasters ensued – the Soviet Union, the various awful eugenics programs in numerous western nations (the classic example here being the Catholic traditionalist Chesterton arguing against the Fabian socialists Wells and Shaw, who were vigorously endorsing eugenic purification of the breeding stock in pursuit of a new and better mankind), the Great Leap Forward, the Nazis etcetera were all based on the implementation of some Grand Transformative Vision for society which promised utopia tomorrow but only offered genocide today – and the argument is that indulging second-wave feminism is another case of progressives making things worse to the exact, limited extent they're enabled to – obviously nowhere near genocide in this instance, but we should still be very reluctant to just let the reins slip. (Socialism probably didn't *mean* to kill all those kabillions of people initially either, it just became a tragic necessity once that stupid recalcitrant human nature refused to conform to the Plan, the beautiful Plan...) You don't have to agree with this argument, and I'm not sure I do, but I can certainly see the pattern which they're pointing at, and it's a real thing that caused untold, unparalleled quantities of human misery. In comparison, somebody who just says "let's just stay right here and try to figure out how to repair this damage, at least it can't get even worse if we don't move from this spot" seems like a shining saint of wholesome reasonability, and if he adds that he thinks the best thing to do would just be to rewind all the social mores to 1880, well, maybe that doesn't sound optimal or feasible to me, but at least we've already been there once and it was much less bad than the Red Khmer, so he still wins in terms of the amount of backing he has for his promises.
If we aren’t using metrics like wealth and health in addition to self reported happiness to measure well being, what is the point of effective altruism? I guess that’s not your bag?
You’re right about the rising tide of technology lifting all boats, so we should cross childhood death off the list. Being a servant might be replaced with run of the mill poverty. We can nitpick line items, but is there really a dispute about it? I would not be able to be prosperous without a change in social attitudes and policies pushed by progressive social movements.
I shouldn’t have left the question of my own well-being unstated. I am happier in the current context I described than I am reasonably certain I would have been in a context predating the women’s and civil rights movements. I mean, duh. Probably should have mentioned too that I have a strong social network which matters just as much to happiness as things like safety and autonomy. I am thankfully not a victim of the loneliness plague in the modern West.
Reasons for falling unhappiness across modern society are speculated (loneliness plague?), not known, and we should not act like the cause-effect in the case of rates specific to women IS known. “Women are less happy now” is, as I’ve said before, a rhetorical device used by people trying to dunk on feminists. I’ve encountered some thought provoking ideas here, but nothing to challenge that one.
Also agree with you that progressive movements - any ideological movement - needs to be met with skepticism. I am also skeptical of contemporary far-left progressivism which I guess these days we call being woke.
Thanks for engaging. I appreciate seeing others’ value systems in a reasoned way.
Paragraph breaks, my dude!
> progressives are shoving cotton in their ears and pretending nothing is wrong.
> I think the more accurate framing is that progressives believe society is moving in the right direction but that it has not yet reached the goal.
It's definitely the cotton wool thing.
It would be one thing to say, we've got to get there from here, and along the way there'll be a period of chaos and transition, but bear with because it'll be worth it when we get there.
But that implies that *you know where you're going*.
Progressives don't. They didn't expect the problems they're facing now, they don't understand why they're happening, and they can't predict what's going to happen next.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that progressives don't have a good model of reality, they don't really know what success looks like, and they're not leading us anywhere good.
Traditionalists believe we're moving in the wrong direction, yes, because what we're actually doing is following a leader who keeps saying, "trust me guys it'll all be worth it" while very obviously not having a clue what she's doing.
And the further we follow her, the worse things get for - in this case - women.
> the worse things get for - in this case - women.
No. Somehow, you have turned “research shows that women are becoming unhappy at a slightly faster pace than men are becoming unhappy” into this statement.
It would probably help if you could give some definition to how much you want to roll back the clock. Do we just want to pull back on the you-go-girl rhetoric in society enough to ensure there are adequate attractive young family-focused women in the population for the men looking for that? Or do we want to roll back all the 20th century legal rights granted to women? I’ve seen a lot of people here say they are not traditionalists and don’t want the old model, but I still don’t have a sense of what actual traditionalists are proposing.
> the worse things get for - in this case - women.
> No. Somehow, you have turned “research shows that women are becoming unhappy at a slightly faster pace than men are becoming unhappy” into this statement.
I raise my eyebrows pointedly at you for taking exception to this.
What do I want? For a start:
Championship of the masculine and feminine virtues. Girls raised wanting to be wives and mothers. Boys raised to take pride in being strong providers.
The widespread understanding that a high IQ woman serves society better by creating multiple future physicists and statesmen than by becoming a single one herself.
The widespread understanding of society as a well oiled machine, with men and women the finely engineered moving parts, who create the miracle of civilisation by working together just so; if the roles break down, the machine cannot magically keep working.
Seen in that light, it should be obvious there must be some relegation of homosexual and nonstandard gender roles to a lower status than traditional roles. We don't try to forbid or persecute anyone, because we are Westerners and we adhere to the ideals of classical liberalism. But promoting and celebrating LGBTQ to stop at once, especially to children.
I would also like more widespread knowledge of history, and that means historical narratives that progressives absolutely do not share (hint: it doesn't read like it was written by Margaret Atwood.)
In particular I would like everyone to have a much wider perspective on what "bad times" can actually look like, in order that people can look at being screamed at at work or slapped on the bum, and see those things as the tiny trivialities they are.
The same goes for complaints like "having to do emotional labour and please a man". Bitch you are being offered the precious chance to do emotional labour for your children and please a man who loves you. Check your privilege.
You'll note that I haven't hearkened back to the Old Days and I'm not interested in "rolling back the clock". I am aware of history but my beliefs are not based on any kind of romanticism or nostalgia.
I am talking about accepting an accurate model of human nature, and adopting roles and virtues that make the best of it.
It doesn't matter to me which previous eras did the right things, only that we start doing them now.
Understood, thanks for laying that out.
Different angle: What would you say goes into happiness, and how optimised is a given lifestyle for producing it?
Off the cuff, I'd suggest some important factors:
- having dependents who rely on you (isn't this supposed to be one of the single biggest contributors?)
- having a daily dose of status-affirming positive interactions
- having a daily dose of little wins or opportunities for Csikszentmihalyi-style flow.
- having material comforts.
I think material comforts are the smallest contributor in the list. I think you need just enough to get off the bottom of the Maxwell Needs Heirarchy, and any benefit from more possessions after that is actually from their enabling status- or flow-based behaviour.
Having dependents who rely on you is self-evidently a point for the mid-century housewife (in her ideal form, whether or not she actually ever existed).
By "daily dose of positive status-affirming interactions" I'm saying that a lot of people giving you the feeling that they're pleased with you, or impressed with you, or that you're better than them at X and everyone can see it, is likely to leave you in a better mood than a day full of the opposite. Your mileage may vary on this but I think it's fair to call it a major contributor of most people's happiness.
If status is dimorphic for men and women, and women get positive status from the things you suggested upthread, then the status-yield a modern woman gets at her job is in a sense "empty calories". You're scoring in Man-points but getting graded in Woman.
(Your words upthread were, "their value is to be beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers.")
If this is true, your job could put you in a position of great power, wealth and authority, but it wouldn't result in people being more awed by you on a level deep enough to really make you happy. You'll get superficial respect and nothing more.
If at the same time you're watching men doing exactly the same job but getting a truer, more genuine reaction from those around them, then your status-affirmation score is probably well into the red by the end of the day.
(Under the dimorphic model, the successful professional man and the mid-century housewife are both entitled to genuine appreciation and respect for what they are. The modern woman and the guy who focusses on caring and nurturing find that, on its own, that work counts for nothing.)
So of the four things I randomly decided should make up happiness:
- material comfort falls off quickly
- both status and family choices favour the housewife and immiserate the modern woman.
- only Csikszentmihalyi's flow/engagement process is gender neutral. (At least, I don't remember him ever saying otherwise.)
So for a modern woman there are two steps you can take to become happier:
- Repent your wicked ways and embrace tradwife life.
- Increase your time in flow by building sandcastles and learning to play the guitar.
A bunch of things:
-I do want to nitpick the idea that women were merely supposed to be " beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers." This idea totally flattens historical notions of womanhood. For example, look at Gervais Markham's 1615 handbook "The English Housewife". A "complete" woman prior to the 20th century was supposed to know how to cook, clean, raise children and act as nurse practitioner. She was supposed to know how to identify literally hundreds of adulterated or spoiled food items for sale in a market, grow and preserve meats and produce, and know when and how to harvest what she grew for maximum output. She might spin or weave, and could almost certainly sew and embroider, and chose fabrics and constructed the family's wardrobe. She also probably managed the household's money, servants and farmhands. The early education of the children was largely in her hands as well, regardless of whether the family was literate. There was A LOT to know (and she might not even be able to write any of it down.) A "good" woman, someone who was wife material, had vast stores of domestic, horticultural and social knowledge, and the lives of her family depended on it. A pretty wife was a bonus; a stupid, lazy wife could easily kill you and your children.
-As soon as I became aware of Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow/engagement, I realized that this is what I get out of housework. I get flow from cleaning and home maintenance, and cooking is both a flow and creative outlet for me. This is a major reason why I am a happy housewife; I get a lot of flow out of my day. Also, as challenging as kids are, I definitely get a wonderful "daily dose of positive status-affirming interactions" from my small children. Oxytocin is literally a drug, and the hugs and kisses and myriad shows of love and affection I get from my kids is absolutely making me happier on as many social, psychological and chemical levels as you care to count. My husband is appreciative, affectionate and helpful, too. I got flow and appreciation from working as a data manager, too, but nothing like this.
I also get something else from Maslow's hierarchy of needs: mastery. Our meals are tasty and healthy, our house is reasonably tidy, and my husband and kids regularly tell me how nice things are at home. Therefore I must be pretty good at this. That's really all the status I need, too. Domestic life is much more of a closed system with fewer people to please, and if the above is true I've fulfilled the outside world's expectations for my role admirably as well.
There is A LOT of reward built into my day as a homemaker that would be hard to match at any job, but that largely has to do with being the kind of person who experiences flow and mastery and has a family providing positive feedback. You can't universalize the idea that homemakers are happier because there are plenty of women who, beyond not experiencing flow, hate cooking and cleaning with the burning of 1000 suns and have a family that derpily extracts the benefits of her labor without acknowledging the work. Those women SHOULD spend the majority of their time out earning money. But besides money, they might not be able to cash in what they get at work for the same kind of immediate reward feedback cycle happy homemakers experience. And they'd be way more miserable at home. My point earlier is that these arrangements are temporary; I'm not going to be as happy to stay home in 5 years when my kids aren't babies anymore. We need more flexibility.
-I do believe status works differently for men and women, but I think the "man points" metaphor isn't quite right. I would propose that men and women are both getting status, but we can't cash it in for the same rewards. I've personally felt respected and appreciated for my professional work, but at the end of the day the status was more symbolic than useful, at least outside of the workplace. It's a bit like men are paid in status cash while women are paid in status Bitcoin (with the added assumption that Bitcoin is worth what it says). You're rich, but you can't buy a pizza.
And there may not even be pizza; a big part of social dynamics is that men seeking status largely want to cash it in for female attention. Rich women might enjoy male attention, but men aren't instinctively drawn to female wealth and power. It might not matter at all for a woman whose real goal is to find a desirable man, so unless she really loves the job itself, there's one less reason to chase the brass ring.
I used the OP's words, not my own, for what a woman was supposed to get status from.
I personally think both your stated requirements and her facetious ones could definitely stand to get more exposure. The practical skills you mention are worthy of respect in their own right and most modern women just don't have them.
Meanwhile the idea of a woman wanting to be affectionate, pretty, and make her man happy is something you couldn't even bring up at a dinner party these days. I think we need more of it.
Regarding status, there's a much longer spiel between me and DinoNerd below where I've tried to flesh out how I'm using the term.
From what I can tell, status isn't entirely dimorphic by gender. It probably varies depending on who you have in your environment, and to an extent who you listen to. It may also depend on what you personally believe. But I definitely see women with status as managers, engineers, etc. (I'm less personally sure of status in roles I don't interact with as often.)
I'm not sure any woman in the modern US gets to experience quite as much positive feedback for career etc. as an otherwise identical male might, because there are always some who react in gender-dimorphic ways. But career success doesn't produce entirely empty - or even mostly empty - calories either.
We're trying to explain an effect seen across a large number of people. Noisy data and local variation is to be expected. All that matters is if, in aggregate, women have moved from a steady source of status-affirmation to an impoverished one. If they have, we should expect that women on the new sauce are less happy.
The difference, perhaps, is that my approach offers an alternative for women who want to improve their happiness, other than trying to live a probably-no-longer-economically-viable female lifestyle.
I wasn't aware you had offered an approach. What did you suggest?
Implicitly, to hang out with people who are less dimorphic in their attitudes, and reconsider whatever internalized dimorphism you may have.
You assume that this "support for family care" us just a free lunch that will come out of nowhere. If you assume that it will just replace "unaffordable" daycare with "unaffordable" taxation to fund said daycare, it doesn't seem like so great a deal.
"Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives."
Most people (men and women) don't particularly like their jobs. They like getting paid, which shouldn't be confused with liking work itself.
Where’s your data?
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/
What do you mean by "high-quality" child care?
High quality child care is child care provided by people who have the temperament for interaction with young children and are educated in early childhood development. It can be provided on an individual level or at child care centers that have funding for good infrastructure.
So you're entitled to a career, but the person caring for your child isn't?
Someone has to do it, and there are good reasons for it to be the child's mother instead of a hired stranger.
Come on, this is uncharitable. Childcare can *be* a career. Someone can specialize in teaching two year olds (say), and do it for fifty years instead of one. Specialization, continuous improvement, and economies of scale, applied to childcare.
Early childhood development is arguably one of the most important fields of work that exists. I am a hundred percent in favor of it being rewarded with the pay and prestige of a career. It is not the kind of work that increases shareholder value, and work done primarily by women has historically been considered low status, so the free market leaves us with low quality. I would love for people who choose this field out of a passion for the work to be spending all day with my kid rather than me. Many mothers and fathers are not cut out for the tedium of 24/7 time with young children.
I fully agree with the first part and disagree with the second. If mothers and fathers are not cut out for spending time with children, maybe they just shouldn't have children?
I didn’t say “spending time” - I said 24/7 time. They are two completely different things.
It can also be provided by mothers.
Pretty much everything that was available to provide happiness for women in the 1970s, is available to women today if they want to live like women of the 1970s. And there have been many positive improvements on top of that. So *if* women are less happy today, it is because they have chosen poorly, or it is because they are unavoidably jealous of the women who put their children in mediocre child care while they go off to high-profile careers to earn money to buy material comforts, all of which are more visible to outsiders than the internal rewards of family.
Alternately, the premise is false and women aren't less happy than they were fifty years ago. It's plausible that they are, but the quality of the data doesn't inspire confidence in the conclusion.
See the subthread on happiness research by Erusian.
This is actually part of why I suspect changed sexual mores are the core of the explanation. They're the *only thing* that I can think of that's changed where you more or less have to follow the herd if you want to have a good chance of getting a good partner, making it significantly more difficult to opt out than e.g. opting out of having a career.
Changed sexual mores would definitely tilt the balance against women who want children more than they want good sex. But they're a boon to the women who want good sex more than they want children, and I *think* those roughly balance out for the female population as a whole. But it's worth considering as a hypothesis, I agree.
The way I see it, the same type of objection applies even more strongly to the other proposed explanations, e.g. all the work-related ones fail to account for the fact that as Erusian pointed out, the labor force participation of women only increased by about 20% post women's lib; thus it shouldn't be able to account for a society-wide and general drop in women's happiness since only 1/5 were affected. Since changed sexual mores apply to effectively all women who want a relationship *and* all women who want to *keep* one, it's much more pervasive.
But the other thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a well established fact that women on average find casual sex less satisfying than sex in a relationship, with one-night stands showing the lowest satisfaction of all; also women typically have less interest in "pornified/extreme/pick-your-own-unsatisfactory-adjective" sex acts (the clearest example being norms around oral sex AFAIK). In other words, the sexual revolution militates *against* women's sexual satisfaction on the whole both by them having to put out early in the relationship and by normalizing more extreme sex acts. Those are broadly things *men* like.
Temperament, certainly. Educated in early childhood development seems like a red herring, I think degrees in early childhood education (if that is what you mean) are probably uncorrelated with quality of childcare provided.
But also: the ratio of care providers to children should be not too large. (What too large is depends on how old the kids are. Obviously you can get by with much larger ratios in high school than in daycare. But if you have fifty toddlers per care provider in a daycare then it doesn't matter how good the providers temperament is, or how many degrees they have, or how good in infrastructure is, it *cannot* be high quality child care).
You probably need a ratio of no more than 1:3 (maaybe 1:4) at the earliest ages. Rising to, say, 1:30 by high school age.
> Educated in early childhood development seems like a red herring, I think degrees in early childhood education (if that is what you mean) are probably uncorrelated with quality of childcare provided.
I did not mean degrees specifically. Early childhood development is a well researched field. The education can come from a degree, certificate, or training program designed by the educated founder of a center but however you slice it, the caregivers should have knowledge of the research.
> But also: the ratio of care providers to children should be not too large.
Minimum ratios are regulated by the state, and 50 toddlers per adult is illegal. I don’t think of it as a bar for quality because it is regulated, but you’re right that it matters.
>>>Early childhood development is a well researched field
Is it? Or is it full of the same wish fulfillment junk as young adult education?
And even if it is good education research, on what do you base your supposition that highly political child care departments will actually follow the science?
I am not credentialed in that field and can only speak as a science literate parent who very selfishly cares about what works in early childhood. The research I am referring to is the kind not subject to culture wars, in other words researched claims like “pretend play is good for cognitive development.” Early childhood research should be approached with the same skepticism that is applied to all social science research.
"the temperament for interaction with young children"
I wonder if an application of this standard would end up with feminists who refuse to submit to gender norms around femininity getting excluded.
"and are educated in early childhood development"
That would substantially drive up the price while making it ever harder for working-class people to find jobs. Here's an idea: if you think it's worth it, you make the choice as a consumer to pay for it? And others who don't think it's worth it don't have to pay for it.
> if you think it's worth it, you make the choice as a consumer to pay for it?
A primary goal of making high quality child care a public good is to combat falling fertility rates in industrialized nations. If you aren’t concerned about that, then I understand the belief that it’s free lunch.
This is a bit rambling - sorry -
Last I noticed, women were individuals. My memories of the 1960s involved miserable homemakers, isolated in suburbs with no adult company, self-medicating with alcohol, if they weren't using drugs prescribed by their doctors.
I doubt all the women on our suburb felt like that - but my mother did, and so did most of her social circle.
OTOH, I've certainly encountered women who want to be housewives, and who *might* not even mind being stuck in a suburb with no transportation. Assuming they are correctly predicting how they'd react to the experience, they would presumably be happier, in conditions that destroyed my mother.
I've also encountered posters in SSC-derived forums (mostly not this one) prescribing all women being primarily child producers and tenders as the optimum human society. And I don't think *all* of them were male.
Looking at things from the other side - no one can do it all. A single person can fully dedicate themselves to their career. A married person who wants to stay married probably needs to spend some time with their spouse.
A sufficiently prosperous person can hire out tasks that interfere with their all-consuming career focus. Obviously, having society make it easier/cheaper to get hired help allows more people to use this method.
And having friends or family members, or even a long term employee, take up the slack in a responsible fashion allows even more career focus, provided you have some way to motivate those friends etc.
One way to get that kind of support person is to marry them. Their career then becomes enabling your career, and you have the chance to go even farther than a single with only casual hired help.
Men are individuals too. Many of them aren't made happy by an all-consuming career. Ditto for women, only perhaps even more so at a statistical level. If that's not your bag, enabling you to give even more of your life to your career probably won't make you happy, though it might make you richer.
For myself, now retired, I find I'm sorry that I put so much into my career for so long. The money was great, and will enable me to have a comfortable retirement. But I'm heartily sick of the rat race.
I appreciate your sharing this personal account, and my heart aches for women like your mother. There is a lot to be gained from moderating traditional views of the “best” life model for men and women.
I wonder how much about happiness is about expectations. Like, two people could be in exactly the same "meh" situation, but if one expected horrible things and the other expected great things to happen, the former will probably report more happiness.
If you are a man, you are socialized to work hard and stop complaining. Your worth as a human being depends on how much you succeed to fight for yourself. Don't expect any help. If you are not a part of the small group of winners, you are a loser.
If you are a woman, you are probably told that you are awesome, and that you can have it all.
And then both grow up and realize that the reality is somewhere in between. The life sometimes sucks but sometimes is okay; most of you will never become CEOs, but most of you won't starve either. The men celebrate, the women complain.
> If you are a woman, you are probably told that you are awesome, and that you can have it all.
Oh boy. Not sure how to respond to this. Maybe I will try.
From birth, women receive the message that their value is to be beautiful, to keep the men in their lives happy/satisfied, and to become mothers. The other stuff (talents, hobbies, quirks, accomplishments, brilliance, etc) is bonus and should not come at the cost of self beautification, wifely duties, and motherhood.
The “you are awesome” messages are an attempt to combat the “you are a second class human” messages that are so pervasive, you are not even seeing them.
No traditional housewife, hypothetical or not, ever thought of herself as a "second class human being". Neither did her husband, nor any man or woman in the society around her.
I think this exposes the edge of a bubble. It's either around you or me, but the worldview inside has vastly drifted from the world outside. Because seriously, only feminism and the incel movements it gave rise to could actually consider women to be second class human beings.
I wonder if the 19th century version of housewives in question who do not consider themselves to be second class human beings would have supported the 19th century movements that led to women achieving property ownership and the right to vote. Those women were probably confident that women do not have the intelligence or emotional disposition for these manly responsibilities. This is just how God made women, after all.
Because to do anything else would probably be sexist, I choose to believe you when you tell me about how God made your emotional disposition.
How respectful of you to show deference to the education I received from my pastor!
We don’t seem to be on the same page about civil rights and moral progress in general, which I would venture to guess is not a disagreement we can resolve here.
During the last several thousand years, keeping points 1 through 3 was the best path to a comfortable existence and the rest was, indeed, a bonus. Compare and contrast with men, who are considered by society to be basically worthless outside of their accomplishments, and need to constantly prove their worth.
It remains to be seen whether the rules of the game have truly changed, or is the current insistence they have changed just a short-lived fad.
Is there not also a message of "you need to go to college" and "you're kind of a loser if you don't have a career" that women also receive? These messages may not come from the same sources as the BE A MOM and BE HOT messages, but they are there, and have been for at least a generation or two.
College/career expectations are second order messaging that start in adolescence and might come from a family or social bubble. Beauty/motherhood messaging comes at every woman from every angle starting from birth.
What about in the huge number of liberal families out there in every western country who will teach their daughters "You don't have to be a mother, you're just as capable of having a career as boys" etc? I really don't think there is just one message that any girl hears anymore about what she is supposed to do based on being female.
To be sure, messaging about career towards both girls and boys is strong in higher income and/or liberal circles. I am talking about subliminal messaging - the insidious stuff that is socially programmed into how adults interact with babies and young children on autopilot, how marketing is aimed at girls vs boys, how female and male protagonists in stories for children are written, etc.
Asked my wife for a third opinion, she said that the part about "keeping the men in their lives happy/satisfied" is obsolete, but the rest is correct. :D
(I guess it also depends on local culture and the bubble you build around yourself.)
>I see the “women are less happy now” argument brought up in the comments section regularly as if women’s rights advances were a mistake.
It's a replicated research funding, and a pretty damning one at that. Because feminists consider women's "rights" (an overly broad term that is used to describe things that aren't actually about rights) as so crucially important, it's bizarre that women are less happier since the time when they started getting what they want. Because let's be clear, the finding is not that women are no happier now than when they got their rights (and non-rights).
They're *less* happy. Which means whatever little hypothesis you have for this, you're saying that thing is enough to *more* than entirely cancel out any of the happiness they got from their rights. Whatever thing they're unhappy about now is worse than whatever terrible thing from the past we got rid of, which is a really weird thing for a feminist to believe.
>n my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce
Okay, well, I don't think you should describe your in-group's position on a contentious political topic to be self-evident. If it's so obviously true, there should be a wealth of data for you to prove this. And you should be proving (or at least supporting with data) it instead of declaring it self-evident.
>women are dissatisfied because
allegedly
>they want high quality and affordable child
Okay...so? I want a lot of things too. It doesn't make them rights. Nobody said its a right to be able to have a white collar career and have children and have free time.
>they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives.
You mean, back when only 30% or less of jobs were white collar (around half as many as today)? So you're saying that women are dissatisfied because they supposedly don't have things as good as a minority of men did in the past? I don't know what kind of understanding you have on pre-1960s America, but the vast majority of men did NOT "enjoy professional careers". And how many women today have "professional careers" (or would if they had better childcare)? Not a majority. Are the minority dragging down the overall happiness? Or do you have another "self-evident" theory for why the majority have become less happy?
And why exactly do you consider it some great injustice that white collar women supposedly have all these household burdens, but it's fine that large numbers of men cannot hope for a professional career at all (and do the vast majority of dangerous work)?
And just stop and think about what you're saying: Having a career is so important to these women that they're willing to it despite supposedly having excessive household burdens, and yet the difference in happiness between carrer+burdened & career+unburdened is somehow greater than the gap between no-career & career+burdened. The implication of your argument is literally that women would happier not having careers.
>Is there a seriously held belief in the community here that the answer to “women are less happy now” is a return to the midcentury housewife model? Or am I misinterpreting?
If it's true that women's rights have (directly or indirectly) made women unhappier, it's true. The fact that you think that this is the logical implication of that claim has absolutely no bearing on its truth value.
Dude, you're reading way too much into the way she phrased jobs. She didn't say professional careers, at all. She said professional lives. That just means work life.
Like, calm down. There are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing.
If the data is out there somewhere, it would be interesting to know whether or not working women in countries with good childcare are happier. It's not like this is some mystical otherworldly thing, there's a couple of dozen of our peer countries that have just what the OP is wishing for. NYC / Toronto would be a pretty good comp, or Seattle and Vancouver.
"countries with good childcare"
What does this mean?
France. (Recommended reading: "Bringing Up Bebe.")
Yes! Great example.
GDP per capita in the US is 64k. In France it is 38k. Figures from Google. The difference (26k/yr) is more than the cost of full time daycare at our local Bright Horizons, even for the smallest kids.
Mind, I'd be happy to see childcare in the US more subsidized. But if you are arguing that `French parents making typical French wages are better off financially than American parents making typical American wages' then the math doesn't seem to add up.
I presume it is shorthand for `countries where the state subsidizes childcare provided by non-parents and non-relatives to a significantly greater degree than does the United States.'
Free daycare centers operated by the state (does this exist anywhere?) might be one way to do it, but I am sure there are others.
Yep. This. Free or easily affordable. Also, like, good quality care. Not a warehouse with TVs where the kids re-enact Lord of the Flies.
I was thinking specifically of what I heard about over lunch a few years back when vacationing in Montreal. I looked it up for the conversation in the other thread, and apparently the cost is capped at 181 bucks / month, CAD. Assuming I read the chart right.
Instead of massively subsidizing daycare specifically, would it not be better to simply make an equivalent cash payment to parents? Then they can choose either to use the money to pay for daycare, or one parent can stay home and they can use the money for something else.
"does this exist anywhere?"
I think Sweden has that. Not coincidentally, Sweden also has either the world's highest taxes or the world's second-highest taxes depending on whether Denmark beat them that year.
I'll dispute that there are decaffinated brands that are as tasty as the real thing (assuming you are talking about coffee, don't know what else you would be talking about).
But certainly, it would be interesting to have cross country comparisons. You'd want some unbiased way to do it though, because if you allow me to cherry pick the country to compare to I'm sure I could come up with whatever sign of effect you want.
>I'll dispute that there are decaffinated brands that are as tasty as the real thing (assuming you are talking about coffee, don't know what else you would be talking about).
Movie quote, and yes, it's probably not true. Real Genius. Great movie. Strongly recommended.
That's sorta why I suggested the comps. Vancouver and Seattle are right next to each other and (I am told anecdotally) have similar cultures. If moms in Vancouver are significantly happier than in Seattle (or vice versa) that should be meaningful. Likewise w/ Toronto, though more of an asspull. I just had a friend tell me that Toronto was great, like the Canadian NYC.
Vancouver vs Seattle could be interesting yes, although one would have to wonder if those two cities were representative of the broader societies. You would also have to somehow adjust for the confounder where sneering at America is de rigeur for American urbanites (Scott even identified it as one of the identifying markers of the Blue tribe) whereas `Canada is the worst' is not an important part of Canadian urbanites self-identity.
Ah, never mind. I was going to say that since the cities are similar to each other, it doesn't matter if they're representative of their larger societies, we could simply compare moms' happiness between the counties to see if good affordable daycare makes a difference, since they have it in Vancouver but not Seattle.
But it turns out that's not true. My wife and I had a long lunch with acquaintances of hers in Montreal some years ago, and they told us all about how this worked and how they had good and very cheap daycare and preschools. But upon further examination, it turns out to be a provincial benefit, so you'd have to find a comp for Montreal. Unfortunately, Montreal is simply incomparable.
The discussion in all those comments was thoughtful and interesting. I've not much else to bring to it directly but I recommend Leah Libresco's substack "other feminism" which generally focus on these kind of questions.
https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/
Erusian et al have already responded pretty well but I think it's worth clarifying that we're probably not discussing a return to the midcentury housewife model. At the meta level, I think a lot of people are desperately searching around for a functional model
Historically, the midcentury housewife is kind of an aberration. It wasn't the standard before WWII and it passed out of common usage at least by the 70's. To the extent that housewives were ever widespread, it only lasted a generation. If you were looking for stable family structures, you'd probably need to go back to the early 20th century extended family structures for something that seems stable but...that's so different from modern society it's difficult to imagine adopting any of those norms.
At the same time, internationally, just about everyone has been hit with similar collapses in family formation, or more specifically birth rates. Birth rates aren't a perfect measure of family formation but they're passable and it's worth looking at a global map of birth rates because it's declining everywhere with a reasonable standard of living (1). They've collapse in Japan, in China, in Russia, in Hungary, in France, even in parts of Latin America like Chile. Whatever is happening, its affecting vastly different cultures with little in common. The best predictors we have, as far as I know, are female literacy and economic development which...there are not tons of supporters for rolling back.
But the long and short is that returning to the 50s is...politically catchy but not a serious policy position. Realistically, we have very few models of high birth rate cultures (again, sorry, birth rates are not a super-accurate statistic for family formation but we need simple, cross-country stats to track and it works) that seem like they scale at all. Probably the best example is that the Mormons, pretty famously, fell below replacement birth rates a few years back. If either Hungarian marriage benefits or Scandinavian child care could fix these issues, a lot of people would have jumped on it already.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_birth_rate
2. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/11/27/first-time-fertility/
> At the meta level, I think a lot of people are desperately searching around for a functional model
Sounds about right! It’s worrisome that for all the thinking being put into this problem worldwide, no good solutions have emerged.
Well no one wants to agree on a yardstick.
Does "good" mean "provides a significant benefit over what we have now"?
Or does "good" mean "reaches a utopian standard", which may or may not be possible?
Or, does "good" mean "something that works well enough to pass muster without contradicting our ideological principles"?
If it's the middle one, we might be in the position of children who wish they could fly by defying gravity. We just have to learn more about how things work and realise that what we want is physically impossible. That may mean ultimately accepting that the aeroplane, though big and uncomfortable, is already a very, very good solution over what there was before.
If it's the third one, then what we have is a request for someone to just make (in this case) Feminism work. What does it imply, if other times or countries are outcompeting the best Feminism can offer.
If it's the first one... then don't we have a moral imperative to restore the state of affairs that made more people happy?
> Does "good" mean "provides a significant benefit over what we have now"?
> If it's the first one... then don't we have a moral imperative to restore the state of affairs that made more people happy?
I don’t follow? Happiness is not the only significant benefit that society can provide. It is one in a list.
> Or does "good" mean "reaches a utopian standard", which may or may not be possible?
> If it's the middle one, we might be in the position of children who wish they could fly by defying gravity. We just have to learn more about how things work and realise that what we want is physically impossible. That may mean ultimately accepting that the aeroplane, though big and uncomfortable, is already a very, very good solution over what there was before.
“Good” means that it allows all individuals to make the choices they need to achieve self actualization while also securing the best interests of humanity as a whole. There is an inevitable push-pull between the two. It’s fair to argue that this is utopian/impossible, but I don’t think it’s obviously utopian/impossible. It will require deep investigation and experimentation over the span of generations before I think humanity is morally justified in doing something like… returning women to pre-modernity norms. (?)
> Or, does "good" mean "something that works well enough to pass muster without contradicting our ideological principles"?
> If it's the third one, then what we have is a request for someone to just make (in this case) Feminism work. What does it imply, if other times or countries are outcompeting the best Feminism can offer.
What is the metric to determine outcompeting?
Yes, feminism is based on an understanding of natural rights that is currently not shared by all humanity. If you really want to get into all that, we can. I haven’t found it productive to try to debate anyone about natural rights, and I don’t think it’s necessary. The change is spreading through W.E.I.R.D. societies at a rate that shows it resonates with a majority.
"“Good” means that it allows all individuals to make the choices they need to achieve self actualization while also securing the best interests of humanity as a whole... It will require deep investigation and experimentation over the span of generations before I think humanity is morally justified in doing something like… returning women to pre-modernity norms. (?)"
This paragraph feels like a thought-stopping response to me. It's a mash of words with what I suspect will be vague and changing definitions, recommending a lot of vague activity with a long time horizon and no concrete actionable suggestions anywhere.
Basically I think it's, "we need to go and do this long shaggy dog train of busywork before we know for sure - oh and in the meantime let's carry on doing what I want to do."
On the contrary: feminism is failing. It is making women less happy, it has had its chance, and now its results are clear.
If you would like to change the focus of feminism to something other than improving the lot of women, or you have new and better ideas about how to do it well, then by all means, go ahead.
Do your deep investigations and generation spanning studies, and get back to us.
In the meantime, we need to solve the task at hand using immediate, non-utopian means.
And you are ruling out a potentially superior solution, one that evidentially made women happier than what we do now, simply on the grounds that it doesn't fit with your ideology.
Also, I don't know what W.E.I.R.D is but I could note that rapid ideas spreading quickly through societies haven't always, historically, lead to the best outcomes.
Say 19th century women are at point A on the “women’s happiness over time” chart. We are now at point B, which is lower than point A. My belief is that point B is a valley on the way to point C, which is a higher peak than point A. The hypothesis is that steps required to get from B to C include things like affordable high quality child care. Hopefully this logic is easy enough to follow. Testing many possible routes from point B to C is what the generation-spanning experiments will accomplish.
The anti-feminist preference is to return to point A rather than forging ahead to point C. I am happy to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate this one.
I’m mostly a homemaker, and I think the answer here is more homemakers, though not necessarily women.
It should be noted, as Erusian already said, that a considerable percentage of women always worked. If you were middle class or poor, there was an excellent chance you worked outside the home or, just as likely, in it. My great-grandmother and her children spent many hours sewing buttons on cards in their Harlem tenement, earning a few cents a day.
If you were wealthy, running a household was an equally complex endeavor to running many businesses today. If you were a farmer, as 90% of Americans were just over a century ago, you were part of an economic unit right along with your kids. But we tend not to include all of this in our mental picture of life before the 70s. The key element, though, was that you were *home*. Modern suburbs can be so alienating because for most of the day they’re largely empty of functional adults, and weren’t meant to be.
There’s also a curious maximalism we apply to this whole question of women in the workforce. It sometimes seems like people assume you’re either a career woman or chained to the stove, and that once a path is chosen there’s no variation over time. My grandmothers were office workers and homemakers in various proportions over the span of their lives. So was my mother, and so am I.
Millions of women around the world work part-time while raising kids and find this quite agreeable, but there’s no shortage of people trying to “fix” this and get them all working full time. This is because more women than men do tend to choose this path, and thus it perpetuates gender inequality and suppresses the number of c-level female executives.
What we removed from the landscape since the 70’s, especially the US, was some critical number of able-bodied, high-functioning people whose primary concern was the well-being of their families, homes and neighborhoods. We also move around more in our 20s, leaving many of us with almost no local social support just as our child rearing years begin.
As anyone raising kids now can tell you, unless you live very close to lots of family, you have very little slack when it comes to childcare. Paid care *does not fix this*. Nothing makes up for the presence and availability of sane relatives and neighbors, people who are not at work all day. Anyone I know with more than two kids has at least one retired or underemployed grandparent, sibling or cousin providing those resources. But how many people do I know with more than two kids? Not many, even among those who could theoretically buy their way out of the problem. Social support is incredibly important, and it’s usually reduced to “affordable childcare” in every discussion. It is so much more than that, just as homemaking is more than just cooking and cleaning.
It’s worth noting that I really wanted to be a homemaker. Finances permitting, I wanted to take time off to raise kids and just be domestic for a while. I deliberately chose a career that wouldn’t punish me too hard for that, but also had modest ambitions to begin with. The worst thing I faced was a very successful female friend who, when I told her I wanted to be a homemaker, made barfing noises at me.
There’s long been an undercurrent of disdain for homemakers in a lot of feminism, partly because it’s “where we’ve been.” I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said women would need to be dragged out of choosing to be homemakers even against their will. It’s become much more of a privileged role as well, but what made my friend barf was the assumed backwardness and small dreams it implied to her. The fact that I didn’t *want* to be CEO was a sign that “there’s still work to do.” In her view, if feminism had really reached me, I would never entertain the idea of being a homemaker.
I think part of the unhappiness women experience is the malaise of no good choices. More women than men will, I think, always want to be homemakers because as much as we downplay the demands of pregnancy and nursing these are real factors in how you want to spend the first few years of parenthood.
We feel bad about the stress on ourselves and our families if we work full time, and we feel like losers who are propping up the patriarchy if we don’t, regardless of whether we’re gunning for CEO or just want a steady job. Some of us handle all this better than others, but I think the negative trends we see in anxiety, depression and obesity stem in part from the fact that humans were not made thrive in situations where *no one is home.* Remote work, a UBI or maybe subsidies for people to relocate near family might mitigate this, but I can’t say for sure how much difference any intervention would make. I favor anything that helps homemaking an attainable position for more people.
I don’t think 1950s-style June Cleavers are the cure to our social ills, but I do think it would be good for society if we figured out how to accommodate more people taking a step back from paid work, especially while raising kids. If feminism is supposedly about women living more productive, fulfilled lives, it should try a little harder to make room for homemakers *of any gender*.
