I'm a person on the left who sweated out paying my student loans in full, and I am glad that other people are getting relief. It doesn't go far enough, and we need real tuition and loan reform, but it's a good start.
This was a "red pill" moment for me. I paid off my student loans in full recently. Boy am I a chump. Another bailout that ultimately rewards bad behavior. Seems like political suicide to me.
Ok look if you actually did pay off your loan since March 2020 or I guess at least the amount that's being cancelled and that your income was below the marked one then you can talk to your loan servicer to get that payment back, and then apply for the 10k or 20k with Pell grants.
Okay, well...thoughts on the Biden administration's just-announced-today student loan cancellation and forgiveness?
*Risky gamble for midterms, there was some real solid Sound Policy Momentum building for a minute there.
*Exacerbates deficit and also inflation(?), largely regressive, most college-educated already lean D (including didn't-graduates in this category).
*Fairness principles, as with all means-tested benefits; plus larger concerns of those who already paid back loans, and thus partially helped pay for this bailout.
*Time discount: yes, covid + Ukraine has been an outsize destabilizing double punch, but all Future Student Debtors are left out of this jubilee. Proposed ongoing Dept. of Ed reforms will eventually equal the magnitude of front-loaded relief, but it's quite a disproportionate situation for anyone currently existing who isn't *quite* college-age yet.
*Money is fungible, this could have been spent on many more higher-ROI things. Like pandemic preparedness or international relations/foreign policy improvement to help avert getting into future situations like the current one.
As someone suddenly relatively much richer and having a positive net worth for the first time ever, I'll take the money self-interestedly, but...even most-charitably framed as some sort of unique economic-justice response (recompense for Millennials who graduated into the Great Recession), it still seems like an inefficient option within that possibility-space. There are so many worse-off and more-deserving than student debtors...and a majority of Americans never went to college, still. I don't know. This does not feel like The Way. I could be wrong though.
What struck me were the income limits. From the standpoint of the people designing the bill, an individual making only $120,000/year or a couple making only $240,000 count as poor and deserving of charity.
Ah, I see John Schilling beat me to it. Indeed - the majority of student debt (dollars; I think possibly also *debtors*, too, but unsure on that stat) are exactly those we'd usually categorize as some sort of "middle class" rather than "poor". Even me, who earns...south of $35k annually...that's only "poor" by the relative measure of SF's high CoL. Elsewhere in America that'd be enough for a mortgage or whatever. And I did manage to scrounge up the liquid cash to pay off loans in full, sans degree, working dead-end retail, which totaled around half that annual income when the original payment pause started. It's not fun, but eminently doable...so I have a hard time (morally) understanding why I get this money and not the homeless customers who shop at my store daily.
At the point where you stress out about having zero foodstamps funds, not just cause of the food, but because then you gotta pay the punishingly regressive SF $0.25 paper bag fee - *that* is poor. All those people making up to $120k/$240k...I dunno what their deal is, but it sure ain't that.
The target audience for this move is people who thought that they would automatically get a job with a six-figure starting salary just because they got a Master's Degree in, uh, let me get back to you on that. So anything less than six figures is "deserving of charity" because they are deprived of what they have rightly "earned". Throw in a bit of a cushion on that to cover the edge cases, and you get to $120K.
The guy making $60K/year from his communications degree, and paying $10K/year on his $90K of student loans, is well above any sensible definition of "poverty", and he's not going to worry where his next mean is coming from, but he's absolutely the guy whose vote Biden is trying to buy.
I listened to Elizabeth Warren sales pitch on the News Hour last night. I’m about as liberal as one can be on ACX and… oh boy. This one is going to be regarded as an unforced error in the D’s rear view mirror.
Maybe Bernie’s booming angry old man voice can make it better. <weak stab at humor>
The most optimistic steelman I can come up with is framing it as some sort of paternalistic quality control...Everybody Knows that everyone needs a college degree to access the American Dream, so it's colleges' fault when that "promise" doesn't pay out due to "misleading claims about market relevance". (Hold forth diatribe against predatory for-profit colleges here. They shall be the primary media angle, the perfect victims.) Just as gun manufacturers are to be held accountable for when their products are misused and injure people, colleges are to be held liable for degrees that don't pay out. Because we're the government, and we're here to insulate you from the capitalistic vagaries of market forces. Tertiary ed is too big to fail - we have the best universities in the world, and this helps ensure their excellence.
...sorry, I can't actually make it pass the Ideological Turing Test, but the logic is at least consistent. No matter the many erroneous factual assumptions...
Two times the median household income, or 4 times for a DIC.
Meanwhile, some no-high school guy who bought a mom&pop grocery store and is working 80 hours a week cause he can't afford workers and is clearing $20k a year? That's a corporation that stole PPP money from the American taxpayer.
It's a grotesque bribe to young college educated people who at least have the education if not the actual degree. It's funded from the paychecks of waitresses, janitors and plumbers who didn't go to college. It is timed for the midterms, after which Biden plans on resuming loan charges, and it adds to the deficit.
And Biden defends this...chicanery by the claim that big businesses get tax breaks.
I hope those people who are gifted with this illegal transfer do fantastic things with the windfall.
Well, if it helps you feel slightly better, I'm putting the vast majority of my fallen wind into retirement accounts and investments based on Rationalist advice. (It's thanks to places like ACX that I bothered to try attempting future-planning in the first place, instead of wallowing in hand-to-mouth hedonistic poverty...maybe I'll end up remaining poor anyway, but by George, I've got to at least make an honest go at moving up. Easiest way to ensure failure is not to try at all.)
Since a direct repayment-reversal isn't really possible, would you say voluntarily tossing those forgiven debts back into the General Fund (like on annual tax return) is the next-most-appropriate "clawback"? Not as altruistic as bednets, but I'd like to rebalance the scales from this uncomfortable "gift" someday, if possible...
For me, I had zero downside financially from covid. I made enough that I only got a trivial handout from the first covid check, and I put a wad of cash in the church collection plate the next week.
If I was in your position, with debts, I think I would keep half for the debts (understanding that we aren't talking real money in the hand here) and give the rest away. Part of it to the general fund, sure. Or to maleria bednets, or in singles to the beggers at street corners, or to an animal shelter, or something.
Maybe something you think the govt should have funded instead of this, if you're pro govt spending in general.
And if you are struggling with financial planning in general, check out Dave Ramsey Financial Peace. Solid program that works for a lot of people I know.
Me either, which is certainly lucky and I know better than to do dental checkups on unexpected equines...but it's been weird to largely come out ahead as a result of covid, knowing the majority of others are suffering. (Not just abstract-others, but most of my peer group.)
Assuming that the policy proposal goes through as planned, I'm actually debt-free now...that's part of the head-spinningness, I've not been in this financial situation ever since reaching the age of majority. Less than 5 years ago, I had...triple the debt load than what just got wiped out. More debt than an entire year's worth of income. So it's like waking up one day and realizing you've been having a bad financial dream all along, and now you get out of jail free, collect $200, pass Go and start life for real. (At a much older age than you'd expected to, as a child.)
A lot of that was due to poor college choices - I knew tertiary ed wasn't for me, and still slammed into that ivory tower wall l over and over - and a lot of that was due to being the unfortunate victim of a professional con artist. Things are better now, and I've gotten much wiser quickly, yet...clearly, both parents' genetic disposition for spendthrift hoarding got passed on to me. It's something to remain vigilant about. I've been semi-successfully hacking it by getting excited about investments instead: it really is exciting to earn capital gains for the first time! But I know I can and should get consumption even lower. (It's also patriotic - fight inflation by spending less!)
Government spending..."It is the role of government to do for the people what the people cannot do for themselves." This wasn't it. The most marginal would have been better served by, say, direct checks, since perhaps student debt load isn't actually their most pressing financial need (or they don't have any!). When a man needs a fish, any fish, you really ought to give him an actual fish, rather than lowering his salmon tribute...I get the argument that this is doable vs. many other much-better more-desireable impossible-things, but. But. Guess this is why I'd make a terrible politician.
Why couldn’t those kids just work their way through school like I did? Asks the guy who paid 1,000 bucks a year as an undergrad and had grad school paid for by his employer.
Not sure how voters will react to this. It’s a politically dangerous move for sure. I don’t fully understand how the cost of a degree has jumped so dramatically since I was in school, but it really is insanely expensive now.
If there were some way to lower those costs to current students, no one would complain.
Who am I kidding? Someone will always complain not matter what any administration does, because reasons.
Even after reading various pieces like Scott's old "Considerations on Cost Disease", I'm...not really sure? There's several identifiable pieces to the puzzle - continually turning up the tap on govt-backed student loans is indeed a big one, subsidies behave exactly as expected - but they never quite add up to the full picture. Loans + credentialism arms race + non-legible/hard-to-evaluate "product" + "college experience" expectations gap + narrowing of employment tests + tedious racial gap analysis + hollowing out of non-tertiary-ed paths + teachers' unions/protectionism + school funding structure (Board of Education separate from rest of state/local govt, federal mandates) + lack of competition (largely shitty for-profits, ~no one else doing the University of Austin thing) + continual weird failures to utilize technology + administrative bloat + ...
Lotsa puzzle pieces, and they fit together to form a depressing picture, but it still doesn't *quite* map perfectly onto actual costs. Housing and healthcare seem simple to tally up by comparison...
I think it's a poor policy overall, but it's important context that most of those other priorities can't get through Congress right now, so it's basically Biden doing what he can through the mechanisms he has. The "fairness" argument is strong, except it can equally run up against the "better than nothing argument."
Politically, I doubt it will matter. People have short memories these days and this will be out of the news by November.
Isn't that just a version of Bad Thing Exists -> We Must Do Something -> This Is Something? Political capital is not as perfectly fungible as the unit of caring, but...I dunno, maybe there were Reasons behind the scenes. A limited-time opportunity or whatever. It'll certainly make a mark on history, and that doesn't count for nothing, I guess. Then again, that's still economics-style thinking versus politics-style thinking. Which is definitely not the modern modus operandi. The recent ACX re-litigation of utilitarianism must be on my mind...
Can't wait to see what other October Surprises await on the long road to Election Day.
Bad Thing Exists -> Many Things Must Be Done To Address It -> This is One of Those Things -> Ergo, This Should Be Done Even if Other Things Cannot be Done
Which makes sense in isolation, but does not factor in the possibility that Doing This Thing will hurt your ability to Do Other Things, both for fiscal reasons (i.e. spending the budget here and starving future initiatives) as well as political reasons (i.e. making people mad and hurting the chance for progress & compromise on those fronts).
To be clear, I'm not big on the policy. I think there are a lot of illogical and unhinged reactions to it but there are also good faith critiques.
1) I'm broadly in favor of our new Covid/student debt policy of just throwing money out of helicopters in the vague direction of problems. No joke, I don't trust government to execute really complex policies and and as long as there's not a ton of hidden language or effects, simpler policy is better.
2) Man, how does this not feed inflation? Like, inflation literally just slowed down so we're going to give $10-20k to a group of people...not defined by wise financial decision-making.
3) This...pretty clearly feels like a sop to an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.
4) Have we just quietly accepted that student loans are busted? Because there's been an moratorium on student loan repayments since Covid started, right? And now that's getting extended again, along with the debt relief, right? So, uh, when do college debt payments go back to normal? Cuz it's been, like, 2.5 years now.
Probably aimed at increasing turnout rather than winning over swing voters. I think the people pushing for student loan cancellation would never consider voting Republican, but might stay home rather than vote for a boring establishment Democrat like Biden.
I thought the same thing, but now I squinted at it a little bit, and I'm not so sure.
First, we are a bit too far away from the midterms. In 2.5 months, either something might eclipse this, or the novelty might fade, and the people who weren't originally planning to vote might go back to not planning to vote.
Second, if you look at the polls, Republicans are quite likely to take the House, but somewhat unlikely to take the Senate. It feels as if FiveThirtyEight is actually overestimating Republicans' chances in the Senate (it has them at 1 in 3). Republicans are likely to take NC, OH, WI, but everything else - AZ, GA, NH, NV, PA - seems very unlikely. That's going to put Republicans at 49 in the Senate, or maybe, if they are super-lucky, at 50. So that enormous cash handout is not very likely to change outcomes. Are they taking FiveThirtyEight's 1 in 3 odds of Republican Senate takeover as being too high and striving to reduce them?
I'm worried that there's something I'm missing. It doesn't look like it's something about election administration, because the polls say what they say, and thus if they don't cheat, they'll probably get the results FiveThirtyEight says they would. I wonder if it's something about getting people who get the money more active in some way other than voting.
But who knows, I think historians will be debating the "bribe" effects of covid-era direct stimulus on vote turnout for decades to come. None of my peers were upset about the by-now several checks we've all gotten, that's for certain...and they're far more progressive than me, yet also bearish on the value of voting at all. Curious to see what happens come November.
(Relatedly, it'd be interesting to compare the median perceived effects of "eliminating debt" vs "giving out money", even for identical net amounts of money...perhaps that's the angle being worked here. Psychology and sociology, the oil to economics' water...)
A very nice little history of polyhedral dice, but it also caused me to think about redundancy and roughage ratings for videos and texts.
Redundancy has an obvious meaning-- roughage is things like small talk between the hosts.
Some videos are very efficient and I appreciate it, some have a little personalization-- Answers with Joe is at a good level of that for me. Some have what I consider to be agonizing levels of repetition.
And then there's repetition between videos. Is there anyone who talks *about* the Fermi Paradox without explaining it yet again?
For people who follow AI more closely, why is speech generation progressing so much slower than image generation? It feels like it should be much easier to put together a synthetic voice that sounds natural than generate a realistic photo, but at least on the public-facing side of things this doesn't seem to be the case. What's the reason behind this, assuming that it's actually the case?
If you look at images generated by AI, very often, you'll notice, by looking closer/more attentively, some small glitches here and there, figures in the background that aren't really complete, or shape weirdly, unnatural body parts (typically ears or hands), etc. If you just glance at the piece, it don't really look out of place, either your brain fills the gaps, or the details are too small to notice immediately.
With text, however, if you start having nonsensical words in the middle of your sentences, then it gets glaring really, really fast. I know that, because most of the books I read on kindle were digitalized through OCR, and it fails here and there, transforming a letter into another, or a pair of others.
Your brain just has a much wider tolerance for variation in art and photography than it does with speech. In general speech generation is pretty convincing but there is something "off" that makes it sound robotic. With the human voice, even the slightest abnormality can throw you off whereas that isn't the case with art by its very nature.
What about the success of generating faces? The brain is extremely finely tuned to recognise faces, it's why we have such a strong uncanny valley reaction to ones that are even a little off, but it seems like there's been lots of progress in photorealistic face generation e.g. This Person Does Not Exist.
What if Trump removed the classified documents from the White House on January 20, 2021 and took them to Mar-a-Lago, the National Archives informed him that the action was illegal shortly thereafter, and then Trump promptly returned them to the Archives so they were only in his possession for, say, two months? Would he still be in trouble right now?
Is he in trouble? I'd bet (were I a betting man) that this is over, unless he has another closet with another set of documents he's still withholding and another informer tells the FBI about it. He isn't charged with anything. I'll be shocked if that changes.
I doubt it's relevant. This case will turn on what procedures, if any, a President needs to follow to declassify documents. No one doubts the President has plenary power to declassify anything he chooses -- he derives that power straight from Article II of the Constitution, from his position as Commander in Chief, so that power can't be circumscribed by any law Congress passes. But nobody has ever had to think about what procedure the President needs to follow, because heretofore the generic procedure for declassification has boiled down to "ask the President."
Presidents routinely declassify things implicitly, and in the moment, e.g. when JFK called former President Eisenhower to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy implicitly declassified a bunch of stuff by just telling it to Eisenhower, and of course he was perfectly within his right to do so.
It would also be perfectly legal (or more correctly perfectly constitutional) for President Biden to tell former President Trump a bunch of classified stuff, or hand him some classified documents, if he wanted Trump's opinion on something. Biden wouldn't need to tell anybody about that, or write it down somewhere, or follow some procedure, he could just do it.
Here we have the decidedly weird situation where President Trump may want to assert that by his actions in "communicating" to his future former President self some classified information, he was doing essentially the same thing other Presidents have done, implicitly declassify something by communicating it to someone other than himself -- in this case, his future non-President self. It's a very weird situation, and God knows how anyone intends to resolve it.
I think any court that rules that your future self is a different person will successfully precipitate the full breakdown of law and order in the US by reducing the law to a transparent farce that protects the strong and enslaves the weak, which means I'll place like a 30% odds on it happening.
Of course Trump is a different person today. That's the whole basis for the investigation, right? When he was President, certainly he could store any number of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and he wouldn't need to ask anyone's permission or even tell anyone, and this investigation would be inherently absurd.
The issue here is Trump is *no longer* the President, he's a private citizen, and as such it is generally illegal for him to have classified documents -- unless, of course, the President said he could and declassified them for that purpose. Id est, Joe Biden could certainly have sent all those documents to Mar-a-Lago and said "Here, Donald, I want you to take a look a these and tell me what you think." That, too, everyone agrees would be legal, and Biden would not need to ask anyone's permission or even tell anyone.
I think people think there is some kind of "procedure" for declassification, laid down by statute, and even the President is subject to that. But there isn't. The President's power to declassify doesn't come from any statute, it's in the Constitution (implied by his role as Commander in Chief) so no mere law passed by Congress can limit it, or specify how it's carried out, courtesy of the Supremacy Clause. To the extent there's any procedure, it's whatever the President says it is, and it necessarily doesn't apply to himself unless he says it does.