More specifically, we need to account for the decade or so when there’s a good chance someone in the household will prefer to limit paid work and focus on domestic life. We work to build our homes and families, then treat actually living there with them like an afterthought. That was never how it was supposed to be.
All of this was thoughtfully stated, and I agree with just about everything. Thank you. A shift across all society to family-focused living is the ultimate goal, but it needs to address the financial and political disempowerment that results. Care giving in all forms - home, child, elderly - is not valued by markets forces. I think of it as a basic problem of modernity that causes all these effects to float to the surface, from declining happiness to birth rates to inequality.
Plus, there’s the bare fact that there are plenty of women who do not want to be homemakers for long periods of time. (I did it for a couple years with my young child, and it was not for me.)
I don’t know the answer. But as important as it for parents to have the resources to be homemakers at alternating phases of their lives, which will require an attitude shift for many men, I think it is equally important to create pathways for ambitious and talented women to rise into leadership without giving up on having a family.
"I think it is equally important to create pathways for ambitious and talented women to rise into leadership without giving up on having a family."
You might consider that *nobody* can be both maximally focused on work and maximally focused on family. You seem to want something that is impossible.
> You might consider that *nobody* can be both maximally focused on work and maximally focused on family.
Men have been able to maximally focus on work for decades thanks to having wives they trusted to take care of all things related to their children.
I’m saying is that women should have a pathway to focus on their work for long intervals - the kind of focus required for major, not creeping, professional advancement - without feeling that there is serious penalty to their family. This is doable with a stay-at-home-dad model. In a dual income household, other resources are needed to achieve a similar confidence that the family is well taken care of for the duration of your focus elsewhere. I would like those resources to… exist.
More specifically, you would like those resources to be paid for by someone else (presumably multiple someone elses, via state subsidy). Full time daycares already exist, you just have to pay for them (an arm and a leg). Free (i.e. taxpayer supported) public schools also exist, as do after school care programs (which you have to pay for).
I wouldn't mind. Additional state subsidy to parents of kids would put money in my pocket too, and I'm generally in favor of pro-natalist policies. But lets be clear about what we are asking for.
ETA: I would prefer a subsidy to direct public provision, because realistically, not every daycare will be good, but a subsidy would leave me the option to choose which daycare to use.
Yes. Important clarification, thanks.
> I think it is equally important to create pathways for ambitious and talented women to rise into leadership without giving up on having a family.
There seem to me about a million bigger problems in society than privileged women not getting to have it all.
I suspect that this will not matter to you given your incoming beliefs, but for the sake of argument:
A benefit of having women represented at all levels of leadership is that woman-specific perspectives are taken into account in decisions that directly impact the entire US population. This applies in politics, tech, medicine, architecture, law… everywhere. It is not simply about stroking the egos of ambitious women.
Well all right... but once we've admitted gender essentialism to the discussion, we have to at least consider the possibility that one of those "woman-specific perspectives" is that women have a special dislike of being separated from their children for the length of a working day even if someone else is paying the bill, and that this is one of the things driving their loss of satisfaction.
I am most definitely not advocating for gender essentialism. I am referring to examples impacting the female sex such as these:
Health tracking apps should include metrics for menstrual period and basal body temperature tracking.
Female bodies have a higher average thermal comfort temperature than male, so building comfort cooling systems should be designed for both male and female bodies.
Infrastructure to support breastfeeding women should be mandated by law.
Research should be funded to appropriate levels for diseases of female anatomy, such as polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis.
> women have a special dislike of being separated from their children for the length of a working day even if someone else is paying the bill, and that this is one of the things driving their loss of satisfaction.
“A special dislike”? This claim applies to some women, applies to some men, does not apply to some women, and does not apply to some men. I am troubled by the idea that a sweeping statement like this may be used to inform policy by decision makers who believe it. We need women in the conversation to push back on these generalizations.
In this instance I was at least one of the people bringing it up, but I did so specifically to dismiss the financial argument; "I think we can posit as a null hypothesis that this is probably *not* because they can open bank accounts now". Rather, my position is that it's the effects of the sexual revolution that have made women less, and men more, happy. Although this was pitched as a way to liberate women, in practice men effectively gained something at women's expense by the loosening of these mores. (On the group level, of course. There will always be individual exceptions.)
"In my circles, it is considered self-evident that women are less happy because support for family care has not increased at pace with women’s participation in the workforce, so the burden of life for women is heavier than it used to be when a majority of women were homemakers. Women are dissatisfied because they want high quality and affordable child care so they can thrive in their professional lives the way men did when they had homemaker wives."
You don't strictly say otherwise, so don't take this as combative or anything like that, but do you realize that this is an actual mathematical impossibility? Even if we take the fantasy version of this where all women were homemakers (a falsity, as Erusian points out), going from 50% of adults being out of the work force to ~0% out of it means there's simply *nobody left to be the childcare workers*, unless your idea is just that all women take jobs as paid childminders for each other's kids or something, which is obviously just an economic and social net loss. Either the quality or the quantity of child care has to decline precipitously, unless you just accept that individual workload increases significantly instead (the solution which I'd say we de facto broadly opted for as a society). This is arguably the whole reason homemakers became a thing to begin with.
> You don't strictly say otherwise, so don't take this as combative or anything like that, but do you realize that this is an actual mathematical impossibility?
High quality child care can be achieved at economies of scale that don’t require mom to be home with 1-3 kids for 20 years. Pay child care workers well and fund child care facility infrastructure. The people who are skilled at child care and who genuinely enjoy spending time with children will gravitate to the jobs.
"High quality child care can be achieved at economies of scale that don’t require mom to be home with 1-3 kids for 20 years."
Obviously this is to some extent a matter of personal values, but from my point of view, it self-evidently cannot. Handing the kids off to a non-relative is *immediately and inherently* a precipitous loss of quality; going by my own childhood I'd say worse than just letting the kid run outdoors and play unsupervised all day. (And not, to be clear, because my particular minders and schoolteachers were spectacularly awful: they were just regular small-minded middle-class women.) The fact that, as Moosetopher already pointed out, economies of scale can only be realized by each adult taking care of numerous children means another inevitable drop in quality. The shift from being taken care of by your mom to daycare is like going from being a beloved household pet to getting crammed in a chicken factory farm.
Emily Oster is a good resource on the relative benefits of different types of child care based on behavioral and academic outcomes. After 18 months, the socialization available in a classroom of other children can be more beneficial to development than full time one-on-one care from an adult. (I would bet that conversation with parents of young children bears this out anecdotally.) It makes sense if you think about child care centers simulating a village with many young children. Excellent child care workers are loving, fun, patient, and educated in research on early childhood development. To be sure, there is a lot of awful child care out there. I consider excellent child care to be a public good worth big tax dollars, like excellent highways, libraries, and health care. It’s hard to understand the point of civilization if it doesn’t create conditions for everyone’s quality of life to rise across the board.
> After 18 months, the socialization available in a classroom of other children can be more beneficial to development than full time one-on-one care from an adult.
Rolling to disbelieve. Three years old kids often don't know how to play with each other, they just stay there silently or compete for the adult's attention.
(I think there was a research about how kids 3 and younger have significantly increased stress levels from kindergarten, but I don't remember the link.)
> It makes sense if you think about child care centers simulating a village with many young children.
In a village, little kids hang out with their older relatives (who are annoyed by them a lot, but the parents tell them to take care of the little ones). In a kindergarten, children are typically separated by age, so it goes completely against their instincts.
> Rolling to disbelieve.
Research parsed by Emily Oster suggests that the positive effects of one-on-one care dominate under ~18 months and the positive effects of daycare dominate over ~18 months. By no means is this based on RCTs of course.
> Three years old kids often don't know how to play with each other, they just stay there silently or compete for the adult's attention.
The type of play you’re referring to is called parallel play and is well understood as developmentally normal under 3. There is observation and learning happening at that stage when children share a play space even though they are not playing with each other.
> (I think there was a research about how kids 3 and younger have significantly increased stress levels from kindergarten, but I don't remember the link.)
Would be helpful to see the research. In the US, (optional) preschool starts at 3 and (mandatory) kindergarten starts at 5.
> In a village, little kids hang out with their older relatives (who are annoyed by them a lot, but the parents tell them to take care of the little ones). In a kindergarten, children are typically separated by age, so it goes completely against their instincts.
Both of us are speculating. If a village is ~150 people, you’re going to have a lot of young kids approximately the same age hanging around together simply based on their abilities. Infants are strapped to moms. Toddlers corralled because of shared danger and mobility. Older kids watch younger kids as you said. Younger kids play together. Some older kids assist with work that isn’t child care. Adults are all around either doing child care or their own thing or both. Would love for an anthropologist to jump in so we can stop guessing. Child care centers sound a lot more like this to me than 1-3 children at home alone with mom.
See, this is clearly informed by your personal values about other things. I don't consider *anything* to be worth big tax dollars, except the military and the cops. I don't think you have the right to legal-plunder other people just because you want more stuff than you can actually afford, and painting it as altruism is a bit rich. So, consequently I obviously can't agree that providing free childcare is worth big tax dollars.
"It’s hard to understand the point of civilization if it doesn’t create conditions for everyone’s quality of life to rise across the board."
Not at all. Civilization would be adequately justified if even just *one* person's quality of life rose while everyone else's stayed the same.
> I don't consider *anything* to be worth big tax dollars, except the military and the cops.
Fair enough. This is the kind of impasse that will not be resolved in a comments section :-)
>The shift from being taken care of by your mom to daycare is like going from being a beloved household pet to getting crammed in a chicken factory farm.
Hard disagree. Starting at about the age of three, kids love being with other kids. Going to daycare is a desirable enough option that even when we had a grandparent available to do full time care we made a point of getting our kids into a preschool a couple of days a week at that point. Not for the grandmother, who was perfectly willing to have them all week, and not for us, it cost a decent chunk of money and grandma was free, but for the kids themselves.
"Starting at about the age of three, kids love being with other kids."
Speak for yourself. In my childhood having to put up with kids whose company I hadn't explicitly chosen myself stood for easily 60% of the negatives, maybe more like 70%. (The obnoxious child minders were the vast majority of the rest.)
Well, we're both speaking from our experience and projecting general preferences, no? My kids, and the kids of most of the parents I know, all enjoyed being out of the house with other kids. I'm sorry it didn't work out that way for you, but I strongly suspect you're the outlier here.
Is this the kinda thing we have data on? Does someone survey four-year olds about their life satisfaction?
Child care workers, by definition, work longer hours than the person paying them. Therefore the only way they can be "paid well" while charging their clients a sufficiently low rate to make child care economically viable is for them to have multiple kids in their care. The more kids in their care, the lower quality that care is going to be.
Also, 20 years?
20 years checks out if you imagine she'll be home as long as the kids are minors and there are 2-3 years between children.
If it's so darned important to their happiness, these women should be paying for it themselves. If they can't afford it, then you're literally asking everyone who isn't a white collar female professional to subsidize their economically unprofitable (as in, being in this career yields them so little money over the alternative they can't afford extra expenses) jobs for the sake of...what? Some sense of career satisfaction?
The mid-century gains to women's workforce participation are often overestimated. The main thing feminism did was not increase female workforce participation but open up longer careers with higher pay and in more fields. There's been a less than 20% increase in women's labor force participation since the 1960s, mostly upper middle or upper class women. Dual income households increased by about the same amount. But the majority of households already had women contributing some degree of income already. And the drop in women's happiness is not solely among the well off. Likewise the decline in happiness and increase in employment do not co-vary. The decline in happiness began in the 1970s while female labor force participation has been increasing for much longer. So your theory, that it's due to wanting subsidized childcare so they can live fulfilling professional lives, seems unlikely.
(You may note, of course, that this also means the idyllic conservative 1950s where "women stayed home" was a fantasy only a minority of wealthy families ever enjoyed. And you would be correct.)
I'm not sure a purely gendered explanation works at all. Happiness has been declining across the board and from roughly the same historical point. Women are merely getting unhappier faster than men. I'd find it very surprising if it wasn't roughly the same cause but simply something that affected women more or perhaps due to gendered differences in reporting. Male and female complaints over why they are unhappy are broadly similar.
To take your specific theory and glancing at the original study men and women are both slightly dissatisfied with the amount of leisure time they have. (And yes, leisure time excludes time doing chores etc.) But men report they are both having more fun and are more satisfied with how they spend their leisure time. Women also report less satisfaction with their siblings/parents and their friends which might tie in. I wonder if it's as simple as men and women having the same stressors and women not having as many options for blowing off steam.
Thank you for taking the time to do a detailed explanation of happiness data. It’s helpful to me to see the actual research separated from the rhetorical device used to dunk on feminists.
Yeah, you don't get to act like the reasonable one here considering you came in here, used offense and incredulity alone to dimiss an argument, and then declared your position is "self-evidently true".
Dude, shut up. This is like the fourth time in this thread you've popped up to sneer at her. You're hunting down every one of her comments and bagging on her. Stop being an ass.
"I'm not sure a purely gendered explanation works at all. Happiness has been declining across the board and from roughly the same historical point. Women are merely getting unhappier faster than men."
I don't think that this is accurate. Every version of the curve or table for these figures (for the US) I've ever seen has shown women's happiness dropping and men's happiness rising significantly over the same period.
I'm fairly well read in happiness data. Whether it's the GSS or BLS or polling organizations none that I've seen show a net gain in happiness for men over the same period. Where are you getting your data?
I genuinely don't know of the exact source, the US CDC or something, I think. To my mind it's "the one that always gets bandied about in these cases". I suppose it's entirely possible that it's just some weird but widespread canard.
I will take a look nevertheless.
My apologies in advance if I've dropped you into a rabbit hole that's also a dead end. Cursorily googling I can't bring it up now either, now all I find is variants of this one: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/happinessgender.jpg , a curve where men start out at just above 50% being very happy (AIUI), spike in the mid-'70s, then nosedive along with women but pass them in the '90s to return to a near-50% level. It seems I'm indeed off on the part of this argument relating to men, but it's odd because I swear I've seen one many times where men's happiness just crawls gradually upward from WWII (presumably a significant low point in male happiness).
My guess (for both women and men) would be the increasing atomization of society and associated decline in communities. Also declining birthrates and family sizes, which is sort of a related phenomenon. I could imagine that women would be more affected by this, being (on average) more social. As for what to do about it, beats me.
The decline in community institutions, most notably marriage and church attendance, definitely has had a negative effect on happiness. Whether that's due to something specific to that lifestyle or a proxy for general connection and social capital is a debate I'm not going to dive into right now. I'm not sure if it has more of an effect on women or not. It would be possible to run the numbers by gender. And the fact women report having less fun, feeling less happy with their friends, etc all gesture towards it being at least a solid hypothesis.
Do you have evidence for "has has a negative effect on happiness", or just for "has been correlated with a decline in self-reported happiness"?
I'm generally pretty sceptical of self-reported happiness as a proxy for happiness.
How else would you measure it?
I wouldn't - I don't think there is a way to meaningfully measure happiness; the best we can do is make plausible guesses (and that's not good at all).
And those guesses are probably going to be even less use comparing people in different cultures or eras or demographics than they are guessing which of two similar people is happier.
A lot of the gap in happiness between conservatives and liberals is explained by religiosity, income, and marriage rates. All three tend to correlate strongly with happiness and the median Republican is more religious, wealthier, and more likely to be married. Perhaps not the entire gap but the differences in median demographic means you wouldn't expect them to be exactly the same.
Does that hold up in other countries, or are the demographic differences between left and right pretty stable across the first world?
Asking because I don't know how to look it up and it seems like the sort of thing you might know off the top of your head.
I was specifically talking about the US but it does generally hold. Happiness data outside the US tends to be significantly lower quality. But what data we have tends to point towards the same trends at least in Europe.
I'm not Erusian but I believe it does. Income in particular correlates very well with being fiscally conservative, since you're one of the ones paying for all the "freebies". Also, speaking more to Integer's claim, you'd just generally intuitively expect "desire for change" to correlate strongly with "dissatisfaction with the present state of things (i.e. your life)".
>Income in particular correlates very well with being fiscally conservative, since you're one of the ones paying for all the "freebies".
That one really doesn't play for me. It just seems like things are harder here, in a way that's directly traceable back to policy choices, and that we could make everyone's life better if we raised taxes a bit, cut the military a lot, and did more social spending. Having more money seems like it would make you more willing to spend more. I make more than double what I made when I started working, and if my taxes go up a couple of percent it'll be noticeable, but much more livable than when I was young and starting out.
I don't know. Demographically I should be a Republican, but I literally can't imagine voting for that party ever again. I guess I'm an outlier, but most of my friends are like me. Bubbles I guess.
Thanks
The US spends about 3.7% of GDP on the military, which is far below its 20th century average.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=US
Many European countries spend under 2% of GDP on the military, with some as low as 1%. Taking 1% as the absolute minimum [a false economy that would likely cause several wars that the US would eventually get dragged into], that's only 2.7% of GDP freed up for social spending. The gap between Europe and the US is almost entirely higher taxes -- government spending as a % of GDP between Europe and the US is 8.7% of GDP, so at most 2.7% military spending, 6% higher taxes.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/government-spending-to-gdp
46.5% of GDP in 2018 for Europe vs 37.8% of GDP for the US in 2018
Income predicts Republican votes only for folks without a 4-year college degree. This is especially true in the US but the phenomenon by which education becomes a strong predictor of politics is happening almost everywhere in the West (minus some outliers like Ireland).
The best predictor is when education does not match income: low education + high income = right votes; high education + low income = left votes.
See:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship
https://twitter.com/MattGrossmann/status/1544319680441098240
Yeah, obviously you have the right and agency to make up your own mind and any individual can exit the norm for any number of reasons, but it's a practical fact that on the group level attitudes to taxation track level of contribution – for example, women being more in favor of high-tax regimes and socialized services is probably not connected to some essential trait of their sex but just to the fact that women as a group are still net tax recipients. It's observable that among poor people who strike it rich there's a group-level alignment with their new economic class even though assuredly many individuals cleave to their old values, and so on.
Is a Trump/Desantis ticket constitutionally prohibited?
Piggybacking on this question - what do the Republicans here think is going to happen in the primary? What is DeSantis' plan for going up against Trump? Could he win?
1) All polls say he can't win.
2) He probably won't run unless some kind of emergency comes up, e.g. Dems somehow manage to disqualify Trump, or Trump is in such bad health that everyone agrees he needs to be replaced. He's just there biding his time until 2028 and ready to step in in 2024 if it's absolutely necessary.
>1) All polls say he can't win.
1. We're over two years away from the election.
2. What the hell kind of polls give us definite, 100% answers to these questions? He literally cannot win? My god man, let us know of these magical polls that will allow us to become rich through prediction markets!
Alright, "current polls say he can't win if the election was held today".
True, I can absolutely see polls changing and DeSantis winning if, for example, Trump had a stroke, resulting in him being unable to walk and speaking only with difficulty. I'm sure there are other possible future events that can result in DeSantis looking a lot more attractive than Trump, but I'm not ready to try to assign odds to any such events happening.
Trump wasn't seriously primaried in 2020. I would hazard the guess that from the point of view of an average Republican voter his status as the previous president and his popularity haven't changed so much since 2020 and, barring something catastrophic, wouldn't change much by 2024. (If I'm wrong about the current situation, please correct me on this.) Really, the only new thing now is the existence of DeSantis, and I'm having a hard time imagining that that alone would be enough.
Not a Republican, but I do live in Iowa. I don't think Trump will run ... but I spent the first three months of 2019 saying Biden wouldn't run. Anyhow, for arguments' sake I will assume he runs.
My read is that Trump's support is a mile wide and an inch thick. People will flock to someone new and charismatic once they declare. Perhaps, once Trump realizes he will not have an inevitable coronation, he will back out "for the good of the party". (ok, that is a joke) Perhaps somebody will "out-Trump" Trump (that is not a joke).
Unlike 2016, where the Republican Establishment looked at a two-person race between Trump and Ted Cruz and decided they would prefer Trump <example ref. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/20/cruz-gop-establishment-dumping-rubio-trump/ >, the Establishment will pick the other candidate in 2024. Unless it's someone too moderate like Larry Hogan. Or it is actually Ted Cruz again.
Not a Republican but I am from Florida. I'm not even sure there's a conflict. Trump and DeSantis have traditionally been friends and they've been campaigning together this week. The only people who say they're feuding and secretly hate each other are liberal outlets who neither of them actually talk to. Both have directly brushed off comments saying they're fighting. They both still say nice things about each other in public.
DeSantis is up for re-election this year and Trump has his slate of candidates. That will probably be a better signal for 2024 than anything we've got now. But it's already notable that DeSantis has asked to not be endorsed by Trump (apparently Trump offered) but simultaneously has endorsed Trump's picks and campaigned for them. Even the ones not in Florida.
In what sense is there not a conflict? Are you not expecting DeSantis to run for President?
I think it's a real possibility that he doesn't run. If he doesn't he'll be governor until 2026. So he'll be able to stay relevant throughout most of the Trump presidency and then run into term limits just as the 2028 election cycle starts. At which point Trump would be ineligible and would presumably endorse him. (Honestly, election cycles are long enough that beginning to campaign immediately after the midterm is possible.)
I also think it's a real possibility that Trump endorses DeSantis (as he has before) and doesn't run. Trump is old and divisive in a way that DeSantis isn't and if Trump is primarily worried about getting prosecuted then he might value the more electable candidate who's a political ally. DeSantis has already condemned the raid and called the whole thing a witch hunt. Besides, stamping his name on something and then retiring to Mar A Lago is a pretty classic Trump play. Though I think this one is less likely especially after the raid.
Or they could run together. Or they could run against each other in the primary. Or in more outlandish scenarios Trump could be arrested or DeSantis could lose his election. It's too early for me to think any of these are likely. In particular I want to see the aftermath of the midterms for Trump's candidates, the Republican Party, and for DeSantis personally. But realistically possible? Sure.
In what sense is there a conflict? DeSantis spent the last week physically with Trump campaigning alongside him in order to get Trump's slate of candidates elected. The Trump loyalists in Florida and Trump endorsed candidates have been praising both of them. DeSantis's strongest early supporter was Trump and DeSantis has remained a political ally and was key in pushing Trump's narrative around covid. They could have a rupture in the next two years but it hasn't happened yet. And DeSantis is notably closer to Trump than, say, Abbott.
The main reason DeSantis and Trump are thought to be fighting, as far as I can tell, is that DeSantis comes second in a lot of polls. That's literally all the reason I can find discounting unsourced statements from liberal outlets.
I'm not a conservative or any other relevant thing, but I want to second this. I think Trump effectively ended several prominent Republicans' chance at the big chair. Not just Jeb, but also Rubio and IMO Cruz. DeSantis wants no part of a fight with Trump. He's young. He can wait for 2028 if he needs to. Or 2032 for that matter, if the political environment doesn't look good.
According to Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/president-vp-different-states/), "Nothing in the constitution bars presidential and vice-presidential candidates from the same state from running, being elected, or holding office together; it only bars the electors from their home state from voting for both of them."
Oh, right, I forgot Trump is a Floridian now. Florida's a largish state, so running two Floridians isn't a good idea. It could theoretically create a result where Trump wins but Desantis doesn't.
The standard workaround is for one of the candidates to establish legal residence in a different state shortly before the election, e.g. Dick Cheney selling his house in Dallas and registering to vote in Wyoming in 2000 (where he owned a second home that had previously been his primary residence) to ensure Texas electors could vote for both of them. This got challenged in federal court, which ruled in Cheney's favor.
I see Desantis as less willing to do this though.
It would be trivial for Trump to declare residence in NY, no?
I don't think it would be hard, but would he want to? (1) He would then be subject to NY tax, and (2) ego wise, why should he have to change residence, the VP should.
He could try, but Hochul and James would declare by executive fiat that he wasn't one, and Lawrence Tribe, Ken White, Elie Mystal and the entire Twitlaw-o-sphere would declare this totally within the NY Governot's powers.
which I guess is a moot point on the R side if it gets thrown to the House. I withdraw my question!
I don't see why it would be. Trump only served one term so he's eligible to run again.
I guess my phrasing is incorrect. It would only be an issue for Florida electors.
Surely Trump can move before the election.
He can, but would he? I dont think he would, seems like it should be the VP who has to move. But Desantis has more of a connection to FL than Cheney had to TX, and... might not move?
For Trump though, isn't that just staying outside Florida for a few more months of the year than usual? He has multiple residences.
why would he do that if he didn't want to? He seems to enjoy his place in Florida, and not paying taxes in other states. And again... I would think the presidential candidate would get to dictate the terms of who has to move.
"The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves."
Looking at online tide data, I noticed that the peak high tides in my area are always higher when the high tide occurs at night than during the day, and the later the peak, the higher it is. Anyone know why this might be? Is it a general phenomenon or something unique to my local geography?
You say "always"--does that pattern not vary over the course of a month? Or summer to winter?
For some reason I always get nerd-sniped by thinking about tides. It sounds like you're describing a diurnal component, one of which is explained here, about the tilt of the earth relative to the plane of orbit of the moon/sun: https://noc.ac.uk/files/documents/business/Diurnal-Inequality.pdf But that would vary over time corresponding to the direction of the earth's tilt relative to the moon/sun.
You can see other diurnal components in this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_tides#Diurnal But if it's *always* higher at night, I'd assume that would be a diurnal component with a period of 24 exactly. There's one of those in the table, but it's got extremely small amplitude.
Just whenever I've checked, which is admittedly not very often. I haven't been keeping close enough track to know if there's any seasonable component.
Where is this? If this is true for a long period of time something fishy is up, and I'd be very interested in knowing more!
Because it shouldn't be generally true, though it (and the reverse) is often true for a few days or weeks at a time. Most places have two tidal cycles per day, though some places have only one. This is known as Semidiurnal or Diurnal tides. Many places have a mixed tidal cycle, where Diurnal and Semidiurnal tidal cycles interfere, creating one higher tide and one lower tidal cycle per day, sometimes with flat periods. The tidal cycle is about 50 minutes out of faze with the day-night cycle however (because the moon orbits the earth slightly slower than the earth rotates around its own axis relative the direction towards the sun, and the tides follow the moon), so after a few weeks you'll have morning and evening tides instead, and a little while later you're back to night and day tides, but now the day tides are higher. It gets a lot more complicated than this too, with whole series of secondary and tertiary tidal components and local geological effects, but that should explain your observed phenomena :) If you're interested I warmly recommend the Wikipedia article on tides, even just scrolling through and looking at the graphs and pictures: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tide
(Source: I'm an (occationally) professional skipper, and really ought to know this stuff :P )
Yes, we have two tide cycles per day, they advance 50 minutes a day, etc. My point is that the peaks are always higher when in the evening and at night and I'm wondering why. E.g. right now we have a morning and afternoon high tide. But the *height* of the afternoon high tide is higher than the morning one, and every day as it advances 50 minutes into the evening and night, the peak is slightly higher than the day before. The high tides are always highest when it falls right around midnight, and then as it continues advancing 50m/day into the early AMs, the peak starts going back down again, etc.
And this remains true over many months?
So there are secondary and tertiary waves too, some of them ought to be from the much weaker solar tidal forces, and would be synced with the day-night cycle... Though this is beyond my knowledge! Check out this graph for some example location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#/media/File:Tidal_constituent_sum.gif
You’re not at the Bay of Fundy by any chance are you? ;-)
I read this too quickly as "a bay area fundy"
I am interested in a discussion based on the following premise:
Consciousness can be defined as the ability to imagine you are someone or some thing else.
The technical term is "theory of mind", and you can have one without the other.
I get that you can have consciousness without theory of mind, but not so sure the other way round would work?
I think it's possible - a sophisticated enough text transformer AI would pass tests for a theory of mind, the same way it can be said to have a theory of anything else.
There are also some thought-provoking fictional examples in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia.
Yeah ok, I did some reading. The vocabulary is a bit like jello. I apologize for that. Theory of Mind, and consciousness.
I don’t know but it seems to me that some equate consciousness with sentience. That’s a whole different ball game. I don’t really buy into that definition personally.
You're right that some people use those terms as synonyms. Those who make a distinction apparently are talking about how the smarter animals have something in common with humans, brain-wise, which allows them to subjectively experience living in the world, as we do. It's like a proto-consciousness, a baseline over which consciousness can develop.
The more I am pondering this, the more inclined I am to think that the “hard problem of consciousness“ is a problem better addressed by biologists and chemists rather than computer scientists and philosophers.
For what possible reason would you want to define it that way? It's not what the vast majority of people mean by it, including those in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and it does not appear to have any usefulness whatsoever.
The remarkable thing about consciousness is the having of subjective experience at all, not one very particular kind of conscious experience.
Discussions of the idea are muddled enough as it is without these highly idiosyncratic definitions.
That’s what I’d consider a pretty high level of consciousness. There are more basic levels - like being barely conscious or dimly conscious. Which usually involves just noticing that you are noticing stuff.
Consciousness is tautologically imagining what it is like to be yourself. Nothing to do with the other afaik
In your thoughts, do you never bring other people on stage?
And which version of yourself are you bringing on stage? Different ones perhaps; the version that will handle the imagined situation best, or the version that will create quite a stir, or others.
I propose that a mental construct of yourself (that you imagine) is the same as “someone else”.
Unless of course you know yourself perfectly in which case other people can be dispensed with. For purposes of this discussion.
I look at it as "consciousness is imagining what it is to be yourself" with your reference group defining what "yourself" actually means in a way that is different from a direct sense of being provided by your own senses.
Reference group provides you a framing within which your consciousness operates.
Imagining yourself doing "kid things" if it thinks of you as a kid, imagining yourself doing criminal things if it considers you to be a criminal, thinking of jokes if they think you are funny, trying to work things out rationally if you think you belong to rationalists and so on.
You could also hold multiple reference groups and switch between them - using different frames for work and family, for example.
This is useful.
I imagine you to be a thoughtful person with good technical knowledge around this issue. Some part of my mind is trying to conjure up a physical avatar for you in my mind space.
Suppose a person has a brain injury that prevents them from imagining what it would be like to be someone else. Is it morally acceptable to torture this person, since they aren't conscious?
The only thing I can say is you were dealing with a hypothetical person who lots of people assumed was conscious and that kind of puts a finger on the scale in this discussion.
How would you test whether anybody other than yourself possessed the ability to imagine he is someone or something else ?
With the only information available to me. By their behavior.
By that logic, becoming paralyzed instantly robs a person of their consciousness?
I don’t see how that is implied in my proposal.
Fair enough; but then, what does your definition of consciousness buy you, epistemically speaking ?
I think the advantage for me is, it is a touchstone that helps keep me honest. It helps me remind myself that I’m watching a movie in my mind when I think about other people. It also implies that when I am thinking about myself I am also watching a movie. I could think, oh why doesn’t so-and-so do this instead of that? Or I might think so and so is doing that because this.
As someone else in this thread has pointed out it really does come down to thinking about one’s self because other people in this mind space are really just characters that I am generating and not the actual other people. But the same can be said for the versions of myself I imagine. It helps me navigate the boundary between justified belief and opinion.
“Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.“…”to have knowledge of.”
Is this the definition we’re using?
On the contrary, I'd argue that conciousness is the ability to imagine that you are the thing that you are. (but that both capabilities are intertwined)
How is this contrary? I don’t really disagree. It’s just that the “thing that you are” has now become a mental construct and as such, I will argue, can be considered someone else. I have lots of versions of myself kicking around and I’ve made them all up out of...whatever I have to work with... But none of them are me in totality. that is the gift of consciousness.
I don't know what it means to be not conscious. But most of the day my inner monologue is turned off and I am experiencing my life not choosing the next steps in it. There is a meaningful sense in which I am conscious only when introspectively reflecting. When I emphasize/imagine I am someone else it feels much more like experiencing their life, i.e. the less-conscious default way I live life.
I am not talking about empathy. To me that is something else.
> when introspectively reflecting
I’m curious. At its heart how is that different from imagining you are someone else?
It seems unrelated to me. When I am 'conscious' I hear a sequence of thoughts in a language in my head that I believe I am actively generating and have feelings of evaluating if they are true or not and why I think so. When I am not conscious I experience five senses things like temperature food etc. When I imagine what it's like to be someone else it's the five senses thing. It would be not weird for me at all to imagine myself not being able to empathize with other people (feel what I think they feel) and also to be able to be conscious (think philosophically about myself). Or vice versa. I go hours of not being conscious, and frequently feel what others feel at some point during that time.
>I hear a sequence of thoughts in a language in my head that I believe I am actively generating
Interesting that you say “hear”
Do the voices vary with the tone of the thoughts?
Anybody read Erik Hoels piece on effective altruism?
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist
I thought it was very convincing (tho' to be fair I didn't need much in the way of convincing) and would be interested to hear a response from any EAs who want to mount a defense against the criticism.
Thank you, very interesting read!
Although his repugnant consequences were already handled in Scott's Consequentialism FAQ, section 7.1 (if the outcome is horrible, it shouldn't be what utilitarians want, d'oh) and 7.5: I miss the term "Schelling point" in Erik's essay. A world in which fat people have to be afraid to be thrown under the trolley is not nice, so let's have a rule against that.
Well yes, Erik writes something like that and compares it to Ptolemy's epicycles. Although I wouldn't mind necrophiles having their way with dead dogs, because where's the victim?
I'm not sure whether there's a strawman or a real Scotsman here, but I like his recommendation to "dilute" utilitarianism, just do whatever cool things you want and call that utilitarianism. There's always a reasoning why you may give your surplus money to poor rock musicians in your neighborhood, instead of to starving children on the other side of the world?
I don't think "well-ordered" is the right mathematical concept for the author to reference. Well-ordered means that there are no infinite descending sequences, but I would expect utilitarians to agree that such sequences of goods and evils do exist (for example: having toothache for 0.9s, having toothache for 0.99s, having toothache for 0.999s...)
And a well-ordered set doesn't necessarily come with addition and subtraction defined.
If there are a million starving African kids I am less motivated to sacrifice the only national park in existence to feed one of them, than if there was one starving child. Effective altruists say the value of saving one child shouldn't depend on the number of other starving children. Whether this essay persuades you or not really seems to reduce to whether you agree with that proposition.
The dust speck example is similar. If I could choose between living N+1 lives, N lives with dust in my eye and 1 life of torture. There is an N large enough I'd pick being tortured. But notions of fairnes move me to be unwilling to choose to torture 1 person to save N people from dust in their eye for any N.
I'm sure if you lock me in a room with Elizier Yukowski he'd convince me I'm wrong. I'm also reasonably confident I wouldn't change my preferences to be coherent in response.
There's still a lot of moral improvement the EA movement helped me achieve within my preferred framework. There are a lot of low hanging fruits to pick on this planet before running into repugnant conclusions or impossible values handshakes.
I'm pretty sure if it was called the Low-Hanging Fruit Movement and confined itself to that instead of jabbering about the machine god it would be a lot more successful, or at least a lot more palatable to normal people.
The link in the mail and in the article (curently) seems to send me to the http (instead of the https) version of Asterisk mag. http is generally frowned upon, especially when you ask for information such as email. The usual practice is to redirect all http traffic to https. I have no idea what kind of control you have over the Asterisk website itself, but you should be able to edit the Substack link by putting "https://asteriskmag.com", which should redirect to the https version of the website. Cloudflare has an article on why it matters https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ssl/why-is-http-not-secure/, and I'm sure lots of people here can explain way better than me why it's necessary. In shrort: it's about protecting your users.
I'm excited about this magazine. I have a personal bias for orange and your writing, which is already a good start, but more than that, I can feel like the authors behind were smart, and dedicated to the readers. The desaturated colors are easy on the eyes, the headline is short and impactful, the "We are" part delves deeper on what I can find without overstaying its welcome, and saying what people will write about instead of who they are (achievements, stuff like that) while leaving a link for the curious is proof that you put your money where your mouth is: it's a space where people are judged on their actions rather than on who they are, that you're already applying the principles that you stated before. I also love the favicon.
That's why I think taking care of the https stuff is important. I'm being dramatic here, but without it it kind of ruins what you've built up until this point. I personally don't fear much outside of a few more spams than usual if my email addresss ends up somewhere I didn't want to, but not everyone is in this situation.
I'm very confused. Your link redirected to https://www.asterisk.com which doesn't match your description. It's selling something, probably sports equipment. Or maybe it just devotes 2/3 of its page to ads that somehow bypass my adblock. No "we are" link.
They gave the wrong link, it should be https://asteriskmag.com
Thank you.
After reading Slime Mold, Time Mold's "Chemical Hunger" series and following their ongoing potato study I was reminded of the saying "Any diet works as long as you stick to it" (or maybe that was just the name of the meta-study that demonstrated this result: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1900510)
In psychotherapy there is a similar hypothesis—the "Dodo bird verdict"—that says that all legitimate forms of therapy produce about equivalent results. If we look around further I'm sure there are similar phenomena in e.g. weight training, software engineering (the "how to best develop software" flameware probably predates the Internet), etc.
If you squint a bit it looks like it's the same phenomenon repeating itself—following a protocol produces the desirable result, no matter what the protocol actually is. Given this I have two questions:
1. Is there a more general name for this phenomenon? I personally like the "Dodo bird verdict", so if you broaden the definition it could be applied to subjects outside of psychotherapy
2. Is there something else going on here? Given that the chosen protocol doesn't seem to matter, could it be that the positive effects are a result of being more mindful of your actions? E.g. if you've committed to a Paleo diet you start checking whether your meals follow the Paleo protocol; but maybe any weight loss you experience is not a result of eating like a troglodyte but simply because you're more mindful of what you're eating?
>Is there a more general name for this phenomenon?
Sounds similar to the Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)
People consume many more calories than they realize or remember. Being aware of what they ate, either by following a diet, writing it down, etc often makes then eat less and lose weight. You could rightfully call this mindfulness.
I posted about this sort of thing over on the subreddit a while back and it generated some interesting discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/iznujz/can_anyone_think_of_other_topics_this/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Thanks for sharing, I think you came up with some really good examples. Child rearing in general also seems to follow the same pattern where the primary deciding factor is how much parents care for their children.
Perhaps all approaches yield similar results is due to (modern) human beings being consistently lame in their execution of all approaches. Meanwhile, the outliers who display excellence in their execution of given approaches show outsized "returns", but are filtered out in any group studies.
I think a possible issue with the diets is that lots of different diets work on different people, but it's rare to test lots of different diets on one specific person. A possible explaination would be that people stick naturally to what works for them. Some will work well with keto, some with the potato diet, some with a vegan diet. I frequently hear people say, when promoting a diet, "I tried lots of other diets before this one", which makes sense because once a diet works, people will stick with it. The goal of a diet is, for most people, to lose weight/get in better shape. It's not a journey in self-discovery. It then makes sense that the last diet you will try is the one that worked. Rare are the people going carnivore for one year, omnivore for another, and then vegan for a third, all the while trying to keep everything else the same. If we lived 1000 years it might make sense to take 10 years to properly figure out your diet, find the "most optimal", but with our current lifespan, "good enough" is what makes sense.