And as I said above, we have long accepted that Presidents can declassify information implicitly, just by conveying the information to someone not previously certified as being able to have it. That's what happened when President Kennedy talked to private citizen Eisenhower about Cuba, or when GWB talked to 41 (his former President private citizen dad) about whatever secret stuff he felt like talking about. If President Obama talked over the pending killing of Osama bin Laden with his wife or kids, that too everyone agrees would be perfectly constitutional. (Whether it's advisable is another story.)
So the question is: can the President implicitly declassify stuff by conveying it to his future non-President self? Like, while still President he has a bunch of classified docs shipped to the room in which he'll know he'll wake up the next day as a private citizen. Did he just implicitly declassify them, or what?
It's a lot like the question of whether the President can pardon himself. It's definitely a weird Moebius strip kind of question, but it's neither a trivial nor (as it turns out) unimportant question. And I have no idea how anyone proposes to resolve it. Congress can't resolve it by passing a law, and no court can resolve it by pointing to an existing law, because Supremacy Clause. The Supreme Court can issue an opinion on what the Constitution says about this, and maybe that will work, but Presidents have always asserted a co-equal right to interpret the Constitution as far as their own powers go, and the Supreme Court has usually been reluctant to oppose this.
Ultimately this probably has to be decided by The People, as the only true ultimate sovereign, by their deciding which point of view they'll countenance.
It goes to mens rea. I believe the relevant standard is ‘knowingly’ (actual knowledge that you have classified info in your possession). In your scenario, Trump could say that he was unaware that files in his possession were classified and that he returned them as soon as he was informed by a credible authority. It’s not dispositive but it is certainly more helpful than keeping them once so informed.
If the standard is really ‘knowingly’, any crime could be tough to prove. Only 300 files so far have been claimed as ‘classified’ and that’s a moniker that is frequently applied to some really mundane records. I suspect if you really dove into the LBJ or Clinton or Bush presidential libraries you could come up with some technically classified material inadvertently stuck in the archives. On the other hand, if the records were highly sensitive, preserved in some highly personal safe, dealt with matters that he gained by concealing, that he’d discussed having with others and he’d failed to return the material when asked, then yeah that’s a better case.
If the document is labeled "TS//SCI", then it's an unambiguous violation of the law to take it out of a government facility and put it in your private stash. And I'm pretty sure you won't find any documents so labeled in the LBJ/Bush/Clinton archives; those archivists know their jobs.
But if there's no evidence that you meant to do anything beyond carelessly packratting your old work files, and you return them promptly on request, nobody's going to throw you in jail for that. It's when you *don't* return them promptly on demand, or otherwise behave in a manner inconsistent with this being an honest mistake, that you get in serious trouble.
A smaller subset of files were marked TS, but that doesn’t change the legal analysis. Under the statute, he has to knowingly remove classified information and then have specific intent to retain it.
By way of example, a former Secretary of State was found to have retained a significant store of classified info on a personal server. Unauthorized possession was not in dispute, but the DOJ declined to prosecute because they found no specific intent to retain classified information which would be the mens rea required for violation of 18 U.S.C. 1924.
I am glad to announce the second of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. Note this week we will meet at 3:30 not 2. The first meeting was great, and I hope to see many of you at this one. Based on the first meeting, I chose two popular topics to prompt future conversation and activities.
This week it will be at 3:30 (usually 2:00) to avoid a conflict with an online LW meetup
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (readings at the end)
1) Forecasting and predicting the future
2) Psychedelics.
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions.
C) There will be opportunities to go for a walk and talk about an hour after the meeting starts and use some gas barbeques if anyone wants to grill something. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with takeout hot food available.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed the way you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the future direction of the group. Topics, types of meetings, activities, etc…
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Prediction
Superforcasting is a review of experiments done about how well various types of experts do in predicting the future. Generalists tend to do better than specialists in prediction, but why? Groups tend to do better than individuals, but are there ways to improve the performance of groups even further? How can you train yourself to be better at prediction? How can you help others?
The tale of two receptors is an interesting speculation as to the underlying pharmacology of psychedelics. Hypothesizing that serotonin can both help us cope with the distress of a bad situation and help us look for creative ideas out of the old mental habits that can keep us trapped in a bad situation. Conventional antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics operate on the acceptance system, while psychedelics operate on the later, lateral thinking. Is this perspective useful? Oversimplified? Can it be made into a rigorous scientific idea, or is it just another evolutionary just-so story? What possible uses and hazards does this suggest for psychedelics?
If you want a more general introduction to psychedelics, here is a book summary of the recent popular review of psychedelics. “ How to change your mind” by Michael Pollen
I've been hunting around for datasets regarding stock-prices and commodities prices, but this is a very new space for me. Does anyone have any suggestions? It seems like there's nothing available that's open source.
For both individual stocks and indices (basically anything with a ticker symbol), Yahoo! Finance has very easily downloadable historical data going back decades. It's basically the last functional thing left in the Yahoo! universe.
I started looking for such years ago, and my impression is that they just aren't available as open source. There used to be pages of daily stock prices in paper newspapers, but I'm not sure when that ended.
I'm kind of surprised no one has succeeded at cracking a source.
It's possible to extract data from Yahoo's financial data api; but that requires time and effort...but thanks for reminding me about the newspapers, maybe those prices could be OCR'd.
On Thursday 8/25 night starting at 8:00pm eastern, 7:00pm central The St. Louis Rationality Group will have an online discussion of the ACX Book Review Contest in GatherTown.
We are inviting all other ACX/Rationality readers as well.
If you haven't read all the book reviews, still come.
If you are nervous about talking to people because you find old age makes you less social, still come. If you will be late due to time zones or other obligations, still come.
If you feel awkward, still come.
It'll be fun.
Here is the link to the event, click it for more information:
Let's talk ACX Book Reviews. You need not have read every book review to be part of this event, as long as you have read three or so you are good. The purpose here is to meet and learn from each other and share thoughts about this year's book reviews.
Wander from room to room and group to group and talk! No rules about group size or how long you have to stay within a group.
Here are some questions to ask each other:
Do you like or dislike the book review contest?
What makes a good book review?
Are there any books that you have read because of a great book review?
Which book reviews from this year's contest were your favorite?
Did you learn anything useful or insightful from any of the book reviews?
Is book reviewing an art?
What's the best book you've read in the past two years?
I think there's too much focus on trying to design utopian cities, and there should be more focus on trying to design utopian towns first. Get things right at a small scale first, before scaling up to a megacity. If you can take a greenfield site and a budget in the single-digit billions and build a medium-sized town of twenty thousand people, and persuade twenty thousand people that they want to live there because your urban design is so wonderful, then I might believe you can do it with a larger city.
Here's my idea for a town of 20,000. I've tried to cut a middle path between standard urban design and the anti-car fundamentalism of so many "urbanist" type thinkers.
- The whole design looks like a scaled-down Adelaide (check it out) with a downtown core surrounded by a ring of parks surrounded by a ring of suburbs.
- Downtown core is dense and highly walkable. A few major streets and a bunch of narrow lanes. In general there's no parking within downtown itself, but there's space for delivery trucks etc to keep the shops supplied. A narrow river running through the centre of town would be nice.
- Next, the ring of parks, which hide underground car parking beneath. If you want to go downtown, you can park underground and walk. Supermarkets etc can be placed at the outer edges of downtown close to the carpark entrances to make grocery shopping convenient.
- Immediately outside the ring of parks, medium-density apartments and terrace housing, gradually turning into quarter-acre blocks as you go further out. Some major arterial roads head into the residential areas, but there's also tendrils of parkland with bicycle paths in them. A bunch of corner stores and cafes are sprinkled throughout the suburbs. Street layout isn't a grid, nor the cul-de-sac maze of most modern suburban developments, but some kind of haphazard mishmash of the two.
20k isn't a big town. It's hard to make somewere of that size not walkable. A notable example of modern, small-scale urbanism is Poundbury, England. It's a suburb of Dorchester but it seems to have a well developed core despite its population of under 4,000. I think that in practice, you'd struggle to build a critical mass of jobs in a place below 50-100k people unless there's a bigger city nearby to commute to or a single large employer (e.g. a university).
I'd recommend laying out the parks and green space as radial wedges rather than in rings. That way it isn't an obstacle to travel between the suburbs and the centre and it allows for gradual expansion rather than constraining the CBD. It would make sense to use the river floodplain for this.
I don't think that attractive multi-storey carparks are really a thing.
I don't think the cost of underground car parking is a particularly big deal on the scale of the whole project. And we're building it cut-and-cover, at large scale, on a greenfield project, and covering it with not-very-heavy parkland, so I think that's about as cheap as it gets.
All the comment threads in this post are hidden behind “Continue Thread” links, which are wildly inconvenient to read on a mobile device: is it one uninteresting reply, or a major subthread of interesting opinions from the most prominent bloggers who follow scott? No idea, lets click on 543 slow-loading links one by one to find out!
I miss static html, and dearly wish for substack and similar single-page-application monstrosities to all shutdown, their leaders discredited, their investors bankrupted, and their developers unhireable.
I'm pretty sure Scott deliberately changed this as of the last Open Thread because people were complaining about the lag of the fully-revealed thread.
Personally, I'm not getting any lag (laptop), and I'm also not seeing the Continue Thread links, so I don't really have any beef with this either way, but something that *does* annoy the heck out of me is that if I accidentally click a link, e.g. one of the omnipresent "gift a subscription!" links, my thread-state is completely obliterated when I hit Back, notably removing the new reply markers which makes catching up very frustrating.
I've entirely abandoned trying to access ACX via mobile, whether through the Substack app or via mobile webpage. Not a good look when so much of the Substack UI is Mobile First(tm)-oriented. It's almost like they didn't anticipate any blogs becoming popular enough to have hundreds or thousands of long-winded comments! Reading comments via email notifications is a decent workaround, but that's purely passive, I have to wait until I get home to reply...
...and then watch as the editor struggles to keep up, cause of idk what background process chicanery hogging CPU cycles and leading to the same issues Himaldr-2 notes. Like yeah, my laptop's old and not very powerful...but cmon, it's a blog, and Open Threads don't even have pictures. It's 99% unformatted text, man! Genuinely confused at what's causing such hang-ups. Especially frustrating cause the Open Threads are usually highlights of my weekly ACX experience, and I do enjoy browsing through the entire "stack" hunting for interesting conversations to participate in. The top-level posts definitely don't always cut it for worthiness-heuristics.
That's the worst, but there are a few more things that anger me:
This (probably Substack as a whole, but I only comment here) is also the only page wherein — and I'm not sure if due solely to how ungodly slow it becomes with a lot of comments, or some other error — I cannot select (highlight) more than a paragraph or so of text; it gets slower and slower until it finally refuses to select at all any more.
Trying to select a *small* amount is also fraught: no response, no response... SUDDENLY HUGE BLOCK HIGHLIGHTED
Too, just composing a comment at all is a chore because the letters take an eternity to show up, the cursor freezes, etc. Deleting is particularly fun.
And I don't even get to use italics or boldface, for all the slow, clunky bloat. You'd think such awful design would at least offer a bunch of features to compensate!
Edit: The edit function is the sole bright spot that's been added (IIRC, at least, it was not initially possible?) -- but of course, even that is screwy: edits don't appear until a refresh, and trying to edit again before doing so erases your first set of changes.
I think everywhere is optimising for reading on mobile devices, which is of course a pain because then the design has to fit on a narrow screen with limited scrolling down capacity.
This is why I do everything on my desktop PC like a dinosaur.
Agree 100% with maybe later. I almost never read the open thread posts because threads are so hard to follow on this website format. I would bet that there would be a lot more commenting and reader engagement if we had the classic, Slate Star Codex-type commenting format.
Why would you not put the parks on the outside of the line? With this layout all the places you want to go are an extra 150 meters away from a train stop.
It would also give you more room for the parks - 150 meters is not actually that big when it comes to nature. Central Park is 0.8 km wide.
Also, I still don't see how a line has benefits over a grid (or maybe a circle if there are limits to the shape of your Hyperloop), but we've beaten that horse to death in the original Neom thread already.
- Make diagrams of the layout. The attempts at explaining the layout left me unclear on how it would look. If someone can make a simple sketch, that’s the first step to getting a diagram.
- How do you propose to acquire the land and get permission to build? The proposed location of USA has different constraints than Saudi Arabia, and solving the land acquisition and zoning is a big part of making it feasible.
- You mention: “Stores could open after the commuting peak.“ How would that work? Many people commute to work in stores. If you push back store hours, that would tend to push back peak commuting time as well.
- Is there a proposed governance structure required, or just a standard city governance proposed? The proposed location of Birmingham to Montgomery in Alabama crosses 5 or 6 counties. Any ideas about how that might work with governance?
- I remain skeptical that hyperloop-based travel makes any sense on earth. On Mars you get near vacuum for free due to little atmosphere. On earth, maintaining the vacuum over multiple lanes/airlocks/etc is not a solved problem, and planning travel around more conventional rail/maglev systems would make more sense.
>>Hyperloop will almost certainly work. There are no major technical challenges in terms of missing or infeasible technologies, we solve equal or more difficult infrastructure problems relatively frequently, and anyone who claims otherwise is speaking completely from ignorance.<<
Q. Isn't it true that Elon Musk's Hyperloop will never work?
A. No, not at all.
At this point, I’ve written enough answer on the subject that I think I reasonably qualify as skeptical of both Elon Musk in general and the Hyperloop project in particular.
Let me be the first to say that the idea is completely feasible, and most of the criticism is based on ignorance. The only thing that’s really up in the air is if all the tech challenges can get worked out in a way that give it some market viability.
The skepticism surrounding Hyperloop is a complete mess, and has no real logic behind it. The general problem is that community doesn’t do enough research nor have enough knowledge to be drawing conclusions about these issues, so there’s a general trend to just insert a convincing-sounding argument that doesn’t disagree with the little bit of knowledge the person does have. That creates huge holes in people’s logic that they don’t have enough knowledge to actually address, so usually they find some way to distract from them. Appeals to authority are rampant, and arguments from incredulity are just as bad.
I would strongly suggest you ignore all of it, because at best it’ll just be confusing, and at worst you will come away with opinions that are straight-up wrong.
For example, people frequently discuss the “massive pressure” a Hyperloop tube would have to withstand, but don’t ever put it in perspective. If they did, they would realize that it isn’t actually massive at all relative to other structural loads. The pressure exerted by the atmosphere on a vacuum chamber is only about as much pressure as a tunnel that’s 9 meters underwater. This is not actually a very challenging design problem and isn’t really an unprecedented structure in any way - at worst it would be expensive to build.
Most skeptics act like it is a major obstacle though, which is almost objectively wrong.
That’s just one example, but hopefully it illustrates my point while keeping this answer brief. I could go through each of the other claims and explain in detail why they’re either oversimplified, missing critical information, or just outright wrong, but I think that would distract from the conclusion:
Hyperloop will almost certainly work. There are no major technical challenges in terms of missing or infeasible technologies, we solve equal or more difficult infrastructure problems relatively frequently, and anyone who claims otherwise is speaking completely from ignorance.
The real question is whether or not it can be done cost-effectively, and if the final product will actually get built.
That answer presents conclusions while skipping the argument that would justify them, so I don’t find it very convincing.
Using an existing, proven, commercially viable technology (like HSR / maglev) is more feasible than one that isn’t yet (hyperloop). If money is no object and you’re sufficiently convinced that hyperloop will be a comfortable viable means of transportation, go for it!
I kind of get where you’re coming from. I’m a proponent of nuclear power, but I think uranium-based plants are a historical artifact from focusing on refinement of payloads for weapons, and trying to use that same refinement pipeline for fuel for power generation. If the plan had been to find a better, more available, safer power generation source, I think thorium would have been chosen instead of uranium. I would love for a billionaire to make a push for thorium power, and when designing a city, I would push for thorium-based nuclear plants.
But thorium power hasn’t been implemented at scale yet, while uranium power has. If I were trying to give advice on a feasible power source for a city right now, uranium power would be my recommendation. If we had all the money to spend to push through approvals and develop the tech, thorium is the clear choice.
In this analogy HSR or maglev are uranium (established), and hyperloop is thorium (unestablished). I personally think hyperloop has a bigger gap to feasibility than thorium power, but hopefully the analogy clarifies my recommendation, and why I’m not trying to step on your hyperloop optimism (despite my pessimism).
They are completely inappropriate for a system with a stop every kilometer. Hyperloop (as I envision it) can handle depositing a passenger every kilometer.
I assume you want an ink sketch of the ETT lanes, not just text characters. I will see what I can produce.
Placing the city (which I dubbed "Coosapolis") in Alabama is an attempt to get a more "grounded" feeling for the concept. Other elongated cities have developed along cities, e.g. Volgograd. I didn't get as far as governmental permissions (though that would certainly impact actual construction of a line city).
I'm dealing with the peak traffic problem right now. Richard Gadsden gave me some good data on that. More coming on that.
There are a lot of folks thinking about Hyperloop so I will leave the vacuum problem to them. I am confident it can be solved.
Running a 200 mph train every few minutes down the middle of the line city would destroy the livability IMHO. For me it's buried Hyperloop or nothing.