I think the same would apply to physical activity: the advice I hear the most is to try to find something you enjoy, because that's what will make you stick with. That's a lot of words and not a lot of data, I don't know how much data is collected about "failed diets" but if there are some it might be interesting to take a look at it.
I think it's correct to call this a somewhat random walk until you find a local maximum/optimum, but I prefer your Dodo bird verdict.
Hyperprocessed foods = bad, whole foods = good. The exact reason(s) hyperprocessed foods are bad is unknown and understudied. That is my conclusion after reading a lot of (mostly) terrible nutrition studies. Whatever diet works in eliminating hyperprocessed foods from your diet is the right one.
What is the quickest way to learn history ?
Do you know of a place I can read about the history of various countries but in a format that is shorter than a book ? Like 30-50 page summary of the history of various countries instead of 400 or 600. Basically long blog posts. If you know a history blogger that does this let me know. Also if you know similar history youtubers I'd be down too !
There are tons of great history podcasts and lectures.
History has long been an ideological battleground, so be aware of the biases and agendas of whoever you are reading, or find a historian with a similar worldview to yours.
All of the advice given here looks more or less worthwhile to me. One thing I haven't seen covered yet, is pushed a fair bit by science historian James Burke.
At the end of his book _Connections_, Burke lays out multiple ways in which history is organized: history of a country or a part of the world; history of a certain time period; history of a type of thing (e.g. war, agriculture, theater, civil rights). The connections(!) within each are fairly obvious. Burke's thesis is that in real life, the connection is much more meandering - there isn't some narrow lineage of people focusing on nothing but how to build houses better, for example; rather, someone comes along with an idea for smelting a certain type of metal, say, which makes that metal very plentiful, which causes other people to try all sorts of things with it, which leads to the invention of a new style of cooking. Or someone invents the loom, which raises several subproblems, one of which is solved by a version of the loom that uses cardstock with a carefully designed pattern of holes to produce a particular type of weave in great quantity, and someone else applies this idea to the simultaneously emerging field of electronics to create a programmable computer. In general, one can model history as this organic flow of earlier phenomena into later. It's history by causation, by contrast to history by category.
The downside to this perspective is that it's often hard to tease out the causations, since a lot of the relevant information isn't indexed that way today. One upside is that the product stands a good chance of being more accurate - this problem really did arise because a previous solution made that problem more important, etc. - and with enough information like that, one can recognize patterns that could predict interesting possibilities about the future.
It's also great for learning, I find. Describing events by causation this way is putting the "story" back into "history", and stories are perhaps the most ancient of human learning tools.
It probably matters a lot what you want to know about history. Traditional history texts often focus primarily on the history of governments, focusing on wars and revolutions and changes of official state organization. But they tell us a lot less about how most people lived, in terms of the history of economic and technological organization, and things like household structure and gender relations and level of urban or rural focus. I believe there are more people these days focusing on the latter sort of thing, but they tend to be newer.
The quickest way to get a basic overview that's practically useful, in my experience, is to read high school textbooks. This gives you a basic overview and, more importantly, lets you know what the median person from that country knows. If you're interested in history beyond the basics you really need to pick something you're interested in to study. No one really studies history writ large because it's too wide and varied. It's all history of western medicine or history of the Roman military or whatever.
That's smart. HS textbooks tend to be well made and designed for comprehension rather than style or aesthetics.
And as a bonus the text book may include questions and answers about the text or possibly be accompanied by a test. Testing your knowledge will also help increase your retention.
I recommend getting the Penguin atlases of history (Ancient, Medieval, Recent,..). They offer an overview from the end of the Ice Age to the 1950s. They are "atlases" because the format is a map on the left-hand page and discussion about what's happened since the previous map on the right-hand page. In the deeper past, the intervals between maps might be centuries, but the time steps get shorter as it gets closer to now.
These books don't take long to read and they will give you a big picture to which you can attach more detailed history of specific times and places.
Interesting advice, I'll give it a shot. Thanks.
I second this excellent recommendation.
Honestly I find history youtubers like Kraut to be very good, time investment wise.
To some extent though history is just something that cannot be learnt quickly. There is a huge amount of it, but what is the really important stuff, the macro trends? The best I've found for that so far has been Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay, which is unfortunately a 2000 page slog. Maybe try to look for an in depth summary of that.
I'm only a casual when it comes to history though, I only read it in order to better understand politics/sociology and how the world works.
That sounds like a job for Wikipedia. You can dive as deep as you like for any given country.
Has anyone ever successfully purged an earworm infection?
I mean of the auditory variety. Irritating unpleasant songs you heard once (or are made to hear often, thanks to low variance in ambient radio setlists) and can never truly purge from the brain's cache. That sometimes arise unbidden like not thinking of a pink elephant, and then must be consciously chased away by flooding the senses with other music, to much consternation.
This is the one thing I'd use the Pensive artifact for (from __Harry Potter__ universe). If the technology/therapy actually does exist to selectively suppress or erase unwanted memories, I'd like to...hear about it.
Chewing gum! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2015.1034142?journalCode=pqje20
...wait, really? It's that simple? Okay, this seems totally and easily worth testing irl For Science(tm). Thank you. Gonna feel incredibly stupid if this One Weird Trick solves a years-long sufferance in one fell chew.
Meditation?
Well, one way that can work is to get a different earworm. Preferably one that has deep connections with your earlier life. I can usually get either "Pepsi cola hits..." or "Hearts of Stone" to work. Then you branch from that one into associated memories. ("Pepsi" was used in Alfred Bester's "Demolished Man" as the type name for this kind of thing.)
I guess I didn't grow up with music this way - it's always been an important source of nourishment in my life, and plays in some form in my head most of the time. (I autodidacted whistling as a child specifically to be able to give voice to music playing in my head, cause I can't sing for shit, but The Music Wants To Be Free.) But all of growing up was, like...listening to the radio, maybe hearing family play their vinyl records sometimes, parents' CDs. Nothing I could replicate on command, or necessarily name the song/band. I didn't actually own any music of my own until, like, 18 or so. (Thanks, Guitar Hero 3 OST!) By that time most life milestones had passed, and things that have happened since then...not really appropriate to hook music onto. Mostly negative things, more losses than victories.
Or, I dunno, I guess maybe I experience music as its own separate information-category, with no external referents. A few obvious exceptions for, like, stuff I've heard in live concerts - you don't forget those memories easily, those songs will always sound extra amazing forever after! But in general I seem to not link "mood" to music...I don't have a "Spotify mindset". Like, there is never not an appropriate time for metal, at least internally. I'll shift what I play publically based on the calculated reactions of others - but that's social heuristics, not acoustic evaluation. (If the entire world ran internally the same way my ear did, I wouldn't have earworm problems! Unless it's just a *really shitty* Nash equilibrium where no one actually wants to listen to crap, but somehow we all do anyway because bad incentives.)
I have read that the chorus to "I See All Good People" by Yes works for this because it's catchy enough but too long for the brain to hold onto it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FFxqdhqb9c
If you sing the song to the tune of Gilligan’s Isle, that usually works. I know it sounds silly, but it’s really quite effective
For me, listening to the song I have stuck in my head will usually work.
This may be an issue if you find the song unpleasant; for that, you could try replacing it with a more infectious song that you don't find unpleasant. Note however that the sensation of a song being unpleasant may entirely arise from your not wanting to hear it, as opposed to you not wanting to hear it because it is unpleasant; we humans often reverse causality in then particular way. So picking a song on purpose may solve the problem.
Start a Fire, Heroin, and Crucifying Jesus by The Tiger Lillies are some of the highest-grade earworms I've encountered. They may or may not be the most annoying songs you have ever heard, though. (Personally I rather like them.)
There's also Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Tiny Tim, if you like living dangerously.
I feel like I've got a good sense of "unpleasant because I don't want to hear Song at this exact moment" and "unpleasant because I *never* want to hear Song, it's like chalkboard-on-nails and/or employing Dirty Audiological Tricks that I'm opposed to". In the same way that junk food is claimed to be irresistably hyperpalatable, I feel lotsa post-Autotune pop skips right past the brain's discernment process to just instantly hit reward buttons, against my will. This is unnerving both from an agency point of view - being made to "like" things against my will, that I don't actually like - and from an acoustic palate point of view. That is, I don't want my appetite spoiled by the empty ear-calories of pop. Sometimes in fits of weakness I'll somehow decide that *this* one pop song is Actually Good...then later after the insanity passes, I'll listen to it again and be like "the fuck is this crap? how did I ever like this." That's the sure sign of Dirty Audiological Tricks - listener's remorse.
(There are also just certain particular bands whose sounds drive me up the wall, for unclear reasons - I can't stand ABBA, for instance. It's like some sort of music allergy. The same way I'm a picky eater, not due to fussiness, but like "I can't eat this cause it'll literally trigger my gag reflex, sorry". Autistic hypersensitivity~)
C.f. taste refinement, where one is unable to perceive poor quality without first experiencing better quality. Videogame music is illustrative for this concept: yeah, there were a lot of catchy Formal Constraint-inspired melodies from past eras. But boy are they rough to listen to now, compared to modern remixes of same melodies. I still like some of those, but have the social decency to listen in private rather than inflict the harshness of chiptunes on other people unwillingly, heh. And who's to say how much of that is just nostalgic rose-tinted earbuds...
So, yeah, I guess it just comes down to fighting bad fire with good fire.
Personally I view "taste refinement" as a primarily social phenomenon arising from status signaling games.
Eh...I think it's like any other form of aesthetic preference. If you only ever know of [X..Z] music/food/beer/whatever, then it's easy to think Basic McThing is hot shit. But expanding one's horizons to the rest of [A..W] things often means finding out the hot shit you used to like is, actually, quite bad.
There are still some Basic McThings I'm very fond of, despite having experienced supposedly fancier versions...McDonald's makes the best fries, totally-plain Cheerios is the best toasted oat cereal (quite possibly the best cereal fullstop, I love eating it right outta the bag, no shame), I'm not ashamed of enjoying Metallica despite that being the stereotypical know-nothing-else-about-genre metal band.
But like...my first ever experience with alcohol was Mike's Hard Lemonade. I used to really dig that stuff, buy it in party pack x36 sizes and drink the whole thing myeslf! Then eventually friends introduced me to better stuff, and...now I favour hard kombucha/cider. I did try to drink a Mike's like a decade after the first, and - holy shit, wow, I can't believe I used to like this paint thinner cheap malt liquor. That's "taste refinement". I just didn't know any better at the time, cause I was a broke-ass college student and that's what everyone else drank. (C.f. White Claw etc.) I don't drink fancier stuff to signal status, I drink it cause my actual revealed palate preferences have shifted too far to enjoy the basic stuff anymore.
Music is the same way. I've come a long way since first experiencing the Guitar Hero 3 soundtrack. Still contains some great timeless hits - "Welcome to the Jungle" is just solid classic rock, cross-generational. But most of those tracks I've pared down over the years...they aren't inherently bad, I might listen to them on my own rarely. However, given a limited listening budget (there isn't actually Time Enough At Last, sadly). I'd prefer spending it on music I enjoy a lot more. Even within the same bands - like okay yeah everybody made a Big Fucking Deal about "Through the Fire and Flames", but DragonForce has put out so many __better__ synecdoche songs for the speed metal genre. E.g. "Fury of the Storm", "Cry for Eternity". This, too, is "taste refinement". It's low-status and not worth socially signalling regardless, but damnit, I'll take superiour shit over mediocre shit any day. Elegance is required in all things, even embarrassing music.
Whatever qualities you enjoyed in Mike's Hard Lemonade did not go away, did they?
If they did not - what is preventing you from enjoying them now?
The qualities are still there, but I do not (cannot?) find them pleasurable anymore. Think of it a little like being immunologically naive to covid: a brain that's never experienced alcohol before at all, and also very little of pure added sugar and bullshit flavouring (I eschew sweets and "junk food" just generally, for whatever reason palate has never much liked it). Suddenly it gets this huge novel rush of malt liquor backed with a ton of additives designed to be addicting, and...well. Combine that with a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, and *of course* I got hooked like right away. Those were some Bad Times.
Years later, of hard painful struggle and hitting rock-bottom more than once...I can't put that genie back in the box and forget what alcohol is like entirely. Total sobriety isn't impossible, exactly, but there's a recurring itch to drink that gets increasingly more challenging to hit snooze on. (Living with two alcoholic roommates doesn't help at all.)
And a big part of building up this self-defense against liver mortification was realizing that stuff like Mike's is, in fact, mostly lousy and "cheating" by directly pushing reward buttons in my brain with minimal work. I was being made to like things without much say in the matter, having a weakness exploited. Now, if I want a drink, I make myself buy nicer stuff...and the cost helps a lot with keeping that itch in check. When a can costs $5 instead of $0.50, it is much less affordable to drink in bulk. Even better is nursing a nice bottle of $75 Scotch over months or years. I get more enjoyment per milliliter, can feel honest about said enjoyment, and overall end up with less cost to both health and dollar (due to not having more than 1 drink a day tops). So whether it's subjective perception all the way down, or I somehow altered the reward circuitry in my brain, stuff like Mike's just tastes really objectionable now...harsh, artificial, unpleasant. Obviously the alcohol is still there - even White Claw still gets people drunk eventually - but I don't drink mainly for the incapacitation.
It’s The Delphonics all the way.
American Civil War marching songs usually do the trick for me. Particularly "Rally Round the Flag" and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home".
We're springing to the call for three hundred thousand more,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And we'll fill the vacant ranks with a million freemen more.
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor he will never be a slave
The Union forever!
Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars!
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again!
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
American Civil War Reenactment was 8th-grade history for me...a bunch of unruly unmotivated kids made to sing marching songs. I got assigned to the Union side; we did "John Brown's Body". The Confederate half of the class got "Dixie".
Ngl, I liked the South's song way better. Purely from a musical standpoint.
This comment needs a trigger warning :(
I think you ended up being it, ironically, so thank you for your sacrifice. And here I was about to just start listening to anti-earworm recommendations willy-nilly. It's dangerous to go alone!
Not that this helps - I'm the audio equivalent of aphantasic so don't get them. Sometimes I remember songs and sing them to myself, but they never stick for very long.
I've developed a mental process for getting rid of them because I'm extremely susceptible--there have been periods in my life where I woke up with a new song stuck in my head everyday for months on end. Basically, I compose an 'end' to the loop that keeps playing (usually a dramatic, exaggerated finale with cymbals crashing, etc.) , and then visualize things like curtains closing, lights going off, people clapping and falling silent, anything that signals the end of a performance, and then as soon as possible involve myself in a complex thought.
90% of the time it works 100% of the time.
This is similar to what I do, though perhaps more dramatic. I play through the whole song in my head to the end, imagining it in as much detail as possible.
I am also extremely susceptible to earworms, and I wish I understood why! I'll have one verse of one song stuck in my head for days until I remember that I can try to evict it.
The best I've been able to do is replace it with another earworm, which I like better, and have memorised such that I can play it in my head start to finish (I find this is less likely to result in infinite loops). If I do this often enough the bad earworm automatically transitions to the 'good', finite one.
This is essentially what I would have said, had you not beaten me to it. The easiest replacement for a bad earworm is a more enjoyable earworm.
As a side benefit, I find good earworms also serve as excellent sleep aids. I often can't finish one once my head's on the pillow, and if I get through about 30 minutes, it's a good way to tell there's something external I need to take care of (a looming deadline or a problem that demands a solution) or avoid doing in the future (drinking coffee too late in the day; skipping a workout).
I do wish there was a better or more permanent solution than an earworm arms race - was honestly surprised not to get a "have you tried meditation?" answer from at least one person. It's not costless to consciously Build a Better Earworm, so ideally one would simply become insensate to earworms in the first place. (It'd be some fun woke hyperbole to claim that "earworms are acoustic violence".)
Making a point of running through longer songs/albums does tend to burn out lower-strength earworms, I agree. But even good earworms that I find pleasant can be somewhat distracting...like it's generally a bad habit if I listen to music before bed, cause that's just stimulating more brain activity, and I already have trouble wrestling that manically defiant beast into slumber submission. "can't turn off the shitty music while trying to sleep" is a majority of my unwanted earworm infections.
Hmm. Even upbeat, jazzy earworms don't keep me awake (I currently hum Rhapsody in Blue to myself, and rarely get past the 1/3 point), but maybe that's just me.
Before that, I was humming some of the Starcraft Terran music to sleep. It's also pretty low-key energetic. (I like videogame music.)
Don't you hate how Terran Theme 4 also includes Terran Theme 3?
My current effective High-Grade Earworms are from Hammers of Misfortune ("The Locust Years", "Trot Out The Dead", "A Room And A Riddle") and Diablo Swing Orchestra ("Gunpowder Chant/Infralove", "Porcelain Judas"), which are...uh...stimulating. They work too well, so I've been trying to calibrate downwards to just-sufficient-to-burn-out-the-shitty-pop.
The Other Scott Alexander: Rhinoceros Guy
I was recently reading something of Scott's and Google prompted me with a related search for "scott alexander author". It was accompanied by a thumbnail of a guy who was clearly not "our" Scott - tanned, mustache, big grin - so I was curious enough to click through.
This guy apparently writes self-help books with a rhinoceros theme, like "Rhinoceros Success: The Secret to Charging Full Speed Toward Every Opportunity", "Advanced Rhinocerology" and "Rhinocerotic Relativity". I hope "rhinocerotic" is just an adjective from "rhinoceros", and not a portmanteau of "rhinoceros" and "erotic", but I'm not certain.
The whole thing is bizarre enough that I wondered if "our" Scott had created it (the Amazon and Goodreads pages, etc) as a joke, or as a distraction during the NYT doxxing debacle.
I'd never heard of this guy before - but presumably, in some specific niche and/or in terms of absolute numbers, he is the better-known Scott Alexander...?
Funnily enough "the other Scott" was mentioned in a guest post on Noah Smith's Substack a few weeks ago: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/is-web3-culture-similar-to-amway
If the Rhinoceros book piqued your interest the post is well worth a read.
Oh that's an excellent read, thanks for the recommendation. Lars has quite the talent for writing. I don't know many other authors that would keep me happy through 10,000 words on a subject I've little prior investment in.
That's hilarious. The 'Rhinoceros Success' book is from 1980, so I imagine it's a different Scott Alexander. But maybe our Scott was having a fling writing self-help books as a kid? It COULD be true!
If you *were* a highly precocious child writing fake self-help books with a rhinoceros theme, it makes sense that you would pick some ridiculous moustache guy who looks A) adult and B) like he might really mean it about the pachyderms as a fake author portrait. Also, kids like big, weird-looking animals like giraffes and rhinos. It all checks out!
FAO Scott and anyone else who likes traditional art, dislikes modern art, and is rich:
I came across this thread https://mediachomp.com/spite-patronage-and-cringe-commissions/ about how tech nerds could be commissioning their own operas, sculptures, etc - and how the Renaissance happened because of newly-rich merchants commissioning the type of art they wanted to see.
I gotta say, I've been wondering for a while how expensive commissioning a painter would be (and, if the answer is "a lot", then an art student, I bet the little buggers are cheaper & quite able at imitating classical styles) for a personnal, vanity-driven portrait.
Honestly anywhere from a few hundred dollars upwards. Most painters will happily accept commissions (within the boundaries of the styles they're comfortable with) for a similar price to what you'd normally buy one of their paintings for.
Thanks to that fourth image, I'm now imagining a high-vaulted cathedral decorated with furry art. I wonder if anyone does fursona commissions in stained glass...
Of course, this lady does not mean the kind of good art that we like.
I don't know if that thread is vastly overestimating FAANG salaries or if I'm vastly overestimating the cost of commissioning artworks.
100k yearly salary is not unheard of in FAANG. Senior positions with senior responsibility can a multiple of that. The author asks to use 10%, so lets say, 10k USD.
I happen to remember Beethoven was commissioned to write the 9th symphony by London Philharmonic for £ 50 in 1817 (though he had some other sources of income). According to https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ , 50 pounds in 1820s was approximately 4 horses, or 10 cows, or one year wages of skilled trade labor, or £2,871 in 2017 currency according to a formula of theirs.
I don't think one can one year of skilled tradesman in a developed country with 3,000 GBP today, so the currency conversion hides some important changes in economy. But 10k USD is several months' pay already (for regular people). Get a dozen or such to pool their 10% commission, maybe call it "Society of Hacker Friends of Music or something ;) and you have 100k, more than yearly wages in many skilled trades that are not FAANG programming.
The best way to actually with out inflation is to compare that money to the median wage then, work out the ratio, and multiply it. Id put that at £60k or so.
True. I merely wanted to share an anecdote about Beethoven.
And for the cost of commissioning artworks today, it is more relevant to look at on-going rates. (Whoever is the prestige musician today ... How much Hans Zimmer is paid to compose a score?)
Isn't this already happening, to some extent? Angel funding is a modern form of patronage, and lots of stuff has come out of Patreon/Kickstarter, some of which I think will qualify as art in future. Sure, these are mostly not operas or symphonies, but every age has its preferred art forms.
Patreon, Kickstarter, and angel investment are artist-led, AFAIK. An artist says "I want to make X; who will fund me?"
This article is suggesting a patron-led model where a rich person says "I want Y to exist; who will make it?"
I think it's more like Fiverr or Upwork than Kickstarter or Patreon, except that Fiverr/Upwork are usually smaller-scale: they might provide the soundtrack or a sprite for a computer game, but this is more like a whole game, or a whole opera or building.
The only difference I can see is if the type of art the hypothetical rich person wants is a type that borderline _no one_ is making. Yes, Patreon is artist led, but the market decides what they pay for. A rich person can be their own market, funding only people who make art that they want.
And presumably during the patronage heyday, artists were advocating for patronage, which seems sort of similar. I'm sure that not every rich person _actually_ knew what they wanted, they just wanted the panache that came with having artists on retainer.
I'm really curious, what bet do you have going that depends on Imagen/Parti access?
From https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2268.msg259696.html#msg259696
"Bet with Vitor, from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design/comment/6945486?s=r
Quote
My proposed operationalization of this is that on June 1, 2025, if either if us can get access to the best image generating model at that time (I get to decide which), or convince someone else who has access to help us, we'll give it the following prompts:
1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
We generate 10 images for each prompt, just like DALL-E2 does. If at least one of the ten images has the scene correct in every particular on 3/5 prompts, I win, otherwise you do. Loser pays winner $100, and whatever the result is I announce it on the blog (probably an open thread). If we disagree, Gwern is the judge. If Gwern doesn't want to do it, Cassander, if Cassander doesn't want to do it, we figure something else out. If we can't get access to the SOTA language model, we look at the rigged public demos and see if we can agree that one of us is obviously right, and if not then no money changes hands.
Anybody worked with AlphaSights before?
Dave Karpf writing on his difficulties with Longtermism:
"If we take the Longtermist/Long Now perspective seriously, then it is absolutely true that when we cure cancer just isn’t that important. 500 years from now, it simply won’t matter when the breakthroughs occurred. Every life saved will have long since ended.
But I have friends and loved ones who have died of cancer. I’d like there to be a cure sooner rather than later thankyouverymuch. Our world—the world you and I inhabit today—will be much more improved by potential breakthroughs in cancer research than by a fucking art project in a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos."
See here: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/against-jackpot-longtermism
Hmm. just for the record, life 'cured' cancer. It's called aging (and with it eventual death, which I think is mostly a good thing.) We are developing treatments for cancer, which is also a good thing to do.
As sorta a side thought, if we could give AI cancer, (make it up from lots of little parts each of which might go rouge and take over the AI), then AI could invent aging (and AI death) to control it's cancer and this might be a solution to any future AI problem.
I could argue that concentrating too much on curing cancer right now has not been very productive. We have spent really a lot of money with only modest gains. Who knows, if we had just spent this money in fundamental cell research without clear purpose, we might have already stumbled upon more serendipitous discoveries to cure cancer much better than we do now.
We do both, and a lot of fundamental cell research can be easily funded by saying "but caaancer". I'd say if anything, we're not focusing on cancer research enough.
Also, cancer research provides tools for non-cancer research (e.g. immortalization for cell cultures).
It would be a bad argument. The most common variety of kids leukemia used to be a death sentence. Now the five-year survival rate is north of 90%. This is not a modest gain.
It is only in this one kind of cancer, and some others. But overall the progress is much more modest.
Someone else might say that treating Alzheimers is more important and approve Aduhelm. In my opinions, all these examples serve that long-termism is more important.
The problem with Aduhelm is that it does not treat Alzheimer's.
That's exactly my point. If we concentrate too much on one single target and give a lot of money to this cause, we try to pretend that we have solutions.
Solving all cancers is an extreme goal on the same level as solving all infectious diseases. We made decent progress on both, but manage your expectations.
While we can now save 90% of kids with cancer, other progress is modest is still not a strong argument. The death of a child is one of the greatest tragedies that can befall a person. We provide extra care and protection for children in our society for good reason.
I might be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like the argument is basically, well, they would have died eventually anyway. Which is of course true, but besides the point. Everyone dies eventually. In the meantime, the world is a much better place if sometimes your kid can survive cancer.
>The death of a child is one of the greatest tragedies that can befall a person.
Then surely all this research money would be better spent on whatever is killing the most kids globally (and the answer is not leukaemia)
Agreed. Healthcare in Afghanistan spends about $10 per person per year. Cheap vaccines and basic medicines, antibiotics, greatly reduced child mortality.
I am not against cancer research per se. I am just thinking that it would be good to work on long-term projects too and let serendipity do its work as it always had in drug research. You need environment for penicillin to be discovered like labs working with different molds. But also enough slack that you occasionally mess up and then look and notice that something unusual is going on. If we try to concentrate on one single task – create a cure for cancer – it doesn't seem to work. Maybe in engineering it is important. Or creating another vaccine just for a different pathogen with incremental improvements but not for breakthrough discoveries.
Well, just recently we had children locked up inside for 2 months in a futile attempt to save some elderly who were to die soon anyway. I really wish politicians would have listened more to your suggestions to care more about children.
Children rarely get cancer comparatively to elderly. Thus the question is: how much have we actually spent in researching childhood cancers compared to all other cancers?
I also remember from my studies that childhood cancers yield better to treatment. The 90% success rate is maybe just the reflection of this fact and not that researchers have paid any special attention to these treatments. Why don't we try to achieve 99% now? I mean, I am all for better treatments especially for children but if I had billion dollars to donate to a good cause I doubt that I would give them to childhood cancer research fund because it is very hard to predict that this amount of money will make any difference. Most likely it will not and the money will be wasted.
I would instead give money to some project that tries to improve the science in general, make it more efficient, maybe disrupt the current system of “publish or perish” in lie of better publishing system that facilitate distribution of scientific knowledge. Or maybe in a clinical trial system that is easier and cheaper and where all general practitioners are involved by default. It might not solve any immediate problem but could work better in long-term.
> give money to some project that tries to improve the science in general, make it more efficient
There's a lot of initiatives like that, and lack of clear metrics of success and even a coherent approach makes them a huge money sink. Meanwhile saved children are saved children.
I really don't think I get what you're getting at. Yes, we're still working on cancer. Since cancer is a bunch of different things and some forms are prevalent in kids, some cancer research is kid focused and some isn't. Yes, all the things listed in your last paragraph sound like worthy funding targets and I hope they get money.
A is good, but B is also good? A isn't good but B is? Like, what are we talking about here? Or, if it's getting old bouncing this off my thick skull, feel free to stop. I was really just reacting to the claim that we haven't done that well in cancer research. I think we've done amazing work in cancer, and getting cancer now is better than getting it 10 years ago, which is better than 30, which is better than 60. We've made a lot of progress and extended a lot of lives, many for decades. If cancer isn't a science success story I don't know what is.
Longtermism should focus on solving problems that cannot be solved in the future. For example: English spelling reform is impossible now but in the past it could have been solved and saved a heck of a lot of people (possibly trillions) a lot of inconvenience. They should look for problems like that.
Problems that will be solved in the future will be solved in the future so it doesn't matter to someone with a long time horizon.
It obviously matters when we cure cancer because the descendants of the people saved, and their work, will be present - possibly with compounding interest. Consider that it's mostly old people who get cancer, and losing someone with multiple decades of experience in a specialized field is a huge setback.
Old women don't produce extra descendants if cured of cancer. Old men theoretically can but rarely do.
Sigh. "Long termism could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting wealth inequality". I too can pretend that if you think about anything but the Current Thing, it might prevent you from solving the Current Thing. "Wealth inequality could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting trans people!" "Trans rights could serve as an excuse to avoid confronting Bodega bro!" Get a life.
In terms of the particular quote linked, three things:
If a million people die of cancer a year, then curing cancer in 2050 saves uncounted millions of lives, and curing cancer in 2025 saves uncounted millions of lives plus an extra 25 million. The latter is obviously much much better. "It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
Obviously it's natural to want to save our friends and loved ones. But you start having to deal with this awkwardly just for normal questions about charity before you even confront long-termism. Why cure malaria in Africa when it doesn't help my friends and loved ones? Why help black people gain civil rights if they're not my friends or loved ones? Eventually people with functioning consciences have to admit that some of charity is about helping people other than our friends and loved ones. But all of this is irrelevant to long-termism because most charity beneficiaries aren't our friends and loved ones anyway, plus you can already get "save our friends and loved ones" by agreeing that curing cancer 25 years earlier would save 25 million extra people!
Finally, the last sentence gets all of its oomph from a stupid analogy that has nothing to do with long-termism. Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain is stupid, and curing cancer is good. If we compare Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain today (maybe as an art project) to curing cancer in twenty years, obviously curing cancer in twenty years is better. This doesn't mean you should always do things twenty years from now instead of doing them today, it means you loaded your analogy by including a stupid thing (Jeff Bezos building a clock on a mountain) and you should unload it before doing anything else.
>"It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
To quote Zvi:
"Recall that when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we *by default* actively optimize *against* Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources."
Dave is arguing that because under longtermism existential catastrophe is of value ~-∞, longtermism implies prioritising avoiding X-risk over curing cancer or alleviating global warming, to whatever degree avoiding X-risk and curing cancer/alleviating global warming make incompatible claims to the same resources. This is correct.
He also claims that this is self-evidently an incorrect morality, which seems... like something a fool says in a cautionary tale?
>If a million people die of cancer a year, then curing cancer in 2050 saves uncounted millions of lives, and curing cancer in 2025 saves uncounted millions of lives plus an extra 25 million. The latter is obviously much much better. "It simply won't matter when the breakthroughs occurred"? What? Why not?
Neither "saves" any lives. We all die. It may prolong millions of lives by some arbitrary number of additional years. One of the things that lead sot a lot of sloppy medical thinking and medical policy making is assuming someone "saved" is somehow worth "one human life". I know you know that and mostly adjust for that, but I think avoiding the language entirely is best.
> It may prolong millions of lives by some arbitrary number of additional years
So does solving infant mortality in modernity. What's your point?
My point is that all "life prolonging" is not the same. Instrumentally, or "ethically", and often people use "saves lives" language to refer to pretty disparate situations so it is best to avoid it when discussing health policy.
That new drug that allows people about to die on ventilators to last an extra 6 weeks "saves" tons and tons of lives. That doesn't mean it is a good idea or worth it.
"Saves lives" here is shorthand for "prevents premature deaths", which in turn is shorthand/proxy for "gives an individual more QALYs".
Yes, the people still die, but I expect most people would rather die of old age at 90 than of colon cancer at 60.
If you want to avoid colon cancer, the most important thing is to get sufficient fiber in your diet, and the second is to get your proctological exams. This isn't sufficient if you have certain genetic lines, of course, but in those cases the basic problem is a metabolic abnormality that should be treated (if we only knew how to do so). Waiting until the cancer shows up and then curing it is really sub-optimal.
Well sure but it is sloppy thinking that really causes A LOT of bad policy in this exact area "medical policy".
So many things that "kill people" often kill people who are just about to die anyway. So you will hear that a heatwave of hurricane or whatever "killed 50 people". And then if you actually dig into it 35 of them were people who were going to be dead in the next 6 weeks anyway who were 85 and just pushed over the edge, or lost it when their power went out and the devices that keep them alive for a few more weeks/months stopped working.
You saw this with COVID and so often the last several years of people's lives (particularly once they hit their late 80s) are not of very high value to almost anyone. Yes saving 9 year olds and 43 year olds from premature cancer death is a huge win, but it is important to remember what the real distributions are.
The point seemed clear to me. It's about the difference between people alive now, whether or not they are friends and loved ones -- whom presumably some other people care about -- and people who are gone in the distant past or who may be in the distant future.
Well future people for sure don’t have the same moral worth as current people. That much is undebateable.
That said I think there is a lot of benefit to long term thinking. We spend a lot of resources chasing in circles trying to solve/mitigate transient problems or things which may not even be problems.
Did you accidentally negate the sentence? It seems that it is undebatable that future people *do* have the same moral worth as present people, though we have less knowledge about how our actions will affect them (and whether they will even exist) so it sometimes makes more sense to think more about how your act will affect present and near term people than far term people.
No. People in the future absolutely matter less than people here now. Just as people far away matter less than people close by. These biases are core parts of human psychology for good reason, and there is no reason to suspect they are wrong.
Imagine you have a magic remote. With it you can press a green button to save a child who is drowning right this exact second, or a red button to save child who is drowning in 200,000 years.
Do you really have any confusion about which button you would press?
Morality doesn't exist outside such things. Morality is a cobbled together concept that is approximating our psychological and instinctual decision making and urges, social contract theory considerations about how best to mutually operate society, leftover social taboos and norms, consequentialist/utilitarian considerations, and 15 other things.
Attempts like "utilitarianism" to somehow systematize it ALL into one grand scheme are both wrong headed and doomed to failure.
I think you’ve replaced “matter” with “it’s useful for me to care about”.
Also, your thought experiment with the buttons has a clear answer because I am much more certain that the person who the green button saves actually exists. Even beyond the science fiction of a button that saves a drowning child, we would need a *massive* science fiction to have confidence about something 200,000 years in the future, let alone certainty.
If we actually had the ability to be certain about things in the distant future, and got used to coordinating with people in the distant future the way we do with people in the distant present through Zoom, then we would count people in the distant future equal to people in the present, just as we care equally about people in the distant present as close by.
No that is wrong. I DEFINTELTY (and people generally) don't think people in Zoom meeting on the other side of the world/country have the same moral value as my neighbors/family.
You are importing a huge assumption about the value of people being disconnected to your relationship proximity to them that is not justified by any actual huge behavior, impulse or functioning society.
Literally no one behaves as though random stranger four blocks away is just as important to them as their neighbor. And while you might dispassionately say "yes from the moon they are the same", no actual person is a disembodied god mind sitting on the moon observing people as though they are ants.
If your cousin is drowning right now and a random stranger from a suburb 20 miles away is drowning right now which one would you save?
I wasn't comparing a random stranger on a Zoom call to a neighbor you know - I was comparing your friend on a Zoom call on the other side of the world to a random stranger who happens to live next to you. The fact that the person is physically distant is irrelevant - it is their social closeness or distance that matters. No one treats the random stranger who happens to live on the same block as significantly as their friend who lives in another country, and my claim is that the same is true for time.
Social connections determine how much we care about people, and better knowledge and abilities to intervene often mean we are more likely to work towards helping people who are nearby in space and time, even if we care about them less. If a random stranger from a suburb 20 miles away is drowning right in front of me and my cousin is drowning on the other side of the country, then of course I'm going to save the random stranger, because that's the one I can save, even though I might care more about my cousin.
I think you're taking all this stuff about what we personally care about, and our abilities to know and to act, and building it into whether or not someone matters, when that's a different thing (which is, of course, related to these in systematic ways).
It is not useful to assert your moral intuitions as obviously correct and not up for debate even if you think that's the case.
It is especially not useful when you're in the middle of a conversation with people who clearly do not share those intuitions.
I’m interested in learning more about Chinese history, and am wondering if anyone here has any (text)book recommendations?
If you'd like a great intro to more recent Chinese history, particularly from the rise of the People's Republic of China to around the 1990's I would suggest the graphic novel "A Chinese Life." It's an autobiographical reflection on life in China under Moa, Deng, and the economic success that Deng brought with him. Very good reading.
A few years ago I took a class on the history of Beijing. It had an eclectic reading list, which included:
* "Peking Story" by David Kidd
* "Rickshaw" by Lao She
* "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang
* "When China Ruled the Seas" by Louise Levathes
I recommend them all, especially "Peking Story" and "Wild Swans". I also recommend "Nixon and Mao" by Margaret Macmillan.
More about "Peking Story" on my blog: https://j-nelson.net/2017/02/twenty-writers-david-kidd-peking-story-the-last-days-of-old-china/
I recently listened to "From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History" one of the "great courses" audiobooks, and liked it quite a bit. It's a good chronological, high-level introduction to Chinese history.
5000 years is too long
The China History Podcast, by Laszlo Montgomery, is not a book.
Not exactly what you're asking for, but I'm currently enjoying a podcast called The History of China by an American living in Shanghai. Should be the first hit in your favourite podcast search tool.
I enjoyed reading The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. It is more readable than the typical undergraduate textbook on the history of a country. As I recall, he starts toward the end of the Ming Dynasty.
Imperial China: 900–1800 by F.W. Mote is on my to-read list, because I see it recommended again and again.
Tanner Greer has a list of suggestions: https://scholars-stage.org/making-sense-of-chinese-history-a-reading-list/
+1, just wanted to second Tanner Greer as a resource.
Why are they "against easy answers" at asteriks? What is wrong with an easy answer as long as it's correct?
Well, maybe all the easy answers have been found?
How to know? - Putting the "easy" answers into practice may be tough. E.g. "open borders" - i.e. simply STOP keeping people go to work and live where they want, seems like the easiest answer to the HUGE question: How to quickly double world GDP and erase mass-poverty. - But Bryan Caplan has a hard time even to convince Tyler Cowen: "The US would turn fascist if you tried". People from NY can move to Austin and work there, why not people from France, Sweden, Singapore? Why not from Mexico? From Nigeria? From India? - Whatever happened to “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Worked like a spell for the US of A. - It always seems to me that not "sorry" but: "let people do as they choose" are the hardest words. No wonder: French (laissez-faire).
Bon chance!
Its pretty clear to me that such an action would increase poverty in the US, at perhaps - an intial gain to the first immigrants. After that open borders would equalise world wages, probably destroying the consumer demand necessary to maintain works growth. If we could find a better solution that impoverished billionaires i would be all ears.
I'm curious how that's "clear" to you when essentially all the available evidence (which is admittedly limited!) disagrees. It _could_ be true, but there is borderline no evidence to support the idea.
Wages will continue to fall until they by and large equalise across the world, with differences no greater than the kind of differences you see across countries today. Not everybody needs to move to equalise wages.