Note: the yellow side-walks are 10 m wide, which is pretty wide! Sufficient for foot traffic and bike lanes both directions with room to spare so you're not right up against the buildings.
Yes to an ink sketch. I would also appreciate one of the proposed city layout (buildings, parks, etc.).
About trains: I agree that above ground train wouldn't be great, by buried High-Speed Rail or Maglev seems like it would be similar to buried Hyperloop in terms of impact on livability. You could use lower-speed lines for local trips and high-speed lines for longer trips. This makes the proposal more feasible as it reduces the number of hard problems that need to be solved to make it work.
If you don't value feasibility that highly or if you're just interested in planning what a hyperloop system could be that's fine too. It's cool stuff!
Some of the early critiques focus on some of the embarrassing mistakes from the original paper (like this https://leancrew.com/all-this/2013/08/hyperloop/). I’m not concerned about the raised structure issues, but when your original white paper has stuff like that it’s hard for structural engineers to take it seriously.
See the critique I just posted. They are NOT worried about vacuum. They think Hyperloop must travel in a straight line at a constant elevation. How about that! Linear cities and hyperloop: a match made in heaven.
I've been re-reading Meditations on Moloch. The first time I read it I remember being very struck by how profound it seemed, but looking over it again, I think its main thesis is just that "coordination problems can be very harmful and are difficult to overcome", which seems quite obvious in retrospect.
I'm pretty sure I already had a good understanding of the trouble coordination problems can cause and probably most other readers did as well. Even thinking that though I still feel like that post has some huge insights that aren't immediately obvious and maybe are difficult to articulate, and I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas about what made it so special.
I still love that piece. Maybe I could be persuaded it's overrated among Scott's fans, but coordination problems are desperately underrated by humans in general, and in particular it's even more underrated by policymakers and polticians. Moloch is the enemy.
It's possible that the post looks worse in hindsight because of the same cognitive bias described in the post "Read History of Philosophy Backwards," from 2013. Correct ideas tend to win out and eventually become regarded as common knowledge/sense, while intellectual mistakes stand out more and more over time as the world moves past them.
I read it many years ago though, so it's also entirely possible that it just actually wasn't as good as I remember.
I agree with this assessment about it looking worse in hindsight than it was at the time, for the same reason as in the "history backwards" post but also another:
The optimism has worn off.
2014 was a long time ago.
The reason for describing the problem as "Moloch" rather than merely as "coordination is hard" isn't just to tip the hat to Ginsberg, it's because of perverse and pervasive it is. "Moloch" in fact is too parochial a diety, but is punchier than a phrase like "hidden forces of global subversion". In any case, if in 2014 an avowed transhumanist could end a long poetically-written piece about coordination problems with a battle cry about killing god, in 2022 it seems much harder to do so. Moloch seems to be winning the alignment war, and dying with dignity seems a long shot.
So yes, the perennial portions of "Meditations on Moloch" are now more mainstream, but also the hopeful portions of it (which justify the poetic tone) are also less believable. That doesn't make it less brilliant, it just makes it something that was brilliant and went unheeded.
Can you elaborate on what you think is do different in 2022 compared to 2014. I can think of the pandemic that we failed to prevent/contain for reason maybe related to Moloch and international tensions have risen, but mostly Moloch's strength and our ability to resits don't seem that different to me. To me, the really the big historical victories for Moloch are things like the failures of Soviet central planning and western Social Democracy, which both happened quite a while ago.
If we limit our examination to the turn at the end of "Meditations on Moloch" (i.e. the possibility of using AI to defeat Moloch/Gnon), and compare the tone of the AI research/alignment 'community' in 2014 and 2022 (especially the Big Yud, but not just him), the loss of hopefulness is obvious.
The other ways in which the race to the bottom has intensified in the last 8 years (whether click-driven news, increasingly addictive entertainment, widening gaps between rich and poor, or what-have-you) add up to arguably as big a victory for Moloch as any similar 8 years in the decline of the Soviet experiment, but I won't pretend to be able to quantify such a thing.
I interpreted the concluding paragraph of Meditations on Moloch as saying something more specific than that.
> As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.
I thought this is hinting at the fact that if we get AI alignment right we may be able to overcome these kinds of coordination problems once and for all. Assuming there will be a unipolar, god-like, benevolent AI.
I still like the post, but perhaps it's because I'm enough of a contrarian to think Elua isn't much better a bargain than Moloch. We'll still end up eaten, it's just a matter of which god devours us and how conscious we'll be as it happens. Screaming into the brazen belly of fiery Moloch, or docilely drugged like Eloi for flower-wreathed Elua?
If "Eula" was renamed to "The Son of Man", and "eternal flower paradise" was renamed to "The Kingdom of Heaven which shall reign forever and ever, Amen", would you still describe it as being devoured?
“You!” he cried. “You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last — you are the people in power! You are the police — the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I —”
Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot. “I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’
“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least —”
He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.
“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”
As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”
Oh dear, am I not engaging in the slap-fight you anticipated? How uncouth of me to refuse to play this game!
I'm enjoying this late summer afternoon, I don't feel the need to start off an exchange of "But reelly, now, reelly whydonchu?"
And if what I quoted does not give you the point I was making, well, that obscurity is on me. Has Elua ever drunk from the cup? Can you answer that? Then we can talk about the marriage feast of the Lamb.
Totally agree. I think that post is hugely overrated.
My initial reaction the first time I read it was "ok so he illustrated the prisoner's dilemma a bunch of times. Big deal." And some of the examples aren't really good. Take Las Vegas: I think it's totally reasonable that it exists. There's nothing wrong with having a place to hedonistically self-indulge.
I don't think Scott's problem with Vegas was anything to do with hedonism (that wouldn't be a coordination problem), I think his problem was that the whole city had been built off profits from gambling. Since gambling is zero sum every building represented a net loss to society as a whole and was just wasted capital.
His point was if human society was organised by a rational planner it would never even conceive of making something so wasteful, but the combined result of many individual actors following there own perceived self interest did produce a result that was collectively irrational. Kind of the whole point of the post.
I think he meant that Las Vegas is even worse than that; it's not "hedonistically self-indulg[ing]". It's people sitting in front of slot machines feeding in coin after coin like prisoners on a treadmill. That's where the bulk of the profits come from, not the James Bond-roulette-baccarat-dinner jackets and evening gowns fantasy of high-stakes glamorous gambling. It's addiction and desperation and not fun or glamorous or anything near hedonism.
It's what is described in the Harlan Ellison story "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes", where Las Vegas is its own circle of Hell.
>so he illustrated the prisoner's dilemma a bunch of times.<
But that's neither literally nor figuratively what the post is; not all coordination problems are or are equivalent to a Prisoner's Dilemma, nor was the larger point "here are some examples of the Prisoner's Dilemma". Nor was the objection to Las Vegas "people shouldn't be self-indulgent!", at all.
Perhaps this is why you didn't get too much out of the post.
Yes....but there is also no reason to have it in a desert where water is _extremely_ scarce (I don't recall meditations on moloch being anti-vegas, merely anti "let's build a giant city in one of the driest deserts on earth when there is no particular reason to have it there".
I think that post is one of those "once you have integrated the idea, it's obvious, but if you have not integrated the idea, it will radically change your worldview" kind of things. And I think that this community vastly over-indexes for people who are likely to have either encountered it already or to have figured it out on their own.
The point that "many of the world's issues are because coordination is hard" is one that most people don't get (or at least, they don't act like they do). Most of the world acts like problems are because "bad people are in charge". Realizing that most people aren't bad, that most people are trying their best, but that coordination problems and incentive structures make even "obvious" solution hard to reach can be a truly world shaking realization, if you are coming from "man if only people weren't so evil".
Wait what? Las Vegas sits at the confluence of the two largest rivers in the region for several hundred miles, the Virgin and Colorado. It has gobs of water -- or rather, it *would* have, except for the fact that 1/3 of the Colorado water is siphoned off by California and another 1/5 by Arizona.
That region being a very dry desert. You've correctly identified the tallest dwarf.
I'd argue that the Colorado river doesn't have enough regular flow that _any_ large city (or large agricultural base) should be siphoning off of it. The fact that other places are also trying to drink from the same, too-small straw doesn't make Las Vegas' existence acceptable.
That's just silly. The Colorado is quite a large river -- you've seen photos of the Grand Canyon, one assumes? -- and the bulk of human urban and industrial water usage always comes from a nearby river. Only agriculture relies even partly on water falling from the sky.
So there's no general reason at all not to put a city in the desert, and some good reasons to do so -- the eternal sunshine and stable weather lends itself well to certain activities, actually including agriculture (given modern irrigation technology), flght (both transport and aircraft development and training -- note that Las Vegas is home to a substantial amount of USAF training), being a transport and distribution hub in general (which Las Vegas is), manufacturing that benefits from stable weather and a minimum of hail, snow and rain (i.e. where you're building big things that have to be outside for part of their construction), and even solar power (the Ivanpah solar power station is in Las Vegas).
The main problem is not the existence of Las Vegas per se, but the fact that the water that you might think "naturally" belongs to Las Vegas, which arrives there on two big rivers, has been siphoned off long ago by water transport infrastructure built in the 30s by two distant states -- California and Arizona -- which were built up much earlier than Nevada.
And the real solution is not to limit or reverse Las Vegas, but for California in particular to build up its own water infrastructure instead of resting on its prior claim to the Colorado water. California has metric assloads of water in the Sierra Nevada, but it hasn't built a water project since the 50s, even as the population has doubled, because of NIMBY problems and the obsession of state government with other priorities than the basic infrastructure of life. It's the same reason I-5 and CA-99 are the same size they were 40 years ago, when there were half as many cars on them, and why the electric transportation lines haven't been expanded in 40 years, and remain wholly inadequate to support the hypothetically arriving transition to EVs.
You realize the Grand Canyon took 6 million years to form and that it's size has nothing to do with the amount of water in the Colorado river in any given year, right? But I'm the one being silly.
Also, the current water storage capacity in CA is enough to capture >100% of total rainfall in some (drier) years and that in drought years >80% of total outflows from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers are diverted for other uses (which, as aforementioned represent the bulk of total CA outflows)? Water storage is not CA's problem, and it doesn't have an "assload" of water in the Sierras. The problem is that it's population and ag industry developed on assumptions of annual average rainfall that appear to be historical anomalies and that reversion to the mean + climate change are resulting in a drier climate. Building more storage won't increase the rainfall, and the wet years that exceed current storage capacities are getting fewer and farther between.
As for who uses what water, why does the upstream claim have precedence to the downstream claim? Why is positional claim more important than temporal claim? And as for "modern irrigation" technology, that mostly amounts to drawing down non-renewable aquifers.
The point is that there is not enough water in the Colorado for everyone who wants it and has some sort of claim to it (either positional or historical). So we should ask ourselves "which uses of water are _required_ to be in the place where they are? I'd argue that, among all the uses of the Colorado River, none of them are _less_ geographically based than Las Vegas.
Every one of the reasons you listed for Las Vegas being where it is is either non-unique and exists somewhere else with more water/natural resources or else is a historical accident that is where is _because_ Las Vegas is there and _also_ has nothing to do with being where Las Vegas is, and would have developed just fine somewhere else if Las Vegas never existed.
And while I agree that CA has _horrible_ NIMBY development policies, I really don't see how they have anything to do with water infrastructure.
Right, I mean if we're going to talk about cities that shouldn't exist due to the lack of a water supply then we should be talking about San Francisco, not Las Vegas. Las Vegas gets its water from a dam about twenty miles out of town; San Francisco pipes its water in from freaking two hundred miles away.
San Francisco sits at the mouth of the largest estuary on the west coast, downstream of a confluence of rivers that represent something like greater than 80% of the total outflow of CA. If San Francisco doesn't have enough water, then there is not a city in the state of CA that should exist. Not to mention the fact that >70% of water useage in CA is ag use, not urban. So CA is _also_ using too much water, but it's not because of cities.
Additionally, my point wasn't that "there isn't enough water". It's that "there isn't much water AND there is no particular reason to be _there_ specifically. San Francisco has a _very_ good reason to be exactly where it is, that couldn't be anywhere else: the aforementioned "largest port/estuary on the west coast". You can't move San Francisco Bay, so you can't move San Francisco. What natural feature does Las Vegas rely on?
So why doesn't San Francisco get its water from the Sacramento River? I'm not saying that Vallejo shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that San Francisco shouldn't exist.
Las Vegas relies on the natural feature of the Hoover Dam. Admittedly the Hoover Dam isn't strictly speaking a natural feature, but presumably that particular site was considered the optimal place for damming the Colorado River.
I've severely fallen behind in my poetry reading, so I'm looking for recommendations of decent modern (writing in the last twenty years) poets.
What I am not looking for:
(1) the standard "chopped-up prose" where it's
Because I write
The lines
Like this, that
Makes this
A
Poem.
(No, it doesn't. e.e. cummings could get away with it, but you, modern poet person, are *not* e.e. cummings).
(2) Em, this is going to sound critical, but also not whatever it was that girl poet produced for Biden's inauguration (granted, all official poets/poet laureates produce crappy stuff for the Big Official Occasions). If we're talking spoken word poetry, I'm afraid I'm stuck on John Cooper Clarke as my most recent exemplar of same (so, yeah, the 90s).
What I am looking for:
Something modern and good. Is this an impossible request? Hit me with your favourites!
(That reminds me, I've got to go re-read "The Four Quartets").
Thanks for the recommendations, I'm enjoying them all even if some of them are not my thing. But this is exactly what I need, recommendations outside what I'd usually read.
Ethan Coen's The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way doesn't quite squeak into the last twenty years, being published in 2001, but maybe it'll make a decent recommendation anyway.
A great ask. But I'll ignore your request and give a recommendation of a modern poet who I think does "chopped up" prose in a way that's really successful: Dean Young. Here's his "See A Lily on Thy Brow:"
Thank you for that, and I hope I don't sound ungracious and ungrateful when I say I hated this poem.
So the title is lifted from "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and he's evoking Keats. Well, okay. But aren't you the great one altogether, reminding us of what the world was like pre-antibiotics and pre-anaesthesia? And just to rub our noses in the grimdark of it all, the teenage labourer may be committing incest! Why not, indeed? Of course he's going to die, because what would a modern grimdark social justice poem be without a victim in the end? Every bit as maudlin as 19th century poetry about dying maidens, and worse because it has pretensions to realism - harsh economic conditions, sex work, etc. etc. etc. let us check off the bingo card.
I'll stick to Keats, for original imagery, and if I want medical poetry, Dannie Abse, who did it first and better, Mr. Oh Yah I Studied For A Nurse. Read this poem based on an account of an operation from 1938 for real body-horror:
I am straying a bit from the original discussion in that it's not a poem at all but this also reminded me a lot of Georg Heym's The Dissection: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/the-dissection/ in that it tries to shock you with the description but also has a romantic undertone
Has there been any attempt to use technology to decrease the number of teachers needed in K-12 education? I.e. we could imagine a model where a high school or even entire school district only needs to hire one history teacher per grade (or 2-3 if we want honors/AP level history too) to teach all the students in that grade history via Zoom. Then, you could have part-time teaching assistants, who could range from local college students to stay-at-home parents to retirees help “tutor” kids outside of the main lessons being taught via Zoom.
Essentially, instead of needing all teachers to hold undergraduate degrees, as is the case in most school districts (although many districts are dropping this requirement already due to a shortage of qualified applicants) I’m picturing a model where 80-90% of the teaching is done by numerically fewer but “higher quality” (whether that means more credentialed like a MA or PhD or more years of experience) teachers and then the last 10-20% of tutoring being done by less credentialed tutors but in a more individualized, in-person style.
I haven’t worked out logistically exactly how this model would work - but I feel like the advent of video calls / YouTube etc. is made for this sort of more centralized, but possibly higher quality teaching + individualized tutoring system.
I know I’m not the only one who has thought of a model like this, (I think I’ve heard it proposed by a few different people on different podcasts) but I’m wondering if anyone/anywhere is actually trying to put this into place?
You might want to have the tutoring done by older students — algebra by sophomores who got good grades in freshman algebra. Teaching is a good way of learning.
My daughter tells me that Oberlin did it that way at the college level. Any student who had done well in a class could be paid to tutor students in that class. But it was a supplement, not a standard part of the system.
I think our civilization is lucky that printing books was invented before general education.
Otherwise we would be stuck in a situation where a few people keep saying: "couldn't we print books that contain school knowledge? so that kids could read the correct version even if their teacher makes a mistake, or could read the book at home again if they forget what the teacher said?" but most people would be yelling at them: "don't you dummies realize that a mere book can never replace an actual human teacher? a human can react in real time to what kids are doing or saying, can answer their questions, etc." "But we are not talking about replacing teachers with textbooks. How about having teachers *and* textbooks? That way, one teacher could perhaps teach 20 kids in a classroom at the same time, so we would need fewer teachers than we do with 1:1 tutoring." "No; education is our sacred value, and any compromises are completely unacceptable!"
Luckily, the books were invented before general education, so it is okay to use a book in the classroom. It's just not okay to use anything that was invented later, such as videos, interactive application, computer testing, etc. Don't you know that mere movie or a computer cannot replace an actual human being?
Great comment. I will just add that pretty much every classroom in the US has a TV or projector for showing videos, computers and Ipads are ubiquitous in the classroom, and adaptive computer based testing like MAP is ubiquitous. We've transitioned to using all this technology with minimum pushback from teachers and parents.
When you show up to school you recognize that you can walk out the front door or play hooky. No matter how much pressure society or your parents put on you, you know you are essentially there by choice. And standing in front of you is some lady who is inexplicably dedicated to making sure you grok Beowulf. She is relentless, and no matter how much of a nitwit goon you are, she perseveres. You don't remember anything about the bear, but you get that humans have been writing stuff for thousands of years, and in spit of modernity we are somehow the same as we always were. Plus you met this girl, and that is why you showed up semi regularly.
Zoom lectures? Most teens are not watching those, but they will still show up to the the tutoring sessions for the hang, which is going to be really tricky for those tutors to navigate. That is why the zoom lecture/tutoring method is not used more.
It is not uncommon for schools enroll students in online classes (usually specialized subjects like AP physics, IB Econ etc) A teacher will be a mentor or overseer. This does decrease the number of teachers needed, especially in smaller schools.
As Carl Pham mentions below, the problem is that while this model may work for college (because the students are older, and pre-selected for intelligence and interest in the subject, and should at least theoretically have the self-discipline to do the work), it is a much different kettle of fish for younger children.
For 12-15 year olds, I think it would be much more difficult. And for 4-12, impossible.
EDIT: You would also need to keep a very tight rein so that educational fads weren't included (and I'm not talking about the culture war "As a teacher, I am truly oppressed by not being able to tell my class about how I'm polyamorous and bisexual with my husband and girlfriend") but things like this account of the wars over teaching reading: studies showed that the old-fashioned method of phonics gave better outcomes, but teachers hated it, opposed it, and insisted on the Latest Trendy Fad. Now some teachers are trying to get the old ways back, but good luck with that:
Sure. There was this widget called the printing press, invented in 1450ish, which allowed the great minds to write down very carefully the best possible instruction in a subject matter and have it widely distributed at tiny cost. Eventually completed changed education, from a 1:1 (or 1:5 say) teacher:student ratio in Aristotle's day to what we have now.
But what we have now is stable for entirely different reasons, I think. It's not about the best possible delivery of the subject material -- this has long ago been delegated to the textbook, or assorted pseudo-textbooks (e.g. videos and Internet thingies). What the teacher does *now* is mostly centered around what you might call education nursing care, what an RN does for patients pre- and post-surgery in the hospital: unsnarling unexpected kinks, observing and assisting with exceptions and dysfunction, providing a human face that inspires effort by students who are wired to please authority figures, maintaining a positive social climate, keeping civil peace, tending the emotional well-being of the students.
These things all demand a certain modest teacher:student ratio because there is a limit to the bandwidth the teacher's mind has -- she can only keep track of 2-3 dozen other human beings before stuff starts to slip by even the most apparently psychic, with eyes in the back of the head and on top. In college where the students are more self-reliant, socially, you can up this to anywhere beween 100 to 1000 or probably 5000 without much harm. But at the K-12 level it's impossible for one person to keep track of the emotional state of 50 or more 10-year-olds, and have an accurate "read of the room" for social currents, so that's where we're stuck.
About the printing press. Yes, it was great, although for a further century the hand written book eclipsed the printing press for output, and not because the press was complicated to make, but people preferred the hand written volume and there were a lot of people who were trained to copy write books. But what the press did do, in terms of education, was print off Alphabet posters - in one Venetian warehouse destroyed by fire in c.1500 more than 10,000 (!) alphabet posters were discovered by modern-day archeologists. The result of the proliferation of alphabet posters was increased literacy, and the primary purpose of the posters was in pedagogy. I do not think though, that the press greatly increased the number of authors and the translation or commentary on the classics remained the primary form of writing. Our present-day need for new interpretations and for each student to say something new was not part of European education then (and is still not part of education everywhere). When all students learned the same texts, at the same time, then class sizes of 100 to 150 students were both common and efficient. Whether the individual education outcomes of the present day are superior is a matter for another discussion.
That only works *if* all the kids are on the same basic level of understanding and attainment, you've got small class sizes, and you are going for "extruded grade-attaining product" not education.
Give the kids the potted highlights curriculum so they can select the right answers on a multiple-choice test marked by machine? Perfect!
Actually teach them history (or at least, the ones who are interested in history)? Or any other subject? Nope.
The *real* teaching would be done by the 'part-time teaching assistants' and, depending on whether little Johnny gets retired Joe the former mailman or Sally, the college student doing a degree in History and doing this as a summer-vacation nixer, the level of teaching is going to vary wildly. (Lest anyone think I am looking down my nose at Joe, if he really does have a love of history, then he might be a *great* choice). But in general, if you depend on volunteers and parents, you are going to get "Ah, yeah, okay, Second World War was 1939-1945 and Hitler was the bad guy" level of teaching.
I honestly don't get what is this perpetual desire to do away with real, live teachers and replace them all by technology. "I was a smart kid who loved maths and taught myself by reading the textbooks, so every kid can do the same for every subject!" is the best guess I can make on this.
Have any of you ever stood up in front of a class of secondary school age pupils and tried teaching? (Despite having no qualifications for teaching at all, I got roped into doing this for my old school because the science teacher was out sick and since I was already doing preparing the science lab for them, I was asked to take - which really was mostly supervise - science classes. And religion. And study sessions. Look, it's a long story, the moral of which for me was "I definitely do not want to be a teacher").
You can't do it by Zoom and one teacher, preferably just a part-time unqualified supervisor, overseeing a class of fifty little peppers all full of zeal to learn the heck out of the subject. Whatever the subject. You'll have a mixed range of ability and kids who (a) hate this subject with a passion (me and maths) (b) kids who love this and want to advance (c) the bulk of the class who are just doing this because it's one of the subjects on the curriculum and they want to do the least work to get a passing grade.
Thanks for your reply. I think there are two main competing priorities, at least in my mind, we’re trying to balance and where I think technology might be able to help:
1. Class size/Instructor:student ratio
2. Cost
On 1) I believe maximizing 1:1 or as close to 1:1 in-person teaching time would lead to the best educational outcomes. I imagine we align pretty closely on the idea that in a world of high quality teacher-abundance, every K-12 student would have a personal tutor, paid for by the state, who had subject-matter knowledge and real motivation to teach. Obviously, the whole day wouldn’t just be spent with your tutor, as we want to build socialization + collaboration skills too. But the core teaching/lesson-giving/asking and answering subject questions I think benefits the most from as close to a 1:1 instructor:student ratio as possible.
On 2) Cost-efficacy of K-12 education - while I think we’d be more than justified in spending an order of magnitude more on K-12 education, I haven’t seen much evidence this is politically viable in the near-term.
Maybe all it takes to deliver higher quality education is the mean salary for teachers shooting up to six figures+, incentivizing more (and possibly more intelligent) people to go into teaching, schools having the funds to hire this hopefully near-surplus of new teachers, and the result being smaller class sizes with higher quality in-person teachers. I just honestly don’t think this is possible or is likely to become possible for a long time.
So, instead, I’m thinking about ways technology can decrease cost of education while increasing the quality. One way to do that, maybe, would be getting the “best” teachers to teach the most students. I don’t think, as the commenter above stated, this is necessarily through using lots of asynchronous content like Khan Academy (although I do think Khan Academy is an awesome resource for self-learning) so much as it is technology possibly allowing larger synchronous classes (akin to when my college lectures went online during covid but still allowed for live q&a on part of students) with the best teachers teaching core content via Zoom and then in-person tutors (themselves possibly being instructed by the super-teachers) supplementing the core lessons and facilitating in-person discussion, projects, etc.
To be clear, I have relatively low confidence (~30%) that this would definitely be a better model than our current one - but I have relatively high confidence (~75%) it would be worth trying at the high school or even middle school level and seeing what the results are. Which is why I’m curious if anyone anywhere is actually trying a model like this…
There seems to be little political will to actually improve education. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it seems not to be just "the other team" mucking things up. However, this shouldn't stop us from speculating about what systems that will never be implemented could be better. After all, the smart people in this comment section like doing things like calculating how many trains it would take on what schedules to make Neom work, with no concern whatever that the place won't be built. That having been said, I submit the solution is:
Machine Learning trending towards Machine Teaching.
Children in a virtual narrow-AI-assisted educational panopticon that tracks their eye movements and dishes out rewards and punishments in some partially game-ified manner will fully individualize learning. Unfortunately or fortunately, such children will also be evaluated in real-time for their genuine cognitive capacity, leading to enormous amounts of chagrin when it turns out that not every child is equally educable. Unfortunately or fortunately, by then we'll either be living on UBI or toiling in the paperclip mines, so this won't matter as much as anxious parents might think.
There's enormous political will to actually improve education. Most states spend about half their budget on public education. We have a Federal Department oF Education, notwithstanding the Constitution gives no powers at all to the Federal government with respect to it (barring the service academies). Every 2 or 3 years, we have a new school bond measure, a measure to reform education this way or that, new state standards, new state tests, curriculum reform, Federal mandates of this or that form. There are few things in which the electorate fiddles around more consistently and expensively.
But improving education for reals -- meaning the ultimate outcome is better educated adults after 13 years of effort -- is like improving physical fitness or losing weight: all the pain is up front, and all the reward is well down the line.
For people to end up more mentally fit, they have to endure increased levels of discomfort and effort, the same way they do if they to want to be more physically fit. No pain, no gain. Students need to study longer hours. They need to be compelled to learn faster, to fail more often, to come closer to the limits of their abilities. They need to feel bad because they didn't grok something more often, and be more afraid of the humiliation of being left behind, so they try much harder.
Which all sounds miserable, and it is. So just as in the case of physical fitness and losing weight, the air is absolutely filled with cons, swindles, and Get-Smart-Fast schema that promise A Free Lunch. You can lose weight *without* feeling hungry! And not only that, you can be more educated *without* feeling stupid, without staying up late sweating over incomprehensible gobbledegook until a glimmer of sense shows through. Just take this equivalent of educational amphetamines and you will feel 100% smarter right away.
"They need to feel bad because they didn't grok something more often, and be more afraid of the humiliation of being left behind, so they try much harder."
Shaming only works if the capability is there and it's laziness or lack of effort that is holding someone back. Believe you me, I cried real tears over not being able to 'grok' maths like everyone else did, and I got the "well you're perfectly capable in all the other subjects, so it must be that you are lazy not stupid" from teachers (as well as blazing rows with my father when he tried explaining the maths homework to me and I still Did. Not. Get. It).
You could have beaten me like a donkey, and you would not have improved my mathematical performance. What *did* work for my entire Junior Cert class was pure fear instilled in us by our maths teacher who had the herculean task of fitting three years' work into one year, and succeeded by terrorising us (you can't beat education by nuns!) so that everyone - including myself - at least scraped a pass in the state exam. But that was pure rote memorisation and no understanding on my part.
So yeah, your pedagogical method would certainly have worked to instill shame and humiliation in younger me, but would *not* have achieved improvement in mathematical attainment. Like tone-deafness for music, you can't make something happen if the capacity is not there originally.
(When I say "terrorised", I mean precisely that, and it was achieved not by violence - corporal punishment was not allowed in schools any more by that time - or raised voice and temper tantrums; just quiet, steely menace. We had a new teacher for the first two years of the course and he didn't cover everything adequately so our third year teacher had to revise all the course work we *should* have done as well as the new material. And when I say "fear", yes, because one time I was holding a piece of paper in my hand waiting to go up and recite the theorem we had learned, and the paper was shaking because I was trembling with fear. Oddly enough, meeting her outside of class years later, she was much more pleasant. But in the classroom? Hoo boy!)
Well, yeah, neither the carrot nor the stick works on someone who's already trying his or her best. But...you are certainly aware that this description does not, alas, apply to all students. Not even most of them.
And I only emphasized the stick because there's a large current demographic that thinks you can achieve it all with just the carrot. Unfortunately, that is also not true of human beings in general. We are generically lazy, and at some point the expense of the carrot required to get us off our asses is exorbitant compared to the price of a similarly-motivating stick. So we mortal sinners need both to do our best.
The general point I'm trying to make is that I think the major component of improved student outcomes is necessarily increased student effort, which will not be fun, for the same reason bumping up one's gym workout from once a week to thrice isn't fun.
Plus I think almost all nostrums which promise significantly improved outcomes for *no* significant increase in student effort are attractive scams just like the scams that promise to let you lose weight without eating less and exercising more.
So in general I view someone who says "We should improve educational outcomes! It would be easy! We only don't do it because of [insert conspiracy theory, conclusion that everyone's a moron, no one's ever thought of this here]" as a Pied Pier hawking snake oil, a politician taking the low road to re-election, or a naif.
I think there is a way to hack learning. Just like it's possible to get and stay fit by participating in engaging and exciting activities like hiking or group sports, there must be a way to present the material in a way that makes learning exciting and interesting. Difficult, yes, but the way a tough video game is difficult, not the way walking uphill in wet socks with pneumonia is difficult.
The problem is designing a learning experience that can actually deliver that.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue is that teaching is a mass profession. There are over 3 million teachers in the U.S. That's, like, 1% of the population. If course, if you got the top 1%, that'd be one thing but for the most part the top one percent will end up in much more lucrative and/or intellectually demanding fields.
Increasing the pay and the prestige of the teaching profession could potentially nudge things in the right direction but it would come with a huge cost, considering just how many people you'll have to recruit.
I think there's only so much "exciting! fun!" you can make of learning, there does come the part where only hard slogging will get your through. You have to grind on, learning the rules, doing the homework, practice practice practice, and the rote memorisation. If you like the subject and/or have any capacity for it, you'll put up with this to get where you want to go. If you're only doing this for good grades on a test, you'll put up with it and then, once the test is done or you've left school, with a sigh of relief promptly forget everything you crammed into your skull.
But there is that "I know tomorrow my joints will ache and my muscles burn and my socks are wet and there's another five miles to go" element of all learning, no matter how fun! exciting! modern! your educational methods.
Flipped classro style? You watch Khan Academy lectures as homework and in class you do the exercises while the teacher walks around and answers questions?
A current fad which is doing incalculable damage, that. It has the major advantages (to the educational bureaucracy) of slowing down the pace of learning, since Socratic Q-and-A necessarily delivers new information far less efficiently than a good lecture (because the organization of the material, such as it has, is from the student -- the newbie -- instead of the teacher -- the master), and it socializes the cost of ignorance, since everything is a group project and the completely clueless are dragged along by the good-to-average students around him. Both effects improve grades *and* make the students happier with their outcomes, since who wouldn't be happy with the same grade for less average effort?
But genuine learning, which is always and everywhere an individual task -- nobody can master d/dx e^-bx for you, you've got to grok the principle all by your lonesome -- suffers, I think. You end up willy nilly with a significant expansion of Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
I think you're misunderstanding the "fad". The students DO watch a lecture first. The whole point here is that live time with a teacher need not be spent on a lecture since a good lecture can be recorded and shown at any time to any number of people. Then the much more valuable time face to face with an expert can be spent on improving the understanding of tougher bits rather than delivery of the basics.
That would only be true if the total classroom time were subtantially expanded. Basically you're just talking about the lecture + recitation model, which has been in use for centuries.
The current fad is by contrast basically replacing the lecture with a bigger recitation, and not adding to the total instructional time. So the components of the lecture have to get squeezed into some other and smaller space, where they lose a significant amount of their effectiveness. Sure, maybe a video. That is considerably less valuable than an actual in-person lecture, because it is 100% passive. If you've ever given a successful talk, you know that it is highly interactive, even if the audience says nothing out loud. The good lecturer "reads the room" and adjusts his or her pace, content, and style to capture and hold the interest and information absorption rate of the audience.
Furthermore, human beings are naturally better tuned to an in-person lecture, and will pay greater attention, especially to subtle non-verbal cues that come from tone of voice, expression, gesture, and so on -- and thereby learn more. There's a darn good reason why people prefer to get critical communications in person -- why nobody likes to be fired or get a grave medical diagnosis by Zoom meeting.
Good points about the benefits of in-person lectures, however, they can be somewhat offset by a few counterpoints.
1) Due to teaching being a mass profession, a lot of the in-person lectures end up being delivered by mediocre lecturers. Online lectures can be delivered by brilliant teachers and scaled massively.
2) Online lectures allow for pausing and Googling to clarify a difficult passage or rewinding. Questions could be asked by viewers and addressed by experts, creating permanent comment threads that one could refer to at any time but that could go far more in-depth than random questions asked during the lecture.
These two points could offset the drawbacks of online instruction. Or not. A lot would depend on the actual implementation.
I don't disagree with you on those points, and if you're suggesting a more multimedia form of "textbook" for people who learn better that way, I'm all for it.
But I would view this as chipping away at the role of the textbook, not really replacing the role of the teacher. As I said elsewhere, I don't really think the role of the teacher, except at the most advanced levels, is primarily the exquisitely crafted delivery of expert information. Even in college, most instructors just pretty much follow a textbook (sometimes that they assign, sometimes that from which they learned themselves). Not until you get to the graduate seminar does it become reasonaby common to totally design your own curriculum and mode of delivery.
So by me the primary job of the teacher is to take care of the human aspects of education. Keep track of the students, get to know them, judge how much they can absorb and how fast, assess whether methods of instruction are working or not, inspire students, motivate them, place the information in context, and so on. Stuff that is for the most part outside the plain communication of info -- which, I think, is done quite well by a textbook, and I agree with you can also be done with videos for people who like to see and hear stuff more than read it.