"Will continue to fall". Evidence that wages are falling please. Wage _increase_ is not as fast as it has been in some time periods (although also _much_ better than is usually reported), but I have never seen evidence that real wages are falling across more than very short time periods
Even _if_ wages fell (which...again, the available evidence suggests this isn't he case), then it will come with a matching drop in prices. Labor is literally the reason that prices are higher in the west. If labor falls across the board, then so will prices.
And there isn't anything inherently better about a given wage, as long as the "lower wages" buy the same amount of stuff (or more!) then people are better off.
So, A) The evidence disagrees with you and B) if you were right, that alone would not be a bad thing, you'd need a drop in wages _and_ a drop in productivity or a drop in wages/prices, but a huge increase in wealth inequality or something. Dropping wages alone is not a negative in this context.
Easy and correct may not be correct and complete. Most answers that are correct require lots of nuance, caveats, and context. In my view this leads to true knowledge/wisdom.
Strikes me as a matter of hitting the right balance given the context. Arguably no answer is ever "complete", one reason we get thousands of books on say, WW2, or Churchill, or the Civil War. Someone famous (Einstein?) supposedly said, "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler".
In mathematics the simplest solution is often considered the most elegant.
Or they may be right. As Billy Joel might put it. - To state the obvious, "easy" is also a very lazy(!) word to talk about or even judge solutions. E.g. Bryan Caplan has a handful of - seemingly - relatively "easy" answers to improve the life of billions, even mine and yours:
Open borders. Build, baby, build. Leave it to the markets, cuz politics just aggregate stupidity. Have more than one kid if you like kids (it is more fun and less work than you think).
Ignore "equality issues" coz the distract you from the far more impactful "growth-questions". https://betonit.substack.com/ (The Zvi links to Caplan, Scott did in the era of star slate codex . ) Those easy answers comes with books attached and (easy to follow) suggestion how to do steps in the right direction if you are afraid. ("keyhole solutions"). Based mostly on the insights of Adam Smith. - But all too easy for the EA crowd. For "altruism" another "too easy" answer would be: Give normal people in poor countries some regular money. They know best how to spend it. https://putanumonit.com/2016/04/27/more-power-less-poverty/
Not sure I believe in the true knowledge/wisdom thing. I do like solutions that work. Even more if E.A.S.Y.
When you reduce an argument to just it's conclusion you get an inaccurate version of "easy" vs "not easy".
For all of these 'obvious' solutions, you still need to defend the position as actually correct. That defense stops being 'easy' and reveals it's complexity when you have to stop and explain the mechanisms that they work by, when you have to identify the 'near-miss' versions of them that should be avoided. Completely untracked borders with no highway patrol seems like it's not quite what you intend by 'open borders' for example, there are still nuances and complexities to be tracked and studied.
By your own admission there are entire books written to defend their position, that strikes me as being medium answers at the least.
Seems like there's also some confusion between "easy to explain" and "easy [and non-disruptive] to implement". Open borders sounds easy, but...
Unsurprising that this comes from a field that by and large dismisses the existence of behavioral heritability.
Because any fool knows that E=mc^2. Easy, right?
> What is wrong with an easy answer as long as it's correct?
It is low-status. Any fool could have stumbled upon it by happy accident. How does is signal your sophistication?
(Just kidding. I believe the implied meaning was "easy and wrong".)
Any WW2 buffs here?: Is there a map of the population density in Eastern Europe just before WW2? My understanding is that most of the Soviet population was in the west, but then I don't understand how the Soviet Union could send millions and millions of people to the front in WW2 if most of their population were occupied? And wouldn't their industry suffer catastrophically (I know they sent it east of the Urals but how did they have time for that if it was all located in the west, as I presume)? Also, how did the Nazis occupy and keep control over such a large area and population: just through sheer brutality (I guess they didn"t have much of a plan)?
Maybe I should just play HOI4.
Have you listened to Dan Carlin's "Ghosts of the Ostfront" series. There maybe some answers there. (Russia moved much of it's industry.)
Not really a WW2 buff but this is one from 1929: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/351/31812399992_9d885cc721_o.jpg Honestly, other than a slight shift south, the density map hasn't changed that much.
The Nazi theory of victory was predicated on a few things. Firstly, they assumed (correctly) the USSR was unpopular. They thought they could "kick the door in" and things would collapse. However, there were two issues with that. Firstly, a core of hardcore Communists proved willing to keep fighting and forcing other people to fight more or less indefinitely. Basically, the bureaucracy didn't collapse and if there were any disloyal elements they were removed which meant conscription etc could continue. Secondly, being Nazis and killing large numbers of people made them even less popular than the Communists.
Secondly, they assumed (again correctly) they could take out a lot of the key industries needed to sustain a war machine in the initial strikes. Mainly chemical industries needed to make weapons, gas refineries, high precision equipment, etc. They succeeded at most of these and the evacuation of Soviet industry was only a limited success. But the US just replaced those industries with lend lease aid.
Thirdly they expected blitzkrieg tactics could work iteratively. France was small enough they succeeded basically once and the country collapsed. And it worked on the USSR once too. They hoped they could do it repeatedly but the USSR adapted and ultimately stopped their breakthroughs before ultimately shattering a lot of their tank corps at Kursk.
The Germans largely couldn't keep control of large rural areas. This was part of why partisan attacks were so common. There was not a continuous line of contact along the entire front (though that's fairly normal). The goal was to seize key industries and cities and break armies such that formal resistance ended. But in general the Germans who were charged with logistics and occupation and the like were against the invasion because they believed it would be difficult and, even if successful, probably a net negative. As a result they were sidelined from planning with ultimately bad results.
Thank you so much for the map! It do seems like a large percentage of the population would have been under occupation (or internal refugees). I have to dive deeper into the Soviet industry during the war: how much was captured/destroyed, moved east or kept in non-occupied territory. Thanks again!
You'll also want to look into American supplies through East Asian ports (and how Japan affected those), the Arctic Convoys (and how Finland affected those), as well as the invasion of Iran and the Turkish straits negotiations.
Russia's economy was devastated by the German blitzkrieg and they would have lost hard if not for Lend Lease, a lesson they are currently re-learning from the opposite perspective.
Some portion of the population fled/was moved. So they weren’t occupying fully inhabited areas.
Wouldn't the German army have been moving faster than the civilian population, especially early during Barbarossa? I guess I have to find numbers on n.o. civilians that fled vs remained.
Tanks and halftracks moving cross country, against enemy resistance, and having to wait for fuel to be trucked in from Germany every time they run low, are much slower than trains running through friendly territory. And if you're not important enough to merit a seat on a train it's not out of the question to outrun them on foot, if you have a bit of a head start and again are walking through friendly territory. The Germans averaged maybe 15 km/day in their 1941 advance on Moscow.
For the first couple hundred miles, but Russia is BIG, and the Russians really were doing some actual scorched earth and presumably not everyone is sticking around after seeing that and are following the retreating soldiers burning/confiscating/destroying what they can.
I know if the army rolled through my town grabbing everything that wasn't strapped down and burning some of the rest, some portion of people (possibly including myself) would be inclined to follow them.
It was a quick advance, but wasn't instant, it took the Germans a month to get to say Kiev, and another 2 months to finish encircling it.
I don't know about population density, but population density is not the same as troop density. The Soviet union had troops in Siberia and at the Eastern border to defend against Japan. When the Germans headed for Moscow, Stalin moved large contingents of troops from the Eastern border to defend the city. He speculated correctly that Japan would not attack in the East.
For the industry, from wikipedia:
In one of the greatest feats of war logistics, factories were evacuated on an enormous scale, with 1523 factories dismantled and shipped eastwards along four principal routes to the Caucasus, Central Asian, Ural, and Siberian regions. In general, the tools, dies and production technology were moved, along with the blueprints and their management, engineering staffs and skilled labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_World_War_II
Also note that Germany only occupied part of what is considered the Western part of Russia (it's huge). You can compare "Siberia" (which may or may not be considered the Eastern part of Russia) with a frontline map from 1941. For example, in the south, Germany captured roughly what is nowadays Ukraine, but hardly any of Russia's today territory. If you look at this map, then in the north they never came further East than Moscow (and even that only for a short time), and that is still pretty far West *within* the Western part of today's Russia. (Look for Rostov, Voronezh, Moscow, St. Petersburg to get an impression for the frontline in 1941.)
https://www.worldometers.info/maps/russia-physical-map-full/
The map also gives a rough impression of today's population density. There is plenty of population to the East of this line.
Correction: Germany only occupied part of what is considered the *Western* part of Russia.
The edit button doesn't work.
The edit button does work, but when you are done you have to reload the page manually to see the changes.
Ah, you are right. Thanks for the hint!
It's very unintuitive.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Self-refuting_idea#Kettle_logic
This is one you need to be slightly careful with, because:
Alice: "X is happening, and is bad"
Bob: "X is not happening, and also it's good that it's happening".
is obviously Bob being dumb and hypocritical, but
Bob: "X is not happening, and also if it were happening it would be good".
is a perfectly reasonable answer and
Bob: "X is not happening"
Charlotte: "X is happening, and is good"
is a perfectly reasonable three-way disagreement, but both of them will feel a lot like the first scenario to Alice.
"I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies."
—Jack Vance, 'The Eyes of the Overworld'
The modern version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Does a blog search website exist?
- Feedly lets you search your own list of RSS feeds well, but their global search returns a ton of junk from various websites, not just blog articles
- Google Blog Search has been dead for a decade
- Normal search for "topic" + "blog" usually returns a bunch of junk and not just blogs
- Even site:substack.com returns a ton of junk on Google
https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated list of small websites that are only searched if manually added and approved.
There's also https://search.marginalia.nu/ , which also lets you filter by sites that have/don't have JavaScript and gives options for several searching algorithms.
There's https://blogsurf.io/
It's manually curated and leans very heavily towards software and tech, the search is kinda bad, but the corpus it's searching is so much better than google's corpus that I think it's still worth trying
Thank you, this works great as far as I can tell
One year is too early yet to call it a trend, but maybe?
The U.S.A. had a spike in births (after a long general decline for over a decade) in 2021 that appears to be lead by college educated women working remotely.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-remote-work-behind-the-spike-in-us-birth-rates
It’s long been noticed that higher IQ’s (and educational attainment) increases the likely number of children men have, but decreases the likely number of children women have.
Until now (maybe?)
For me, any data from 2020 and 2021 (and maybe 2022) on almost every topic has to be considered an outlier/exception until there are at least 5 more years of data to back it up as a trend. The pandemic was just too big of an event.
I've been remote for what is now the majority of my career. Anecdotally women and women having kids are much more common where I work than they are among my in office peers. There's also a lot of women who that works on as a selling point for the job. So I think the rise of remote work has something to do with it.
Both being at home doesn’t hurt the sexual life. Helps it significantly if kids aren’t home too.
Sounds like work-at-home allowed women a lot more flexibility to have children while working, although looking at the chart it appears that the trend is back in decline again as of early 2022.
Good to know. I have this fear that maybe there is no zero bound for fertility and that in the future couples who today would have no children will need to hunt and kill the children of others in order to have even fewer.
I see some such tendencies in Scandinavia: People hold other people's parenting to extremely high standards and almost delight in moving children into foster care.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_scandal
I think the fact that higher education leads one to hold parenting to higher standards is a large part of how increasing education decreases birth rates. That is, one doesn’t hold others to high standards because one has fewer children; rather one has fewer children because one holds others, and oneself, to higher standards.
It is not primarily highly educated people who like to complain loudly about other people's parenting. At least not in Scandinavia. It might be different in more socially segregated societies.
Oh my. A less charitable explanation is that the childless adults are envious of other people's children, and they instinctively coordinate to take them away under plausible pretexts. A more charitable explanation is that the childless people simply have unrealistic ideas about what it is like to have children, they live in bubbles that reinforce their opinions, and then they vote for setting the legal bars unrealistically high.
One problem with this hypothesis, though. Looking at the age pyramids of various countries, some have a worse shape than Scandinavia, and yet they do not have similar policies.
A possible explanation is that just looking at the age pyramids of the Scandinavian countries is not enough; you would need separate pyramids for the native populations (who made the laws) and the immigrants (who probably have more kids). I wonder if such data can be found anywhere, because this is probably a very sensitive topic, politically.
Here you go for Sweden:
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/living-conditions/living-conditions/children-and-their-families/
Note "inhabitants with foreign background" are defined as people born outside of Sweden or people born in Sweden but whose both parents are foreign.
There are millions of people involved, so probably all explanations are valid for someone, from the least to the most charitable and everything in between. But for most people, the most charitable explanation is probably also the most correct: People have too high expectations for the efficiency of social work. Social workers need to deal with a reality where they can do much less to help children than people expect, so they wreck children's lives in order to do anything at all.
I think uncharitable attitudes against parents lowers fertility because it makes people err on the side of not having children. If a very strong social stigma is attached to "failing" as a parent and no social stigma is attached to not having children, socially anxious people will err on the side of infertility.
However, as you point out, this is not the main explanation behind low fertility levels because Scandinavia has higher fertility levels than for example Eastern Europe, where standards for parenting are not at sky-high.
I have seen Swedish data for the average number of children immigrant women from different countries have. So those statistics should exist.
I've heard a number of social conservatives say regarding the overturning of Roe something to the effect of "men who pretend to care about this passionately are phonies; it doesn't affect them directly".
I've also heard, over the years, many social conservatives argue that the sexual revolution was better for men than women because it allowed more men to have sex outside marriage, which, according to the arguments, tended to hurt women in the long run.
I, a man, tend to believe the latter. The sexual revolution was much better for men than women, and legal abortion, along with the pill, was a big part of it. The notion of having sex for pleasure and without consequences was great for men who like having casual sex. But men are the gender more worried about the immediate consequences of sex: babies and such being a negative if it's a casual hookup; women are the gender with all their eggs in their ovaries.
As such, it makes sense to me, a libertine, that men should care more about legal abortion than women.
This isn't the direction you're going in with your post but let's not forgot that one can care about Roe v. Wade and its overturning because one has a principled position on the law's constitutionality.
In principle yes; in practice it's odd how mere legal interpretation so routinely just so happens to match up with ones politics. It's much like interpreting the Bible that way - isn't it a happy coincidence that people 2000 years ago didn't mean what the text seems to say but instead what you already believe?
I have a pretty typical position on abortion: After a certain point in a pregnancy--I can't tell you the exact day--I intuitively recoil at abortion. Hence I find it acceptable that the answer be determined democratically and locally. Under the U.S. Constitution, "locally" means state by state. Roe v. Wade imposed a central, i.e., Federal solution by fiat on the part of unelected judges. It was neither democratic nor local. Hence overturning it seems right both constitutionally and on the principle that democratic solutions are preferable to solutions imposed by a tyrant--whether consisting of a an individual or a small group of "judges".
+1
It's hard to make a solid argument for abortion=infanticide at conception + one second. It's hard to make a solid argument for abortion != infanticide at birth - one second. There is not an obvious place where abortion clearly switches over from being approximately tardy birth control to being approximately early infanticide, and so people draw that line all over the place for reasons that are quite hard to justify to anyone else.
We draw arbitrary lines all the time, because it's utterly unavoidable. Surely there's no *particular* reason why an 18 year old can vote but someone who's one day shy can't, apart from the line having to be drawn *somewhere*?
Not only can we, we *have* to draw those lines. It seems like there inevitably will be some kind of line on when abortions can happen or can't, whether that's "Not one second after conception" or "Right up to the second before birth" or some fuzzy place in the middle. But there's not an obvious place to draw that line other than conception (hard pro-life stance) or birth (hard pro-choice stance). Most people aren't happy with either of those lines, and there's no obvious other place to coordinate on. If I say abortion is fine until 12 weeks and you say it's fine until 24 weeks, how would we decide which of us is drawing the line in the right place?
I think this is one reason this is such an endlessly contentious issue. Schelling had a chapter in one of his books about the situation where two armies are advancing toward each other, don't want to fight, but don't want to give up too much ground, either. If there is a river in the territory, that's the natural place for them to end up stopping, and it will be easy for each one to see whether the other side is pushing too far or not. Without such a natural boundary, it's hard for them to coordinate on where to stop.
If this is about the yick factor and that it has nothing to do with fundamental rights, do you also think think the states should have the right to, for example, decide on whether homosexuality should be legal?
(Not saying you have this response, but others demonstrably do.)
I think there's a constitutional/legal question (should abortion or gay marriage be decided at the supreme court) and also a "what's the best public policy" question. For my own part, I think legally recognized gay marriage is a good policy, but I don't think the supreme court was legitimately the place to decide it. I feel the same way about antisodomy laws--I'm glad they were thrown out, but I don't think it was a reasonable thing for the supreme court to decide. I'm libertarian and think what you do with your body is 100% your business, FWIW.
When you're talking about abortion, it seems like the critical question is about a balance between the rights of the prospective mother and the baby, and it seems very hard to come to any satisfying conclusion on the right balance point. This seems quite different from birth control, drug use, homosexuality, etc., where you can legitimately say "this is between consenting adults, none of your business what we do with our bodies."
But in either case, it's very hard for me to see how the constitution somehow is supposed to have dictated that abortion must be legal and nobody who wrote it or read it ever got around to noticing until Roe was decided, just as it's hard to believe that gay marriage was always required by the constitution but only just a few years ago did the justices notice. Or that antisodomy laws (commonplace in the whole country) were forbidden by the constitution, and the supreme court first found that they were permitted and a few years later somehow the meaning of the constitution had changed and they were forbidden. The dodge about an evolving constitution seems to me to basically be a justification for the justices deciding whatever they want on major policy questions. If we get another Republican in 2024 and he appoints a couple more Republican justices, perhaps the constitution will turn out to require banning abortion and forbid the states from recognizing gay marriage. What principled argument would there be against such a decision, if the supreme court is basically allowed to just decide that the constitution has changed its meaning whenever they rule on a case?
You only have to look at passionate disputes about star wars canon to see that plenty of people care a lot about things that not just don't affect them directly but don't affect anyone.
Anyone know how many of the Justices that joined the majority on Roe had mistresses? Always wondered if this was a motivating factor.
This doesn't seem reasonable - at these levels in society, you can surely safely secure abortion, either legally (other state, Canada) or securely illegal.
I think it’s pretty reasonable for a judge to want to minimize hassle and operate within the law.
Women have more immediate consequences from sex by potentially needing to be pregnant for 9 months. I'd imagine that consideration drowns out all the others when it comes to caring about legal abortion.
According to recent polling, *dads* care quite a bit more than men in general. Whether this is because they have experience of kids in the first place, or some more specific idea that it's bad if their daughters get denied abortion.
Although the idea that men get affected *more* by an unwanted pregnancy than women seems unreasonable.
Care more for or against? Or just care more in general, so in both directions?
For legal abortion.
Hmmm. Maybe something to do with the thing that most abortion recipients are moms? Though for me personally, learning what was happening and how precarious it was when my wife got pregnant, lost the first one in the early weeks, then got pregnant again was the occasion of a significant choice-ward move on my part. Could be some of that too.
>Although the idea that men get affected *more* by an unwanted pregnancy than women seems unreasonable.
They have none of the power and are completely beholden to the choice of the woman.
That wasn’t even the argument I responded to. Quoting:
”As such, it makes sense to me, a libertine, that men should care more about legal abortion than women.”
This strikes me as silly - the woman *clearly* gets affected more, up to and including the risk of death, and hence has more interest in legal abortion.
I am talking about how legal abortion affects the sexually active portion of society not how an individual pregnancy affects that pregnant individual.
My argument: If the absence of legal abortion raises the risks of pregnancy to women, women will have less casual sex. As a consequence, men will have less casual sex.
My assumption/belief is that having more casual sex makes men happier than it does women.
While I'm all in favor of casual sex, maybe it doesn't *quite* matter as much as having your life upended - or ended - by an unwanted pregnancy?
Right, but you need to compare numbers. How many people engage in more casual sex due to legal abortion compared to how many people get abortions? If the ratio is 100/1, it is possible that legal abortion affects those who don't get abortions more than it affects those who do.
I think the legal consequences of a man abandoning a pregnant partner (or just a woman he'd knocked up) have generally been less severe than the consequences of a woman abandoning a baby, and it's obviously logistically much easier for the man to leave - in a one-night-stand scenario, the woman would have to actively look for him! Social consequences have varied over time, but unmarried pregnant women have often been ostracized, or even imprisoned (Google "Magdalen Laundries"). Men, on the other hand, have much more plausible deniability. So while I agree that men *should* welcome legal abortion (in part because it widens the pool of women willing to consider premarital sex), I think it genuinely is a bigger deal for women.
>(in part because it widens the pool of women willing to consider premarital sex),
The most important thing in society, obviously.
Not at all, but I (and evidently OP) do consider it a positive outcome.
As a fellow libertine, agreed.
However incidentally I have been tindering pretty hard in Texas recently and women don't actually seem to be altering their behavior (unless I've just gotten better at this).. I think abortion is still functionally available for 99% of them and at the moment this is still mostly political/abstract
I assume the Tinder crowd is also higher socioeconomic status and on effective birth control.
Men had plenty of sex outside of marriage before the sexual revolution, not least because brothels and sex workers were extremely common in the past before a lot of urban renewal and police corruption clean-up.
One of the things that bolstered the sexual revolution was effective treatments for STDs. As Greg Cochran noted, the AIDS epidemic couldn't have happened much prior to antibiotics as syphilis would get in the way first:
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1541145150897868800
Not sure those times match. Sexual revolution was 1967+. Crack down on inner-city sex-workers was around 1990 according to my perception.
Fucking prostitutes was never that big in post-war USA, at least not compared to the sex that could be had after the Sexual Revolution. Young single men usually prefer to fuck women who aren't literal whores, and the availability of such women increased dramatically in the early 1970s (circa Roe).
Do you have evidence other than anecdotal for that claim?
I think also women who want children have reasons to care about legal abortion. Restrictive abortion laws seem to make health care providers a bit nervous in a way that sometimes have fatal consequences when something goes wrong in a pregnancy.
Women who have given birth know the sense of physical vulnerability that often accompanies pregnancy. Men probably don't experience a partner's pregnancy the same way.
Statistically, restrictive abortion laws aren't correlated with higher maternal death rates. Ireland, for example, managed to have a slightly lower maternal mortality rate than the UK during the period when abortion was outlawed there.
You say "statistically" and then give a single example. Here are some actual studies on the subject:
"Reducing the proportion of Planned Parenthood clinics by 20% from the state-year mean increased the maternal mortality rate by 8%...States that enacted legislation to restrict abortions based on gestational age increased the maternal mortality rate by 38%"
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(19)30419-2/fulltext
Another study showing that states with restrictive abortion policies (specifically, requirements for licensed physician and prohibitions against use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortion care) have higher maternal mortality rates:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306396
Here's a study of 162 countries (looking at data over the 28-year period from 1985 to 2013) that found countries with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal mortality laws. They also found that countries whose abortion laws became more flexible over time saw a correlated decrease in maternal mortality.
https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-018-0705-y
As of 2017, the last year for which I could find data, the US, which has more permissive abortion laws than virtually all of the EU, also has a higher maternal mortality rate (12) than almost all the EU countries. (The only EU countries with higher maternal mortality rates are Romania and Latvia, both of which have 19.)
Incidentally, Malta, which has the tightest restrictions on abortion of any EU state, has a maternal mortality rate of 6, which is also the rate of the European Union as a whole. Ireland, which until recently had tight restrictions as well, outperforms the EU average, with a maternal mortality rate of 5. Back in 2000, Ireland's rate was 7 vs. an EU-wide rate of 10, so it's not like Ireland was lagging back when abortion was restricted.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality-ratio-sdgs?tab=table
I think the evidence I've shown is much stronger. The studies I linked show that maternal mortality rates increase when abortion restrictions are passed and decrease when abortion restrictions are loosened, within individual states and countries (which controls for many potential co-variates). And the studies I linked which show correlations between abortion laws and maternal mortality rate are looking at a much larger sample (either all 50 states or 162 countries) than the examples you cherrypicked.
But hey, as long as we're cherrypicking: it's funny you should mention Romania, because Romania is pretty much a case study in how strict abortion laws are correlated with higher maternal mortality rates. Abortion was heavily restricted in Romania starting in 1965, and then legalized in 1989. The maternal mortality rate started rising in 1965, reached as high as 170 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1989, then immediately plummeted when abortion was legalized.
Here are a couple of figures showing the Romania data:
https://srh.bmj.com/content/familyplanning/39/1/2/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4755-8-39/figures/2
And the original journal articles:
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4755-8-39#
https://srh.bmj.com/content/39/1/2
Well, maybe we should get an expert opinion on the matter:
[i]I want to make a comment on the necessity and usefulness of utilizing second and third
trimester abortion to save women’s lives. I often hear the argument late-term abortion legal is
necessary to save women’s lives in cases of life threatening conditions that can and do arise in
pregnancy. Albany Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral
center that accepts patients with life threatening conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I
personally treated hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there. There are several
serious conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of
pregnancy that require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the
pregnancy, if you prefer, can be life saving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in this
setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not.
Before a Suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be sufficiently
dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a
type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several times its
original diameter. Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required
prior to attempting a suction D&E. In the mid second trimester, this requires approximately 36
hours or more to accomplish. When performing later abortion procedures, cervical preparation
can take up to three days or more.
In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, a doctor more
often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the problem. Let me
illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. A patient
arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe pre-eclampsia or toxemia. Her blood
pressure on admission was 220/160. As you are probably aware, a normal blood pressure is
approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn
child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke. This case was
managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her
pregnancy by Cesarean section. She and her baby did well. This is a typical case in the world of
high-risk obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s
life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly life-saving care.
During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating”
pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children
that I had to deliberately kill was zero.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20151008/104048/HHRG-114-JU00-Wstate-LevatinoA-20151008.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1bS1lHpsXuYpxXgY80oaV69fx0mcT3lCRrHdt68ohqj-brNu5-OU6mA-Y
[/i]
Probably care providers get the most nervous in times of transition, before it becomes clear what to do in different situations.
My sense of unease is mostly not based on statistics. It is more basic that that: As a pregnant woman I prefer if care providers side with me. And like most women in history, I value my older children and my own life higher than my unborn child (which I indeed also value, especially in later pregnancy).
I'm a mother of five and I would welcome more children. I hope I will never have an abortion. Still, I would like to have an abortion if I got to know that I carried a fetus with serious malformations. Laws that allow abortion are not only for people who don't want children. They are also there to make life a little less difficult and worrying for us who very much want children.
The specific example you give is slightly misleading, because the UK is really bad on maternal mortality for reasons which are a bit hard to parse (it is currently about 50% higher than Ireland). Do you have a source for the more general claim that abortion laws are uncorrelated with maternal mortality?
Plumber mentioned the US happiness data that shows that women were significantly happier than men as late as the mid-'60s and have crashed while men's happiness has risen, until men are now slightly happier as a group than women. I think we can posit as a null hypothesis that this is probably *not* because they can open bank accounts now.
The other thing is that IIRC for a long time a majority of US women opposed legal abortion, but men were in favor of it by a sufficient margin to make a majority of US citizens pro-abortion. This changed fairly recently, but before that pro-choice activists really didn't want to talk about this as it implied exactly what you just said, that both sexes saw it as a way for men to get the milk without having to buy the cow.
In case anyone is reading this, FYI Anonymous's recollection of the happiness data appears to be incorrect, so please don't update on this unless someone can find such a source: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-237/comment/8415293
By "women were significantly happier than men", do you mean "women's self-reported happiness was higher than men's"?
Because I think the latter is /extremely/ weak evidence for the former.
Happiness is a subjective experience, how would you measure it except by reported self-assessment?
Also, you seem to be suggesting that women for some reason were always miserable, but used to be so scared of anyone finding out that they lied en masse even to anonymous statistical surveys, then stopped doing so, not all at once, but little by little, in a way that looks exactly like a gradual decrease in happiness over time. All the while men were apparently getting sincerely happier, or else they had *also* been lying to the official statistics, but to artificially decrease their happiness for some reason, and equally gradually stopped doing *that*.
You say the statistics are weak evidence, but this motivated reasoning is orders of magnitude feebler.
>Happiness is a subjective experience, how would you measure it except by reported self-assessment?
So...the street light fallacy?
It doesn't matter if its the only way. Either it's effective/reliable, or its not.
I wouldn't.
I completely agree with you that there are no other good ways to measure happiness, but my conclusion from this is "there are no good ways to measure happiness", not "and therefore this must be a good way to measure happiness".
What I'm actually suggesting is that how people respond to questions about how happy they are is massively influenced by all sorts of subtle expectations that change in impossible-to-understand ways over time, and may well be strongly correlated with sex. "Lying" doesn't come in to it, because these are subjective, undefined terms.
While I certainly agree that men should care about legal abortion, I don't think there's any reason to expect them to care about it more than women do. Children can ruin lives regardless of your gender.
I'm not sure why you related this to libertine sexuality either? Access to contraception and abortion has a pretty major impact on sex for pleasure regardless of whether it's casual or committed.
I think most men would rather have children in a committed relationship than from a one night stand, even men who would prefer not to have children at all.
If women are more willing to have casual sex if abortion is an option, then of course this affects libertine sexuality.
“Happiness surveys” report women’s happiness has dropped more since 1970 than men’s has.
Maybe the “sexual revolution” is to blame?
Could be, a lot else has changed since then as well.
You sometimes see arguments about ”judicial abortion” because of this, the right to disavow yourself of fatherhood up until a certain point (typically earlier than the abortion limit).
Hmm. Can't a man mostly opt out of parenting by using a condom?
Then what do we need abortion for?
Sure, condoms are not 100%. My point is that men do have plenty of ways to opt out of parenting, just not at the stage that they might prefer.
Oh? So exactly the same as women post-roe?
The existing system is a kind of risk-sharing between males and females. If males had the unconditional right to opt out of parenting, sex would be almost risk-free for them.
The status quo is not perfectly fair in any way. But it transfers a few of the risks of having sex from females to males.
Women have none of the risks and all of the power where abortion is available.
Legal abortion or not, the female side of reproduction is not exactly risk-free:
1. Childbirth is a risk. I have heard that some people die from it. Many others are injured to different degrees.
2. Abortion in itself is a risk. As far as I know, no one thinks it is healthy.
3. Sexually transmitted disease tends to be at least as bad for women.
Of course. Same reason they oppose contraception and HPV vaccines.
Some, yes, but how many, and how do you know?
Why do Americans get so much spam / scam calls? It seems that this is such a widespread problem that people have generally abandoned the practice of picking up phone calls from unknown numbers.
Is it a technological problem in that we don’t have the technology to fight number spoofing?
Is it a legal/procedural problem that we don’t have the resources to adequately punish scammers from other countries?
Is it a political problem in that telecom companies don’t want to invest in technology/practices to reduce spam calls?
It seems like something that annoys everyone and devastates a small number of people who get scammed. Given that the median voter and politics are older, it seems like they should care about phone calls being trustworthy and not annoying. Why isn’t there more pressure/movement to defeat spam calls?
Because we have a media-political culture that is focused on idiotic overly abstract ideological debates and posturing rather than tackling problems that actually affect people's lives.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the first amendment is somehow involved. There are probably technical solutions, but they violate some sort of free speech norm, or possibly even something that has been enshrined as a right.
No. The phone companies get paid for every call, so they don't screen out calls. They don't even make it difficult for forge the number the call is coming from. (Well, this info is a year or two old. It may have changed recently.)
As far as I know cold calling a mobile number is illegal here in New Zealand. I've not experienced the problem and no-one I know talks about it. Cold calling of landline numbers does happen fairly often.
It reminds me of the US penny problem: everyone hates 1 cent coins but the government wont get rid of them because it's dysfunctional (the one company that supplies the Mint with metal hires a lobbiest).
It’s always 3. Politicians don’t care enough and corporations don’t care about large scale social costs until it costs them money.
A point of anecdata: I'm in the UK, my phone number is on the national Do Not Call register (https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/register), and I hardly ever get spam or scam calls despite (grudgingly) giving out my mobile number whenever a form asks for one. I get spam texts rarely enough that's it's a surprise when I do (I got one this morning, and on the 25th July, and I can't remember the last one before that). So it is technically possible to solve this problem.
The US has a similar list. The spam callers ignore this list and its difficult to track them down quick enough to enforce the fines (they just "go out of business" and pop up somewhere else).
This is a topic that interests me also. I will tell you what I have heard but I don't know this for certain, so I would love if someone with higher quality information than I could chime in here.
1) Caller ID is on the honor system. The phone network is old, built on old technology, and does not have a built in way to verify caller identity, so it is extremely easy to spoof numbers and would require a rebuild of telephone network hardware to solve.
2) Phone companies charge money to complete telephone connections, and have agreed to share the fee collected for each connection among every company that participates in forming the connection. So a small, local, shady phone company can offer super cheap, low quality service to a small group of scammers who place an extremely large volume of calls starting on the shady company's network but ending on the networks of large, legit phone companies. Because of the traffic cost sharing, the shady company can make a profit from the fees it receives from the large legit companies for placing lots of traffic on their networks, money that ultimately comes from the phone bills of the scam victims. Thus the shady local phone company is actually incentiveized not just to protect the scammers, but to work with them to help them place as many calls as possible.
The caller ID system having no authentication is utterly nuts, but it would have cost some money to do it right, so....
How can this ignorance of caller identity co-exist with long-distance charges?
I can see there could be coordination problems for international calls, but within, say, Canada, the telecoms industry is highly regulated. It's hard to believe the shady local telephone company scheme you outline can exist given such regulation. Unless the regulators are in on the scam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking.
Is is (or at least, was, decades ago) very easy for hackers to place free long-distance calls by spoofing their caller identity. I have heard that the frequency pulses sent by phones were so low-bandwidth that it was possible for skilled individuals to mimic the tones with their voice. I am sure it is much harder to do these days. But a lot of the US phone infrastructure is still either legacy hardware, or designed to be backwards compatible with legacy hardware, and so still vulnerable to various exploits.
It's a mystery, seeing as it can easily be solved, with only a moderate amount of technical work, by adding 25 cents to the caller's phone bill if the person they call presses "7" during the call.
How do you solve the "scammer phone service refuses to implement this" problem?
I don't have detailed knowledge of the telecom industry's commercial and regulatory state, but this doesn't strike me as a serious issue, if regulators and/or major telecommunications companies actually want to solve the problem.
Spam is a problem because it has so many potential sources. In contrast, there can't be all that many phone service companies. I think they can hire someone to check them out. Once scammer companies have been identified, one can just not cooperate with them.
Note that once scammer phone companies are being identified and blocked, there will be very few of them. It's sort of like if everyone's house were being broken into once every few days, one could say "how can the police possibly investigate so many crimes?". But there's an equilibrium in which the police do investigate them all, and consequently there aren't very many.
Yeah, I agree re: the different equilibria, I'm just not sure how to get from this one to that one.
A particular issue is cross-border scamming where most of the telecom companies on the other side allow scammers - somebody trying to implement this would have to be willing to basically block all calls from that country until a non-scam company appeared on the other side.
Spammers are spoofing other numbers.
They are spoofing caller-ID (because that's a valid feature for certain use cases), they are not spoofing the account which gets billed.
Same in Russia, btw, - once you have used your mobile number in ANY sort of registration, it will be leaked straight away, sometimes it takes less than hour for you to start receiving daily calls (multiple times a day at random times) forever. Some of them will be ad robocalls, but a significant portion - scam calls from "your bank's security dept.".
I had to spend a nonzero amount of time and effort to educate my elder relatives and install a spam call blocker on each and everyone's Android phone.
Anybody here making money as a freelance writer or translator? If so, I would appreciate some tips on how to start. I have some technical papers to my name (low double-digit Google citation indices), but no other published text that I can put on a resume.
My experience is that translation houses *love* having as many competent freelancers as possible to call upon, because workload likes to come in clumps and sometimes it can be hard to find anyone to do the work if they're busy with other stuff. This means that if you contact as many as possible, you have reasonable chances of getting work at times. If you can show that you can deliver quality on time, you're likely to get more.
When you can show that you've done documentation work before, this should also help to move you forwards in the line.
Thank you. Any specific translation houses you have in mind, or any hints on how to locate them?
You’ll have to Google for this. Prioritize those that you have experience that fit (and of course, those that actually look for the languages in question).
For instance, I have translated for Apple, IBM and Microsoft into Swedish.
I run a small translation business, what are you looking to do?
Get back into writing, and preferably get paid this time. I've done a lot of unpaid (and sometimes uncredited) writing and editing in my life. I loved it, and I believe I was quite good at it. I used to pride myself on finding just the right words, just the right way to say things, and just the kind of line to put on a T-shirt to make everyone react. However, this was all 5 years ago, and in another life. Recently, all I've had is technical gigs.
I'm open to many things - translating websites, blog posts, videos, manuals, documents. I won't work with technical text that's completely outside my field of expertise and completely incomprehensible to me.
I don't have so many hours available, so I can't take on anything approaching a full-time job.
If any of that sounds like what your business hires people for, may I ask what languages you might be looking for?
I'm a freelance technical editor and writer. I got started on Upwork, and used my experience and good ratings there to land better and higher-paying clients. I also have a website with a blog, so some clients find me that way.
I'm currently doing some work for a technical writing / technical content marketing agency called Wizard on Demand, and they're looking to hire more tech writers. They're great people to work with, and working for an agency means I get a steady stream of work and don't need to spend time hustling for clients. (I was going to post this on the next classified open thread, but this seems a reasonable place to bring it up.)
If you've written some papers, maybe you could write about those topics in the form of accessible guides for non-experts. That would give you some portfolio pieces for relatively low effort on your part, and demonstrate that you can make complex concepts accessible.
Thank you for the information and advice! This is really helpful.
My advice is that unless you have a very specific niche you are very confident won't be made obsolete by automatic translation, don't start.
Automatic translation is still kinda garbage, although there's a new niche for people to check and fix automatic translations.
I used to translate various texts, not commercially, but for my friends who don't speak English... but recently I don't bother, I just use https://www.deepl.com/ and check the results, it often does a better job than I would. Much better than Google Translate.
OK, maybe in short term you could make some nice money by translating things automatically and reviewing the results. But soon everyone will realize this, and the prices will adjust accordingly.
Same, DeepL is amazing. It needs a bit of correction but it cuts the amount of work needed by an order of magnitude.
> maybe in short term you could make some nice money by translating things automatically and reviewing the results
I know at least one person who translates things as a significant part of his job description, and this is exactly his process. The AI revolution already happened, if you know where to look.