As far as I can tell the people heavily invested in a manned mission to Mars don't expend a lot of effort trying to predict when that will happen. They may discuss the issue, argue about when it is likely to happen, but they don't try to predict. In contrast, the people heavily invested in AGI, whether or AGI itself or out of fear about AI going rogue, these people do expend a lot of effort trying to predict when AGI will happen. Why?
That is, we have two (possibly overlapping) groups of people heavily invested in two different kinds of future technology. One group tries to predict when their favored technology will emerge, the other group does not. Why the difference?
I suspect because there's basically nothing else to talk about with AGI; it's not well-enough understood. Whereas with Mars, the technical challenges are all easy for the chattering classes to understand and form opinions on.
Well, it makes a big difference in everyone's life whether AGI happens in 2035 or 2085. By contrast, the only person who really cares whether it is 2035 or 2085 for the Mars trip is Elon Musk.
FWIW, even if mankind does have a future in space, a permanently inhabited lunar habitat is a much more significant milestone than a visit to Mars.
I haven't seen this dynamic personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is treating both groups too homogenously, but taking the premise at face value:
Perhaps it's because AGI is much more of a a pure technical question: there aren't a ton of regulatory or other hurdles in the way of AGI (at least not currently), someone could invent it in their basement, essentially. And there's various metrics you can make trendlines out of and try to predict where things are moving: AI performance metrics, network size, etc.
Whereas in the MM2M case, while there's definitely technical hurdles, it seems like the bulk of the hurdles are not technical: the main hurdle is either a government or a private company deciding that it's worth the money to try to make it happen, and you can't put a nice trendline on that.
Yeah I don't think there are actually any technical hurdles. We already know how to get people there and have them live there with some measure of safety. We just don't want to spend the resources or accept the current level of risk.
AGI might in the extreme case not even be possible.
Honestly if I were a nation state or large space firm I would already be sending people and resources up there non-stop, if only to stake a claim. Yes some people would die, but I have a secret for you, everyone dies. It is a much simpler problem if you view it as a one way trip, and there would be no shortage of recruits.
The U.S. government is the richest organization in the history of the world. It is also, not coincidently, the only organization to put people on the moon. If Musk ends up having anything to do with going to Mars, it will because NASA contracts out some of the work to him (as they have already done with the Artemis program).
Space-Ex spends what a billion a year? A little more? Don't think getting a person to Mars would take more than a couple billions. Would probably be more expensive than curiosity, though I am not sure how much (2-4X?).
Thinking over these comments plus some thoughts of my own, I observe that we know a great deal about the technical requirements of a manned mission to Mars. My sense is that the area of largest uncertainty is the mental and physical health of humans spending that much time away from earth's gravity, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. Otherwise, it's mostly a matter of whether or not we're willing to commit the resources to the job.
AGI is something else. We really don't know how to do it. If we did, there would be multiple projects targeted directly at it. As it is, all we have are ideas and theories and lots of things we don't know. So we're left trying to predict when it will happen, as though it were something outside our control in the way the weather is, or another pandemic. And, given how vague the idea is, the more elaborate prediction efforts strike me as Rube Goldbergesque in complexity, more epistemic theater than anything else.
The rocket that sent curiosity need to carry curiosity, plus the parachute. A rocket carrying people would need to carry an air-filled compartment filled with people, the equipment to keep the air fresh, enough food to last for the months-long journey, and also enough food and fuel to make it back (unless the plan is "go to Mars and starve there").
A) What is wrong with go to Mars and starve there? I don't think I would plan on anyone coming back for many many missions. Too much additional cost for little additional gain. We got more than enough people.
B) Yeah they will need food and air etc.
C) You don't need to send everything in the same launch.
If I were rich enough I could predict the hour the first man will land on Mars with 100% accuracy (barring any particularly nasty fatal accidents) by just... paying for the mission and setting the launch date. It's just a question of when someone will do it.
I found myself unsubscibed from this substack. Any idea why that might have happened? I thought I'd seen nothing from ACX for a while and came to this manually, that's how I knew I'd been unsubscribed. Normally, I receive an email when a new post appears.
Did you get unsubscribed, or just stop getting alerts? I am still subscribed, but I've stopped getting the posts in the substack "inbox" page. I have still not figured out how to fix this and have just been checking the substack manually every other day or so
It might be a good thing. To present myself as an extreme outlier in this regard, I'm not subscribed to anything, anywhere. If I want to see what someone is up to I have to remember that person exists and type enough words into a browser to bring up a feed. This is purely for my own benefit -- a "pull" rather than a "push". For instance instead of just being told when Rolf Degen throws something onto twitter, I have to think "i'm in the right cognitive space at the moment to read abstracts of papers that probably won't replicate, let's see what this guy has found since I checked last."
@Meetups: why not publish the available list around Aug 24th as planned, and then invite a second round of applications for organizers ... and publish an extended list say two weeks later?
I might organize sth. if there isn't an organizer in my place (I guess there is), but I simply don't have the time *now* to sign up.
I think that would be worse. Not everyone reads the original announcement, and if you give people an out of "but you can do it later" then fewer people will sign up to begin with, and then they might not even remember that they meant to sign up and miss the announcement for the second round of sign-ups.
I don't believe you can't spare the few minutes that it takes to sign up. You can check the option of "don't publish my meetup if there is someone else organizing", you can leave the location as "TBD" and if it turns out you don't have time to organize it after all, you can cancel it and no one would hold it against you. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Scott wrote repeatedly about Prospera, the startup city in Honduras.
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:
I recently heard an interview with Ye Tao, founder of the MEER project which aims to reflect sunlight back into space to help cool the climate.
I was surprised by his claim that at least 1.5°C of additional global warming is already baked in, irrespective of decarbonisation, on account of a net energy influx of 1.5W per square metre. Also that if all coal plants shut now, it would actually temporarily exacerbate the problem as reflective matter produced by burning coal would dissipate from the atmosphere much faster than the cooling effect from the decreased CO2. (Note that he was not shilling for coal – he very much agrees that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, he just thinks reducing the energy influx is even more urgent.)
Does anyone know any papers supporting these claims, and more generally whether whether they are generally accepted or in conflict with the mainstream predictions for warming?
So the reason why a certain amount of warming is "baked in" is because of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere + relatively large lag times on warming to equilibrium. Which is why a lot of people are focusing on long-ish term projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere (once we are actually done emitting it at least). Additionally, the claim that immediate stoppage of all fossil fuels would result in short term increased warming from reduction in reflective materials also seems to be pretty mainstream.
I suppose mirrors could work but I'm skeptical that A) costs would be lower than air-capture carbon and b) that there wouldn't be significant knock on effects from reflecting enough sunlight, even if you do it over the ocean.
Sunlight does things _other_ than heating the planet. Removing carbon from the air is pretty much the only way to reverse warming that we can be relatively certain won't have any significant unintended consequences, since all it's doing is reversing what we did in the first place. Every other option is just adding a new alteration on top of the existing alteration, and predicting outcomes from those changes is difficult.
I'm not necessarily against other options, but I'm going to need a fair bit of convincing to overcome my prior that the ideal scenario is
1) First stop as much carbon emitting as is reasonably possible (ideally all fossil fuel burning)
2) Begin working on removing and storing atmospheric carbon to closer to pre-industrial levels.
"Removing carbon from the air is pretty much the only way to reverse warming that we can be relatively certain won't have any significant unintended consequences, since all it's doing is reversing what we did in the first place."
Other than browning the planet? CO2 is an input to photosynthesis, and if you read the IPCC report carefully you can find the passage where they report that total coverage of the planet with plants has increased, probably due to the increase in CO2.
Also, of course, reducing the amount of CO2 reduces the yield of C3 plants — all the important crops except maize, sugarcane and sorghum, which are C4. And it makes all plants, including C4, more vulnerable to water shortages.
Climate change has both good and bad effects. The closest one can come to win/win is to keep the good effects and minimize the bad effects — dike against sea level rise, for instance.
"X degrees more warming is locked in even if we stop literally all emissions tomorrow" is a pretty mainstream talking point that I hear mostly from environmentalists and the anti-anti-global warming people don't seem to push back on it much (at least, not the ones who accept the basic model of why warming occurs).
So those facts generally line up with my understandings. And certainly large space shades/mirrors are one of the easier ways to engineer our way out of the problem. Doesn't take that much material, doesn't need widespread global cooperation, and doesn't require that much change from people, plus isn't directly fucking with the atmosphere like some designer aerosol would. Plus easy to "undo" (just make it be able to change shape).
Human induced climate change by us not being to control ourselves is bad and sort of lame and disgusting like someone shitting in a can next to their desk because they are too lazy to go to the bathroom. So if I was world dictator I would still absolutely want to put an immediate stop to unplanned climate change.
But my "hot" take is that despite the above, climate change also isn't the end of the world because I think in the long run humanity would have decided they wanted to warm the planet eventually.
A) Further "terraforming" of the earth is wildly cheaper than terraforming any other body in the solar system.
B) Much of the land on the earth is very high in the northern hemisphere or in Antarctica and is fairly unusable for comfortable human habitation. And in particular Antarctica is covered in ice.
C) Meanwhile the parts of the planet that are "hotter/wetter" generally have a higher carrying capacity and larger numbers of people in them by far than the parts that are "colder/drier". And despite what the alarmist might tell you, the main outcome of climate change is a warmer/wetter earth, not some global drought. The world will look more like India/Brazil, and less like Siberia/Canada/Antarctica.
Anyway, I think the current rate of change is probably quite sub optimal, likely causing more damage to the biosphere than needed (though I still think human activity & land use is 10 times the problem climate change is in terms of damage to biosphere). But a world with higher sea levels and high rain, and a higher temperature is just likely more suited to human use in the long run.
Yes losing most of the glaciers will be sad, and the "original setup" humanity found the earth in. But that setup was naturally changing constantly even on relatively small timescales, so my rational brain just isn't that concerned about it.
Would make for some great sci-fi movies as well: Technologically we have collapsed and the world is slowly freezing as nobody can figure out how to reach space in order to get-rid-of or redirect the mirrors floating far above us that are causing the problem....
Having looked into it a bit, I don't think this would be a problem; the mirrors would be put at an unstable Earth-Sun Lagrange point and would move out of position if not maintained.
Fortunately, thanks to sci-fi movies complete disregard for science, we can still watch Hollywood blockbusters about the earth freezing due to the disastrous mistake of placing mirrors.
Great summary! I agree pretty much with all of it.
Just a little pushback on C: that's very much a long-run perspective. I agree that globally speaking, the earth probably becomes more habitable for humans. But you don't mention that all our infrastructure is optimized for the current state of earth, and that the cost for relocating/readapting is pretty large. Not so much as a direct consequence of temperature, but because of changes in wind systems and water currents. Not all regions become wetter, a lot them are predicted to get drier. Let alone the political tensions that come from "winning" and "losing" countries. But yes, it won't be the end of the world, and for a new CivReal game I would also choose a warmer earth as starting condition.
One thing in the latest IPCC report I don't see mentioned much. Apparently some, but not all, projections find that climate change will result in greening the Sahara and Sahel.
I suspect the "a lot of places are expected to get drier" is pretty overblown. Basically the modelers picking out the 10% of the planet where things will be even slightly drier and being like "see droughts!", while most of the surface gets noticeably more rain.
The set of claims the models make just really isn't self consistent, unless the general default assumption is "wetter".
Another funny claim I see is that once the glaciers are gone we will lose the excess water from glacial melt, but of course if we got the climate back to say a 1900 baseline, we would also lose "excess glacial melt" since the glaciers would be growing not melting on average.
There is a timing element to glacial melt as well where historically there was some advantage to the glaciers melting during the dry season. But in many places they melt the most during the wet shoulder seasons, not the dry season, and cause extra flooding. Plus many rivers of significant have reservoirs at some point on them regardless. Anyway, it becomes hard to figure out the true impacts since so much of the work in this area is "ok here is a model with 20,000 point predictions, lets pick out the 10 worst most terrible ones out of those 20,000 and then all freak out". Makes it hard to evaluate the overall situation.
I remember a long research paper I read one time predicting the general forest spread in the northern US would move 50-100 miles north in the next couple decades, but acting as though you know, nothing would replace it. Like the tree mix from say Duluth will be on the Canadian border, and instead Duluth will be a barren wasteland of...the tree mix from around Eau Claire (but lets not talk about that or people won't be freaked out). A lot of attempts to make pretty minor changes seem eschatological.
I agree with your general point that a lot of people are overly hysterical about the negative impacts of Climate change. Anyone who thinks that humanity might wipe itself out, or that they shouldn't have children because of climate change is being ridiculous.
That being said, I disagree with your claim that climate change will be on-net positive. Yes, it's true that lots of places will get wetter. But wetter != better. In general, the climate will get more extreme, with the _average_ global impact being slightly warmer and slightly wetter but that mostly being "wet places get even wetter, dry places get even drier, hot seasons get hotter, cold seasons get colder".
And yes, northern latitudes might become more useable while southern latitudes become less, but there is a significant cost to moving industries, and even absent the cost, I'm still not convinced that it would be net positive. It would certainly be very _unequally_ positive.
In short: you're right that lots of people and much of the media are overly hysterical about the negative impacts of climate change. I'm pretty sure you are wrong about it being net positive, and even if you weren't, I'm not sure it would be moral/ethical to say "Russia and Canada will be better off so fuck Northern Africa/ SE Asia"
I don't know whether the net effect is positive or not, but there are large positive effects that get ignored in most of the public discussion. My estimate, using IPCC figures for the end of the century on their second highest emissions scenario, is that the amount of land shifted from "too cold for human habitation" to "warm enough for human habitation" is more than twice the current area of the U.S., and two or three magnitudes larger than land lost to SLR:
Of course, that land will still be pretty cold — but the pretty cold land just south of it will be less cold, and the land south of that ... . So the right first approximation is an increase in usable land of about 10.8 million square km.
The short term (even over a century) impact is likely a net negative, but the long term (over hundreds of years) is likely to be positive (particularly if done more intentionally/gradually).
And I wasn't talking about it in terms of particular countries, but more just general human habitation, obviously people would move around some.
I don't think that this is a fair account of the predictions of drier places. For the places where I have paid attention, the predictions are pretty consistent. For Europe, that's roughly speaking drier Southern (and partly Western) Europe and wetter Northern Europe.
It's not like someone has run some simulation, and picked the driest places. Or that it comes from some newspaper which makes a story. It's that for Southern Europe, several people have run lots of simulations, and it pretty consistently ended up drier, and that is what the IPCC reports ("medium confidence" for Southern Europe).
And for glaciers: I don't know too well about these things (I should, because I live close to the Alpes), but I am not convinced by what you say. Sure, the amount of water does not change with or without glaciers. But they give a constant supply over the whole summer, smoothing out the precipitation over many years. This sounds like a pretty important factor. Perhaps some rivers have sufficient reservoirs. But for the Rhine river, this is almost falling dry just now, and its reservoirs are at such low levels that they can't release more water. So right now, I don't feel reassured by a general appeal at reservoirs.
"Sure, the amount of water does not change with or without glaciers. But they give a constant supply over the whole summer, smoothing out the precipitation over many years. "
Why would that "smooth it out", in *most* places summers tend to be wetter than winters. This is the sort of thing I am talking about, taking the situation (when glaciers help smooth) that is beneficial, and acting like generally glaciers do that. The default assumption with glaciers would be that they generally are anti-smoothing, locking up moisture during the cold dry winter, and then releasing it during the warmer wetter months.
I notice the rainfall models you are refencing conveniently have almost all the increase participation happening over the middle of the pacific ocean and over the artic and antarctic. Maybe that is reality, seems kind of convenient.
Exactly the sort of thing you would project if you were developing the models based on the assumptions there are going to be more droughts and dryness, instead of developing them from first principles (these baked in assumptions are absolutely a problem with many of the climate models, where the models are fed in the results at the beginning and/or selected base don them conforming to expectations).
When I try and find historic rainfall data over our current period of warming (say 1900-2000), I see Italian and Czech rainfall up, and Spanish rainfall slightly down. Incidentally it is a lot harder than I would have thought to just get simple graphs of rainfall changes over time for points on the earth. Would seem like interesting/important data.
I worry a lot about the following:
"Climate change is going to be devastating to humans and there are going to be huge droughts" Model spits out that is not true. "Ok lets tweak the parameters until the increase rainfall is somehow all happening in place outside the OECD." Model now conforms to priors about apocalypse. "There see increased droughts and desertification from a phenomenon that is primarily going to cause more rainfall!"
Now if this wasn't such a politicized/religious issue I might take that data at face value, but too many decades of reading the main Pop-sci magazines, and listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks and such have made it crystal clear that climate alarmism is more an ideology than some reasoned position to most researchers. You have people acting like a world without the North Quebec Forest Beetle is somehow going to lead to global agricultural collapse, when really it is just going to lead to the collapse of the need for people who spend their full time researching the North Quebec Forest Beetle.
IDK if there were betting market futures on rainfall amounts in the US and Europe I would take the overs above general public or even climate scientist perceptions, and probably over the IPCC models, in pretty large amounts. There is some decent chance I am wrong, but while I have zero skepticism about climate change, I have a lot of skepticism about the supposed devastating nature of it (especially since we are like halfway through hit and the climate seems quite pleasant).
Obviously we have very different opinions on how much the IPCC can be trusted on which things. In particular, how climate models are formed. But I don't want to get into an argument here, so I'll leave it at that.