Here's how that particular AI revolution works in practice:
1. Client offers you MTPE (machine translation post editing) work
2. You send back a few screenshots of how terrible the MT is and explain you'll have to bill it as translation
3. Client usually agrees
4. You throw away the MT and do it properly
DeepL is pretty good for stuff that nobody would have paid to have translated in the first place, and it's an impressive technical achievement, but most professional translation work
a) is obscure, highly specialized technical stuff,
b) CONFIDENTIAL EMPLOYEES ONLY DO NOT DISTRIBUTE,
c) comes with some liability that Globocorp X needs to have clearly assigned to a third party,
and usually all three combined.
Everybody we work with updated their contracts to expressly disallow the use of MT, and after a big wave of MT a few years ago when DeepL impressed everybody, things have settled back into "maybe it's good for boilerplate T&Cs but that's pretty much about it". Maybe Amazon is using MTPE to have millions of words of product descriptions localized - but that's not work they would have paid professionals for anyway.
Exactly this. Your client is going to be hyper-optimistic about automatic translation, so you have to show them the error of their ways.
The trick is that the client doesn't have to know about it, and doesn't care that much about quality either way.
>doesn't care that much about quality either way
If it's that sort of client, he's usually figured out to feed everything through deepl himself.
The trick is to use Google Translate for step 2, and DeepL for step 4. :D
My sister is a freelance translator. She got started by people she taught English to asking her to do translations and then did work experience at the main English language newspaper in the country and they paid her more to do translations than to actually write pieces (which she also did freelance for quite a while). She eventually got a translation qualification and uses agencies mostly these days. Reckons it has become a less good career to be in with the advent of AI - a lot of work now is asking translators to 'check' poor AI translations which is harder in many ways than translating from scratch. She reckons it is worth having a 'niche' for translation if you can. So if you have technical knowledge, definitely go for technical translation. If you have technical knowledge then agencies may be happy to have you on their books without translation qualifications.
Thank you very much. That's very helpful.
I'll look into getting certified. One more question: how does she go about locating agencies that would be able to use her?
Not sure - she is registered with several. I asked her about it a while ago for a friend interested in going in that direction and she said to register with agencies you either need a translation qualification or a technical niche (legal, engineering etc). I should probably also add that although she professional translates three different languages these days, that she started with Hungarian and there is a scarcity of native English speakers who are also fluent Hungarian speakers which probably made it easier to find work.
Is anyone else having the issue where Astral Codex Ten does not show up in the Substack Inbox on desktop? And is the only one which does not? I've gone through all my settings to try and find out if I accidentally changed something, but I didn't see anything.
It seems to me that usage of reflexive pronouns has become incontinent over the past 20 years. People used to say or write, for instance: "James and I robbed the bank." whereas now they will say "James and myself did it."
Now maybe I just don't know what proper grammar is. I never really paid attention in school, so maybe I misunderstood what I thought I learned. I thought one should only use "myself" in cases where the subject is also the first person, such as: "I accidently shot myself while James and I were robbing the bank."
Today I read that "James is greater than myself." I really, really thought "I" was the appropriate pronoun in that case.
I also notice that public speakers use "myself" like it's going out of style. It would apparently kill them to say either "I" or "me", so it's always "James, Irene and myself" never "James and I" or "James and me".
Or am myself wrong about this over-usage of reflexive pronouns these days?
I'm almost 70 and started my career as an editor, so I've seen how linguistic mannerisms have developed over time. Part of the reason for the overuse of "myself" is a general fear of using "me", because we defaulted to "me" in toddlerhood and got scolded for it in elementary school. Hence the ubiquity of locutions like "between you and I", "it was a surprise to my wife and I", etc.. (The object of a preposition takes the objective case.) What makes it more complicated is that the rules of English, like those of all languages, are determined by users, so when a usage becomes familiar and comfortable, it becomes acceptable. So we say "it's me" even though grammar books say it should be 'it is I", but you'd sound like a dork saying that. Still, saying "between you and I", or "James is greater than myself" raises the suspicion that you haven't read much, and that you never got over what you mis-learned in grade school, because it's not language you'll find in good writing of any sort, fiction or non-fiction.
Exactly my thinking.
I find "between you and myself" actually worse that "between you and I", because it signals (at least to me) that you know there is a rule but are too lazy to figure it out and want to pretend that you aren't making a mistake.
I have never figured out why people know how to use "he and him" and "she and her" and "they and them" but can't figure out "I and me".
But that doesn't explain the corresponding overuse of "yourself" (because "you" is the same whether subject or object, and no one's been scolded for saying "you").
Language Log usually has posts about any phenomenon like this.
Arnold Zwicky wrote a post about the phrase “such as myself” back in 2005, finding grammar authorities complaining about it for over a century before then: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002458.html
Mark Liberman has a recent post about the phrase “including myself”, but he was focusing on how it interacted with negations, and not commenting on the fact that it’s a reflexive without the standard binding rules: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50701
Mark Liberman has a more relevant 2015 post discussing something more like the observation you’re making, but also finding instances of the constructions dating back centuries: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22979
Arnold Zwicky has a post from 2008 on what he calls the “recency illusion”, which is the tendency of people to note usages and then think they are more recent than they actually are: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463
I’m not entirely sure where that leaves us on this, but those are great entries to read to think more about this.
How did I live without knowing about this website?
Thank you so much!!!
I agree with the observation. My theory is that people think that more stilted and unnatural-sounding usages must be more correct or more formal. The overuse of "myself" and "yourself" mostly happens in business contexts; I tend to encounter it from call-centre people, but I doubt they use it at the pub with their friends. They're trying to sound formal and professional. (See also overuse of "whom" in contexts where it's not grammatical.)
I don't think they understand the grammatical difference between "you" and "yourself", or between "who" and "whom". They just think "yourself" is a more "fancy" way of saying "you", and "whom" is a more "fancy" way of saying "who".
See also hyperbolically-fancy constructions like "whomp'st".
> Today I read that "James is greater than myself." I really, really thought "I" was the appropriate pronoun in that case.
Huh, I'd have used "me" there. Could be a BrEng versus AmEng difference, I guess.
It used to be understood that 'James is greater than I' was a shortening of 'James is greater than I am great.' 'Than' was not to be used as a preposition, so 'than me' was bad grammar. (This despite the fact that the people who claimed this kept getting caught out using 'than' as a preposition, even in serious writing, from time to time.) More recently, this is a case where the old strict grammarians have given up the fight, and say that 'than' can be used as a preposition. If you are using it as a proposition, you need the objective case, so 'James is greater than me' is correct.
Ah, thanks. I knew that "...than I" was short for "...than I am", but it really sounds wrong to me - like the kind of hypercorrection that was made up by Latin-inspired grammarians, like "don't split infinitives" or "don't end sentences with prepositions". I see that Bible translators have been using it from 1526 right up to the present, though: https://biblehub.com/parallel/john/14-28.htm . In Greek, the "is" is explicit (https://biblehub.com/text/john/14-28.htm), but my Latin's far too rusty to know what would be correct in Latin.
I just checked Strunk and White for this, and, as I thought, correct usage of -self pronouns is not discussed there at all. This suggests that the usage you quoted is a recent invention, as it would have probably been sorted out there if it was problematic or confusing at that time. Unless something officially changed about these pronouns recently, I'm inclined to think that this kind of usage is very wrong. (It does stick out like a sore thumb, doesn't it?)
Definitely a "new" thing, in my opinion. By new I'd say creeping in over last 20 years.
It's "wrong" but language evolves. But it sounds bad to my ears and to me it signals - well I'll refrain from making a comment that would be susceptible to "not necessary" and "not nice" interpretation.
I have notice this also. (I find it annoying.)
My working theory is that people don't know if they should use "I" or "me" but know there is a rule. So instead they use "myself".
In Scottish English, "Himself bought the car" would probably be understood as "my husband bought the car", particularly if said car were expensive or unsuitable and the speaker had not been consulted about the purchase.
I just checked this with my Scottish partner, and she said "ah yes, the derogatory reflexive" :-)
That's hilarious. :)
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Interested to hear your thoughts… I’m going through a breakup. I initially thought this person was my soulmate. However, after a year of dating, we realized we were incompatible and we broke up. I went through the five stages of grief in less than a week, and I now feel completely fine, and if anything, relieved… People who’ve heard about the breakup have said that they’ve never seen someone handle a breakup so rationally. (I.e. since I know him and I aren’t compatible, I feel no need to be sad about the relationship ending.) That being said, why do you think I’m so indifferent to the break up? When most people make a logical decision, they still battle the emotional aspects of their decision.
This is going to be pretty individual to the situation. It sounds like you did a lot of your processing of the break-up and preparation for it while you were still in the relationship, and it sounds like you also had the benefit of it being a mutual decision.
I'm still not over my boyfriend dumping me five months ago, but I was completely blindsided by it (we'd just bought expensive tickets to a live show ten days before - at his suggestion!). I thought we were really happy, and super compatible aside from a few political-type things.
But in retrospect, it was clear from his attitude on the call and his unusually distant behavior a week before it that he'd completed any grieving / sense of loss *before* initiating the break-up conversation. I'm pretty sure he felt fine once that chore was done and didn't think about it again. If that attitude is mutual, I don't think there's anything to worry about there.
Yeah I had one end that way when I was ~25. A 18 month old relationship with a woman I was living with and very into. Suddenly our sex life dried up for a couple weeks, but it didn't seem that big a deal. Then one day she wants to talk about something and just springs it on me in the kitchen. I was not prepared at all, though to be fair to her I wasn't pulling my weight that spring, so it is really clear why it happened.
Dumb thing was she left me for this just absolute loser. Talk about a wake-up call.
Sounds like maybe you front-loaded your coping time into the end stage of the dating period.
Specifically, when did you process the realization that this person was not, in fact, your soulmate? I would think that should have been a more crushing blow than the breakup.
My generally rule of thumb is the pain lasts 10% of the relationship. But the main thing that really kills it is a new partner. Particularly one you like better.
I’ve had breakups from insignificant relationships feel unbearable, and breakups from significant relationships feel almost completely fine. Each break up has been different and it think it depends on what other supports and structures there are in my life at the time.
How much did it depend on whether you were the one breaking up/you agreed that you should break up.
In my experience, a big part of the pain is about the loss of self confidence, so it is much worse to be rejected than rejecting someone.
this is normal. I remember breaking up with my boyfriend from undergrad I was with for five years and just feeling relief not because anything was bad but because he lived too far away (Bothell vs downtown Seattle) and I wanted for focus on work (cancer cell therapy).
I didn't go through any grief. Like sometimes you're just done and it's good.
Think having a balanced social network also makes the frequency of pain free breakups higher.
I had a similar experience with my breakup. One difference is that I did NOT think this person was my soulmate, at least not at first. We had attended a school for young adults with learning disabilities together, and at the time were not attracted to each other. We reconnected a few years after leaving said school, and started dating. She was really into me, and I grew to be into her, but our lifestyles were not compatible. Like you, I went through the five stages of grief pretty quickly, and am now mostly relieved that it's over.
From what you described, I imagine if HE thought you weren't compatible but you were positive you were, that disagreement would've made you take the breakup harder.
Glad you are feeling fine.
How well one is able to handle a breakup may be correlated with things like individual temperament, experience, how significant a relationship was, etc. But I think there will always be outliers, and we might not be able to explain them anymore than we are able to explain why only a small percentage of people who experience a similar trauma become depressed.
What I mean is, there will be outliers among a group of people, but also among a group of experiences of an individual.
Can anyone explain in technical terms why catecholamine testing isn't part of ADHD diagnosis? I read a study where they tested dopamine levels of kids before and after exercise and Richard Saul claims he diagnosed kids by having catecholamine tests done by mayo clinic so testing dopamine seems possible? I've asked a number of drs and psychiatrists and they all say haha that would be nice but it's impossible and I just want to understand why.
As far as I know, the only tests that can be done are serum levels of catecholamines, which tells you nothing useful since they don't cross the blood brain barrier. At best it might be indicative of levels of the enzymes in the catecholamine synthesis pathway—tyrosine hydroxylase, aromatic amino acid decarboxylase, and dopamine beta hydroxylase. I have heard that blood levels of phenyethylamime might be a marker for ADHD, but even that is kinda sketchy.
Even if you do have an accurate measure of brain dopamine levels, things are still more complicated. Is it striatal or prefrontal dopamine? Tonic or phasic dopamine signalling? Maybe dopamine levels are fine, but D1 receptors are underexpressed in the PFC. Maybe the D4 receptor has the 7-repeat polymorphism, causing oversuppression of NMDA signalling. Maybe the alpha 2a adrenoceptors are lacking, causing too much cAMP, opening up HCN channels, and inhibiting working memory.
Basically, it's not at all clear that the group of people with behavioral issues which are alleviated by stimulants is the same as the group of people with dopamine levels below some population percentile. Despite how elegant it would be if that were true
So in layman's terms are you saying that the catecholamine tests we currently have can only tell you how much dopamine is produced and that probably most ADHD symptoms are caused by defects in the transportation and handling of dopamine in the brain, we don't really know how, we just know amphetamines solve whatever issues these are?
That makes sense to think of it as a dopamine transport or uptake problem in prefrontal cortex rather than a deficiency. That explains the differences in symptoms from PD which affects dopamine production and thus whole body.
Because ADHD symptoms can be due to lots of other causes, from lead poisoning to ASD, which will remain untreated and stimulants will only make worse. Because some people with ADHD are untreated because the process is pretty arbitrary and depends on the judgement of a human. Because it would probably be cheaper than paying for the time of a psychiatrist to analyze behavior and try to guess what root cause of symptoms is. Because it would take away stigma from having ADHD, which many people believe is over-diagnosed because everyone has ADHD symptoms sometimes in our very complicated world and it would become something less judgemental like an iron deficiency, which is what ADHD is--a dopamine/norephedrine deficiency. If there's a chemical cause why make it into a psychological judgement call? Also could help with dosing and knowing what medication would be best for individual patients instead of trial and error.
Yep you got right to the heart of the problem, stimulants aren't going to help our lead poisoned friend very much are they? It would be much better to be able to categorize dopamine deficiency as a neurological disorder.
Although it's not strictly speaking *true*, if you treat all mental disorders in the DSM as "categories with criteria that only exist so insurance companies can make billing decisions", you're at about a 90% understanding of how the names of disorders correlate to the actual mental states of people who "have" them.
I've got a data-gathering question that will be simple for many of you. But I'm not too proud to ask it: I am gathering reports people make on sites that provide a covid PreP med called Evusheld. Will be compiling reports and making them available to later Evusheld-hunters, to help them find the best sites quickly.
I've made a form for people to give a report on. It comprises about 8 questions, followed by a spaces for people to write in answers. Some answers might be a paragraph long. Some items will not apply and people will leave them blank.
How can I collect these reports? There will be links on the site where people hunt for providers saying, "To leave a report on this provider click here." I could have the link go to a google drive document that's in suggestion mode, so that people's answers appear on the page as edits. The problem is that if 2 people try to report simultaneously, I don't know what will happen, but nothing good. Also, each new reporter needs a fresh document. They can't make a report on the one that somebody else just used
What's a simple way to do this? I do not need a system that compiles results for me some fancy way. This will work fine if I just end up with a bunch of separately filled out report forms. But how do I do that?
Please so not make any suggestions that involve hacking, writing code or anything on that level. I won't be able to implement them. I think I either need a clever idea about how to do this using google drive, which I'm comfortable with, or else an app or a site that will host the process and present a new report form to each new reporter.
Yes, Google Forms would (as I understand it) save each report as a new row in a Google Sheet, which would let you filter reports, sort them by date, or even plot them on a map: https://youtu.be/tJ3hDmefaI0
Thanks to both of you for Google Forms suggestion. Just looked it over, and I'm pretty sure it will work well for my project.
I've written a blog post on when the COVID pandemic should be officially over: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/the-many-definitions-of-a-pandemic. Most interesting learnings were that the WHO changed their official "pandemic" definition in 2009 for the sake of H1N1 and that monkeypox is somehow not officially a "pandemic" yet. Feedback and more datapoints are welcome.
I’m pretty sure the WHO does not consider HIV to be a “pandemic” but rather a “global epidemic”, because most regions of the world have many large demographic groups with low risk of getting it.
Do you know if the WHO ever declared HIV to be a pandemic? I can find academic articles referencing to it as such starting from 1987 but can't find any official WHO declarations.
I don't know for sure! After I wrote my comment I clicked through to your blog post and found that you already said as much as I know, which is that the WHO doesn't officially call it a "pandemic". I would be surprised if HIV has had its status lowered.
But one other thing I noticed is that you didn't obviously talk about "endemic" as an alternative to "pandemic" or "epidemic". I think they usually say "epidemic" or "outbreak" is when a disease has R>1.0 in the absence of seasonal factors, while it's "endemic" if R=1.0 or it is in a relatively stable seasonal cycle
It's already affecting straight people in Africa, yet somehow everyone in the West forgets about them. Hmmmm, where have I heard that before...
Yeah, yeah, very cute. In reality though, straight people getting HIV actually reduced the hysteria around the disease. Once the narratives around oppressed, disease-stricken gay men weren't as predominate, the "epidemic" lost a lot of its kick.
What you really ought to be cynical towards are the people on the left who have spent the past year gleefully mocking anti-vaxxers who have died...and who are now losing their minds over """stigmatization""" around gay men and monkeypox. Because apparently, people being virtually imprisoned in their homes and having their jobs and small business destroyed to contain covid was perfectly legitimate, but even so much as suggesting that gay men temporarily cut back on hooking up with strangers until they vaccinated is absolutely unthinkable.
I thought HIV lost its edge once the safe sex message got out. Once it became clear that your were basically safe as long as you took simple precautions, people chilled out. I was a kid a the time, but that's how it seemed to me.
Of course, that's my assumption around monkeypox too? What, a new disease? Already? Yikes! . . . Oh, it's spread by touch and all you have to do to avoid it is not touch strange people, probably really just avoid fucking around? Whew! Why didn't you say so?
I mean, if we'd gotten this instead of covid people might have gotten worked up about it. But after covid it just seems very chill.
No, that's "stigmatization".
On the topic of human artists who are quickly becoming obsolete -- who are some living artists worth paying attention to?
My 3 favorite living artists you should check out are Jaume Plensa, Anselm Kiefer and Peter Doig
Pierre Soulage if you are into abstract art. But he is not living for very long still, he must be 100 year old.
I don't know who counts as a serious artist among people who know about art, but I'm on the mailing list for Tim Cantor's events, and I've enjoyed every single e-mail I got (I'm on the wrong coast, so can't come to see his stuff in person often). I realize I probably exposed my total lack of education by admitting this.
I visited a few art museums on vacation this summer and the only living artist whose work particularly struck me was Margaret Bowland.
Interesting work, thank you for sharing.
Longtime rationalist/weirdo here! I write short fiction and post it on ashkie.com (and eventually I’ll stop being neurotic and get around to cross-posting it to my substack)
ashkie.com/nowhere-man is my fave story I’ve done recently — & the themes of agentiness, difficulty connecting with others, power of knowledge, etc make me think ACX readers would enjoy it! check it out, let me know what you think :)
I read Nowhere Man and enjoyed it overall. I found the introduction of magic to be very confusing, and it left me feeling like I was missing something.
Agree or disagree:
People used to be squeamish intensely judgmental about sex. We had the virgin/whore dichotomy. Active sexual desire was seen, in popular culture, as a kind of deviance to be judged.
Now we are squeamish about power. We have the victim/privilege dichotomy. Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
In what ways is this true? In what ways is this false? Am i wrong that there're an American tribal valence to this pair of dichotomies?
Is there any evidence that people are more squeamish about power than we used to be? I think we try more to punish people who abuse power (and in recent years, particularly if they abuse power to get sex), but there’s always been a squeamishness about people seeking power.
The victim/privilege thing is a long-standing obsession of humanity, so much so that we have an Old Testament shorthand for it, in David and Goliath.
Attributing the David and Goliath story to "the victim/privilege thing" seems like projecting modern values onto a text that doesn't really have them. Goliath wasn't part of a privileged class within David's society, he was part of the same social class within a different society that David's was at war with. Goliath is "privileged" in the narrow confines of a combat situation because of his size, but I think the point of that is to make David's victory seem more miraculous, rather than to make Goliath seem more evil.
A stronger Old Testament precedent for the "victim=good, privilege=evil" idea would be the conflict between Moses and the Pharaoh. But in that case, the problem isn't that Pharoah seeks power per se, but specifically that he defies divine command in order to do so. I don't think you can point to anywhere in the OT where seeking power is portrayed as intrinsically evil, although such instances do exist in other ancient texts.
>Now we are squeamish about power. We have the victim/privilege dichotomy. Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
I actually don't think this is true either. It used to be considered gauche to campaign for president, either for the nomination or for the office. You had to have intermediaries do that for you, as doing it yourself was unseemly. That concept is completely gone now.
Um . . . can you explain the rest of this point a little more fully? I'm not sure how victim/privilege relates to seeking power. Maybe an example of popular culture showing desire for power as deviance can link those ideas and demonstrate what you're talking about?
>People used to be squeamish intensely judgmental about sex. We had the virgin/whore dichotomy. Active sexual desire was seen, in popular culture, as a kind of deviance to be judged.
I think this one is really gendered. It used to be that *women* were judged intensely about sex and subject to the virgin/whore thing. But I think men were judged the opposite way, and judged to be losers if they were virgins. Hence the whole stereotypical thing where guys would lie about having had sex with a girl, ruining her reputation.
Hence virgin was an insult for a boy while at the same time being a complement for a girl. I don't think this is true any longer, and I'm not sure if it faded at the same rate or if there were separate trends for boys and girls. My sense of it is that the virgin/whore thing hung on longer. Women were having a whole campaign against slut shaming fairly recently, whereas back when I went through high school and college it was fine not to have had sex yet. Spillover from AIDS making male virginity more acceptable, maybe?
Well, IdPol is about little else than the passive-aggressive search for power. Indeed, since the first stirrings of the ideology the 70s, I've been struck by its obsession with re-interpreting the most mundane aspects of human life as power relationships, claiming to speak for the "victims" of such relationships, and turning that status into power, through the relentless exploitation of rights ideology. This enables you to both present yourself as "marginalised" and "powerless", and your opponents as "oppressors" and "powerful" whilst in reality the opposite is true. I've written about this, for example:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/that-cant-be-a-right-can-it
Aurelien, did you link the article you meant to link? What's there is a long discussion of rights. As a quick criticism of the linked article, it seems not to see the difference between negative and positive rights, and then criticises the concept of rights by criticising the way in which positive rights can impose obligations on others. (Maybe you got to this later, I was looking for the IdPol content and skimmed more and more as I got deeper into the post.)
Anyway, can you specify what you mean by IdPol? It seems to me that in my context IdPol goes back to the founding of my country (USA), in yours, surely the relationship between the English and the Welsh, or Irish, or Scottish all center around identity. Or the Indians, or the Catholics, or just class in general. Special privileges for special born is long term norm in a lot of societies, including, I think, both of ours.
Good point, and sorry for not being clear. The result of having two minutes to do what I should have spent at least ten on.
I was particularly commenting on the "victim" issue, and how people who manage to successfully portray themselves as victims then parlay that into the demand for rights, which they then seek the power to enforce. This is not the traditional, overt concept of power, and actually enables those who exercise the power to continue to present themselves as marginalised and powerless. In the essay, I was suggesting a connection with the modern tendency to use rights as offensive weapons, and to subsume everything to an essentially market-economy model where those with the best media and PR support and the most resources, wind up having the most rights. I wasn't addressing exactly the point of this thread, though it's something touched on in the link, and in the immediately following essay as well. But I think the two are profoundly connected, because "rights" provide a discourse which enables the exercise of power in ways that are largely invisible, and indeed anyone who resents or challenges your power is implicitly an aggressor and an oppressor. In Steven Lukes book on Power (and in the experience of anyone who's ever worked in politics) power does not have to be overt and stated. Indeed, you really have power over someone when they don't even consider doing something you might take exception to.
By Id Pol I meant simply the usual collection of -isms and anti-isms, because this is the fundamental mechanism that such lobbies use to acquire and manipulate power. I am so weak and have historically been such a victim that I need to have power over you to stop you hurting me further. The reduction of everything to power is, in my view, a profoundly dangerous development.
Hope that's clearer.
It is and it's not, but it's probably linked in with my general problem in understanding his second point. I don't get what he's saying when he says that we're now squeamish about power, the whole privilege/victim dichotomy. I'm not clear on what he's getting at there, but it could well just be bitching about woke in a somewhat opaque formulation, in which case you're probably understanding him and on point.
On your second to last point I do have a question. It seems like you're identifying things like feminism and the anti-racism movements of the 70s as IdPol. Is that right? If so, is there a reason why that's IdPol, but, say, the racial policies in the American South (and north!) in the 19th century aren't? Or, trying to take it back to your country, didn't Elizabeth remove a bunch of native Irish from Ulster and colonize it with English? Isn't that IdPol? To me it's kinda IdPol all the way down, and bitching about the modern version as something different and new seems weird.
OK, obviously many political movements throughout history have tried to mobilise people with appeals to victim status, some more successfully than others. Irish nationalism is one example, where, interestingly, a number of the original leaders were Protestants.
That said, since the dawn of time, states and opposition groups have made policy and challenged policy on identity grounds, often for strategic reasons. So in your example the English Protestant Crown was worried (reasonably) about Catholic Ireland being used as a base by the Spaniards to attack the country. The solution, then and afterwards, was to encourage emigration there by Scottish Protestants, and try to keep a grip on political power in the country. At the other end of Europe around the same time, the Hapsburg Empire moved large numbers of Serbs to the military frontier with the Ottomans , because the Serbs had a reputation as tough fighters. centuries later those areas were part of Croatia. And let's not even get started about the mass forced population movements after the two Wars of the twentieth century.
Here, we are concerned with something quite different, I think: the political cultivation and manipulation of grievance as a way of gaining power and advantage. The message is: you are a member of Group X, you may not see yourself only as that, or even primarily as that, but we have identified you. You are oppressed or disadvantaged in ways Y and Z whether you would express it that way or not. The answers is to vote for me, put more people like me in positions of wealth and power and support the initiatives I propose, otherwise you are a bad member of Group X.
This isn't new. It is essentially the same technique used by the Left to mobilise support among industrial workers, and nationalists (both anti-colonial and reactionary) to maximise support. But you can see modern IdPol as a degenerate form of this technique, based more on promoting access to power and wealth than addressing legitimate grievances.
A good, if surprising, early example of this technique is, ironically, South Africa. The Afrikaners, the Dutch and Huguenot settlers in the seventeenth century, considered the country to be theirs by divine right. But since the nineteenth century, British settlers attracted by commercial opportunities, had come to dominate the country, although they were a numerically smaller community. English was the standard language of government and education, and all the important positions were held by English speakers. Afrikaners were looked down on, discriminated against for jobs and generally laughed at, as stupid and uneducated. From the 1920s, this produced originally cultural, and then political movements, designed to recover Afrikaner dominance, and mobilise the Afrikaans-speaking population against the dominating British, who had tried to subdue them militarily, and put their women and children in concentration camps. Not all Afrikaners were convinced, but enough were that the National Party squeaked out an election victory in 1948. English speakers were purged from government and the public service, and Afrikaans became the language of power. The apartheid system of racial classification then followed, but it wasn't the original motive.
Ok, I think I've got more of a handle on what you're saying here.
Elizabeth sending the Scottish Protestants into Ireland (didn't know that was the sourcing, btw, thanks) isn't IdPol, because neither Elizabeth nor the Scots immigrants would have considered themselves victims. Likewise, the Habsburgs putting the Serbs on the border isn't IdPol, same reason.
Irish nationalism would be IdPol, because it involved (involves?) both identity and victimhood, likewise the Afrikaner movement before it gained power, and presumably Mandela's movement after the Afrikaners used their newfound power to institute apartheid. Also the civil rights movement under MLK, the Indian independence under Ghandi and the women's suffrage movements would qualify.
Do I have that right?
That just leaves me here:
>But you can see modern IdPol as a degenerate form of this technique, based more on promoting access to power and wealth than addressing legitimate grievances.
Is there anything there other that in this case you disagree with the movement, thinking its grievances are mistaken, and that makes it bad IdPol, rather than good IdPol? I mean, wouldn't someone who believed in Afrikaner self-determination and also that blacks had no business being in government have drawn the same line you're drawing here between his movement and Mandela's?
Seems to me that in the past people were judged for their sexual *behavior*, now they are judged for their sexual *preferences*.
In the past, "having many sexual partners" was a violation of the norm. You were not supposed to behave this way, regardless of your desires. Everyone can have sinful thoughts once in a while, but acting on them is problematic.
These days, "having a preference for a partner who didn't have many sexual partners" is a violation of the norm. You are not supposed to feel this way. As long as other people's behavior is acceptable politically, expressing your feelings about the things they do is problematic. (Remember, personal is political, therefore your private feelings are a matter of public debate. Even if you never talk about them in public, what if they cause you to have some kind of unconscious bias?)
Partially this is about what is socially accepted and what is not. Partially this is a consequence of the way we communicate: if we usually talk online to/about people we have never met in person, of course policing their words is easier than policing their actions.
With power, I supposed it could be similar. In the past, people resented you for abusing your power. Today, in most cases, no one knows whether in real life you abuse your power, so you are judged for having it. Actually, in most cases, no one even knows whether you actually have power, so you are judged for... uhm... looking like someone who might have power (either based on your gender or ethnicity, or the way you talk and the opinions you express).
>Active desire for power is now seen in popular culture as a kind of deviance to be judged.
Huh?
There's nothing wrong with power per se in the current zeitgeist. It's just that the """victims""" want to have it instead of the people they don't like.
Genuine question, have you considered the possibility that there are people out there that *actually* think that there should be less disparity in power, and aren't just lying to try and get themselves on top? That some people *actually* believe something different?
I ask because the most convincing argument I ever saw comparing the differences between Conservative and Liberal thought was that liberals in generally make that mistake in the other direction.
Yes, they exist. But its not a reflection of the majority today. He didn't say "some people believe X", he said "Now we are squeamish about power", and in a way we used to be about sex. So big, massive, societal trends. Not a small but literally finite number of people. "Sqeuamishness about power" is just not in any way an accurate description of modern American *society*.
This strikes me as true on the face, but something seems a bit off. When people express the desire to matter, change the world, have an impact, etc etc, these seem to me like expressions of desire for power (rather than just preferences for certain types of outcomes). But these expressions (when they are thought to be sincere) are typically applauded as a sign of engagement.
As a first approximation to a resolution, I guess I would say that people are squeamish about desire for power that is obtained outside of certain processes. Not necessarily the processes prescribed by law—some illegal processes for gaining/using power are considered fine, and some technically-legal processes are considered immoral. But I guess this is where the tribal valence comes in—determining which methods of getting and using power are acceptable. The trick here is that when people speak about power in a non-squeamish way, they typically avoid using the word power and related terminology
Both are just examples of leveraging guilt and social pressure to modify behavior. It’s just one well proven mechanism to gain power over another person.
Entire social hierarchies and religions are built around this mechanism.
I just got a job at a small (~20 ppl) tech-startup! Check out airforestry.com if you're interested. Located in Uppsala, Sweden.
Does anyone have any tips or thoughts? Either about working at a startup in general, about their idea or that company in particular, anything is welcome :)
I will be working mostly in the workshop with physical prototypes, though I understand that in a small team everyone needs to do a bit of everything. I have a life-long burning interest in all things tech and have had several relevant jobs over the last decade, though never at a startup specifically. I don't have any formal education, but impressed them during the interview by showing some prototypes and projects I've done in the past. I start in a few weeks!
I, for one, welcome our flying chainsaw overlords.
What's the comparative advantage of this product over highly maneuverable wheeled harvesters (or that hexapodal John Deere)?
Huh, never saw that hexapod before, very cool! I'm not a forester myself and most of the specifics in the following are from the pitch I received at the interview, but it lines up with what I do know about how forestry is done in Sweden. Conditions in Sweden are quite different from many other places. Most forestry here is planted Pine (Pinus sylvestris), with a harvesting cycle of 80 to 120 years. The trees are quite small even when fully grown (~40, 50 cm diameter * ~30 m tall at harvest), and usually grow very straight.
Elevator pitch:
Traditional harvesters are 15+ tons, uses lots of diesel, and leaves terrible scars on the forest floor both from an ecological point of view, but also harming the productivity of the trees you want to keep after thinning. The working conditions in the cockpit are quite terrible, with jerky movements, off-angle work, noise and isolation. You also need to leave paths for the harvesters, which reduces effective land use by ~20%. After harvesting, transporting the timber to the closest logging road is a large part of the challenge, which means that hard-to-reach areas are effectively unusable, and that the network of forestry roads needs to be very extensive.
The basic idea is to hang a light-weight version of an ordinary harvester head from a cable underneath a huge drone. The harvester head gets lowered to the top of a selected tree, attaches, slides down the trunk while cutting all the branches off, and then cuts the tree close to the ground while the drone lifts it all straight up. The top of the tree is held to the cable by a claw that remains attached to the top of the tree with the cable running through it when the harvester head descends.
By using drones instead of ordinary harvesters all the land can be used for planting, the forest floor is literally never touched, only electricity is consumed (which may or may not come from a diesel generator depending on location), drone pilots can work from a comfortable and safe virtual cockpit (eventually overseeing several automated drones, but minimum viable product is quite manually flown), the harvested trees can be flown directly to the nearest logging road (distance subject to battery life). Drones also allow a much more economically viable way to do selective logging, something talked about a lot but seldom practiced. Once the drones are developed they should be much cheaper than a full harvester too, as drones are quite simple devices with essentially just six electric motors on a frame with a battery and some electronics.
I can see the hexapod harvester make an impact on some of these issues, but hardly all of them, and they do look frightfully complex.
The drone and harvester head are both in an early-to-mid prototyping stage at this time.
Most if not all of this info can be found on the website, beyond that I feel like I need to be careful what I say as I haven't even started yet :) Any mistakes here are mine etc.
It is usually the case when working for a startup that the time will come when you need to put in extra hours to get the job done. Do not work late. Do not work from home. Instead, go to work extra early and put the hours in then. This is especially true when the problem is 'my co workers are distracting' or 'god, another meeting'. You can coast along for quite a long time putting extra hours in the morning like this, but the 'work until you drop' alternative is the fast path to burnout.
(It didn't work, until we made some new adjustment rules, when my friend who taught me this and I decided to start a company in Göteborg and both started coming in at 6.00 and distracting each other. :) )
If your company doesn't do the 'everybody goes out to eat lunch together at noon' thing, set an alarm in winter so you can go outside, if only to walk around the building once, and see the sun.
Depending on the work and your social situation, extra hours from home could also work, although you have to be careful so that it doesn't get out of hand.
This being Sweden, you need to set the clock *very* carefully in order to get to see the sun. :-)
This is good advice! I'm a notorious night-owl though. But I will keep this in mind!
Night owls need to take this advice more than morning people as they are the ones that most easily burn out this way. (The morning people have all fallen asleep already.)
If the problem is "god, another meeting", then *fix that*. As an early-stage startup employee, you have more leverage than most employees to influence the company's culture and ways of working. Push back on unnecessary meetings; ensure meetings stick to time; ensure that every meeting you're involved in has a clear agenda and a chair, has only necessary people present, and produces actionable outputs that are followed up on. Your colleagues will thank you (and if not, you're in the wrong company).
This is Sweden. Our culture already does these things. And meetings *still* take more time than you would wish and happen when you would rather be doing something else.
Working at startups can be intense, but very rewarding (certainly intellectually and emotionally, and financially if you're lucky). Twenty people is a good size - I'm glad I've had the experience of being Employee #1, but don't think I'd do it again. Make sure you take care of your physical and mental health - AIUI the major cause of burnout is chronic stress caused by problems you have no agency to fix, and at a startup you should have plenty of agency, but burnout is still a possibility. The company looks cool - good luck!
Thank you :)
No problem! One question - doesn't stripping the branches and leaving them in-place increase the amount of fuel on the forest floor and thus the likelihood of wildfires? Or do you calibrate the fuel load so that you get frequent small fires rather than a few big ones? I am not a forester...
This i an excellent question! I have no idea. That part isn't significantly different from how it is usually done currently however, and wildfires just aren't that big of a problem around here, not really sure what the difference is really. I guess just the balance of latitude, average temperature and moisture. We don't usually do controlled forest fires.
Good point, though I guess climate change may make wildfires a bigger problem? I see that Finland (who I think do do controlled forest fires?) had some bad wildfires last year, and Sweden had bad wildfires in 2018.
Yeah, I remember that in 2018, but even then it was a matter of a few dozen square km's in total. Scary when no one's used to it and we (probably?) lack robust planning for it, but ultimately not that big a deal.
I noticed the latitude is 59.9. Are you already used to winter long nights and summer long days?
Looks like a fun outfit to be involved with though. Good luck to you! Oh and be sure to enjoy the northern lights!
I appreciate the concern! As it happens I'm already a Swedish citizen, and will actually be moving almost 600 km south for this job. I always make time for the Auroras :)
A Swedish friend of mine once took a university job in Minneapolis, and was very amused that the welcome pack was full of advice like "we're very far north here, prepare yourself for the short days in winter and watch out for SAD." Even as a Stockholmer he was moving fifteen degrees south :-)
That's hilarious! I take it Minnesota gets properly cold in the winter though.
The family visited Sitka, Alaska when I was 13, and I remember having a hard time explaining to people that I had almost never been so far south :P
Hahahaha that's hilarious :-) As for Minnesota, I understand it gets cold enough there for ice-fishing to be a common leisure activity, so yeah, pretty chilly.
I prefer to call it hard water fishing if you don’t mind. <joke>
With improved electronics it’s become like a video game. You can see your jig on the sonar and every once in a while something much larger comes to look at the lure.
I think the record low in Minnesota is around -62 F. I was working with a guy who grew up in Novosibirsk when that happened. Even he was impressed.
1) "Johan Domeij" is a quite central-Swedish name. Knowing nothing else about the user, I'd say it's quite likely he was born and raised in either Uppsala or nearby Stockholm.
2) The skyfires are not frequent or intense at the latitude of Uppsala. Even significantly north of there all you really see is an occasional smear of green fog in the night. You have to go up into Lapland before you have a decent chance of seeing the upper air blaze.
Skyfires. I like that.
We do get good Auroras in Umeå where I currently live, at least several times per year. The trick is to get out from the city lights and really let your eyes adjust.
The name "Domeij" is originally from Domsjö, close to Örnsköldsvik, so your deduction of central Sweden is spot-on :)
I suggest reading this post before taking the job: http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/. Though it might not apply directly for your specialty or location.
Thank you for the link! I read this and several further links in full. It gives good and measured perspective.
I've had the most fun jobs of my life in startups. Not, mind you, the most remunerative, or the longest lasting, but most fun. Enjoy it, but keep an eye on how you're positioned for your next job because the truth is, most startups fail and, even worse, some limp along forever without really getting to the next level.
(Advice is from the Bay Area, Sweden may be different!)
This is good advice I think, and reflects much of what was said in the link posted above (though it also talked a lot about fun jobs at big companies). I am indeed more motivated by the work itself, rather than the compensation.
What makes GMU economics department so special? How did it happen that so many greats (Tyler Cowan, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, maybe Garrett Jones) landed there?
https://slate.com/culture/2006/03/the-real-secret-of-george-mason-university.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/tabarrok_should.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/02/why_do_so_many.html
A critical view of that:
https://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/30/fabians-and-gramscians-in-law-and-economics/
I think the GMU strategy of turning their Econ department into an ideological libertarian haven has paid off, and it also makes their law school and other related fields distinctive in similar ways.
I think Tyler Cowen took over and decided to select for exciting-thoughtful-and-popular instead of has-published-the-most-articles-in-top-journals. Since nobody else was doing this, he could get a lot of exciting/thoughtful/popular people, but nobody feels like replicating this or competing against him because it would mean they have fewer people who publish the most articles in top journals, which would make them lower status among academic peers (and the most ambitious students).
Plus the libertarian aspect that other people mention.
Obviously a big part of the story is that Tyler Cowen used blogging to become a public intellectual and encouraged other people to do the same. But did he recruit people who were different, or just encourage ordinary professors to act differently? Did he have the power to recruit? This is an unnecessary detail. Maybe the person who steered the department did not become a public intellectual, let alone the most famous one in the department. Don Boudreaux seems like most relevant chairman of the department, 2001-2009.
Cowen did have some power. In 1998, he took over the Mercatus Center and convinced the Koch brothers to donate $30 million the next year. Presumably they are more interested in public intellectuals than in top journals. But Bryan Caplan was hired in 1997 and Robin Hanson in 1999, before Boudreaux and maybe before the Kochs. But maybe TC had informal power before that. Presumably he got the Mercatus job because he had indicated an interest in power, such as an interest in hiring.
I think they went to the trouble of deciding to be the non-liberal university and were able to build up a bunch of economists and other people of that ilk before it became impossible. You couldn't do that now.
There’s nothing impossible about that now. It would just be a contrarian move, as it was when they decided to do it. You have to choose to privilege a particular ideology, rather than going for broader area coverage, as most academic departments do. But there are departments in other fields that have done self consciously similar things: UMass with Marxist economists, Duke with Bayesian statisticians, Carnegie Mellon with mathematical philosophers. The fact that the George Mason choice interacts with electoral politics makes it slightly more edgy, but carving out a niche is a known move in academia.
What is impossible now and why?
This reminded me of Conquest's Second Law: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/how-and-why-is-conquests-second-law-true.html
Aha! Very interesting. It's something of a safe haven for libertarians or nonconformists or conservatives?
The full university is not thought of in that way. Its just a good, not great state school in norther virginia. Its the econ and some law only that have this reputation.
Libertarians mostly, but yeah, everyone you hear about from GMU leans libertarian. It's more in the blogging world than real academic papers from what I hear, but it has raised their profile. I am not the expert here.
I asked my gf, who's an econ PhD student, and she hasn't heard of GMU being special from an econ insider perspective. Still I'm wondering what the story is behind the rationalist hero confluence.
Rationalists have their own criteria for selecting experts , which mean towards controversialism over conventi onalism, blogging over paper publucation, and.so.on. It all.ends.up being rather circular ... experts agree.with rationalists, because rationalists read experts disagree with them.
Does GMU actually have better economists, or just better bloggers in it's economics department? It's pretty easy to stand out if you're optimizing for something slightly different than everyone else is.
It would be cool to know whether the department actually rewards blogging somehow in order to land this unique profile.
Academic economist here.
I don’t know whether they reward blogging, but they are definitely not using the same metric to judge performance as “mainstream” departments. Brian Caplan’s CV, for example, would not have gotten him tenure anywhere in the top 50 US departments. Even top 100 I’d say. Still, he, and most people at GMU, punch way above their weight in terms of influence in the profession.
Whatever they reward, they are not optimizing for their ranking, and, IMO, it has paid off.
How seriously are people like Caplan taken? I've heard mainstream academic economics can be quite dismissive of GMU, they'll call them "ideologues", lacking in credentials etc.
Also do you have any idea what kind of incentive structures cause academic economics to be so credentialist/orthodox and why GMU seems to be able to ignore them?
On how seriously they are taken, I'd say most people don't even know about them. Also, for many academic economists, if you are not playing the publishing game in mainstream journals, then you are not a real academic. These people are dismissive of anything heterodox economists such as Marxists, Feminists, Austrian, Georgists, and the fellows at GMU, and are prone to call them ideologues and the like.
For what it's worth, I am an academic economist very much in the mainstream, trying to publish in the mainstream journals, being evaluated for tenure on very standard publication metrics, and I think they (people at GMU) do serious and interesting work. Many mainstream economists agree, so GMU is more influential than what its ranking alone would lead one to predict.
As for credentialism in economics, my theory is that most economics departments' objective function is their ranking. To maximize their ranking, they need to publish in top journals, which are primarily controlled by academics in the top 5-10 departments, which are very much mainstream departments. As a result, the current system strongly incentivizes departments to be in the mainstream. In other words, most Econ departments aspire to be Harvard (and fail).
I don't know this for a fact, but I guess that Tyler Cowen made a conscious decision to ignore GMU's ranking (i.e., he decided he did not want GMU to be Harvard). Hence they do not give tenure based on how many top publications you have and use other metrics to evaluate promotion. If they wanted, I think they could become a top 50 department, but that would require playing the mainstream game, giving up their differentiation, and becoming "just another top-50 department." In the end, they'd likely be less influential.
Why don't more departments do this? Ignoring your ranking is not easy, if nothing else because most academics are status conscious and want to work in highly ranked institutions. I doubt that, within the current system, there could be many other GMUs. There aren't that many highly intelligent, non-status-driven people out there to fill in those positions.
Question for people with knowledge of nutrition.
Imagine you have these two alternatives: (A) eat half of a medium-size pizza, and (B) eat a whole medium-size pizza. Pizza is not a healthy eating choice, so both alternatives are bad, but obviously, B is worse than A. Also, for the sake of this question, let's say this is a one-off thing. Otherwise, you have pretty healthy eating habits.
I have the idea that option B is not twice as bad as option A, even though it involves twice as much pizza, but I don't have much theory or evidence that this is the case. Intuitively, if you eat half a pizza your body will process it normally, but if you eat a whole pizza your body will pass a lot of it relatively quickly. As a result, a whole pizza is worse than half a pizza, but not twice as bad. Is this roughly right?
(Note: I chose the half pizza/full pizza dilemma to keep things within reason. I imagine eating 10 pizzas is more than 10 times as bad as eating one pizza.)
I don't think your intuition is right. A healthy body can metabolize a moderate amount of high glycemic food without a huge spike of glucose, but a lot of high glycemic food will spike it to unhealthy levels. In economic language, marginal costs rise. The sixth slice is harder to metabolize than the first. I discovered this for myself using a CGM (continuous glucose monitor). My impression is nutrition and longevity mavens are converging on the view that swings in bood glucose, and therefore insulin (in fact especially insulin), are a major cause of metabolic stress and therefore aging.
What's wrong with pizza?
Wheat flour, yeast, olive oil, salt, tomatoes, cheese, oregano?
Sounds fine to me.
I think that a lot of the reason that pizza (and many junk foods) are seen as harmful has three important factors (probably more, but these are the two that come to mind)
First they aren't very nutritious. Probably most people would say that eating a pizza with a bunch of veggies on it is healthier than eating a pizza with no veggies, even though you're eating the same amount of pizza. Basically, pizza (and potato chips, soda, etc) can often displace your other important nutrients. If you were going to eat the same amount of other healthy foods as the pizza/supplement very well, this point wouldn't be an issue. But, you probably won't, so it's probably slightly worse.
Secondly, they have a lot of calories. A small pizza at a place I like has about 1000 calories. That depends, as others have said, on how many calories you burn in a day, whether you need to gain/lose weight, etc.
Thirdly would be cholesterol. I don't think pizza is going to be low in it. But, neither are eggs. So once again, it depends how it fits into your diet (are you eating lots of other high cholesterol foods) and your activity (are you in great cardio shape).
In terms of marginal effects, my guess would be that it's small when you're close to being healthy (less than a 1:1 badness ratio), but high when you're far away. If you're prediabetic and you try to live off pizza, you're probably going to get diabetes and that's pretty bad.
Just to clarify my credentials: I don't have any beyond that I recently had to pay a fair bit of attention to these sorts of things, so I'm at least ok informed for my personal situation
This is not exactly the right question. The amount of pizza is only unhealthy if it is out of sync with your activity levels. It might not be healthy for a sedentary office worker. For a runner or cyclist it might be just the right amount. For a professional wrestler or construction worker it might be dangerously low.
Depends on why pizza is considered unhealthy in the first place. For simplicity, let's assume it provides excess energy to the body, leading to weight gain. From a caloric perspective, it would depend on whether the pizza replaces any other (healthier) food one would have eaten. If the pizza is just on top of a weight stable diet, I would assume that the weight gain scales more or less linearly with the amount of pizza you eat. If either (A) or (B) can replace lunch, but even (B) is not filling enough to replace dinner as well, then (B) might be slightly more unhealthy per unit of pizza?
OTOH, if pizza is considered unhealthy not for what it contains but for what it does not contain, the situation would be reversed. If either (A) or (B) can make you skip a vitamin-rich salad at lunch, that would make them equally bad, so (B) is just half as bad per unit.
Personally, I would be somewhat skeptical regarding general statements of some food being unhealthy. Depends on the BMI on the eater and what their alternatives are. Getting your energy from pizza is probably still be vastly better than getting it from sugar.
This strikes me as a pretty weird question. Why would your body process half a pizza 'normally' but a whole pizza quickly? Also, what's so bad about pizza?
I chose pizza as an archetypical example of junk food. Feel free to switch it with fries, burgers, etc.
My experience is that when I eat excessively, I use the bathroom sooner and, let's say, more "intensively" than when I eat normally. Perhaps that is not generally true.
I know the question is weird and poorly phrased. I'm just trying to see if there is anything to this intuition of mine.
Okay, it helps to know that this is about your personal experience, because it might be specific to you. I don't know of a reason why eating more would necessarily cause you to go to the bathroom sooner than eating a normal amount, even if it's junk food.
However, I've seen enough memes about American junk food that I can believe some of that stuff has an immediate impact on your digestive system. I just haven't heard of anyone having that experience with junk food where I come from.
If I had to guess, I'd say that if the quantity of unhealthy food you eat in one sitting provokes a digestive system reaction, there's probably something about it that negatively affects your gut in any quantity. There's just a threshold for your body to have a strong response to it. So, even if you don't have a digestive system reaction to that amount of food, I suspect the negative effects would still be there, even if you're not aware of them.
>I don't know of a reason why eating more would necessarily cause you to go to the bathroom sooner than eating a normal amount, even if it's junk food.
Torso has limited volume.
I've experienced the same effect myself, although eating a pizza in one sitting wouldn't be enough (the time I remember best was from eating two full piled-high plates of curry+rice; note that that's not really junk food). Basically, if you eat several kilograms of food in one sitting, that's litres of volume. Your belly can expand somewhat to account for it, but only somewhat, and the pressure rises. So your body decides "hey, better dump some stuff" in the form of large-intestinal contents.
I think Calcifer's mistaken, though; I don't think this implies a lot of nondigestion (it should be mostly the stuff already in the large intestine that gets dumped; I think it's just salts and vitamin K that get absorbed there).
Excuse me? Several?? Kilograms?? Admittedly I'm built like a twig and I'm stuffed after eating a single 500g pizza, so I find it hard to relate, but is it even physically possible for a healthy weight individual to eat two kilograms of food in a single sitting?
I mean, I'm healthy-weight* and I think the biggest meals I've had would have been somewhere around 2-2.5 kg (hard to be completely sure, as I didn't weigh them, but it sounds about right). Obviously, I don't eat that much very often, or I would be a balloon (my normal dinner+dessert would come out to ~800-900g), but at parties and stuff I tend to indulge.
*On the old BMI chart I'd be considered slightly "overweight" for my 6ft height, but AIUI that chart's out of date and that "overweight" band is actually the lowest-mortality. Certainly, my doctor wanted me to eat my way up to this sort of weight when I was under it. And I was in what that chart called the "healthy-weight" (or even "underweight") range when I ate most of the meals I'm thinking of.
The hot dog eating record is almost 7 kg, plus buns. Terrifying.
http://metrocosm.com/hot-dog-eating/
Edit: I think this article might be looking at the wrong size hot dog; it might be more like 3 kg.
Huh my intuition says the opposite. Half of a medium pizza isn't that much: depending on your body size and activity level it might not even be more calories than a normal dinner. Whereas a whole one is more clearly excessive.
If half a pizza is not excessive, make it seven slices vs. eight slices (i.e., a whole pizza). The question is: is the harm/unhealthiness of the marginal slice decreasing?
I expect harm of the marginal slice would increase. Your model seems to be that the marginal slice has less material absorbed because the digestive system is saturated. I would contend that marginal carbohydrate absorbed is worse because the ability to be sorted in cells is saturated it is floating around in the blood stream causing all the havoc that diabetics suffer.
Something that took me off guard in the last couple of years is the difference of my ability to remember things I've observed vs participated in. I used to listen to podcasts and be befuddled that I could remember details that the hosts themselves would forget or be hazy on from episodes that happened a year or so earlier. Similarly, as an aficionado of Diablo 2 speedruns, I'd be confused that streamers would forget that they had certain layouts in the map they were playing, or get details mixed up between different runs in the same day (D2 has randomised maps and items, so every run is different).
In the last year and a half I have begun doing both of these things myself (hosting and editing a podcast, performing D2 speedruns) and found that it's not that I had a better memory than the hosts or speedrunners, it's that my memory of events as an observer is far superior to my memory as a participant! This seems really counter intuitive to me, surely you should have better knowledge of what you yourself have done rather than what you've seen other people do.
I would think that is mostly just cognitive loading.
Some of it due to selective attention. Try this test. https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo
Then see the commentary on the website it refers to.
When I watch a replay of a game I played (especially PvP shooters or rts games) many mistakes I made seem obvious that I missed while playing. Partly this is because that is the second time I see the game, but I think even more is owed to the fact that I can just watch instead of having to do it too (including planning what to do next which can be a big distraction!).
I've noticed what I think is a similar phenomenon: the days when you had someone zipping through TV channels in front of an audience, before on-screen TV guides and streaming. The audience just watching the screen virtually always caught the program they're looking for before the button-masher does (like in Toy Story 2 when they're trying to find the Al's Toy Barn commercial). The observers are able to give the screen their full attention, while the button-masher's focus is split between the screen and mashing the button as fast as possible. So like the others here have said, participation in an activity splits your attention between observing and doing, even if you aren't doing very much, any focus on any activity at all can distract from you noticing something a completely undistracted observer could spot and remember.
I see this all the time in Let's Plays; the player picks up an item, for instance, and then tries to find it in the inventory. He'll cycle around the whole list at some speed that's obviously too fast for him to notice what's on the screen, and zip past it two or three times, while I, the viewer, am yelling IT'S RIGHT THERE YOU MORON.
I like Laurence's explanation based on cognitive load, but I'm also reminded of a comment I once read that fans of a game often know the rules better than the game's designer, because the designer considered many different versions of the rules and can have trouble remembering which version became official, while the fans only ever see the final version.
Could be there's a thing where the person doing the activity is looking ahead to consider multiple things they could do, or multiple ways it could go, and these hypotheticals get mixed up with what actually happened. Meanwhile, passive observers only see one version.
This is commonly observed by the audience of let's-players, speedrunners and the like. Not actually having to do the thing (talking, playing) frees up a LOT of attentional resources which means that observers can often notice and remember more (or different) things than the people performing.
I attribute this partially to the pressure that the person is under: they're being recorded, which adds a certain amount of stress for obvious reasons. They're also the ones having to interact (with the game, or other people) which limits what they can attend to.
For example, you could have memorized a part of the map better than the speedrunner you were watching because you were free to direct your attention wherever you wanted, while the runner needs to keep an eye on their time, how they're playing, and what upcoming parts of the run to mentally prepare for.
There are certainly things that you remember better if you've done it yourself vs if you've watched someone do it, but there are many perks to being a passive observer too.
This is often referred to as the "streamer tax", where sometimes even "obvious" and large prompts on screen get unnoticed.
I think another aspect of this is that (the generic) you, as the passive observer are not penalized as much for making mistakes, which means 1) You're going to miss some mistakes you made, when the speedrunner + all of their viewers wouldn't because they clearly have a time loss 2) You're not going to remember when you made a mistake, unless you're judicious about recording when you're wrong. 3) Since you're a participant, you're automatically setting expectations lower for yourself than the "talent", so mentally any successes count as exceptionally positive and any negatives count as business as usual, whereas for the podcast creator / D2 speedrunner, successes count as business as usual and negatives count as exceptionally negative. 4) In the case of a chat talking to each other in real time, you're not really comparing one person's memory against your own, so much as one person's memory + a large percentage of chat's. If you had a hunch on something, and chat says it, you'd score it as correct whereas if you're actually playing, you'd have multiple possibilities in mind or have time pressure to decide when you're unsure.
I'd guess that OP is cognizant of the above to some degree, but unless they are relatively judicious with keeping track in a notepad, I'd guess a 30:70 ratio of the above selection effects to attentional bankruptcy.
So I just saw Garett Jones, a GMU economist, tweet this out- a proposed new system for selecting political candidates for office. The idea I guess came from Reddit, link below.
He proposes convening juries of randomly selected citizens to interview political candidates. It'd probably have to start at the very local level, so maybe 25-50 folks who are impaneled for a couple weeks for their local mayor, DA or sheriff's office. They review CVs, interview candidates, and have them do policy presentations, just like for a job. "Mr. Stewart and Ms. Jones, affordable housing is a major issue in our town. Please prepare a 20 minute presentation on your solutions, and then be prepared to answer questions afterwards." For transparency's sake all of this should probably be recorded/posted online.
You could have the jury then select the candidate, or you could have their selection go to a referendum, or at a minimum this process could be the new 'primary' with multiple winners and then the public could vote on 1 candidate from there. A new future jury could then examine their job performance at the end of their term and consider new candidates, etc. My guess is that having the jury select the winner would be fine for very local offices, and the higher up you go (state, federal office), it'd be more likely that this process serves as the primary instead. I would argue this process is about 100x more effective than current American political primaries.
Yes there are certainly some logistics to work out (it'd be tough for regular people to take such a large chunk of time off, though paying them could certainly help). I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts. Ideally the system could help avoid the demagoguery inherent in the current process. Being a legislator is a job, and it makes more sense to treat hiring them like a regular job interview than based on one's ability to give demagogic speeches or what have you.
Realistically, this would probably start at the hyperlocal level, maybe with District Attorney or sheriff elections (which really shouldn't be highly politicized/partisan). If it's proven to be effective, maybe it could work its way up the electoral ladder from there
https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/wbesg1/sortition_election_hybrid_let_juries_elect/
The jury part is an unnecessary complication.
Just randomly select legislators. Give them secure communication devices so they can work from home and turn the US Capitol into a museum.
It's the only way to get a truly representative sample, after all.
He's approaching the problem from the wrong angle. The correct answer is to break up the US into about 15 smaller countries.
Also, electing district attorneys and sheriffs is ridiculous. As far as I know only the US does this, another reason to break it up.
Seriously though try looking at how other countries solved this problem first, especially Germany, they have serious experience on this matter.
Why break it up into 15 smaller countries? Why not 50? 50 smaller countries seems about the right number for me, for the United States.
It's a great idea. The only thing that could possibly foil it is if some of the countries (hypothetically, we'll name them California, New York, and Texas) were to become outsized. This would throw a wrench into the system. There needs to be a way to prevent the big countries from stomping all over the little countries.
Perhaps a common legislative body, one that is proportional representation, and another that is the same number per country, and make them work together?
50 is not enough. We should have city-states.
Actually, I did think of one other downside. What if the governing body of all 50 countries became too powerful, effectively creating one single super-country, and all the 50 countries are just subservient to that super-country? This would probably be a problem. We would need some mechanism to prevent that.
Or, at the very least, if it happened, to have the citizens of the subservient countries be empowered enough to fix that actual core problem.
If the United States didn't already exist no-one would invent it. The way the state borders run, even the national borders (if the US broke up then so would Canada), the way the constitution is written and the electoral systems. These are all products of ad-hoc arrangements and piecemeal acquisitions.
Everywhere there are straight lines on the map there is tension, often to the point of war.
Everyone who wrote a constitution after the US only copied the good bits (and none of them had to accommodate slavery).
If the United States didn't already exist no-one would invent it.
Maybe you should explain that to some folks in Brussels....
The EU has been going through quite the growing pains. I'm all for confederations, but trying to make an effective continent-level government—that I am sceptical will work.
There are rich countries not rushing to join: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, UK; and mid-wealth countries that are holding out on adopting the Euro: Poland, Czechia.
All sorts of problems have arisen, from the migrant crisis to the euro crisis. Greece has certainly faired vary badly by being in the Eurozone.
And the rise of the Eurosceptic parties (soon to win in Italy, probably) does not seem to be going away.
I'd say the EU project has just about gone as far as it can in terms of integration. They could get tighter but that would probably come at the expense of loosing more members.
The United States is definitely the worst form of country and government in the world, save for the others.
Not exactly on the same issue, but there's a revival of interest in direct democracy, where a professional political class and political parties are considered to be the problem rather than the answer. (Such developments in politics are actually pretty recent anyway). There's a good polemical tract on this by David Van Reybrouck, "Against Elections with lots of historical examples" Referendums are the best-known facet of this thinking, but other ideas include randomly-chosen assemblies to draft laws and single-term, non-renewable mandates.
This just means the candidate only needs to bribe the shit out of 25-50 people instead of promising massive pork-barrel stuff for his whole state. I guess you could see this as a net win, but I personally think that switching to a system where every political position is purchased from a small random assortment of citizens would likely be significantly worse overall.
Only if the identities of the jury members are accessible to the legislator.
If the identities are a secret, now we're handing off voting to a we-swear-it's-scientifically-random-trust-us group. Note how hard polling companies work, first to sample enough people randomly, and then to adjust that random sample to reflect what they think the final electorate with be like, for prediction purposes.
Which they will be if he bribes one or at most two more people.
It seems like we could take care of this problem the same way we take care of the problem of rich defendants bribing juries of only 12 people, which doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
This is a good point, but I don't think the situations really match – for one thing, I assume that the juries are kept in line by a careful examination of their finances so that they don't suddenly show up with a yacht a week after deciding that Johnny Depp is not guilty of the crimes imputed to him? This sort of thing works because Johnny Depp does not control the levers of police power, but the prospective legislator does, or rather all of them do, and have a shared interest in making sure their client-electors get away with it. You'd end up with a chamber whose deputies' incentives are all aligned.
Wasn't the Athenian solution to this to just make the juries so big that bribing them would be unworkable?
I interviewed candidates at Google for over a decade, I hated it, I never got better, and I still don't know if I did a better or worse job at interviewing people than anyone else. I seemed to be well-calibrated with other interviewers according to the statistics they kept, but maybe we all had the same biases?
Who would make a good software engineer? I'm not really sure, and it's a job I did.
If someone wanted me to choose who would be a good mayor of New York or California, I haven't the a clue where to begin. And I think most ordinary people haven't a clue either?
So I think it would we hard to say whether changing the selection procedure would do a better job when we don't even know what we're looking for in candidates. Figure out how to solve interviewing for ordinary positions, and maybe we'd have a chance.
Jus requiring people to actually talk and think about the question, rather than turning the question into a personality test, might do better.
The fact that you are uncertain about your ability to select the best candidates makes me trust in your ability more not less.
It's one of these things nobody can be certain to be good at due to poor feedback. Same as with judges (evaluating witnesses trustworthiness and other evidential considerations). But some people who have done this sort of thing develop an unearned confidence that they have really figured it out and KNOW what they're doing, mistaking noise for signal.
This seems like a perfectly fine idea for things that might be local and non-partisan...oh wait, now we're seeing all sorts of political fights over school boards (parents' rights, LGBT issues, selective schools & affirmative action), elections for district attorney (Soros-backed candidates, DAs effectively deciding not to enforce certain laws, etc.), and so on. Unfortunately almost everything is being hijacked by tribal politics and culture wars.
I suppose the easiest way to integrate that proposal would be for a political party (potentially even a third party) to agree to support a candidate that wins the support of the jury (which I suppose could be funded by donations to that party), either during a primary or in place of it.
If, as I understand the proposal from the reddit line, these "juries" will replace voters: no, I'm not interested in having some unknown group of people pick my elected officials, even if they promise to think really hard about it. Having said that, I suspect the whole thing relies on some shared assumptions about things that I'm not aware of, given the appearance of the jargon-y term "sortition".
EDIT: Actually, let's clarify: The phrase used was "a proposed new system for selecting political candidates for office". Do you mean selecting _candidates_ or selecting _officeholders_?
You already allow some unknown group of people to pick your elected officials, namely the voters. The jury should be no worse than the voters, since it’s a sample of the same group, and could be better, since they are given the job of actually thinking about it instead of being asked at the end of a long election campaign while they’re doing a day job.
Yeah, I assume he's trying to overcome the problem of incentives. If I am one of several million people choosing the governor, I have little incentive to bother looking into the candidates much because it won't matter very much how I vote. If somehow I found myself on a 13-person committee to choose the next governor, I'd figure I needed to pay a lot more attention to the decision.
How do you randomly select people? And make sure they show up and do what you want them to? Is there any reason to think they wouldn't just vote along party lines? Like, this seems to just be regular voting with with a vastly reduced sample size.
We have a system like this for jury duty already, and people don’t end up convicting or acquitting on the standard “party lines” of being tough or easy on crime - they end up caring about the case.
Sure, because neither someone that's hard on crime nor someone who's soft on crime want to convict someone who's innocent. But also, jury duty is about determining an objective fact. In principle, with perfect information, everyone should agree on the answer. That's not the case for a voting jury. I don't think we can just assume that the model of jury duty will transfer over.
This seems like a system where parties could potentially break down, actually. If you're appointing a single officeholder (not a member of a chamber), and the people doing the appointing have extremely-high information, there's very little advantage left for party candidates (as opposed to in chambers where party blocs have outsized power, or with low-information voters where the party endorsement itself gives you information about their policies).
This is a fair point. I was thinking about this more last night, and I think using the jury to replace party primaries (and then the general public gets to decide from the top 2, 3 or 4 candidates from there) seems more likely
You could figure out technical means to randomly select from a file of registered voters.
I'm pretty confident that the jury would take the job seriously for very local offices. I think the evidence we have now is that even in a hyperpartisan US, the more local the office is, the more voters are looking at actual credentials & policy over just party. (Bryan Caplan made this point in The Myth of the Rational Voter). There are a number of Republican Governors in blue states and Democratic Governors in red states, etc. I'm much less confident that the jury system would work when you get into House or Senate elections, but I think it's an interesting idea at least worth trying out
It may be true that these juries will take the job seriously, but I think you need to do more work to show that. I'm still not sure what advantage this is supposed to give over the current system though. Local offices may be less partisan, but that applies to regular voters just as much as it would to a jury. And now instead of having to at least nominally cater to the electorate, a politician just has to cater to 13-26 people.
This is my first time hearing about the idea, but presumably the advantage is that people have more incentive to make a careful decision when their decision carries more weight. The cost/benefit ratio for a regular voter doing detailed research is kinda dubious.
Presumably one could amplify this effect if the jury is given pay or other resources that help them to do a good job. (In fact, just being able to ask direct questions to the politician and get direct answers already seems like a pretty big research advantage.)
Seems similar to the idea of a bunch of friends pooling their charitable donations and selecting one random person to direct all of the money--it's more efficient than having each person do their own research, and the selected person has more incentive to do a good job.
I think the point would be to take out the cronyism of party politics, where climbing the political ladder tends to initially be more about impressing party insiders who can get you the right endorsements than appealing to actual voters. The broad majority of voters have no idea who they're voting for most the time except in the bigger important positions. Usually they just vote the party line for everything and only pay attention to primaries for President/Governor/Senate.
ETA: I should say I'm part of the majority of voters. I don't vote in primaries and I barely know the candidates for anything lower than Congress (though I might pay more attention to state/local politics if I didn't live in a deeply blue state with closed primaries)
We could call these random reasonable dudes "electors." Instead of voting for president, we could vote for electors, and the electors could put someone reasonable into office. We could then change the type of country from "democracy" to "republic."
It's pretty genius, actually. The only thing that could possibly foil it is if a two-party system were to come into the picture!
Philo Vivero is making a joke based on the current US presidential election system, under which you vote for electors and then the electors elect someone.
And apologies. I missed the random/lottery aspect of Fikisipi's suggestion. This is actually a big improvement, in my opinion. I have also often thought replacing an aspect of our current system with lottery would be a big win. My idea is simpler and not obviously as good (although I believe it's possible it would be).
My idea is to replace voting with lottery entirely. As in, anyone who's of the legitimate age, regardless of gender, race, IQ, education, or anything else, gets thrown into the elected positions.
The obvious critiques of my plan are things like: "What if someone of IQ=60 gets put into the position of president, or vice-president? What if someone super-evil becomes speaker of the House?" Or other forms of "What if someone unqualified gets to make the rules?!?!"
My counter is: we already have checks and balances. It doesn't matter.
But I definitely must entertain the possibility I'm wrong. If so, Fikisipi's improvement seems like a really good one, because it should weed out 90% of the problematic people (if there is such a thing) from participating in the legislative, executive, or judicial processes.
An interesting wrinkle: People selected for jury duty in the US often take it seriously - but these people aren't selected truly at random.
A random pool of jury candidates is chosen, but this pool is then filtered down by an adversarial & collaborative process of the judge, prosecution, and defense. A jury is intentionally, deliberately, and carefully chosen to be a pool of people that will take their duty seriously, and serve both as relatively neutral arbiters but also representatives of their society's unwritten values.
I'm not sure how directly you could apply that idea to a "political candidate jury", but I strongly suspect there's some fruit there.
There's an obvious benefit to filtering out prospective jurors who know the people involved in the trial or have an interest in its outcome, but what evidence is there that the other jury selection improves the outcomes of the trial? How would we know whether it does or not? It sure seems like a lot of the jury selection is pure gamesmanship--the prosecutor and defense each want to eliminate whomever seems the most likely to vote the wrong way. I have no idea how we'd tell if that makes the eventual verdict more or less fair.
> I'd like to think that means American society isn't as bad off as I thought.
It isn't and it is. To get a bit off-topic, I think U.S. society is kind of like one of those people who have a good life, well-paying job, stable relationship, etc., who is nevertheless cripplingly depressed.
It can't whole-heartedly celebrate its virtues and accomplishments, without someone from some side of the political aisle screeching indictments about the remaining injustices. But, neither can it put in the work of transformation and change to _solve_ those issues. I guess the USA needs a therapist?
On topic, I think the dichotomy is baffling at first, but makes a bit more sense on thinking. The USA's political process is fairly ad-hoc and unregulated, and within that framework, it selects for the most divisive and the loudest voices.
Jury Selection, on the other hand, exists within a very regulated and very regulatable framework, started with an intentional design, and intentional incremental & iterative improvements have been made to it, and it has the fairly explicit goal of selecting _against_ loud and divisive voices.
Since "solving these issues" necessarily means harming someone, there needs to be overwhelming agreement as to what the problems are, what the potential solutions are, and what the limits are in pursuing them.
This sounds like a ton more work than jury duty though. I'm not familiar with the US legal system but my impression is that people just need to show up, sit through the trial, deliberate, and come to a verdict. I can see how the legal system would be set up in such a way that this is doable for any random citizen, but reviewing CVs and preparing interview questions are skills the vast majority of people do not have. On top of that, I have to wonder if the average person has the degree of policy knowledge necessary to ask the relevant questions and understand when they're being given bullshit answers. Putting a professional politician in front of such a panel seems like asking fifty toddlers to wrestle down a gorilla.
I like the idea in theory, but even assuming every person selected for this job is highly motivated to do it, I can't see how you could escape the fact that the majority of them simply won't be qualified to.
I suspect that fifty toddlers will have an easier time wrestling the gorilla than 330 million bacteria, which is how it works when you ask people to do their voting as a side task on top of their regular job during an election campaign
It couldn’t be worse than the current system. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just better.
Is an exercise like freewriting really tapping into a subconscious or unconscious mind or is it something else (the conscious mind with no editor perhaps)? Reference https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/a-curious-realizer-guide-to-freewriting
This may be a dumb question, but in Singer's pond thought experiment, are there any arguments in favor of helping domestically versus internationally that aren't related to neglect or tractability?
https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/common-objections-to-giving/
On this page from Singer's non-profit, their argument for foreign aid is that 95% of American charity is already domestic. But assuming that a dollar spent at home could save the same DALYs as another abroad, is there still a case to be made for giving locally?
Sure there are tons of reasons.
The simplest reason is people care more about locals. That is a perfectly normal reason.
Giving locally is also more likely to directly impact the quality of their life.
It is also more likely to be noticed and rewarded by friends etc.
You also are in a much better epistemically position regarding the need/effectiveness of your intervention.
The utilitarian premise that “all DALY” are the same makes fine sense if you are a disinterested policy maker on the moon. It is lunacy if you are an human person living somewhere, and not how ANYONE behaves.
If you son is starving should you think about whether the food you might give him might actually save two kids in some less expensive area?
No and if you claim to you are just a pretentious moron with a malfunctioning brain.
To take it to an extremely high level: You are a piece of genetic + mimetic information. Per Whitehead in Science & the Modern World, existence is a matter of persistent patterns recurring over time. So while you have subjective experience at an individual level, you also exist as part of a greater whole of your replicating information package. Preferencing your altruism locally helps more of your information package exist/persist both mimetically (people local to you are likely to have more shared experiences/produce similar cultural artefacts) and genetically (your future children are more likely to procreate with the descendants of those who live domestically vs internationally). There are a number of implications here that I won't get into, but generally absolves the need to rely on the veil of ignorance and other secular takes on philosophy that lead to the Drowning Child problem, but still ends in a morality that has concerns for others (although preferencing parochial interests).
For a less abstract take: your visibility of impact on domestic problems is likely to be far more reliable than your visibility to international ones. You may think there is a 50% chance that the local charity will fritter your money on a problem that you expect would have a 1 QALY impact, an international charity may present as much more impactful (say 10 QALYs for the equivalent money), but your personal ability to assess their efficacy will be much lower since you don't know the cultural considerations, possible negative externalities, etc. and it may be reasonable to reduce the estimate of your expected effectiveness per $ to something more like 5%.
Zvi touches on this a little bit here, where he identifies that his ability to assess the effectiveness of his impact locally (by giving a promising grad student money for a laptop) is much more reliable and thus can expect outsized returns compared to donating to GiveDirectly or something. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/06/06/transcript-of-a-twitter-discussion-on-ea-from-june-2022/
It's entirely possible that I'm misinterpreting Zvi's take, it was a couple of months ago that I read the post.
Several possible cases for giving locally:
(1) A life in a rich country that generates technology is more valuable in terms of # of existing utils of humans in 2200 than a life in a poor country that doesn't generate as much technology
(2) The magic glue that makes rich countries the fonts of human flourishing that they are probably includes some non-zero amount of local co-ordination, which charitable giving helps foster and maintain
(3) Genetic selection / generational effects
> But assuming that a dollar spent at home could save the same DALYs as another abroad, is there still a case to be made for giving locally?
I think that this assumption is likely wrong. Labor costs vary by orders of magnitude between countries, and I would assume that the ones with most absolute poverty (where the low hanging fruits wrt QALY per work hour are) also have low labor costs, so you can get much more work out of your dollar.
I think that an argument could be made for domestic charity if the alternative is spending it in a foreign country with a similar median income. American donors should probably not favor Norwegian or German charity projects over US projects, I think. But for absolute poverty, I would assume that well-managed project can offer a QALY payoff beyond anything you can get in the first world.
One obvious thought is that it solves a coordination problem. If there are a bunch of people that could benefit in the same way from aid, and a bunch of people who are willing to give aid, then having every donor aid the recipient closest to them helps avoid too many collisions.
But as you mention, there’s the tractability argument, that suggests the same resources can go farther closer to home because there are costs (not least, epistemic costs) in acting distantly, and the neglect argument, that suggests that if most donors are clustered in a different place than recipients, then focusing on the close ones will cause more collisions.
I think the epistemic costs are huge. You can’t reliably understand distant situations nearly as well as you can understand local ones.
>not if you're a consequentially
Why do you say this as if consequences can be evaluated in a one-dimensional, completely unsubjective matter?
Consequentialists often say that there *is* a one-dimensional ranking, but not that *we* are in a good position to identify it.
Wild animal remediation-- giving legs to a snake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SgGfMlbCoM
Very silly.
Scott mentions that the Pennsylvanian Quakers are the first historical culture to have recognisably modern moral norms, in regards to opposition to slavery/ treatment of women/child raising and other issues, in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
I'd like to know if this is a fair characterisation of their culture and if they really were so different to neighbouring cultures/every other pre-modern society.
Also he seems to speculate that we inherited modern norms from the 17-18th century Quakers, does that suggest our current attitudes aren't the product of some kind of historical progress and are just as arbitrary as any of the other moral system that have existed?
It does seem like the Quakers had more historically novel views than modernity in some regards, like animal rights and pacifism, so maybe they were on a Whigish trajectory but were actually ahead od modern society in some ways.
>our current attitudes aren't the product of some kind of historical progress and are just as arbitrary as any of the other moral system that have existed
AlwaysHasBeen.jpeg
My knowledge comes from "Albion's Seed" but I think you are mostly right. Slavery as I recall was practiced by some in Quakerland.
I also recall that William Penn opined that too much reading oppressed the mind, and he wrote several books on the subject.
I'm not sure what to think, but it seems like, whatever the right answer is, it would have big implications for the "realness" of moral progress and its causes.
Currently I'm leaning towards: moral progress is real and the Quakers were just ahead of everybody else for some reason (maybe genetics).
But it looks like a strong case for the "morality is is just cultural and arbitrary, Quaker views just became influential for contingent historical reasons " argument can also be made.
Prohibition is like eugenics and hardline communism in that it was unshakably popular among progressives right up until it was tried and entirely predictably led to a massive catastrophe.
If somebody could figure out how to cure the left of the need to *actually cause* the disaster before they'll accept that the plan is bad, he would do humanity a favor on the scale of Norman Borlaug.