For precipitation in summer vs winter, I can easily think of lots of cases where water usage had to be restricted in summer, but I don't seem to remember a single case where it was restricted in winter. Perhaps I am wrong about the balance of water availability vs consumption in summer and winter, I haven't looked into that. But I can assure you that you are wrong with your assumption on how I formed the hypothesis.
You might want to think about how much sea level rise it takes to eliminate most coastal cities. The current IPCC projections imply about a meter at the high end by the end of the century. London's average elevation is about ten meters, and I think the lowest city in the Netherlands is eight or ten meters below sea level. Flooding coastal bits of cities with a meter of SLR is believable, losing major coastal cities everywhere is dystopian sf.
Human civilization currently exists across a wide range of climates. Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa won't make in uninhabitable.
>Human civilization is pretty optimized for the climate we've had for the past few thousand years.
Well most of that time the climate was warmer than it was in say 1900. Closer to what it was today (though not where we are headed). Also I don't think the statement is true.
> I mean, Scandinavia has done OK being cold for all of recorded history.
Sure it has. But the population of Scandinavia is smaller than the population of Florida, in large part because most people find it unpleasant (and I live somewhere very similar and don't find it unpleasant, but I am well aware that isn't the norm).
>fat-tail risks triggering much greater warming or a much worse outcome that currently predicted.
Doesn't seem to be much evidence for those, but if they did happen we do have some easy remedies in terms of engineering if needed.
I often hear about how American land was taken from indigenous peoples, but I don't know what the goal of those conversations are. When I say "hear", it's usually either in the context of a land acknowledgement ("The land we stand on belonged/belongs to the XYZ nation.") or something more general. It's hard to tell whether most of these aim to just inform people, or come with the hidden call-to-action that we should return the land to the given nation. It always falls short of being meaningful for the former, but I'm more curious about the second option.
Most of this land has been developed and inhabited by people *other* than those who initially took it. That doesn't make it right to *not* give it back, but taking it away from the current inhabitants doesn't feel right either. I was born and have been inside the USA's borders for all but one week of my life. Both of my parents (and, I believe, all of my grandparents) were natural-born citizens. Any connections I have to a "home country" in Europe are distant enough that I don't even know any relatives there. If I "returned" my land to indigenous peoples, I wouldn't have anywhere at all.
I've never seen anyone explicitly argue for returning land, but it feels like it's being heavily hinted at. Do I have that right? Has anyone written on the topic before? Are there other ideas that are out there that don't run into this issue?
The only argument I've ever heard for land acknowledgements and thought was legit is that if you're in a field that works heavily with native americans, then it's a way of showing respect to them and showing that you're on their side. Like if you're working with native american artifacts and repatriation or something. Other than that, I hate to sound like a conflict theorist, but I do think that it's likely just virtue signaling, stemming from memetically entrenched modes of thinking that all originated with Moloch. These modes of thinking generally dislike the West, and work heavily on modern Americans' and Europeans' propensity to feel guilty. That is to say, I don't think 99% of people who say this are really barking up any actionable tree to actually return land to native americans. They just want to simultaneously jump on the woke train and create an environment that's further hostile to anti-woke modes of thought.
It's not a healthy relationship if someone makes the other constantly again and again say that they wronged the other one. That sounds like an abusive relationship, one in which one party is leveraging their past hurt to manipulate the other party.
Well and particularly when neither party is the same party. It is like a relationship where one party keeps demanding apologies for the other party's great grandfather's adultery.
I think it's pettier and more cynical than that. I don't think it's about Native Americans at all. I suspect a lot of it has to do with status signalling; being concerned with human rights and being seen as empathetic is high status. If these people actually cared about Native American land they'd return it, but of course most of them are never going to (unless it's in a remote location nobody wants to live in anyway).
You see the same thing in Canada. How many of these people would actually give back the land where Toronto is built on? It's a charade.
Most responses so far fall into 'the acknowledgement is not meaningful,' 'it's actually a measure of conformity like Havel's greengrocer's sign', or 'the ultimate goal is the return of the land and/or the delegitimization of the state'. Or some combination.
There is a fourth interpretation. Why are a lot of university buildings named after rich people? Usually because those rich people donated to the university. Land acknowledgments can be seen as akin to donor recognition: a low-cost way of showing respect.
I'm having a hard time squaring "choosing the cheapest possible acknowledgement" with "showing respect." I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the concept -- I'd be delighted to show respect for the law by putting a "Blue Lives Matter!" bumper sticker on my car, instead of obeying the speed limit -- but I just can't seem to make it work out in practice.
The police have the power to actually arrest you for breaking the law. Native Americans, for the most part, only have the power to make you feel ashamed of yourself. So, what's the cheapest thing you can do that makes you not feel ashamed of yourself no matter what your local Native American activist says? Once you've done that, you can stop worrying about what can't hurt you.
For a fair number of people, that's a "land acknowledgement".
Well, if your goal is "feel good about yourself" I might argue that the cheapest possible thing you can do is pour out a stiff bourbon :)
But if your goal is to have local Native Americans not despise you, I would suggest a land acknowledgment is actually going in the wrong direction. I'm not personally of American Indian descent, but if I *were* I would hold these pious useless statements in contempt, and they would make me think less of the people making them, not more. It would feel -- as perhaps it actually is, in many cases -- like my history and heritage was being exploited to make the managerial class feel better about themselves, in which case, fuck you assholes, it's bad enough you took the land in the first place, now just shut off the self-serving crocodile tears already.
I would agree, but I don't think most of the people doing land acknowledgements have enough contact with the local Native Americans to understand whether they're despised or not. And I don't think they much care. So long as their ingroup says "you're good", they're good. If their outgroup says "how dare you!", even better. The Indians on the Rez, are the fargroup. There might be a few Native American campus activists in the ingroup, but they won't be at all representative.
There are a few calls-to-action that can come with those kinds of land acknowledgements.
One of them is, yes, return the land. Or at least, some of the land. Obviously returning all of the land is never going to happen, but it's not all-or-nothing: even giving back small parcels of land to individual tribes can be meaningful to those tribes, especially if the land in question is culturally significant or if owning it gives them access to profitable resources. And the land doesn't have to be "taken" from anybody: it can be donated, or bought. This has already happened in a few forms:
Private individuals donating land back to local tribes, e.g.:
In some cases, tribes are willing to buy land back - in this case the argument would be that if someone is selling land that was previously stolen from a tribe, that tribe should be given the right of first refusal, or otherwise prioritized as potential purchasers. California already requires utilities selling off land to do this.
I have also seen requests for other forms of reparations. For example, land taxes or other forms of cash reparations given to the tribes. I don't think this is legally required anywhere, but land acknowledgments can be one way of guilting people to donate voluntarily. And I mentioned this in another comment in this thread, but some state university systems are moving towards providing tuition waivers or other scholarships to Native American students as a form of reparations.
So yes, some people do argue for returning land, or use land acknowledgements as leverage ("ethically, you really should give back the land, but since we all know you aren't going to do that, at least give university scholarships to the descendants of the people who the land was taken from"). But you're right that it's not going to look like land being seized from the people who currently own it.
Thanks for sharing these data points. It's nice to see some actionable and in my opinion reasonable outcomes come out of all this, instead of just cynical deflections or performative statements.
...Or on tumblr, or on lefty twitter. Google "landback", OP. It's... well, it's a thing.
Seriously, if I wasn't well versed in how political memes (in the original sense) have a selection pressure towards their most inflammatory version, I'd think the "landback" movement was some right-wing troll's proposal to intentionally make the left look ridiculous.
The thing about the academic left's views on "indigenous peoples" is that if you change the target ethnicities it suddenly turns into the views of the extreme right.
The bulk of the left intelligentsia sort of hates the west, and is stuck in a childish 1970s over-reaction to the late 19th century and early 20th century "manifest destiny/white man's burden" lens/story of history and the humanities. Reacting so strongly against that and what they correctly identify as widespread historic injustice (though they seem fairly blind if it isn't committed by Europeans) that they fail to really engage their brains.
It is part of the broader "religion" that is taking hold of the left and filling in the gap that the dwindling traditional religions are leaving in people's lives. They want original sin, they want the righteous and the wicked.
I think of it like children, when children are fighting on the playground and committing injustices against each other, do you engage in a lot of soul searching and a detailed examination of what started it and who harmed who, nurturing and detailing the pain. No you do not, it is counterproductive. Instead you tell them to stop hitting each other and to forget about what happened. I really do think the "colorblind" "we are all one" method was the better long term way forward than the reigning dogma. But the problem is it leaves the people in the humanities with a lot less to do, and they need topics for their "research" papers.
I'll admit I was being subjective with that, but give my reasoning. Quite often, it feels like a fill-in-the-blanks statement or an item on a ceremonial checklist instead of actually talking about the topic. You say it at the start of your meeting or event, then proceed to do and say nothing even tangentially related to it for the rest of it. It's like saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, or singing the national anthem at a sporting event (though arguably, the national American pastime of baseball is still a somewhat relevant context).
Isn't that the point? It's a way for an external observer to quickly see who is and isn't loyal, who does - and more importantly *does not* - habitually bend the knee. The reason it feels like part of a checklist is because it is part of a checklist, just for quickly inspecting people instead of things. That's the point being made by Ninety-Three about Havel's Greengrocer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Havel's_greengrocer), things like this were invented by bureaucracies looking to make people legible (a la James C. Scott's "Seeing Like A State").
Performance has meaning too. When a Soviet greengrocer puts up a sign saying "Workers of the world, unite!" that's different from putting up no sign, even if everyone knows the man doesn't really care about the workers of the world. The message is that he behaves as authority expects him to.
Because "We acknowledge we stole your stuff but we're not going to give it back" is satisfactory to nobody. If your car is stolen, you expect to get it back (or claim the insurance). Having the chop shop issue a letter saying "We stole it, we admit it was your car" and then hang on to the money they made from stealing and selling it on, without any other consequence to them - and that it is expected everyone will congratulate them on issuing such a letter acknowledging the theft! - is ridiculous.
I have heard of this 'land acknowledgement' in the context of universities. So what are they actually doing, about this 'stolen land'? Are they handing the keys over to the remaining tribespeople? Are they paying them rent? Is this anything more than liberal white people doing virtue signalling which costs them nothing in real terms?
Starting this fall, the entire University of California system (both graduate and undergraduate programs) will waive all tuition and fees for California residents who belong to a federally-recognized tribe, as reparations for the stolen land. The Montana University system already does something similar, and I expect we'll see more universities creating similar programs as time goes on - I think Colorado is already considering it.
Basically: activists push for land acknowledgements, universities adopt them because it seems easy, and then activists can point out the ridiculousness that you mention as a way to pressure them into doing something more substantial.
I guess my perspective is: land acknowledgements have a 0% chance of leading to the US no longer existing, but a >0% chance of convincing university administrators or state legislators to give tuition benefits to Native Americans.
I don't see how it is a 0% chance though? When all the authorities open every formal event with a "Land acknowledgement" that attacks the legitimacy of the State and the legitimacy of most ethnic groups even residing there, and this movement has significant elite support, and no one willing to argue back against it...
I don't see how such a movement can logically end with anything other than the dissolution of the state and the expulsion of people of European, Asian and African ethnicity unless it's defeated. And no one seems willing to argue against it.
One use is to refute Libertarian arguments that taxation is theft: if the land itself isn't legitimately owned, then the any other idea of private property is on shaky foundations.
I don't think this is particularly true. It might be a use to which such declarations are occasionally put, but I strongly doubt it enters the mind of most people making them or hearing them.
To be blunt, the idea that taxation is theft isn't that well known, and even most of the people who have heard it reject it out of hand. It's far enough outside the overton window that most folks don't stop and reason out a rejection in their heads, they just say something like, "Huh? What? No, that's dumb.", and move on.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it's a fully generalizable argument, i.e. it could be used against *any* political and economic system that Westerners set up anywhere in the Americas. Libertarian notions of private property would be illegitimate, sure, but so would social democratic notions of redistributive government and progressive taxation and the welfare state. Just about *anything* Westerners do in Native American lands would be illegitimate, short of giving the entirety of the continent back to the Natives (which no one on either side of the political divide is seriously proposing). That makes leftist attempts to use this rhetorical weapon exclusively against right-libertarians seem transparently disingenuous.
"so would social democratic notions of redistributive government and progressive taxation and the welfare state"
I don't see why. If the legitimacy and illegitmacy of property, taxation etc, is decided by the state, then any arrangement the state wishes to make is legitimate. Libertarians need a notion of legitimacy separate from the state to be able to complain that state actions are illegitimate. Statists don't.
Theft needs to be a very specific kind of deligitmizing if stolen land can host legitimate government but not legitimate libertarian industry. Seems disingenuous.
Hold on, that's not the argument! "All land is stolen" points to "all property is theft" but you can't get from there to "taxation *isn't* theft". Taxation might arguably not be theft if it was in service of returning the thing in question but if you tax settlers and spend it on something other than natives that's just stealing stolen property a second time.
Some property survives that objection. Sure my claim to own a car is complicated if the car was made with metal from stolen land, but the Harry Potter IP isn't derived from land (yes technically Rowling had to sit somewhere while she wrote, but the land wasn't *relevant* to the production like it was for physical goods).
I don't actually think so-called "intellectual property" is really property in the same way that land is, though. Copyright, trademarks and patents are all limited privileges granted by the government to encourage creation, to help consumers make purchase decisions, or to spur the public disclosure of inventions - but morally, they aren't and can't be regarded as similar physical property rights.
If they were like physical property rights, I would ask why all of them except for trademarks have limited duration? Just as one can pass on a parcel of land in perpetuity (barring imminent domain, or failure to pay property taxes), shouldn't one be able to pass on intellectual property rights in perpetuity then?
But aside from some self-important artists, and some greedy companies most people recognize that this isn't how things should work. Ideas being owned by one family line, or one corporation for all of time is a terrible way to set things up - especially if all of the modern baggage of derivative works comes with it. Over time, the number of legally expressible ideas would shrink and shrink until all of the ideas had been mined, and no one would be able to say almost anything worth saying anymore.
I think the similarity is a bit deeper. When a copyright or patent expires, that does not actually give people the right to your creation. If you have, for example, kept it secret, nobody can demand it from you, as they could demand access to a piece of public land on which you were squatting. So as long as you "defend" your property by keeping enough of it private that no one can duplicate it (and all property needs an active defense to remain yours, including land), you are entitled to sole use of it in any way you see fit. Nobody can compel you to reveal it, or use it in any way, or at all.
I think perhaps a better view of patents and copyrights is that they are like a real estate sale and rent-back. The state buys your intellectual property from you (in the interest of fostering other inventions, and for the public good generally), and your payment is a multiyear leasehold on your (former) property, with the burden of its defense now resting to a large extent on the state -- you no longer have to try to keep it secret, you can merely notify[1] the state someone has attempted to copy your work and the state will enjoin that by force.
But you are not *obliged* to sell your creative work to the state. You can keep it a trade secret[2] if you prefer, and maintain your control over it forever. (Obviously this poses practical difficulties of significance, but the principle is clear enough.)
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[1] Which of course might be very expensive on an objective basis.
[2] Note that idea of trade secrets as property is well established, which is why you can recover damages from someone who reveals yours in breach of some agreement.
Are you sure that most people agree with you on IP? Neither side has an overwhelming majority but when you get down to the basics, a *lot* of people share the instinct of "I made that, you can't just take it" even when the thing is as abstract as literature.
I don't think most people have thought very deeply about IP, and many of those that supposedly have only think about what IP law means for their own works, not the health of the overall media environment of society.
I think *physical* property already has a problem of sorts, after the homesteading phase. Once all the virgin soil has been claimed by people, what incentive does the rest of society have to accept a world where they don't and can't own sufficient land holdings to eek out a living because of an accident of their birth, while large parcels of land owned by absentee landlords never gets properly developed? (And there's the additional issue of, why should farmers who do all of the work on a piece of land have to pay rent to a guy whose great great grandfather homesteaded it, and got lucky several generations back? If the initial act of claiming and developing land is sufficient for a property claim, morally why is the person actually doing the work today not entitled to more than whatever a landlord can extort from him?)
How much more so would this happen with so-called "intellectual property" if it was perpetual? There'd be no Disney, because all of the folklore they got big off of would have belonged to someone forever. Maybe people would like that, but it would affect all smaller creators as well. Should the distant relative of Shakespeare have veto rights over his great-whatever ancestor's creation, just because of an accident of birth meant that he inherited the rights to those works, even though he wasn't involved in their creation at all?
I think the solution in both these regards is some sort of wealth tax. Though it is kind of a nightmare to setup and enforce. Basically people can only afford to hold property they are making active use of.
Though the sunset of IP after some number of decades has been a fairly good solution there.
But for material property the main levers against accumulation that seem to make sense are wealth taxes and making sure externalities are properly accounted for and taxed.
If the land isn't legitimately owned, the idea that the government has the right to levy taxes from people on land it never justly acquired is on even shakier foundations.
If the government is the source of legitimacy and can declare taxation to not be theft, why can it not simply declare the seizure of land from natives to not be theft? Of course that's kind of a moot point, seeing as that's exactly what has happened in practice. But if theft is "taking something from others by force, but it doesn't count when the government says it's ok" then the land in question cannot be stolen by definition, seeing as the government at the time explicitly approved of the seizure and to this day enforces contracts in favor of the non native owners.
This is because in the US you have an obvious line separating evil white settlers from noble natives.
Meanwhile Europe has always been a clusterfuck of borders and states with varying degrees of legitimacy. The city I live in historically had like four different ethnic majorities over its lifetime, and had five political affilitations in the last century. Around here the reasonable response to "give back the territories" is "to whom?".
That only increases the potential for trolling. Like, imagine giving a lecture at a university in Slovakia, and starting by solemnly saying: "We acknowledge that the land this university is standing on traditionally belongs to the Hungarian empire."
I was surprised to read through these replies and not see anybody point this out earlier. Those indians stole the land from other indians, they're not some sort of paragons of virtue. I think it's all part of the extremely strong tendency of the left toward a noble-savage narrative where they conveniently fumble away things like the habitual torture of captives and which, as usual, ends with the lefties in question needing to have a paternalistic oversight over the holy innocents and also everybody else.
I guess that's why Trebuchet got all these responses and also why people were happy to restate *other* equally obvious historical realities for discussion, eh.
"imaginary 'leftist academics'"
There's something in this testy denial of another obvious historical and contemporary reality that reminds me of De Boer's https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what. Presumably you must actually know that academia is in fact about 97% leftist and that all of these corrosive, ridiculous reality-denying ideas on the left have come out of it. Nothing imaginary about that. So why try to deny it anyway? "The right started the Culture War!"
What the widespread adoption of this strategy suggests to me is that you don't think you can win if others can see the situation clearly.
I know personally one (1) leftist academic who studies intelligence and knows very well that it's hereditary like every other trait. That in no way means that blank-slatism isn't a product of the wider left-academic culture. Besides, who do *you* claim is pushing these silly ideologies? Right-wing oil barons? Independent manual laborers? You must know very well which class and political alignment this guff is emanating from. I don't care whether you think the horse is dead; the bare fact is it's still up and running, so hand me my club.
"as opposed to just believing they were savages period and it's a good thing we displaced them and destroyed their cultures?"
No, it doesn't have to be a good thing to make land acknowledgments silly and idiotic, just a neutral thing. Our stealing the land from Tribe A wasn't better, just *not worse* than them stealing it from Tribe B. Thus we have nothing to be ashamed of visavi Tribe A, and we owe them nothing.
Are you claiming that while pre-Columbian actions of native tribes do not damage their claim to the land, the post-Columbian European conquest does damage Europeans' claim to the land?
This is something that really bothers me here in Australia. There's a little plaque in a park near my house which mentions (as part of a general explanation of local history) that the area was occupied for 25,000 people by the [Local Tribe] people.
This is, of course, almost certainly bullshit. Tribes move around, they split, they combine, and they change their names. We don't know how long any specific tribe had been in any specific area prior to when they were first recorded in the 18th-19th centuries.
In the Southwest, shouldn't we acknowledge that the land was stolen from Mexico -- and then shouldn't it be Mexico's responsibility to acknowledge they stole it from Spain and then Spain's responsibility to thumb their noses at the Native Americans? We know in what order what was stolen from whom -- can't we acknowledge it all?
It could be worse. Wikipedia tells me the ownership of Transylvania has (in reverse order) been claimed (violently) by the Romanians, Nazis, Hungarians, Austrians, Hungarians again, Mongols, Hungarians, Bulgurs, Slavs, Avars, Gepids, Huns, Visigoths, Carpi, Romans, Dacians, Noua, Wietenberg, Monteoru, Otomani, Periam-Pecica, and Baden cultures in the Bronze Age, Gornesti, Decea, Petresti, Turdas and Starcevo-Cris cultures in the late Stone Age, and probably some Neanderthals before that.
No evidence that *anybody* legitimately bought and paid for Transylvania, and registered a deed down at the court house, if only in cuneiform on a clay tablet. Certainly the only fair thing to do is distribute Transylvania to all the red-headed people of Europe, presumably the closest living descendants of the Neanderthals. There are about 30 million redheads in all of Europe, assuming 4% of a population of 740 million, and Transylvania is about 100,000 km^2, so it looks everybody gets deed to about 1/2 to 3/4 of an acre, if we leave a little room for rivers and mountains.
Precisely. Conquest and empire-building has existed on every piece of usefully inhabitable land for all of human history. It's very silly to assert that the actions of conquerors four generations in the past require reparations today, while the actions of conquerors six (or ten, or etc) do not.
It's much wiser to focus all that energy on these attempting conquest and empire-building *right now* (China, et al).
That's something that bothers me as well, as it seems to be part of a broader tacit assumption that indigenous cultures existed in some kind of stasis before Europeans showed up.
To the contrary, there was considerable turnover in polities, cultures, and ethnicities in the Americas prior to 1492. The biggest examples are probably the Aztec and Incan Empires were less than a century old, having started their respective expansions in 1428 and 1438, and even the city-states from which they grew were only a century or two older (~1325 for Tenochtitlan and some time in the early 1200s for Cusco).
For that matter, Viking settlement in Greenland might actually predate the arrival of the Thule Culture ancestors of modern Native Greenlanders: the Norse settlers originally found southern Greenland uninhabited with ruins of prior Early Dorset Culture settlement that had died off or been abandoned quite some time previously. Part of northern Greenland had since been resettled by members of the Late Dorset Culture, which was replaced by the apparently-unrelated Thule Culture within a century or two in either direction of the arrival of the Norse settlers in the South. Norse sagas record contact via sea trade (and a failed attempt to colonize the Dorset-inhabited coast of Vinland/Newfoundland) with both the Dorset Culture and the Thule Culture.
This doesn't justify the conduct of post-1492 European conquistadors and settlers, of course, nor should it be read to minimize the impact: invaders with muskets and cannons are going to tend to do a lot more damage than invaders with bows and spears.
What Rwanda showed is that given local military dominance, militiamen with machetes backed up by soldiers with guns are capable of massacring large numbers of completely unarmed civilians. But I'd expect some kind of local military military dominance to be a necessary precondition for retail genocide.
My claim in not that guns are a necessary or sufficient condition for conquest or genocide, which I absolutely agree they are not. My claim is that European weaponry in the 16th and 17th century was substantially qualitatively better than the weaponry of the natives they encountered, and that advantage served as a significant force multiplier that made European colonization considerably harsher on the natives than had they shown up with comparable military technology to the natives.
I mean... yes, literally — some conflicts *were* undoubtedly spurred by European contact somewhere — but what relevance: the *exact same thing* had been happening previously too.
The Arawak were on their last legs before Columbus; the Iroquois had been fighting Algic neighbors forever; the Comanche were pushing back the Apache before the Spanish got anywhere close; the entire continent had been taken from an even earlier "Paleo-Amerindian" population by the ancestors of all these peoples, who were in the process of losing it to yet a third wave of invaders, the Na-Dene tribes.
Interestingly, there is a growing contingent of the same "land back" people who are trying to revise the historical record to state that horses never went extinct in the Americas and were kept in domestication by the native tribes here throughout that 10,000 year period.
This is now being taught to school children as fact here in Canada.
Couldn't find the article where this group was at a school, but that was what originally clued me in.
The thing is, this sort of thing is getting zero pushback. And it's one of the less offensive and less commonly known lies. A full scale revisionism of my country's history is taking place with little regard for fact. It worries me.
Are you trying to argue that there was no warfare/conquest in the Americas previous to Europeans moving to the continet? You realize that Indigenous people are still humans right?
I'm sure that a lot of movement/conquest/displacement _was_ initiated by Europeans taking eastern land. But I can also guarantee you that there was conquest previous to that. That's what humans do.
It's not a smart game to play if you care about exonerating Europeans from their own theft. But what if you just want to actually understand the ethics of the situation? Presumably sometime land changes hands ethically and sometimes it doesn't. I think it's probably important to know the actual details of the history of ownership changes if you want to actually figure out what should be done in an ideal world
on the other hand, I think the main point the european-exonerators are making is missed by your summary. I suspect that they are arguing that, in the counterfactual world where the europeans never came, the wars between the aboriginals would have continued much as they had for the previous thousand years, and so the lands would have been stolen anyway. The main difference with the euros is that they were strong enough to keep the land forever once they conquered it.
Well I think the much better point from a European perspective especially in North America is: Partly due to disease, but partly as just pre-existing reality, the populations and settlement density up here were simply not that high and so there were not robust property ownership or distinct territories in a lot of areas. Huge areas of land were simply in no way "stolen".
There was some fighting and conquest, a lot over the centuries.
But so many of the interactions seemed to be more along the lines of "Hey look at these morons settling on that fairly worthless land and building a permanent settlement they cannot support. Oh well it is just a couple hundred and we can avoid them or trade with them as needed. Uh oh two generations later there are now a couple thousand of them and they keep taking up more and more area. I wish members of my tribe would quit trading away land for technology and luxuries. Uh oh another generation later it is clear we are going to be totally displaced so we will side with their enemies in a war. Crap we lost the war and now we are being told to move 100 miles west."
Not that there wasn't also some fair amount of "stealing" and breaking promises, especially as time went on. But there were also a lot of "fair" trades, and simple settlement of areas that were being very lightly used with no real "property" structure and it tends to all get lumped together as though it was one thing.
The natives at times thought they were fleecing the settlers, "selling" areas they had no real interest in or use of.
Where I was growing up the natives were both very small in number when European contact started in the mid 1500s, but by the time of settlement the "natives" were mostly immigrants (granted from European settlement drivers) from over 1000 miles away.
In the place of a half dozen or dozen villages of a with a total of maybe twenty thousand people, with some scattered groups traveling around, instead there are a million people using the land at a much more comprehensive and intense level. And the number of natives is higher today than it was then, with half living on reservations and half living in the bigger cities.
The Native Americans absolutely got a raw deal, but that is um historically the deal pretty much everyone got in their situation until extremely recently.
REQUEST: Mathematician who knows about measure theory or Bayes's Theorem for mixed variables.
Setting: Millikan's oil drop experiment.
Millikan announces a surprising discovery that all charges are integer multiples of some smallest charge ! What must his priors have been for this discovery to have been consistent with Bayes's Theorem?
For an experimental measurement, you might expect that the result could be any real number. In this case, your prior would be the Lebesgue measure. But then your prior would assign zero probability to the set of integers: there are infinitely many real numbers for each integer. A Bayesian Millikan would not have believed that charges are integers after any finite amount of experiment data, if his prior was the Lebesgue measure or any other continuous probability density. The interval 1±0.1 contains one integer and infinitely many real numbers, but so does the interval 1±0.00001. Increasing the precision of your experiment doesn't get you to an integer.
What would Millikan's priors have to have been for this announcement to have been rational (in a Bayesian sense)?
Perhaps his priors were a combination between the Lebesgue measure and a sum of Dirac deltas, each of which is centered at an integer.
I'm worried that this doesn't work. Dirac deltas are notoriously ill-defined. Does the continuous Bayes Theorem still apply in a function space that includes Dirac deltas? You can't just multiply and divide by Dirac deltas and expect that everything still works. Maybe there's something that can be done with Bayes's Theorem with mixed random variables instead?
As an extension of this problem, what if we wanted to prefer the rationals instead of just the integers? The prior distribution might involve Dirichlet's or Thomae's function, or it might involve a weighted infinite sum of Dirac deltas, centered at all the rational numbers. This seems like an even worse thing to try to plug into Bayes's Theorem.
You are over-thinking this. You can't possibly arrive at the conclusion that the true values of your observables are exact integers, if your prior is that they are continuously distributed. But simply eyeballing the results will tell you that it certainly looks that way. So you estimate the error in your measurements -- say, normally distributed with standard deviation sigma. Then you adopt a Null Hypothesis of the form "measurements are no more likely to fall within sigma of an integer than would be expected by chance". You can do a chi-squared test on this, and by getting enough measurements you can make your confidence level as large as you like.
You conclude that the true values lie close enough to integers that experiment can't refute their integerness. Then you can just invoke Occam's Razor to postulate that the true values are _exactly_ integers.
There is no need for Lebesgue measure or Dirac delta functions.
This is undoubtedly closer to what Millikan was thinking. This style of thinking might have even been important for allowing the discovery of quantum mechanics.
This also feels like a serious criticism of Bayesian thinking. In this case, science advanced because Millikan used an intuitionist approach to scientific statistics, when a Bayesian approach would have failed.
I would guess Millikan already understood that the charge was quantized -- after all, the success of the experiment relies on that -- because he would have known about Thomson's measurement of the charge-to-mass ratio in 1897, which was fixed. It would be very strange indeed to imagine that the charge on Thomson's "corpuscles" could take on any value -- but whatever it was, it was always exactly matched by a similarly varying mass so that the ratio came out to the same number, every time.
Also, I would say the discovery of quantum mechanics was driven by an unusually high level of empiricism. Planck invented the photon to correctly predict the black body spectrum, but even he himself for years regarded it as just a mathematical trick representing in a crude way some as-yet-unknown facet of classical physics. He remained no less skeptical of the new quantum mechanics than Einstein. Somewhat similarly, when Bohr explained the spectrum of hydrogen, he just said let's just *say* the energy between orbits has to be a multiple of hv, and let's just *say* no other orbit is possible, even though we know darn well that contradicts big chunks of the physics we know, and see what happens.
In each case, I would say progress would've been impossible if those concerns had not been willing to believe experiment so strongly that even the most persuasive possible rigorous argument from well-established theory could be set aside. From a Bayesian point of view, I guess, they had to be willing to set their priors to zero and go where the evidence led no matter how strange to intuition.
Presumably Millikan's priors allowed for some finite probability that electric charge comes in finite units. (Perhaps a very high probability, given that he chose do do this experiment.) Enough so that if his results were 1.000674562, 3.000007659, 4.000243758... the most likely scenario from a Bayesian perspective was that the charges were 1, 3 and 4 times the minimum unit.
You're not really doing a Bayesian analysis unless you consider ALL the priors, though of course it gets hard to do so in an absolute vacuum.
I think you’re confusing the prior for the charge of a drop and the prior for the possible model of physics. The model “discrete units of charge” could have some probability and so could “continuous charge”. Atoms had been postulated for millennia at that point so a nonzero prior on the discrete case would be reasonable. His prior for the charge of a droplet would be relatively unimportant in comparison: even if discrete, he wouldn’t know what it’s a multiple of and so the prior wouldn’t have mass at any given integer either.
I'm reminded of a story I heard one time about a question asked in an introductory probability class:
Why is the probability of rolling a 2 on a fair die equal to 1/6 instead of 1/2? It might be 1/2. There are two possible outcomes: rolling a 2 and not rolling a 2.
The answer is that the probabilities aren't equal simply because there are that many sides of the die. It's because all of the sides of the die are symmetric. The possibilities 2 and not 2 are not symmetric, so their probabilities don't have to be equal.
Discrete charge and continuous charge are also not symmetric. One of these theories has infinitely many more variations than the other one. Why shouldn't we give the one infinitely more weight in our priors than the other?
Even if we should only apply Bayesian analysis at the level of theories, I don't think that this solves the problem. There are infinitely many possible theories of electric charge. For example, there could be two fundamental charges that are not rational multiples of each other. Or charge could be close to discrete, but not quite, like how the masses of atoms are close to, but not quite, an integer multiple of the mass of hydrogen (because the mass depends on both the components of the atom and the binding energy). How should we decide which of these possible theories get nonzero weight in our priors?
You could get some mixture of Lebesgue measure and Dirac deltas to work. You’re right though in thinking that it would be difficult.
That being said all sorts of integer valued distributions exist. For example you could use the Poisson distribution. It would be fairly straightforward to work with a mixture of poisson any normal distributions. In fact there’s a prior called spike and slab that is commonly used in practice that’s a mixture of a point mass at zero and a fairly flat density elsewhere.
You could do similar things with the rationals. For example a ratio of Poissons might work.
The root of the issue is that although commonly expressed in the form of densities, Bayes theorem is really about the behavior of probability measures. It’s derived form the properties of probabilities of subsets. As long as the probability measure is well defined, you can use the appropriate version of Bayes theorem.
Treating Bayes theorem entirely in terms of subsets would probably be more effective here. Do you know of an introduction to Bayes theorem using infinite subsets?
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good. They derive Bayes theorem using subsets. This https://youtu.be/HZGCoVF3YvM is probably also pretty good.
I'm looking for organizations that might be willing to donate IFAKs or their components to our organization, so we can use them to train and equip Ukrainian soldiers. Any advice about how to go about this search?
Could you be more specific? IFAKs are just a designation and their price ranges from almost nothing to hundreds of dollars. Are you looking for military surplus or certain supplies or what?
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I'd like to point out that I've been lackadaisically posting to http://reluctantentrepreneur.substack.com about medicine, technology, and dharma.
Admittedly, there is not much in the way of Dharma yet, but some suff on entrepreneurialism.
More subscribers would, I feel sure, inspire me to write more. All welcome!
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?
Methylphenidate also works on healthy people, in a dramatic way. It cures ADHD in the same sense pouring a bucket of cold water on a sleeping person cures hypersomnia.
As far as I know SSRIs do nothing for healthy people, other than making them really easy to get drunk (come to think of it, how does _that_ work?).
It seems that inhibiting reuptake of serotonin doesn't do much while inhibiting reuptake of dopamine does a whole lot, which suggests very different downstream signaling. I don't think it's possible to get far here without a systems biology approach, for which I expect we lack both understanding and raw data.
> Why don't we prescribe exocytosis-promoting molecules such as MDMA when initiating SSRI treatments?