Prohibition for drugs other than alcohol on the other hand is still the policy of the day. Why ban MDMA and Cocaine and not alcohol? I'd say that's a lot about path dependency, because alcohol was already extremely popular and entrenched while other drugs weren't. But that's the sort of argument that is inherently unlikely to convince progressives, because hardcore progressivism is all about identifying and smashing societal norms perceived as harmful, not compromising and accomodating them. Particularly in the "modern era" of the early 20th century with its focus on big ideologies and theories.
Prohibition became law, though, so it became at least reasonably popular at one time.
Where did the political pressure to repeal prohibition come from? Was it a genuine democratic backlash, or influence from producers?
From what I understand it was eventually generally perceived as a disaster which was empowering organized crime, which is largely because it was. Also the widespread and increasing popular contempt for the law made the long-term enforcement of abstinence from alcohol look bleak; compare weed now.
As far as I know it was genuine. People didn't like having establishments doing illegal business everywhere.
Note that amendments were actually a done thing back then.
I poked around in the dataset that Stable Diffusion is using as a corpus for training their model; LAION. It's basically constructed by scraping the internet, associating images with the text surrounding it, then providing a giant list or URL:s plus text snippets that anyone can download for themselves.
The first thing you notice by sampling random entries is how bad the text is. Picking something by random is likely to just be labelled "Funny images for laugh humorous HD wallpaper" than an actual description of the image content itself. I'm impressed that the model was able to suss out any content from this at all. The complicated queries people use to make the model create "good" images seems to be very much out-of-distribution!
There is also other AI-generated images in the corpus itself! Literally the first entry that contains the token decoded from "dragon" is this: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51363644206_c3e2880fa8_o.png - maybe this will lead to a future where the training corpus is "poisoned" by older models, leading to newer ones targeting the inferior output of older ones?
A solution for this that I can imagine is that people band together to curate content that they want generated; e.g. D&D people collecting all images of fantasy elves/dwarves/etc on the internet and writing detailed descriptions of them; which reasonably should improve images on that subject a great deal. You'd "just" have to create a website for it that people can use to collaborate and submit their work, and have the latest models regularly train themselves on on the output.
> A solution for this that I can imagine is that people band together to curate content that they want generated; e.g. D&D people collecting all images of fantasy elves/dwarves/etc on the internet and writing detailed descriptions of them
Gwern's insight is that groups of nerds will do this anyway, even if they're not trying to train an AI. You just have to find and tap into these corpi.
The technical plural of “corpus” is “corpora”, just as the plural of “genus” is “genera”. I don’t know what the Latin explanation for this is, but I know it from hanging out with computational linguists and evolutionary biologists.
Romanes eunt domus!
That -us pluralizes to -i in Latin isn't a hard rule; "Corpus" belongs to a different word class (third declension) than the common -us words do (second declension).
I *think* the only other such examples where both the singular and plural is plausibly familiar to a well-read English-speaker would be "opus/opera", "genus/genera", and maybe "viscus/viscera". Not enough to establish a common pattern.
I had the same thought re: language models.
GPT-3 is already pretty good at generating "plausible text", and GPT-4 will likely be better, etc. So, as time goes on, aren't we likely to see an increasing percentage of all text on the internet being algorithmically generated?
Could there eventually be so much "artificial" text on the internet that it poisons the corpora of every language model and prevents further modeling? Either too much or too little entropy, depending on how you look at it?
I'm very curious if anybody else has thought about this.
What do people think of this definition + claim:
“religions are attempts to define what 'good' means, and it's impossible for a person to live and function without some definition of 'good', either implicit or explicit.”
I don't think the definition works. Lots of things are attempts to define what good means, say Socratic philosophy. But philosophical attempts are by definition subject to discussion and refinement. You can disagree with Socrates and have a whole discussion about forms and caves and lights and shadows. Your best student can disagree with you and publish an integrated theory of ethics. And so on.
But nowhere is there a final authority. Religion (at least, to me) has a final appeal to a higher power or powers. Why do we have to do charity? It's a pain in the ass and I don't like it. Tough, God says so.
In philosophical attempts to define the good, all you have are your arguments. In religious attempts, you have an appeal to authority. I think that's a significant difference and can't just be skipped over to try to fit the two things into the same bucket. I think they are legitimately different things.
Unless you consider the higher authority to be the Good itself and to that appeal. The difference being that gods embody an appearance of exercising power directly. I want to know more about what these people were thinking and feeling. Were gods involved? Strictly practical in some way?
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-huge-complex-stones-spain.html
>Unless you consider the higher authority to be the Good itself and to that appeal.
I still don't think it works. If you make the Good your higher authority, you still have to reason your way to what an appeal to it should be. The Good is abstract, not an active intelligence.
If your highest authority is God (or the gods), you can still reason about Good, but in the end you need to check in with God (however your religion lets you do that - passed down teachings, holy books, intermediaries, ecstatic practices). It's conceivable that God wants something other than what you can see as Good, either because He sees further than you, or sees differently, or in the example of gods, because they're just different and sometimes Zeus just needs to get laid.
Practical example - I've either read or been told to stop giving to beggars on the street. It's supposedly not good even for them, as it makes their life on the street possible and stops them from getting real help. It's certainly not good for places they congregate, as it makes those places less pleasant and the more beggars you have in an area the more non-beggars will avoid it. But I still carry around small bills for them. (I like dollar coins for this.) And occasionally I'll still take one of them inside and buy them food. I do these things because I'm a Christian, and "Give to those that beg from you" and "Feed my people" are both things I'm supposed to do.
I think I am unavoidably Christian due to my upbringing where the p's never really did not comment on theology or make it part of home routine other than saying grace and faithful church attendance. (I have 7 years worth of perfect attendance) summer camp scholarship, BSA God and Country award. Just can't wash it put off my hair but early on I was rebelling inside against the robotic conformity of the thing. Why should I be singing these hymns if I was not authentically feeling it at the time?
I have a relative who's been sober for 35 years and still does AA and his position is he doesn't care if they are going to use it for drink, "they probably need it". I give on the streets because I see people who I believe are really in need in the moment. Keep bills on the console for for roadside beggars.
I'm open to what the Good is. It's a knowledge problem. I can't even say with confidence that it exists. Slightly more sure that nobody has infallible methodology for establishing their idea of it.
However humanity is the only place I know of in the universe where dialog about the issue can happen. Perhaps someday someone will have it. So I want to keep the question open. That entails humanity doing well, call it the viability of the whole.
Because I don't believe that anyone has demonstrated with sufficient rigor to justify imposing their version on others it's important to be in a position to say no.
And without a certainty about the good I dont do utilitarianism. Rather I prefer the least damage to the greatest number as a guide for my actions and my preferred social policies. I dont think these things can be put on a continuum that measures one against the other with a common unit of measure. They may not always be consistent. It's difficult.
The same would apply to any living thing. Which doesn't invalidate the concept. The implicit part flirts with circularity. And the explicit certainly doesn't require a god, or defined sacraments, or ceremony or priests, or meetups. I don't think the Supreme Court would give it standing as a sincerely held religious belief.
> The same would apply to any living thing.
Yes, i agree. I think organisms all have to promote their own values to survive, where a 'value' is simply a mapping of world state -> real numbers. Single cell organisms promote values like 'keep my ph within this range, keep my salinity within this range, etc'. Cells promote those values by doing things lke activating ion pumps or opening selectively permeable membranes.
> . And the explicit certainly doesn't require a god, or defined sacraments, or ceremony or priests, or meetups
Agree, and i think the association of religion with 'these things' is unnecessarily restrictive. It's like saying 'it's only a religion if you have a sacred text that says a person created the world and we have to follow their rules while interpreting the sacred text literally'. Sure, LOTS of things fit that category. But the purpose of constructing categories is to simplify prediction making processes, and i think the behavior that 'religion' helps us predict is anything that's driven by the side of hume's fork that doesn't deal _only_ with predictions.
I think that is a bit limiting. Religion could also be seen as an attempt to impose a non-human supreme power in an attempt to keep human power in check. After all, what would limit the behaviour of an absolute ruler, if not some fear of divine judgement.
Modern constitutions could be seen as atheistic attempts to replicate that control of power.
People can come up with their own definitions of good; religion is an attempt to standardize it, often by coercion or force.
> “religions are attempts to define what 'good' means"
I gather that some religions see the definition of good as one of their purposes, while some non-religions also try to define good behavior. Any community will form norms, "honor thy parents", "don't clean your keyboard on IRC", "don't talk to the police", etc. Some of these norms are pragmatic, while others have deep theoretical underpinnings (e.g. moral philosophy, theology).
> "and it's impossible for a person to live and function without some definition of 'good', either implicit or explicit.”
I would argue that clever sociopaths can thrive in many societies. Unless you are willing to stretch the "definition of 'good'" to also include naked egoism, that statement seems empirically false.
I think you'd get somewhat better discussion of the claim if you skipped the definition; the word "religion" brings in too much baggage that (based on your other comments) it doesn't sound like you want.
A gradual formalization of associations around positive emotions in a community is how one might expect one to emerge anyway
Honestly, this has a whiff of "Atheism is a religion too, gotcha" coming down the pike. Maybe that's not where you're coming from, or going, or whatever, but my antenna are up.
You seem insecure.
I don't think the first definition would apply to, say, ancient Greek religion? But I would agree that it fits most modern religions that I can think of. Maybe the other component is something about knowing one's place in the universe, and acting accordingly?
For the second claim, I would argue that "good" is a relative term: good for what purpose? I would certainly agree that people can't really function without knowing that things can be better and worse for particular purposes. I don't think people necessarily think that their lives have a purpose. But I think an argument can be made that we're happier if we do?
>I don't think the first definition would apply to, say, ancient Greek religion?
This is an interesting question which isn't as straightforward as one might think. As I understand it anyway, it's not clear from remaining evidence whether Greek religion in the form it's come down to us is a decadent form of itself, or if it was always like that. That is, it's possible that in say the Mycenaean period the gods were seen as straightforward avatars of virtue and vice, moral signposts, but that as sincere belief in them abated they became more like the characters in a comic play or frustrating novel that we know: more or less dickish yet unfortunately powerful meddlers. We do know that by the time of Socrates the Greeks had begun to question whether the gods existed at all or were just fables; several Romans also write in this vein (Pliny famously says the gods are metaphors for natural phenomena, for example).
TL;DR, Greek religion *might* have been about arete at some point before the classical period.
Perhaps a bad example. Maybe Roman? Or any of the extant "polytheistic" religions which are largely about performing the correct rites correctly, to produce good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes. ("Correct", "good", and "bad" being defined relative to the person's values.)
In other words, I suspect the idea that religion is intended to define some ultimate Good is relatively new and weird by human standards. And also I suspect that once we've tasted the fruit of Absolute Ethical Certainty, even just by cultural osmosis, we are corrupted and can never go back, and are doomed to keep reinventing it untill we achieve enlightenment and transcend beyond Good and Evil. Or something like that.
The first one is accurate, but not exclusive to religion, morality can take many different guises and justifications.
The second one is ill-defined, but likely false, since psychopaths don't seem to need anything like morality.
Basically, whatever you are trying to justify by your two statements cannot be justified by them.
I'm interested in building a predictive model of how groups of people behave when they share a common definition of what 'good' is.
A psychopath is an interesting case, but i'd argue that their notion of 'good' is just an implicit belief in whatever they want in the moment. I suspect that the ability to empathize with other people is probably necessary for us to empathize with ourselves in the distant future.
If "a person's desires" count as an implicit definition of good, then I think your second statement is true, but not in a way that's interesting or relevant to a discussion of religion. Even the simplest animals have that sort of implicit definition (something like "food and sex are good, getting hurt is bad"), and I don't think we'd argue that animals have religion.
(Unless you're St. Francis, I suppose.)
I think there's an argument in catholic theology that would say animals are mute angels; they don't have free will, i.e. the metalinguistic ability to define a 'good' concept.
Religion comes from Latin meaning 'to bind together', and i would argue that an individual's desires are like their own personal religion. The buddhist story of the chappana sutta ("the six animals") basically argues, "if your own personal religion hasn't stably converged, you'll be continuously suffering":
https://www.wattpad.com/186773516-buddhist-sutras-chappana-sutta-the-six-animals
organisms like mammals aren't just simple machines that pursue pleasure and avoid pain; we are complex networks of machines, each of which seeks different kinds of reward and avoid risk, all of them tied together inside the same physical body. Effective religions tie these drives together in a way that stably satisfies them (i.e. generates predictions that lead animal upwards on a valence manifold). But since only humans (and maybe some other advanced primates) can actively anticipate the future, remember the past, and develop linguistic concepts that integrate memories to generate predictions, it's much harder for our religions to converge.
The first part seems trivially false, e.g. utilitarianism is clearly an attempt to define "good" which I would not define as a religion. The second part seems like some sort of motte-and-bailey where "good" is can generously be defined as any sort of goal of an agent, which they would indeed likely not survive without. Such a narrow observation wouldn't be very interesting though.
What what you say characterizes religion? I get the impression a lot of people have categories that require something like supernatural belief, but if Hume’s fork is a thing, shouldn’t all value-beliefs be “supernatural” since they can’t be empirically tested?
I'd say religion is a not-perfectly-defined category like many others; you can point to central examples (Islam, Hinduism,...) in a "i know it when I see it" fashion, but it gets unclear when you get to the corner cases (are the quasi-historical Hellenistic or Norse culture heroes religious figures or not?).
In any case, no matter how you define things it doesn't change any underlying reality. If you somehow proved that X should be put in the "religion" category, it doesn't mean that X is automatically bad, or that some religion Y is just as good as X since they are now both religions. Putting all value-beliefs into the "supernatural" category does not teach you anything about the truth or usefulness of such beliefs, it just at most weakens the concept of "supernatural".
Agree with this characterization; what i'm more interested in doing is understanding, in general, what happens when people share a conceptualization that unifies values beliefs under some framework.
There's a belief popular today which defines religion strictly in terms of 'supernatural beliefs', and i think this is ultimately coming from the perspective of "science as religion". If we define religion as "any beliefs about supernatural things", it allows for value-beliefs that don't involve supernatural claims to be thought of as being "fundamentally different" from value beliefs that do. This would be important if value beliefs are inescapable, and science as religion, like all religions, needs some explanation of why it's better than other faiths. "other faiths delve in the supernatural, we don't" is our superiority myth.
for example this line here:
> If you somehow proved that X should be put in the "religion" category, it doesn't mean that X is automatically bad,
Implies that religions is bad, or is popularly seen as bad. I agree that religion today is popularly seen as bad by white collar elites, but i claim that this belief is, itself, a religious belief that is incoherent. It says something like "it is bad to believe there is reality to good and bad."
The utility of any label is in terms of how it helps us make predictions. And what i'm interested in doing is compressing the similarities in _how_ people have, in general, when they share a bunch of value beliefs. Hardcore marxists clearly have a notion of what 'good' means, and i would claim that beliefs about 'bourgeoise coinsciousness' have an aura of the supernatural about them. But for most people they don't count marxism as a religion, and then fail to connect the dots to the massive damage done by other religious movements.
Two items I think are critical:
The worship of an otherworldly source of... something
This otherworldly force inspires or dictates what is good, or at least what is acceptable
Some forms of Buddhism don’t involve worship of an otherworldly force.
Can you say why that otherworldly thing is necessary?
Is there some other word that can be used to describe “beliefs about what is good” other than, say, value systems?
I find it hard to picture a religion without worship and belief of divine power controlling (or inspiring) everything as a basis for good conduct. Otherwise it's a philosophy or a code of conduct, in my opinion.
What I'm trying to do here is come up with a a predictive model for what happens when groups of people hold a shared definition of what 'good' is.
For example, i'm guessing that most people in this group don't consider AI risk to be 'supernatural'. But when viewed from an outside lens... yeah... it sounds like we are trying to prevent the summoning of a demon by casting the right mathematical incantations. I understand that there are far more complex 'inside view' arguments, and i know how to make them.
From what I can tell, all religions feel totally reasonable from 'inside of them', and the other religions seem silly from the outside. Well, that's how it was at first. Yet after years of practice donning the 'inside view' of a bunch of different religions, i'm noticing a lot of similarities in how people start acting once they have some notion of what 'good' means.
Having donned the 'inside view', as best i could, of so many different religions, i find it very hard to ignore how groups like EA act, in many ways, like a religion.
It's now hard for me to imagine an EA-style movement that doesn't end up being very interested in long term existential risk type arguments, just like it's hard to imagine a movement for improving the lives of workers that doesn't end up yearning for communist utopia, etc etc.
My conclusion is that values end up helping us compress our reasoning about events over very long timeframes.
Hm. I think I see what a bit of what you're getting at.
I'm tired, but when I think about this I'm coming up with 3 concepts: dealing with supernatural entities, beliefs that provide a universal ethical framework, and beliefs that regulate every aspect of one's life. These are analog, not binary. My intuition is that these aren't a clean Venn diagram, and that there's connections. My model of rationalism says that the 2nd logically implies the 3rd, and if it doesn't then one is not thinking about it enough. But I really don't like that 3rd concept.
I found your point about religious existential risk really interesting.
One thing that strikes me about rationalism and EA as religious-like is that they too purport to be fully general, ie provide an answer for every question big and small. "What should I do" (do what provides most utility for humans/sentient beings), "what is life about" (again, doing this), what is the universe/life/am I ("we don't have a codified answer but the ultimate set of rational tools to tackle it with").
I think any movement that goes beyond serving a specific purpose but becomes "vertically integrated" so as to fill all our meaning-needs has to also provide answers and goals that aren't concrete and achievable because we have learned that anything concrete and achievable was not enough to fully satisfy us. Thus we look to the stars (literally or metaphorically), so our one-stop-shop-religion/philosophy better does it too.
Also because true peace is formless but that's another discussion.
OK. This is a bit beyond me, not being knowledgeable about EA, but I sort of follow what you mean.
> The second part is hard to adress without first defining what "good" is.
Operationally, "good", seems to have some direct relationship with valence. Forgetting what a 'correct' defintion of good is (since this is, in some level, circular), i'm pointing out that, empirically, move towards what they think is good, away from what they think is bad.
So it then seems reasonable to me to say, ok, what 'good' means is just 'the top level concept that predicts valence'.
If hume's fork splits our minds into 'predicting' and 'valuing' portions, the kind of knowledge that encapsulates the predicting portion is called 'science' ,and the kind of knowledge that encapsultes the valuing portion is called religion'.
> but I figure that's not the kind of conclusion you're trying to reach
My goal here isn't to reach a conclusion but to compress and simplify the patterns in a bunch of existing observations, by presenting a compact conceptual framework for understanding values from a predictive perspective. So i'm trying to come up with a framework for answering questions like, Do all people have values? Do all people act in ways that promote their own values? Can people change their values?
> eople in society do not have an explicit *or* an implicit definition of how they should behave at a fundamental level, which in both cases would have to be learned
What about 'move towards pleasure, away from pain'? That's hardwired, right? What i'm interested in is understanding the relationship between "move away from scalding heat" and "move away from people who are frowning and shouting at you."
I can agree that "move away from people saying, 'kill the nonbeliever for their heresey'" is probably something learned, as is "move towards piles of green paper with the appropriate markings on them". My intuition is that what is being learned is a definition of a concept which unites all the innate drives and learned into a single predictive concept. So the reason people move away from "a group shouting, kill the heretics!" is because their brain has learned, that crowd of people is a predictor of likely pain and violence. The reason people move towards piles of money is that we have learned that a pile of money is a predictor of having other needs met.
If you then try to tie together all the concepts that predict 'satisfying needs' and don't predict pain, suffering, and death, what you end up with is some 'master predictor of positive valence', and i'm claiming this is what the word 'good' does inside people's heads: unite bunch of different drives into a single predictive model.
***Shameless self promotion***
I wrote about why, contrary to popular opinion, I think creative fields will lose jobs to AIs sooner and faster than other endeavors. You can read about it here: https://commentariat.substack.com/p/ai-is-coming-for-artists-first?sd=pf
If you like the piece I'd love if you would consider subscribing -- It's free, and I'm at least 75% confident the median ACX reader will enjoy my writing.
(P.S., last I checked self promotion was cool in these threads, Scott, sorry if it's not)
Not having read your post, and responding just to "I think creative fields will lose jobs to AIs sooner and faster than other endeavors". I think that before Dall-e 2, maybe 5% would agree with you. But now, that figure might be closer to 50%. I think you may have just missed the contrarian boat on this one.
That's fair, I'm sure people are more open to the idea post dalle, but I haven't seen very much discourse about it much so I suspect the conventional wisdom still largely stands.
That makes sense, especially for the sort of art you see in publications and advertisements.
Graphic design, image manipulation, and stock photo sites seem most immediately at risk. This makes me slightly uneasy, since I've done work in that area before and wish I had it as a fall back skill, but there's already a bit too much competition anyway for dabbling. I also kind of like it, being tired of the visual atmosphere created by rampant stock photo use.
I would expect to see more installation and interactive art in museums or art spaces (for instance the new Convergence Station opening in Denver) and more textural home art that clearly isn't printed (along with, of course, a ton of interesting computer generated prints). As came up in another thread here, it would be nice if this leads to more interesting clothing and home decor prints.
i've been using midjourney to design textile patterns, and as someone who works in fashion and knows a lot of great print designers, i'm *astounded* by the results (see https://twitter.com/itsjaneflowers/status/1553207619552157697 and https://twitter.com/itsjaneflowers/status/1554227557385617408 for a few samples)
i haven't seen anyone else using it for this purpose, which makes me wonder how much of a bubble we're still in with these tools⏤i.e. just based on midjourney's discord, it's still >99% nerds creating bland fantasy renders. so what happens when people with actual visual-cultural literacy get into the game?
I want blue #2 as a wallpaper. (#1 is intensely frustrating to me because it got about 80% of the way to a very classic style of chinoiserie, but then the little landscapes with houses and pagodas and stuff fail to resolve properly. Psychological torture wallpaper.)
Yeah, tried making some game assets (backgrounds, skill icons) in midjourney and it's amazing!
A lot of that is the human factor I think. There's very few people who are both well connected fashionistas and tech savvy. I know someone who had a metallurgical innovation that could be hugely impactful for fine metals and he really resisted my pointing out the jewelry industry pays for a lot of expensive metallurgical stuff and might be a good target market. Not so much out of prejudice as simply that he knew nothing about it and no one in it.
Additionally, a lot of the labor is artisanal and not fully replaceable by an auto-generator which means there would need to be a concentrated effort at adoption.
How do you get the pattern onto the textile? I'm thinking my daughter would love this type of stuff.
silkscreen or sublimation printing might be your best bet for one-offs, or something like this maybe if you're wanting running yardage: https://www.contrado.com/fabrics
put another way: are the tech-literate in any position to capitalize as early adopters in the visual-cultural realm in the same way as say, knowing about bitcoin in 2012 gave you a huge advantage over most in finance?
Artists exploring new techniques, media, and styles can have massive influence by being early and producing good work consistently. Good luck, I look forward to a resurgence in patterned textiles!
Asterisk sounds interesting but not I'm willing to go through the bother of a mailing list- hopefully Scott will link to it again when there's actually something to read.
Will do.
I tried to find out whether Asterisk has a Twitter account, or whether it's already being discussed on Twitter. I discovered that another Asterisk Magazine launched just last month. This is an unfortunate name clash :(
The other one is at https://www.asteriskmagazine.net/home
Their subject headings include "In Defense of Living", "On Kissing And Fucking Your Friends", "Hair Is Everything", and "Holes". It appears to be about pushing social boundaries to the extreme.
Luckily for Scott's friend, they have terrible formatting and the articles are unreadable.
But maybe the new Asterisk can steal the old Asterisk's headline writer.
They seem to have a lot of synergy... Maybe they should consider a merger.
Does the name "Asterisk" mean anything special? Astral risk?
I was the one who proposed the name. I meant it to suggest:
- Being technical and showing your work, as in the idea of an asterisk* after a word to indicate footnotes or more elaboration later.
- The idea of existential risk
- The astronomical, in the sense of https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste and the cosmic endowment
It also evokes the fickleness of beliefs as one gets deeper into the details - the footnote to a seemingly-conclusive statement that makes it more complicated, sometimes flipping it on its head.
Disclaimer: please don’t turn this into a culture war thread. I’m asking this to try and find information, not get into a big debate over the nature/existence of gender. Thank you for your consideration.
I have been confused about the idea of “passing” vs many transgender people’s seeming openness about being trans. It strikes me that being open about being trans would be opposed to my understanding of what passing is.
Obviously, trans people are not a monolithic hive-mind, so maybe some people just care about one significantly more than the other. But is there some other interaction that I’m missing, or am I misunderstanding the meaning of passing, or is it some other thing? Thanks
Speaking As A Trans Woman(tm): passing is two separate but related processes.
System 1 Passing: this is a safety heuristic operating in the background. In the same sense that you might have a subconscious mental checklist for "did I lock the door, do I have my keys, whoa that dude looks kinda sketch let's locate the nearest exit, shit that car's muscling into my lane"...etc, trans people have one additional verification step of "is my gender presentation up to code?" Constantly fine-tuning one's mannerisms, body language, voice, etc. so as to be successfully perceived as one's desired gender more often than baseline.
Some trans people eventually get really really good at this, and adopt the new habits so hard that they're truly automatic and efficient; other struggle, especially when starting out (takes time for physical changes to develop, for example). But it's a process that'll always run in the background, perhaps only consciously dropped when alone or around trusted friends. This is part of what's poorly unhelpfully captured by "cis privilege": non-trans people run this process much less, and the stakes tend to be far lower. Getting "clocked" is awkward at best, and can mean death at worst. Constant Vigilance is a stressful way to live though...
System 2 Passing: this is the conscious act of being legibly trans, of being able to marshal one's subjective gender dissatisfaction into a coherent and communicable concept. So like what I'm doing in this thread, for instance. Or what happens in LGBT etc. spaces where everyone's pretty open about their standard deviations. This is where life experience comes into play; most cis people can pass a first-impressions Gender Turing Test if they put enough effort into it. But that's just a discrete action, not who they are/what they do continuously; it doesn't become an "identity", something central to the person. New trans people sometimes think they've got their identity all planned out before actually going through with major changes. These plans rarely survive contact with reality - you cannot actually plot out a new identity on paper and just follow it like a checklist. It's something that accrues with time and testing. A mature identity is one that can stand up to active criticism and interrogation, without having to hide behind paper shields like anti-discrimination laws*. As teachers everywhere say: "explain in your own words", "show your work".
If I randomly met you in real life, it'd be just another interaction with a stranger...time to shift voice, adopt extra-expressive mannerisms, be accommodating and submissively patient (I actually get angry pretty easily, so this can be grating sometimes, trying to squelch assertive aggression when it'd be a poor presentation fit). But here, you're asking a specifically trans question, so I choose to be open about my membership in that class for purposes of edification and authority. Basically, System 2 Passing is part of building and exploiting Everybody Knows-type common knowledge: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/
So to return to your original question, I think you're just observing the exceptions that prove the rules. Most interactions, most trans people aren't going around constantly reminding everyone they're trans. What would be the point? It's irrelevant information and not worth bringing up outside context. Sometimes trans people do prefer to make it explicit anyway - that is, identifying as a trans _____ rather than a _____, even in a situation where _____ would be a necessary and sufficient descriptor. But I notice that such cases are often aligned with virtue-signalling incentives. It'd be contentious to classify transgenderism as a disorder or disability, but I think Freddie deBoer sums up the mechanics nicely anyway: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability
For whatever it's worth personally, I'm at the point where I automatically pass well over 95% of the time and think little about it anymore (likely helped by the bar being somewhat more generous in SF, but that's hard to control for); the odd failures are growth opportunities to update on, adjust the algorithm. This has paradoxically been a bit lonely, though, because being clocked far less often means rarely having, well, interesting conversations like this! Because that sort of outcome is difficult to shoehorn into most dialogue trees. When it does randomly come up, people are usually like "oh you're trans? I didn't know" (and sometimes confused about the directionality too, which is extra amusing). I think for trans people that enjoy System 2 Passing, that might be one charitable reason they go out of their way to be open about being trans.
*These are still useful for other reasons, but "because The Law says you have to respect me!" is never convincing. It's not enough to build an identity out of. C.f. "you shouldn't be defined by statistics".
I don't have any close friends who are trans, but I do have a few distant acquaintances, and FWIW what you're saying makes sense... but... how do you explain the behaviour of the trans activist community ? They seem to be hyper-focused on making trans people as noticeable as possible, *as* trans people, and not just as whatever gender they feel themselves to be. Is this strategy valid, or somewhat counterproductive ?
[Tags: Comments I Will Regret Writing]
I don't - I'm on the record as being deeply uncomfortable with modern trans activism. They picked several really contentious bridge-too-far hills to die on, much to social conservatives' delight and electoral success...which was unsurprising after Obergefell's fiat victory, but still very disappointing. I think the PMC activist class, and especially the bigger blob of "allies" which make up the actual bulk of trans activism (they have to - trans people are so rare, we just don't have the numbers to fully self-advocate), just couldn't settle for quietly incremental victories after getting a taste of major success. When one starts to enjoy the political fighting for the sake of fighting itself, rather than the battles won or lost...that's when things go off the rails, and activists make things actively worse for those they supposedly champion. Because it's about institutional longevity and delicious donor dollars, so The Fight Must Carry On. Not be won/lost and then wound down. (Basically: misaligned incentives.)
Me, I just want to be left the hell alone and never used as a political football ever again. This was a much saner and more comfortable identity when it remained extremely obscure and disconnected from all the levers of power. And I die a little inside every time social conservatives pull the matador act of waving the pink-white-blue flag...every time, *every* time, the Blue Bull charges blindly ahead. It's almost always been a bluff, bait set out to make the libs self-own! This seems completely obvious to me. Just like the harping about gay marriage largely went away when it became clear not too many actually cared + it wasn't election-winning, transgenderism could have just faded into obscurity. A quiet, dignified, no-fuss shift in social norms, with the magic of federalism ensuring people shift at the locally comfortable pace. Instead, we got put on the cover of TIME magazine.
I wanna be charitable and say The Movement Is Not The Ideology, but the corruption seems to run pretty deep in both ways now. Bad things happen when already-marginalized groups are driven into a defensive crouch, and then encouraged to double down even harder on a victim mentality. Friends of mine who are on board with the current direction of activism are Very Concerned about "it'll become/is already illegal to be [some aspect of trans], we must fight this!". And I wanna ask them, like...whatever happened to our storied history of grit, resilience, and thriving under a hostile society? I'll live my life the way I want and own the consequences, no matter if it's legally permitted or not. It's definitely *nicer* to not live in the shadows anymore, to be accorded some basic measure of dignity for fulfilling radically altered utility function - that's a world worth fighting for, sure. But it's not so important that I think one gets to decide tradeoffs don't abound, that cost-benefit analyses are verboten. Sometimes you just gotta take the L for the greater good. And that's my True Objection: resources burned on this petty and trivial distraction of an issue could be put to so many better uses. Both on the right (shut up and do some actual governing) and the left (stop balkanizing minorities, a rising tide lifts every boat in big tent coalitions).
Trans here -
The disconnect comes from the different levels of social cognition people interact on.
Humans have some really really strong inherent wiring for the machinery of gender. You look at a person and before you can consciously take in any one specific detail, your brain has assessed a hundred things about them and made a snap judgement categorizing then as male or female (because you better know which it is to know how to respond)
It's the instant-snap-machinery I want to pass to. If you easily and casually categorize me as a woman, our interactions are going to be pretty easy and productive.
Telling you I'm trans doesn't really have much influence on that piece (usually) so it's not a big deal - and I'm not ashamed of being a trans woman because I (unsurprisingly) believe that being a trans woman is a subset of being a woman.
As an imperfect analogy, an immigrant with a different native language might simultaneously
(1) want to speak their new country's language without an accent, and
(2) be open about where they come from.
These don't seem like opposed goals, though of course someone who speaks English with a heavy German accent might be readily identified as German without having to tell everyone.
Not disclosing that you are transgender is called “going stealth.” Passing just refers to others assuming your gender identity correctly based on your appearance, voice, etc. Someone could pass perfectly and still choose to be open about being trans. Someone must pass in order to go stealth, but not all passing trans people are stealth.
By definition, you are going to know of a lot more trans people who are open about being trans than the trans people who are not open about being trans. If your coffeeshop barista is trans and passing, you'll have no idea about it. Many trans people are open about being trans to their friends/family/partners, or on the Internet (which can be a good place to find other trans people, and where the consequences of a bigot knowing you're trans are lower), but they still want to pass at their workplace or in front of people on the street.
This is a common claim, but obviously absurd as well as unfalsifiable in practice.
I don't think it is obvious absurd. Can you defend that a bit?
To expand: I had this experience once (finding out a dude I'd known somewhat casually was, in fact, trans). Having the experience once was eye opening, as it showed me that you couldn't always just tell.
Knowing that this exists means that unless there's some sort of study, you can't know the percentages. I've only encountered the one passing trans person. But . . . there aren't that many trans people and the non-passers stick out. I had a trans waitress and trans counter girl in the last couple of months who were very much non passing. How many counter service or servers did I have who were trans and passing? Zero? Two? Four? Ten? I have, literally, no way to know. And neither do you.
Considering that the prevalence of trans people is on the order of tenths of a percent of the population, you should be able to come up with a fairly accurate estimate of the number of trans counter-people that you *didn't* notice by multiplying the total counter-people encountered by ~0.005, and then subtracting the number that were noticeably trans.
"Can you defend that a bit?"
Certainly.
First of all, Integer's assertion itself is like claiming that "there are over four thousand Bigfoots living in New York City alone, you just don't see them because they're hiding." "Okay, do you have *any actual evidence* at all of these Bigfoots? Where are they?" "Hiding." In other words, this is one form of a fully general unfalsifiable claim (stone that repels tigers, god of the gaps, numerous others). It's too glib, a bit too obviously a clever bit of rhetoric, devised to persuade in the absence of evidence. If Integer had proof, surely he'd show it without needing to be prompted?
Secondly, if some form of it were true you'd expect there to be a pretty continuous distribution between massive failure and perfect success, with most people somewhere in the middle where, say, you'd be fooled for a few seconds or minutes but then identify the person as a man, or there would be some single specific feature that gave the game away, but this isn't the case. Virtually all identifiable transsexual men are visibly, obviously, instinctive-split-second-ID men despite their best efforts to look like women (and nor, from experience, do they behave as a reasonable facsimile of women), and then supposedly there's this other cluster of wholly unnoticeable ones. Isn't it a weirdly convenient circumstance that apparently the appearance distribution is binary? (And do I need to point out the irony here?)
Thirdly, there just aren't that many transsexuals. There simply *can't be* tons of them hiding in everyday life because there aren't tons of them full stop.
Define "lots". Most openly trans people I see online do not really pass at all (and that's without actually seeing them in the flesh, and presumably the obviously not passing ones would likely be less willing to show what they look like) and I don't know why there be a vast overrepresentation of those sort of transpeople online vs transpeople I happen to meet out in the world.
The basic problem here is that if someone is convincingly enough trans, I could easily walk past them in the coffee shop or something and never notice, which means I can't count them.
I have an old and dear friend who is trans, and she went through a couple of years where she was *jarringly* not aligned with either gender--you'd interact with her in person and the gender-ID neural net in your brain would keep switching between male and female and throwing occasional error codes. Wheres now, she generally comes off as female, albeit with a few unusual physical features that are a tell if you are looking closely. But I think if I ordered coffee from her or sat across from her on a train or something, I would probably not guess that she had XY chromosomes.
To say nothing of confirmation bias, given prior knowledge they are trans.
Three major reasons come to mind, some applicable in different arenas, and not mutually exclusive.
1) Because sometimes one can pass at a casual level, but might not in closer situations, and being open now is a good way to head off drama later.
2) Because acceptance of trans people is still low, and thus there is a benefit in general (to themselves and to other trans people) of reminding the world that they exist. Same reason many gay people still make a big deal out of Pride - because it is seen as necessary for now even if one hopes it may not be some day.
3) Because people like having an Identity, for a myriad of reasons that can apply to any category of people: trans people, Irish people, the disabled, goths, etc. (Discussions of identity and the pros and cons thereof are obviously a very large topic that I'm not trying to get into here.)
"Passing" means that individuals who do not know you assume you are the gender you identify as by visual/audio cues. So, if you passed as a woman, even though you were born with a penis, then people would say "ma'am" automatically, even if they were huge transphobes (because they would see you and think, "woman"). If you could not pass, you would *have* to be open about being trans, since anybody looking at you could identify you as either transgender or a crossdresser/etc, so you would have to make it clear you were the former.
Even if you can pass, you might choose to be open about being trans. For the most obvious case, if you are someone like Buck Angel, who passes as a man but worked in the adult film industry as an actor, he passes - anybody looking at Buck Angel wearing clothes would assume he was born a man - but it is not a secret at all that he is transsexual.
As people generally find it much easier to identify people based on what sex they pass as, than their sex at birth (e.g. there's a clip where Ben Shapiro stumbles on the gender of a trans person, identifying them as their apparent sex rather than their natal sex like he intended), passing is highly desirable.
Do you know a lot of trans people? I know more trans people who pass than trans people who don't. I suspect you might have it backwards, because most of those who pass are not interested in advertising that they are trans.
More or less squares with my extended circle, though it's complicated by the fact that some people face financial and bureaucratic barriers to physical transition and have kind of given up.
On the other hand, in recent weeks I've run across two false positives: people (youtubers, specifically) who I assumed were MtF, but turned out to be cis.
Seconding this. I know several trans people who pass, and who I would not have known were trans if they hadn't mentioned it in front of me. But of course their names aren't going to be brought up in random Internet arguments over how well trans people can pass, because they aren't celebrities or activists.
There's a handful of transmen here at work, and they could pass in some circumstances, particularly if they were photographed. It's the particular combination of speech/movement that IDs them as AFAB.
Likewise, "famously passing" trans people (Blair White?) are presented from a limited POV/camera position/angle.
Unfalsifiable is not the same as untested.
We *can't* prove nor disprove that a miniature black teapot is behind a rock in the Oort cloud, because there's no reasonable experiment we could actually perform today to test the claim one way or the other.
On the other hand, it would be very straightforward, and not at all expensive, to test the claim that "a significant percentage of the people attempting to present as a gender other than their birth sex do so successfully enough that they're not recognized as doing so." As a straw proposal, whenever interacting with any new person, you can record your first impression of their gender, and then straight-up ask them.
Will you get 100% truthful answers 100% of the time? no.
Is this polite? probably not
Would this pass an ethics review board for formal study? Has that stopped anyone?
Is there a better version of that experiment that could show comparable results? certainly.
The claim that started this thread is only "unfalsifiable" to the degree that we keep the conversation within the bounds of thought-experiment in a blog comments section. The base claim is _very_ provable or falsifiable.
Before you start accusing others of Russell's Teapot, remember that you started this conversation by making an empirical claim ("the amount of genuine passing is relatively low") without providing evidence. Unless you can find a study with quantifiable evidence about what percentage of trans people are able to pass, showing that it's low, the only evidence either side can provide is anecdotal/from personal experience. If you have less personal experience with RL trans people, then I think it's perfectly justifiable to give less weight to your proclamations about trans people as a group.
I also think you are exaggerating the claims of the people disagreeing with you. Nobody has said you are "surrounded" by perfectly passing trans people: trans people are a relatively tiny percentage of the population, and depending on where you live, the percentage who are able to pursue medical transition may be even smaller. The claim people are making is that your perception of the number of trans people who pass is, by definition, actually the number of trans people who both pass and are out to you, and that those two may not be the same thing.
If the bet is aesthetic in nature, Stable Diffusion should suffice, which is publicly released soon (weights available to researchers already). If not then you probably want Imagen
The bet is on language understanding - I don't want to find the exact wording right now, but it's about whether it can do the "astronaut riding a horse" type stuff on its first try without complicated query engineering. Is SD known to be good at that?
In my experience, SD requires more prompt engineering than DALL-E 2 to produce good results, and seems a lot more likely to ignore parts of complex prompts.
Which prompts work well seems to differ a lot between models, however- and that plus the fact that DALL-E 2 generates much more varied results from a single prompt makes it hard to get an unambiguous comparison.
The two are shockingly close in quality given that one was made by an experienced company with a ton of funding and the other by a newcomer. Though DALL-E 2 still comes out a bit ahead on average, SD does sometimes produce the superior image- and also has the big advantage of being able to produce much sharper and more finely detailed images than DALL-E 2.
Astronaut riding a horse is a trope now, so a few examples of this are in the Stable Diffusion subreddit [1] and [2]. The second round of their beta has open signups and it sounds like invites may go out this week or the next https://stability.ai/beta-signup-form
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wo94r3/astronaut_riding_a_horse_on_the_moon/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wi2yga/an_astronaut_riding_a_horse_stable_diffusion/
The cool thing about the image https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wo94r3/astronaut_riding_a_horse_on_the_moon/ is that a horse walking in low g might actually raise its hooves like that...
Yes, the real bet is about different examples for this reason.
What is the best critique of Bayesian Reasoning? When should we not use it?
Bayesian reasoning is a theoretically optimal way to live in a world of uncertainty where one gains partial information and has unlimited computational power. Trying to *do* the thing that is theoretically optimal isn’t always a great way to go - sometimes other heuristics that look very different will get you closer. Most of us probably shouldn’t try doing explicit mathematical calculations for our Bayesian reasoning. But there are many contexts in which being more explicitly aware of our uncertainty and thinking explicitly about which direction various evidence should push it, is quite helpful.
One really important criticism is that it's wrong as far as it goes, but that it's insufficient. Bayes' theorem tells you how to /update/ your preexisting beliefs in the light of new evidence, but for any posterior distribution and any set of evidence I can find a prior that will result in it.
That means that for many purposes, frequentist confidence intervals ("This is the range of values of the parameter being measured for which our observation would not have been a 1/20 outlier") are probably a better communication tool that anything bayesian.
"Bayes' theorem plus all the evidence you can eat" still gives you literally zero information about the world. To form any beliefs you also need a prior, which will inevitably require some other form of thinking.
This is kind of reflected in the problem of doing scientific communication in bayesian terms.
"Our prior distribution was X, in light of this evidence our posterior distribution is now Y" is wholly subjective and invites challenge of the form "your prior is wrong", while "here is the algorithm for updating your beliefs in light of our evidence" requires much more mathematical literacy and hard work to understand, and much more formalisation of beliefs, than it's reasonable to expect of an audience.
It is my impression that Bayesian Reasoning can be pretty dissuasive of paradigm-shifting/disruptive hypotheses. As such, it may not be innovation-friendly, and may have entrenching tendencies. But I can't really back this up.
I am not at all an expert in this, and maybe there exist mathematical solutions to these problems that I'm just unaware of them.
I don't think that Bayesian Reasoning plays well with infinity, in several ways:
(1) Bayesian Reasoning stops working when you put in zero or one and you no longer update on new information. A Bayesian's response is that no probabilities are actually zero or one. Which works, as long as you're asking questions about finite sets. But if you're dealing with infinite sets, you often deal with important subsets with zero probability. For example, the probability of selecting a rational number from the set of all real numbers is zero, as is the probability of selecting an integer from the set of all rational numbers. You need a different way of thinking about zero probability sets.
(2) Bayesian Reasoning involves updating in a discrete manner. You update each time you get new information. What do you do if information flows in continually?
(3) The space of possible answers is assumed to be finite. You update your beliefs over a discrete set of choices. You can probably make this work if you assign beliefs over a single continuous variable (like the graphs Metaculus shows), but I expect things stop working if you want to use a much larger space, or a function space, or a poorly defined space like the space of all possible ideas.
So we probably should not use Bayesian Reasoning when infinities are going to be important, especially if we have to deal with a continuum (aleph-1) or something more complicated. I'm not claiming that frequentist statistics will work better here: you'll probably have to do some sophisticated measure theory if you ever end up dealing with a functions space.
There are plenty of people in the rationalist community who think that we should be using Bayesian Reasoning for everything. I think that this comes with the assumption that infinities aren't really real. Spacetime is discrete, not continuous. The universe can be fully specified by a finite number of bits. [1] Computer scientists are more comfortable thinking of things in discrete terms than in terms of continua, and I think this is why Bayesian Reasoning has caught on more in Silicon Valley and adjacent communities than in mathematics more generally.
[1] See, e.g.:
https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%A1-binary/
https://applieddivinitystudies.com/theodicy/
[links contain spoilers for Unsong]
<quote>For example, the probability of selecting a rational number from the set of all real numbers is zero</quote>
what issues does this cause?
Suppose you are a scientist [year~1900] who is measuring the ratio of the masses of different atoms and particles. A priori, the ratio could be any positive real number. What's the probability of any of these ratios being a rational number? Zero. For example, you measure the ratio of the mass of the proton to the electron to be 1836.15267343. Although you can't measure any more digits, you are 100% confident that the digits will not terminate or repeat. Sometimes, you measure ratios that are close to integers, but when you check more closely, you always find that there is some decimals that don't seem to terminate or repeat.
Now, to mix things up, you decide to measure the ratios of charges of variable particles and ions. Once again, the ratio could be any real number a priori, so the probability of any of them being rational is zero. When you measure the ratio of the charge of a proton to the charge of an electron, you find that it is -1.00000000. The ratio of the charges of all other pairs of particles or ions also looks like a rational number to within the accuracy of your equipment.
Should you believe that the ratios of charges are rational numbers? Bayes's Theorem says no. You started with a prior of zero. Your experiments had very good, but finite, precision. You plug this into Bayes's Theorem and it says that your posterior should be zero. So you continue to believe (with perfect confidence) that, if you kept on measuring with higher and higher precision, eventually there will be some deviation from being perfectly rational.
I don't think this is right. You should start to think that the charge ratios actually are rational numbers. The proton-electron charge ratio is exactly -1, not only close to -1. This is a very interesting result and tells you an important piece of information about the world. Bayes's Theorem precludes you from discovering it.
I think that the universe-with-finite-bits response is to say: The ratio of any two physical constants cannot be truly irrational, because an irrational number would require an infinite number of bits to describe, and the universe as a whole is only characterized by a finite number of bits. The mass of anything must be some integer multiple of some smallest possible mass, which is finite, so these mass ratios actually are all rational. Since we're dealing with finite possibilities now, none of these probabilities really were zero, so we can update using them.
This argument relies on a bold claim: "the mass of anything must be some integer multiple of some smallest possible mass". How are we supposed to get evidence for this? We have the smallest possible charge sitting right in front of us, and measurements with finite precision can't get tell us if other charges are actually integer multiples of it - and can't even cause us to update our beliefs in that direction. If we want to be able to pick a reasonable prior for a ratio being an integer (not off by orders of magnitude), we also need to know what the smallest possible thing is, a priori. I also want to say that we should start suspecting that a ratio is rational after only a few decimal places of measurement (say p > 0.1 after measuring two digits), even when the smallest possible thing is many orders of magnitude smaller. When 2.00 L of hydrogen gas reacts with 1.00 L of oxygen gas to form 2.00 L of water vapor [year~1800], that is an important result in favor of atomic theory and this being a simple chemical reaction (2 H_2 + O_2 -> 2 H_2 O, as opposed to e.g. 2004 H_333 + 999 O_370 -> 1998 H_334 O_185), even though we are more than 20 orders of magnitude away from the size of atoms. Bayes's Theorem would require a lot more precision before we can actually start concluding that these are integers.
Do the continuous cases not apply? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#For_continuous_random_variables
Yes, they do. But they assign zero probability to the rational numbers. The region with nontrivial probability will narrow around the ratio = -1, but within any interval, there are always infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers. Even if you know that it's between -0.9999 and -1.0001, you'd still expect that it's one of the irrational numbers in that interval.
the rational part doesn't matter, right? any single number has probability 0. Is the evidence that it is exactly 1 based solely on measurement precision, or is there other evidence that suggests it is exactly 1? If it is just measurement precision, I see no problem in not favoring exactly 1. If there is other evidence, then I don't see there is a problem. Even if it is something like 'this is suspiciously close to 1', well then aren't your priors including that physical laws of the universe tend to favor unit ratios?
Bayesian reasoning is a super useful model / tool and I fully endorse its use in the right settings! I don't think it works as "a general theory of human reasoning" (nor is it supposed to) because there are aspects of uncertainty it doesn't quite handle correctly.
For example, suppose I tell you that a value x is between 0 and 1, but you know nothing else about it. You might say "well, I can model the fact that I don't know anything about x by using a uniform prior." But this isn't quite the same thing, because you also don't know anything about x^2! And if x is distributed uniformly, then x^2 can't be.
(I learned this example in a class, I don't know its source.)
This is known as “Bertrand’s paradox” and shows that there can’t be objectively correct priors for the zero information case, and I think therefore shows that even with information, there isn’t an objectively correct posterior. All Bayesian reasoning tells you is whether priors are correctly related to posteriors by particular evidence, and not which priors to have. Anyone who claims to tell you which priors to have is relying on you sharing some further back prior with them (like that some population is representative).
Thank you! This is very helpful context
"But this isn't quite the same thing, because you also don't know anything about x^2! And if x is distributed uniformly, then x^2 can't be."
Nice example! That was new to me, and I appreciate it.
False confidence theorem
I don't have access to my notes on good critiques of Bayesianism at the moment, but the obvious cases are for logical uncertainty or when you don't know what your hypothesis space even is or don't have any clue how to assign probability mass to your hypothesis space or when your hypotheses are physically impossible to reason with.
The middle two tend to occur when you are confused about a topic so thoroughly that your hypothesis can't produce crisp predictions (e.g. me about consciousness, questions about the nature of "reality" etc.) They can't really be resolved without deconfusing yourself, which is sort of about making things clear enough that you could see how to be Bayesian about them? Not sure how to describe it because I don't have a general procedure of how to deal with this stuff. No one does as far as I can tell, so it is a criqitue of every style of reasoning I guess.
The others can be dealt with via variations on the uncomputable Bayesian paradigm e.g. logical induction, Jeffrey's work on generalising Bayesianism, infra-physicalism by Vanessa Kossoy. Though these are incomplete research agendas.
I think those are the best critiques I can think of at the top of my head.
There are three fairly common reasons to prefer Frequentist reasoning to Bayesian. I make no comment about whether these are the best critiques, but they are fairly persistent in the literature and so at least clearly hard to refute.
The first is that Bayesian reasoning is more computationally intensive, and many techniques that are trivial in Frequentist frameworks are either fiendishly difficult or unsolved in a Bayesian framework. For example as far as I know there's no Bayesian equivalent of a Kaplan-Meier curve, and I know for sure no sane person would try and do non-parametric statistics in a Bayseian framework. Since in theory both frameworks should usually produce similar answers, reinventing the wheel is often not sensible
The second is that priors are both philosophically and practically challenging. On the philosophical challenges I'm not best placed to speak, but on the practical challenges it is hard to usefully use Bayesian statistics in a discussion with a bad faith actor, because they can get to any conclusion they want with a sufficiently motivated prior. Even a good faith actor might be bringing weird background beliefs into the discussion which has the same sort of effect. I use Bayesian stats all the time at work and I've literally never seen anyone use an informative prior for this reason. Note that Frequentist stats has an analogous problem with p values, but at least there's some consensus on what sensible values for these are.
Finally, Bayesian statistics is not preferred in fields where almost all of the insight comes from the data and the prior is likely to be uninformative - particle physics used to be the classic example, but I've no doubt there are some Bayesian techniques applied there nowadays. This is because the value of the Frequentist toolset - especially making definitive judgements about the findings of well-specified experiments - outweighs the value of a prior in those situations
I agree with much of this, but here are a few comments.
There are indeed problems where a frequentist approach is much, much simpler than a Bayesian approach. But plenty of sane people do Bayesian non-parametric modeling (for some definition of "non-parametric"). In fact, there is a huge literature on this. See, for example, my paper at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford/dft-valencia.abstract.html
It's also true that the intellectual challenge of formalizing your true prior beliefs can be immense. But I'm not convinced that unconscious bias is more of a problem for Bayesian methods than frequentist methods. In fact, Bayesian methodology has built-in checks, such as drawing samples from your prior and seeing if they look sensible, that aren't present in frequentist inference. In practice, you have to stop contemplating what is the right prior at some point and settle for an approximation, but checking the sensibility of the posterior can sometimes reveal that you should go back and think harder.
Regarding Bayesian versus frequentist methods in particle physics, some comments in my paper at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford/hep.abstract.html are relevant.
Thanks for contributing to this discussion!
I'm grateful for your blog, some posts were crucial for me to truly understand the difference between Bayesian and frequentist parameter estimation.
Thanks for contributing to this discussion!
I'm grateful for your blog, some posts were crucial for me to truly understand the difference between Bayesian and frequentist parameter estimation.
+1 to all of this!
In my experience, what people call "bayesian reasoning" goes badly when they are trying to reason about a immensely complex problem and become overconfident in their ability to think about it clearly because they couch their thinking in bayesian language. Garbage in, garbage out type thing. This isn't a limit of bayesianism as a tool but rather is user error, and is also not unique to it; any sufficiently powerful tool will cause this effect as people defer to its usually awesome power and aren't worried enough about misusing it
Yes yes yes to "garbage in garbage out!" This is the most common misuse of Bayesianism I see -- taking a bad or misinformed argument and adding Bayesian words to it to make it seem more "technical" or "nuanced".
Yeah I've never understood this at all. If people are changing their mind in response to evidence then surely they mean they are 'adjusting their *posteriors*' (hehe). I think I agree with you that 'priors' is just a shibboleth people use to identify that they are doing Cool Bayesian Reasoning and not Boring Regular Updating Beliefs On Evidence
Jeez, how long have you been sitting on that?
One does wonder. Best adjust before any numbness sets in.
Compounding Pharmacies get a lot of attention from the DEA and the FDA. This is because the compounding is a lot like manufacturing. Making a lot of drugs that look like distribution (esp minors) will get attention.
Let me know if you do this; I'd be interested in reading and signal-boosting it.
I'd be interested!
I'm not an EAer, but I would be interested in reading about modern deontological thinking.
Personally, book clubs are not really my thing, but a list of recommended books from beginner to advanced would be awesome! What would be even better would be a blog post or series of posts giving a surface understanding and overview of the field, though I totally know that is much higher effort.
I'd read that!
Would second @a_real_dog in saying it is possibly related to hyperglycaemia, but your particular response to it might just be down to how your brain is wired.
In diabetes, acute hyperglycemia causes massive behavioral changes, looking like a mental illness to onlookers. With healthy hormonal regulation this shouldn't be that apparent, but some small disturbances are normal.
Apologies. I misplaced your post as a response to mine.
https://www.intrepidmentalhealth.com/blog/5-common-foods-that-can-trigger-anxiety-symptoms#:~:text=Sugar%20has%20also%20been%20linked,low%20mood%2C%20and%20further%20cravings.
On the off chance that your comment was your way of saying, “well, duh. “ I assume that you also think the hard problem of consciousness is a made up problem. Something we have invented to perpetually baffle ourselves with.
Take two aspirin and see me in the morning.
is 'too much' enough to give you a sugar high? Basically all stimulants can cause anxiety at a high enough dose, it could be a similar mechanism though that is pure speculation on my part.
Just asked, it will be announced tomorrow!
There can still be a step change from a feminine man and a masculine women. For instance there is a step change in testosterone levels with men at “300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) or 10 to 35 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L) Female: 15 to 70 ng/dL or 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/L.”
Feminine is descriptor of gender, penis is a descriptor of sex.
Gender and sex are different concepts, this isn't hard.
Gender only extremely recently came to mean what you're claiming it does. Before recently, it was just a way of saying 'sex' without using the word sex (because it has come to mean sexual intercourse too).
If we want to try an drag a definitional argument into the empirical, the conflation could be more or less justified based on how well the two concepts are correlated. I suspect ~nobody is willing to stick to a consistent principle for how sharp the factor analysis needs to get before it's defensible to split or merge concepts.
I admit to being math-stupid, as is stereotypically off-button for my gender, but I don't understand why positing gender as a "spectrum" grants the model any additional predictive power over the common consensus of a strongly bimodal distribution. It really is quite remarkable how wildly varying human societies across time and space rally around the same gender Schelling points again and again! Spectra seem to put too much emphasis on the tails and mushy middle, which really are quite uncommon. (Somewhat less so for the related model of sexuality, but I'm not gonna do the "conflating sex and gender" thing in this thread.)
All words are spectra, there's nothing special about gender. This is just the old psych insight about how people will say robins are more birdlike birds than ostriches.
Now this only makes sense with a definition of spectrum which does not work for colour, but does work for things like the so-called autistic spectrum. The colour spectrum is one-dimensional, linearly ordered. Red is closer towards one end and violet is closer to the other.
The autistic spectrum is not, and here's a decent article online about why referring to it as a spectrum, and speaking of people as more or less autistic, leads to all kinds of incorrect assumptions. https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/
Different autistics have different proportions of the relevant traits. One person's strength of trait x doesn't predict their strength of trait y. You could casually refer to one person as "more autistic" than another, but you'd be summing up their levels of all relevant traits, or looking to at how much difficulty they (or those in their environment) experience because of their autistic traits.
FWIW, I don't consider autistic spectrum disorder to be a spectrum, because if it were, the colour spectrum (rainbow) would need a new term. The two meanings are too far apart, and I don't recall uses of "spectrum" similar to autism until the DSM introduced their new combined name for autism, "high functioning autism" (HFA), and Asperger's syndrome.
> The colour spectrum is one-dimensional, linearly ordered. Red is closer towards one end and violet is closer to the other.
This is true of "color" meaning electromagnetic radiation within the visible spectrum. This is not true of "color" referring to the human visual perception, which has at least three different independent axes (chromaticity graphs are complicated!) even before we get into edge cases like tetrachromats and impossible colors. I don't think this is a mere quibble; word having layers of ambiguity is more or less the whole point!
The term 'gender' is a grammatical term in use since the 1300s.
Used in reference to human sexuality or sexual identity it's a fallacy, a phantasm, an imaginary made-up thing. A very expensive phantasm.
"however, the meaning of gender as "sexual identity" was not far behind, showing up in the 15th century already."
No, this is once again revisionism. Gender as a euphemism for biological sex showed up then. "Sexual identity" is not a real thing and certainly not a 15th century concept.
Attempting to steelman Cosimo Guisti's point, there is a difference between a word being used to mean roughly the same thing it has been used to mean for centuries, with relatively little semantic drift, and that same word being used in a way that has been invented only recently, to refer to a concept that may not even be coherent, or a thing that may not even exist, which is being imposed by fiat by activists who are clearly engaged in a project to radically change the way males and females interact, with goals that many people find objectionable. People are naturally going to be resistant to the second usage.
It's more than simple misuse; it's disinformation, 'progressives' favorite subject. When they complain about disinformation, though, they mean conservative disinformation, not liberal disinformation. Gender disinformation has cost billions, and won't be going anywhere for at least a decade. It wasn't until the 1980s that pop media finally gave up bell bottoms and mutton chops.
Careful. The Immortals may send the gendarmerie after you.
>The original 14th meaning of "gender" in English is "class, kind", with the meaning of grammatical gender closely following; however, the meaning of gender as "sexual identity" was not far behind, showing up in the 15th century already.
That doesn't mean what gender means today.
Sure is biophobic, genophobic and exhibitionist.
Meta comment
I think a narrated reenactment of this thread as a conversation would be kind of interesting.
In period costume.
I'm always pleased (sic) to meet someone who is so self-confident as to assure me they know how I feel, and what I think, better than I do myself.
Claims that "everyone believes in" are among the most trivially falsifiable kinds that exist.
Of course your second paragraph contradicts your first, by suggesting that it's conceivable to you that some individual exists who does not in fact believe the same thing that "everyone" believes ;-)
As it happens, I'm on your side (I guess) in the US political debate. But wooly thinking and rhetorical tricks tend to set me off regardless.
I could critique farther. But other people have already made most of the points I'd have included.
I think the claim you meant to make my be that all societies regard gender as something more complex than two non-overlapping categories with all members of each category essentially identical on relevant factors. You may also have wanted to make the claim that the same applies to all individuals.
That doesn't mean they believe in a "spectrum". It doesn't define what you mean by "spectrum". If the belief is that there's no overlap in relevant criteria, but variance within each category, is that a "spectrum"? If the belief is that the traits are orthogonal, not opposite, such that they can imagine a hermaphrodite or a full neuter, is that a "spectrum"?
I don't see either of those as being a spectrum.
Even if they have "males", "females", and "rare unfortunates who fit neither category". I still can't see it being a "spectrum".
So two spectrums, one of masculinity and another of femininity seems the same(ish) to you as one spectrum, with ultra butch on one end, and ultra femme on the other, with or without all men closer to the butch side than any woman, and vice versa?
There are men who share *some* of the standard characteristics of women, and women who share some of the standard characteristics of men. But almost every human ever born shares enough characteristics with other members of their gender to unambiguously classify them as that gender.
To illustrate, an animal can be a cat or a dog, but never both. Catness vs. dogness is not a spectrum. But are there some cats that act doglike in some ways, for example by enjoying going on walks? Yes. Are there some dogs that act like cats, for example by wanting to stay home all day? Yes. But any animal is unambiguously either a cat or a dog, or neither.
I personally approach this from another angle. "Gender" is a classification that humans have created to make reasoning about people easier. In traditional bigender (is that a word?) societes, most people can be put in one or the other category, and you can use that knowledge to quickly know what you can/should do next. For example, reproduction through sexual activity. In traditional bigender societes (let's roll with it), if you are a male you look for a female, if you are a female you look for a male. This will work in most (not sure how much) of the cases. Now let's imagine a society of beings that for some reason can't create categories about gender and reason about it. The checklist would be something like: What are my chromosomes? How did my gonads evolve? Are they functional? Am I fertile? Does that person meets all the same criteria, except instead of having the same thing we have something different? My list is probably not exact, this is not my domain. But my point is that something that before took a fraction of a second in most cases now become something else entirely.
The thing that people forget is that we went from a low-information society (with 2 categories) to a high-information society (where in some cases categories are meaningless and you need a checklist to take your decision of "can I have children/sex/a nice movie night with them?". For example, I see from time to time people say that trans women aren't women because they can't reproduce, which would imply that infertile women are not women either, and in this case fall in the male category, which wouldn't make any sense. The truth is that you could never assume that someone can make children with you just because of their secondary sexual characteristics, clothes and way of being. To take an example on the male side, sperm counts have been dropping, and with them fertility. Just like not every person who presents as a woman may have a functional womb and ovaries, not every person that present as a male is fertile. I'd even say that most people have no idea of their actual fertility before trying to actually use it.
As for the variations on the masculine and feminine spectrum, I think one important thing is that not everyone may think of it as a spectrum from masculine to feminine. Not meeting up society's expectations on your gender won't always mean that you will meet the one of the opposite gender. For example, in most historical novels that I've read, a man that stopped working/providing for his family didn't suddenly start doing his share of housework, he would gamble, drink, sit at home doing nothing. Thus he's considered as less of a man, but not more of a woman.
>In traditional bigender (is that a word?) societes
Replying to answer that question: It is a word, but it mostly is used to refer to a specific flavor of genderfluid/nonbinary identity. It works alright here, but the most accepted term for what you're describing is either "binary gender societies" or "binary-gendered societies".
Thank you for the clarification.
Losing fertility is part of the female lifecycle among humans. I suppose since a pre-pubescent is not a "woman" but instead a "girl" we could create a category for post-pubescent, but haven't done so. But over the entire lifecycle, the organism is still following one of the two strategies:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/10/28/sex-in-humans-may-not-be-binary-but-its-surely-bimodal/
The third aspect of the Triple Goddess* is definitely a post-pubescent category that we've largely abandoned.
*Maiden, Mother, Crone
Well, you say abandoned, but there's not a whole lot of evidence that worship of any such entity/entities was ever terribly widespread. That motif (with many others that neopagans now regard as ancient) was mostly made up in the 19th and early 20th century by the likes of Graves and Yeats.
I meant that referring to post-menopausal women as "crones" was abandoned.
Oh! Well then, yes. That's certainly true!
That's a good point. Thank you for the article too, it's interesting.
Biologists define female as the sex with the larger, immobile gamete, and male as the sex with the smaller, mobile gamete.
Mammals- including humans - are not among the species exhibiting the exceptions you note.
We don't have wings, either, no matter how much we might like to fly.
I don't see any hostility, I think it's more of a reflections of the people we've talked with. I don't live in America, and most of the people I talk to are not very online and not very aware of all the discussions about gender. 90% of the time where I mention infertile women, people are genuinely surprised because they didn't think about that specific case. My argument that many people have very vague notions of what gender is is based on my experience. I can absolutely see that in different spaces people have been over this already and it's considered common knowledge, in which case your reaction in warranted. But here in Europe talking with 30 something people that are not very online in general, talking about fertility opens the discussion in ways they haven't considered.
My goal when doing this isn't to shut down the discussion or force a definition/opinion on people, it's to bring new things that they may not have thought about, because I usually have more exposure to that than them. That usually leads to interesting discussions, anecdotes, and exchanges where we generally all learn some new things and generally don't change much our initial positions. It's a good way to defuse an incoming shouting fight between people that don't agree on definitions into a more calm discussion.
Speaking about definitions, your point about overanalyzing a casual remark is important too. Some people use words in a precise manner, others in a fuzzy way, with some people it depends on the word used, the context. I don't know where you "pick up" the discussion when you consider something like that as overused and understood by everyone taking part in the debate. In any case, thank you for taking the time to say this nicely, I'll keep it in mind if that subject comes up again online.
A woman who can not bear children is still a woman. She does not become male/a man via not bearing children.
A 'trans woman' is not a woman. That person may prefer to dress and act as a woman does in their society, use female pronouns and use chemicals and/or surgery to modify the normal, non pathological function of their male body. But they can not make that body female, nor will they become a woman via this process.
I get that people want the ability to own their bodies, their abilities and their fates. If I could change some things about myself I would. But not all of our wishes are possible and not all of them are good for us to achieve or even desire.
I think that you're not wrong, on your own terms, but you're using the word 'gender' in a far more bailley-ish way than modern gender ideologues. Under your terminology, even the most effeminate man can still be a man if he meets the biological criteria for maleness, whereas under standard modern gender ideology, (roughly,) the more effeminate the person is, the more likely they are to actually be of female gender, and thus to actually be a woman, regardless of their biology. It's that latter claim - that whether you are a man or a woman - or to what *degree* you are a man or a woman if you are really going to take the spectrum seriously (I assume there must be some people out there who would claim to be, say, 70% a man, 30% a woman, though I'm not sure I've come across any) - is in principle not coupled to your biology, or at least, your biology is trumped by psychological considerations ... it's that sort of claim that people who are gender-skeptical are skeptical about.
"...under standard modern gender ideology, (roughly,) the more effeminate the person is, the more likely they are to actually be of female gender, and thus to actually be a woman, regardless of their biology."
I can't begin to speculate on what standard (!) modern gender ideology says, but that's certainly not how it works in practice. If a biological female who is quite masculine (the hackneyed stereotype of the butch lesbian springs to mind) nonetheless identifies as a woman, no "modern gender ideologue" I've ever met is going to insist that she's actually a man.
There is a tension between the parts of gender ideology that insist that gender, or even sex, is a spectrum, and the parts of it that, in practice operate on an implicit ... 'binary' isn't exactly the word, maybe 'discrete categorization', in which you are either definitely a man, definitely a woman, definitely a non-binary, (...add however many categories you want to run with). But the part of it that operates on the principle that if a biologically male child is into, say, ponies, tiaras and ballet, then they are probably trans, is presumably instantiating something like 'the more stereotypically female traits you exhibit, the more probable it is that you are a girl'.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently : the more effeminate a man is, the more likely some prominent parts of modern gender ideology are to want to encourage him to identify him as a women (and, having done so, the less taking-the-implications-of-the-idea-of-'spectrum'-seriously parts are to simply accept that identification and agree that that person *is* a woman, just as much as any normal female adult.
Various internal tensions and tempest-in-a-teapot internal politics do arise in trans and genderqueer circles, sure. No group of people with strongly-held views is perfectly harmonious, not even trans rights activists.
But if there is one unifying general courtesy that's observed, it's that of self-identification. The whole idea of assigning someone's gender for them is anathema - which is a handsomely libertarian notion, isn't it? You'd think it'd get better press around these parts.
In practice, if a child exhibits stereotypically other-gender behaviour *and* insists they're the other gender *and* is consistent about this, then eventually and ideally the child, the parents, and a gauntlet of counsellors, child psychiatrists, etc. end up grappling with the issue. At the end of a long, winding road, the child might get treated with GnRH antagonists to defer the decisive impact of puberty until they're competent to make the decision.
Sometimes parents hate the idea while the child remains adamant, courts get involved, the child wins the case, and culture war happens, to the tune of The Woke Will Trans Your Kid Without Your Consent. I suspect that merely insisting on the validity of the option feels like pressure in the direction of that option to people who are extremely leery of it in the first place.
The problem with just accepting what people identify as is that it's self-defeating - it destroys any meaning that the thing they're identifying as previously had. If you define a woman as "someone who identifies as a woman," that's a circular definition that begs the question of what such people are actually identifying as. At that point, you could just as well call men "foo" and women "bar" and have people identify with whichever collection of symbols they prefer, because the referent has no meaning.
Gender ideologues should be able to articulate a difference between a tomboy and a trans man other than "it's just whatever someone identifies as." If they can't, that means there's no actual semantic content to those words, just a phonetic and symbolic difference.
"The whole idea of assigning someone's gender for them is anathema - which is a handsomely libertarian notion, isn't it? You'd think it'd get better press around these parts."
By this line of argument letting people decide for themselves whether the Earth is round or flat is also a handsomely libertarian notion. It's an observable falsehood about material reality, that's what gets it the negative press.
"At the end of a long, winding road, the child might get treated with GnRH antagonists to defer the decisive impact of puberty until they're competent to make the decision."
The problem with this idea is that undergoing puberty is absolutely necessary to attain competence to make the decision.
"It's an observable falsehood about material reality, that's what gets it the negative press."
I don't think it makes any claims on the material reality of anatomy or karyotype. It does suggest a certain radical respect for personal autonomy in asserting one's social role and particular way of being human.
"The problem with this idea is that undergoing puberty is absolutely necessary to attain competence to make the decision."
I kind of agree with that, and perhaps in some perfect science-fiction world a person could test-drive both puberties and pick the right one without adverse consequences. But given the limitations of aforementioned material reality, we are reduced to letting people reach legal age and then decide to take their own shot at the puberty they think will result in a body that fits their psyche best.
You can have an "observable falsehood" about sex. I don't think you can have an "observable falsehood" about gender (except as a grammatical usage). If you think you can, I'd like to know you precise definition.
"Please don't do the thing where you make up a fictional vision of what other people believe and then drag them for not living up to it. It's extremely rude."
I do think gender self-id is more consistent with libertarian principles than is biological essentialism. Since libertarians are, in my observation, well represented among the ACX readership, I don't think I'm out of bounds with the reflection you quote. If you feel personally addressed and misrepresented by what I wrote, I do apologise.
"In practice, if any of those people say "nah, it's just social contagion, she'll grow out of these feelings like most always have and be a happy lesbian in five years with an intact reproductive system" they will be punished severely."
You seem quite sure that no one ever floats that possibility. Much of the point of the blockers is finding out in five years without foreclosing the possibility that it's not/she won't. Else we'd just start her on testosterone.
I don't think there's any part of the modern gender ideology, outside of the lizardman constant, that would encourage anyone to identify as a woman. They would affirm that if he identified as a she, but that would have to come from the kid in question. Boys who like to cook and watch My Little Pony are fine. Boys who like to cook and watch My Little Pony and want to be called girls are fine. No one should push the first kind of kid to become the second kind of kid.
>What if the kid in question says he's a robot? Would they affirm that, too? If not, why not?
I mean, yes and no. We humor kids when they play make-believe. We don't do anything drastic about it. Or about this, in the way that you're implying. Kids play. We leave them to it.
>This general attitude that small children know enough to authoritatively state that they are not their birth sex, and should then be hustled off to therapy and hormones, is very strange.
First, note that you're smuggling "small" in here. Second, that is very strange, which is why we don't do that. I won't re-iterate your discussion with Boinu, they seem to have this covered.
>a question that gets one punished for bringing it up.
I've brought it up several times over the last year. Right now I'm for the sort of compromise that let's them participate in high school or college sports but hedges them out of medals, records or things like playoffs. Let the kids play, but keep the records clean. I have yet to get into trouble, despite frank discussion in some fairly woke spaces.
>If only the Anglosphere's school systems, psychiatrists, activists, and politicians really did agree with you on this. :(
Again, outside of the lizardman constant, they do. A bare handful of possibly abusive cases, told in the most one-sided sensationalist way, are getting passed around your media bubble to convince you that the world looks very different than it actually does.
>What if the kid in question says he's a robot? Would they affirm that, too? If not, why not?
Sure, why not.
I've worked as a camp counselor, preschool attendant, and been a kid myself. I know kids that said they were princesses and kids that said they were dinosaurs and fairies and wolves and dragons and transformers (which are robots) and whatever, and some of them got very upset if you contradicted them. It did no harm to just say "okay, the dinosaur has to clean up his toys now" and let them explore their identity. That's part of being a kid.
"they still recognize that this man can be "more or less of a man" compared to another man"
You're just getting fooled by a figure of speech. The people who say this don't mean it literally, they mean "you suck at your job". As TGGP says, if you and I have the same job – engineer, say – but you're much better at it, that doesn't make me less of an engineer on the employment spectrum. I'm either an engineer or fired, it's binary, and if you tell me that "you know, you're not much of an engineer, Anonymous" this isn't understood to mean anything other than "you're pretty terrible at this, and it's a nuisance to me, your superior".
I'm not sure I agree. If an engineer is so bad that he literally does no engineering, and instead drinks beer with his coworkers all day, is he really an engineer?
This kind of argument is why I specified "on the employment spectrum". If you want to assert that "engineer" is a profession conveying some sort of metaphysical or inner nature, I suppose you could lose your engineer status by being shit at it; however, I still think it's clear that the modal person who believes this doesn't think that engineering is a *spectrum* where you can partake of eg. 56% of the Engineering Soul; rather, if you drop below some threshold of incompetence, you lose the Mandate of Brunel. You'll notice this is the way professional certifications work; you have to pass the bar to be a lawyer, and then if you prove to be a blithering incompetent you can be disbarred, but at no time are you accorded a partial status. You're either in or out. It's binary.
"But there are more or less talented and efficient engineers, *even* within the range that is considered 'good enough to remain employable'. "
Yes? That was literally my example.
"That's absolutely a spectrum."
A spectrum of *ability*, not of *engineerhood*. You either are an engineer or you aren't. The shoddiest bungler who still makes a living at it is just as much of an engineer as Brunel. He's just shit at it, not 35% of an engineer.
Because of the ability? I honestly can't tell whether this is playing dumb or autism. Ability doesn't correlate with state, especially not in a way where there's a spectrum so that someone who's 35% engineer is therefore necessarily 65% nurse.
Let's use a different example. A beautiful woman is preferable as a wife to a plain woman; this is fairly universal. Given the choice and all else being equal, any man would choose the beautiful woman. This doesn't *in any way* imply that the plain woman is not equally biologically female or maybe 40% of a man, *even though* our language is riddled with idioms and stock phrases like "Alice is just much less of a woman than Beth".
>A beautiful woman is preferable as a wife to a plain woman; this is fairly universal.
Counterpoint:
"If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So from my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you"
"Masculine" and "Feminine" would mean stereotypically male or female. Lots of categories can have stereotypes. Donald Trump was less stereotypically presidential than average in that he'd never previously held any public office or had any military command. Is there thus a "presidential spectrum" on which Ted Cruz was nearly as much of a president as Trump?
" Then being a president of the US is a spectrum."
This may make sense in French, but not in English. You're playing some early-Wittgenstein word games.
Are all quarks fungible? No: they can have properties like charge or "color". Does that make them a spectrum like the visual spectrum? No, they are much too quantized for that, you can enumerate every kind of quark.
37 is not interchangeable with 2.
Whether 37 is interchangeable with 2 depends on how you intend to use it, i.e. the context in which it occurs. e.g. 37 * 0 == 2 * 0
If masculinity and feminity are social roles, is it more important which role you believe you are playing, or which role the audience believes you are playing?
How did this so called "study" make it to Nature?!
weird, it's under the nature.com domain, doesn't make sense to me.
I was an editor for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for a couple years. When I was brought on, along with some other editors, we had a meeting with some Springer Nature people in Amsterdam. At one point the representative said “we may be an evil empire, but we are a service orientated evil empire”, when discussing the various features they had for finding and managing referees, organizing databases, and so on.
I don’t know much about bipolar disorder, but I know about statistics, and this study is completely unjustified in its conclusions. First they cherry-pick some patients who show a period of a few weeks: they chose people with a “circular course of illness in which sustained episodes of mania of several weeks’ duration regularly alternated with sustained episodes of depression of similar duration”. Then they compared the data to a dozen different lunar cycles, on the order of a few weeks. Then divide the patients into ad-hoc groups, some as small as one. And what do you know, if you try hard enough, some of them matched.
This is the sort of thing the field of statistics was created to prevent.
Epistemic status: I am not a statistician, but I have written software for statistics and data analysis for over thirty years, and I’ve read lots of books and papers on the topic. This post is more snide than usual because I am writing it hungry.
someday we're going to solve all these lunar mysteries, and it's going to blow the wolfman question wide open
Actual LOL. Chapeau.