MDMA has a lot of therapeutic uses, and the reluctance of the establishment to prescribe it has nothing to do with biochemistry.
> Methylphenidate also works on healthy people, in a dramatic way
Could you source this statement?
The last time I checked the studies, they seemed to conclude that MPH didn't really improve the executive parts of the IQ tests for normal people under normal conditions (e.g. not sleep-deprived, no depression, etc.)
The difference between therapeutic and recreational use seems to be one of degree, not kind. I have ADHD but don't take any medication, and occasionally trying small therapeutic doses of MPH (~25 mg) gives me a very noticeable high, hypomania, vasoconstriction etc. I imagine with a bit of tolerance it would reduce to whatever state the psychiatrists intend, but it's still just basically microdosing a recreational drug.
the real question is why does atomoxetine take 4 weeks to work for ADHD. you can say that it takes that long for the alpha-2a autoreceptors to downregulate, but do they really downregulate more presynaptically than postsynaptically? and on postsynaptic terminals these are what we wanna target, ie the reason guanfacine works
Hey, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the idea that the 4 week delay in treatment efficacy is due to the requirement for presynaptic 5ht1a to downregulate first is just one hypothesis of many, and hasn't actually been confirmed. Especially since extrasynapric 5HT levels and serotonergics firing rate in the dorsal raphe seem to be elevated immediately when treatment starts. Alternative hypotheses involve downstream effects taking weeks. These might involve BDNF, downregulation of 5HT2a/2c receptors, or changes in accumbal dopamine levels.
I think 2 is cool. I assume you're talking about the cheese effect etc. Not sure how you would block tyramine/octopamine/PEA though. You can antagonize the trace amine receptor, but the trace amines will still be taken up into dopaminergic neurons causing competitive reuptake inhibition of dopamine.
I think the thing with SSRIs and MDMA is that SSRIs are causing internalization of 5HT transporters, whereas MDMA actually relies on these transporters for its mechanism of action, because it has to be taken up into the neuron by the transporter (all amphetamines are alpha-methylated trace amines I believe) where it inhibits VMAT2 and displaces serotonin, as well as activating TAAR1 I think.
Not too sure about 4. It only makes sense of the autoreceptor theory of the 4 week delay is correct. But under this theory the autoreceptors take mere weeks to downregulate. So presumably they upregulate upon antagonism, quickly nullifying the benefit of this? But maybe this effect is mitigated by the downregulatory force due to ssri treatment? a lot of variables, would require some mouse studies first but I feel like I've heard this idea elsewhere so probably someone has looked into it or is looking into it
> extrasynapric 5HT levels and serotonergics firing rate in the dorsal raphe seem to be elevated immediately when treatment starts
1) Could you source this statement? Is the increase clinically significant?
> downregulation of 5HT2a/2c receptors, or changes in accumbal dopamine levels
2) Could you source this statement?
> I assume you're talking about the cheese effect etc. Not sure how you would block tyramine/octopamine/PEA though
3) I recently found out that this has actually already been explored in the literature. TCAs with low SRI properties & high NET affinity are safe to combine with MAOIs and reduce the stressor response.
> the thing with SSRIs and MDMA is that SSRIs are causing internalization of 5HT transporters, whereas MDMA actually relies on these transporters for its mechanism of action, because it has to be taken up into the neuron by the transporter
4) Knowing that the SETs are not fully occupied by SSRIs at clinical doses, doesn't this just mean that you just need to give more MDMA to achieve the wanted exocytosis effect? If the MDMA dosage needs to be high it may cause serotonin toxicity (aka serotonin syndrome) if the patient stops the SSRI.
> So presumably they upregulate upon antagonism, quickly nullifying the benefit of this? But maybe this effect is mitigated by the downregulatory force due to ssri treatment?
5) Good point. I'm not quite sure how the desensitization (or downregulation, I'm not sure that either is the scientific consensus) works in the details. I'll look into it.
After more than 15 years of living overseas (mostly in African countries) I am thinking about moving to Silicon Valley to teach in public schools. I am getting a lot of family pressure to move there (my Dad is in Palo Alto).
Does anyone think this is a good place to raise my ten year old daughters? Are the cultural opportunities and prospects of being part of a community really great?
I like the area, but I have not spent much time there and I feel like it might be a hyper competitive, rat race environment for my kids. I would get help buying a house, but probably only enough to be in East Palo Alto, or San Jose.
I too used to live in African countries and I find all the regs in California way too oppressive after living so free and cheap in the motherland. So I considered the Bay Area and LA for a bit, but eventually moved to the Miami area and it’s been a much easier transition because it’s much closer here to being like Africa. My daughter is 14 and seems happy. Lots of diversity, lots to do, great weather all year round, less rules, cheaper labor, no state taxes.
So bad i only saw this now, if you are still there there is a ton of stuff to do
Obviously visit the duomo in the centre of the city and the vittorio emanuele gallery that begins in the duomo square, the sforzesco castle and the brera quarter. Then, there is Leonardo's last supper. Another lesser known but beautiful church is sant Ambrogio, one of the oldest in Milan.
Then there are a ton of museums. If you like modern art there is the museum of the novecento in the duomo square. I personally am not a fan, but there is one of the most important pieces of late '800s italian painting, the fourth estate. More on ancient art, there is the brera museum which is really famous. A little less known but quite nice nevertheless there is the Poldi-Pezzoli painting museum.
If you like modern architecture, porta nuova (just outside Milan Garibaldi station) is quite striking (at least for italian standards). Also citylife, but this is a bit outside.
Just to mention that I did a podcast about nuclear war with two ACX stalwarts, Battleship Bean and John Schilling. The basic idea was to discuss nuclear war taking Dr Strangelove as a jumping off point. They talked about things like how powerful are modern nuclear weapons? Would they knock out electrical systems world wide? Would such a war result in nuclear winter?
I wrote a paper about one possible mechanism through which social media fuels intolerance towards other points of view (aka "culture wars"). I sum it up in this blog post: https://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=2179
The even shorter TL;DR is:
- We make reasonable assumptions about the fundamental characteristics of the system: echo chambers, confirmation bias, etc.
- We assume that people want to convince others to behave according to their values and would apply whatever strategy that can lead to that result.
- The main action they have at their disposal is punishing content they disagree with, depending on their level of tolerance.
The result is that both sides learn quickly that there is a (low) level of tolerance that represents an inadequate equilibrium (to use a term from Yud). In this equilibrium, everyone is a jerk because, if they weren't, the other side would nudge content producers to go to their side under the threat of online punishment.
This is true even if they both originally started with high levels of tolerance.
Would love to hear some thoughts. Pardon the self promotion, but I think this is a topic people here are interested in.
Just commenting to say that I think you've written something really good and valuable, and that it reminded me of what Taleb said about intolerance spirals (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 - The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority). When you put it like that (people punish views they disagree with; there is no cost to doing so; doing so will intimidate some people into falling into line and feel great, while not doing so will feel terrible and intimidating; and so everyone will try to harshly punish everyone else because it's free and it works), it's so obvious, even though it was so hard to see before. That's the mark of good writing, and I applaud it.
These are very kind words, thanks! And I wasn't familiar with this specific claim from Taleb, it's nice to see that there is somebody very smart who can put it down in words better than I can :-)
This is a great insight. I have a theory that this phenomenon is driven by the lack of a real attention currency on social media. If partisans can punish the other side at no cost to themselves, then of course they'll push the "punish" button every chance they get.
If instead, users had a limited "attention currency," with which they could promote or demote content, then users would have to be much more selective about the punishment and rewards they dole out. Two opposing partisans would then also have a choice: they can spend all of their currency canceling each other out, or they can go their separate ways and be free to promote content they actually care about.
Apologies for also self-promoting, but this is the motivation behind the voting mechanism on my site https://sigilspace.com.
Of course there is some sort of attention currency online, but it is different in nature to what you're after. There is decade-long research about how limited time and attention promotes / demotes certain type of content. "Competition among memes in a world with limited attention" by Weng et al. (2012) is the first thing that comes to mind.
I assume the "flags" you're talking about are standing in for reports, not downvotes. If the flag acts to quietly make the post less visible, I would expect out-of-window content to quietly fade away without much opposition. Non-dominant groups in the set will be left feeling isolated and wondering what happened.
If the flag is an active signal, like a downvote, then different blocs can see what's being done to their content and will have the opportunity to react. A group X member won't suddenly wake up to feel like an outsider - but they will wake up to find themselves at war.
And if the only way to "flag" a post is to create counter-content - even if it's as simple as a comment that says "you suck" - then that opens the door to much noisier and even less satisfying equilibria.
This is great work and I am indeed very interested in this line of research. What are you going to look at next?
Yes, they are reports, but they are in a sense visible: the model is a bit more complicated than a simple user-user interaction, there is also the "news source" agent class. The flags go to a news source, which sees them and tries to minimize them, so that's why you get this visible effects.
The next step we're interested in is whether this effect we see only works with negative/retaliatory behavior (flagging), or if it also works with positive behavior (likes/shares). So far we were enamored with the idea of studying culture wars, but arguably content-producers chase approval, besides escaping trouble.
Awesome. I'm interested in culture wars, too, of course, since I'm apparently not allowed to opt out of them and all knowledge is power in war.
But I'm more excited by the idea of finding rules and principles that promote higher quality content creation - whether that's jokes/memes, discussion, or proper creative efforts like stories, films and artwork.
The optimal strategy is to write your opinion as a separate article, and only share the link on the social media. Or not bother writing anything, if you have nothing substantial to add; possibly just link someone else's article.
This is actually an interesting take because the model has a sort of "silent majority" effect we didn't really program in it: at the beginning most users are moderate and they hardly flag anything. Most trouble comes from the fringes which dominate the discussion and make the environment look worse than it is.
And in a previous version of the model we actually saw that, when there is low tolerance, many users end up removing all their friends' connections, which is an equivalent of leaving the platform -- again something we didn't program into the simulation, but emerged as a "choice" the agents made, they just found a way not to interact.
Food sanity check request: so, sushi is great, but also pretty expensive. On the other hand, it's ultimately just...raw fish. So is there some red flag risk for simply...buying raw fish, slicing it myself, and eating it? Safety caveats:
*Farm raised, for minimized heavy metal/toxin load.
*Industrially frozen 24hrs minimum, preferably flash frozen on boat, to minimize pathogen load.
This still feels like cheating, somehow, so I suspect I'm overlooking something. Otherwise lotsa people would attempt this...
I work in a Japanese Restaurant running their kitchen(so I do everything that isn't assembling sushi there), and I do a lot of the prep work taking apart fish and getting ingredients ready.
Sushi is expensive, but so is buying precut fish at the supermarket or the fishmonger. You can definitely save a bunch of money if you buy a whole fish, scale it, clean it, debone it, and slice it yourself, but that's a lot of work, and it requires some skill and specific tools to be done efficiently.
Six pieces of salmon sashimi, fully prepared, is going to be roughly 250 grams. That costs 13 bucks where I live, so sushi joints are selling salmon sashimi for $23/lb or so. That's for farmed Atlantic salmon.
On the other hand, buying from the grocery store is exactly $17.21 for a pound of fresh farmed Atlantic salmon. So the savings would be roughly 25% buying precut fish from the supermarket instead of getting it at a sushi joint.
A quick check online says that a 10-12lb whole fresh farmed Atlantic Salmon would cost me 114 dollars to have shipped. From experience breaking them down, if that comes gutted(it should), there's about a 75% yield on the meat. So you get about 7.5-8lb of meat for 114, which is about $15/lb. You also get the scraps if you want to make a fish stock.
So if you buy a whole salmon gutted, prepare it yourself, you are saving 35% over the sushi restaurant prices(since my workplace buys wholesale, it costs about 100 bucks for a 10-12lb salmon, so our margin before operating costs is about 75%, which is actually kinda low. It shouldn't be a surprise that most non-chain sushi restaurants are owner operated. My boss does the majority of all the sashimi, nigiri, and maki that goes out.).
How long will it take you to break down a fish? Only you know your own proficiency, but I'd suggest budgeting yourself 5 minutes to scale it, and 15 minutes to remove the loin and debone it if you are already proficient with knives and general cookery. You'll also want a descaling tool(the scales on a 10-12 salmon are too big to remove easily with something like a metal scrubber). Of course, it's actually a fairly skilful task to minimize the amount of meat you lose to errors with your knifework and excess left on the skin/spine(though once you scale it the skin is edible, gets nice and crisp when you pan fry it, so you can still make a meal out of it, especially if you wraps some of the flesh in it.)
Once you get it finished, you can just cut it into chunks big enough for one portion and freeze them individually, then defrost them as necessary(I don't actually know how long salmon lasts in the freezer though, we turn over everything we bring in within a week, and our farmed salmon is so popular we just bring in fish every day and use it that day, so we don't freeze it).
I value my general labour at 30 bucks an hour personally(that is, anything I'm not trained and skilled in), so if it takes twenty minutes to take apart a fish I'd add 10 bucks to the price to account for it when weighing it's value.
That to me isn't really worth it. On the other hand, maybe it is to you, the prices may be different where you live, and you may enjoy preparing food at home more than I do(doing it professionally takes the fun out of doing it at home for me).
On the other other hand, you can set yourself up with a reasonable fishing rod, tackle box, license, and everything else you need for under 150 bucks(at least where I am), so if you enjoy fishing as a hobby, then suddenly if you catch two decent salmon you've basically brought your costs down to an afternoon of relaxation.
Finally, if you are looking at doing nigiri(or maki) sushi, and not just sashimi, you'll need to learn how to make a decent sushi rice, which actually takes some work. Decent sushi places will have their own blend for vinegar, and every time you open a new bag of rice you have to adjust the ratio of rice to water to make it work. Plus you'll need a high quality sushi rice(calrose works well for this and is widely available).
Hey, I appreciate the professional-grade reply! Always been curious about some of the numbers behind-the-counter, so that's fascinating data.
Whole fish isn't a realistic option for my living situation...in addition to grossing out my vegetarian roommate, I don't have the fridge/freezer storage space for that much fish all at once. (It's shared between 3 people, and my two roommates hoard food to the max, so I get maybe 1/4th the total space...) The price point is definitely better, and I know I could go to places with a fresh-fish counter who'd happily do all the cleaning for me. However, I *also* can't drive, and lugging around a whole raw fish on the bus...yeah....
Prices for fresh farmed Atlantic salmon are much lower out here, more like $12.99/lb or thereabouts at my grocery store? Take off another 20% for employee discount. Sake sashimi goes for similar rates as yours, so buying precut fish at the store is already >50% savings. It comes skin-on too, which both makes the final slicing easier and is a pleasure to eat, even raw...I personally enjoy that bit of crunchiness.
I feel you on the "hate making my own food cause it's my job" thing...that was my major reason to never attempt culinary school. Cooking saves me a lot of money, and it's a near-daily habit, so I don't particularly consider it a labour cost...insofar as I'm gonna be cooking meals anyway, I only "price" labour above and beyond what I'd normally do. More than an hour on a workday = not acceptable; weekends I don't mind investing multiple hours for special projects. Actual fishing is infeasible for me at this time, but would definitely be a nice option if available...
Regarding the rice, I figured that out long ago. I don't try to get it exactly the same as a restaurant would - because I think they use a little too much vinegar + sugar by default. I prefer a more mildly seasoned rice. Calrose is indeed my favourite (yay living in California). After that...good Japanese rice cooker from Zojirushi, some rice vinegar, dash of mirin, pinch of Accent, sometimes a little garlic powder. Occasionally I'll also cheat by using nori furikake...it's not the nicest presentation-wise, but I can't always be bothered to buy nori sheets separately. And sesame seeds are never a bad addition to sushi.
https://www.fda.gov/media/80777/download is the FDA guidelines on freezing to kill parasites in fish. 7 days at -4F (easily doable in a chest freezer) is sufficient and I've done it before (particularly for salmon roe which I really like, technically they say you can just rinse the row well since the parasites are only in the skein around the roe rather than in the eggs themselves, but it freezes totally fine so why risk it, I can wait a week or two).
https://seafood.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/snic/freezing-to-kill-nematode-parasites-in-fish-products-implications-for-haccp.pdf summarizes some of the actual research. Note that reaching -17C internal temperature for several hours is sufficient to kill/cripple the parasites of concern. The -20C (-4F) 7 day recommendation is safety padding to allow for thermometers being off and for thermal equilibrium to be reached (a thick piece of fish or several stuck together can take a while to reach equilibrium). The EU specifies 24 hours rather than 7 days.
Yeah, I was gonna be like "7 days????????" Just like the CDC always recommends steaks and turkey be cooked to well-done...because someone, somewhere, might get salmonella or whatever. If it's good enough for the EU safety regulators, then it's good enough for me (unlike insulin).
Unfortunately I don't have kitchen space for an extra freezer, and I don't trust the temperature controls on either our regular fridge or freezer...roommates abuse it by stuffing everything to the max, so half of the time stuff in the *fridge* freezes solid. There is a temperature dial to adjust it downwards, but due to this super annoying circumstance I prefer to leave it at the default setting (or slightly higher). Hate having ice chunks in my orange juice...the industrial walk-in at work is sufficient.
The only thing I can't figure out is whether the "fresh" farm-raised salmon I can buy at work is previously frozen or not. I thought all fresh fish were previously frozen, and it usually says so on the package somewhere, but not these ones...we buy wholesale from Anderson Seafood. I don't know how they process their fillets though: https://www.shopandersonseafoods.com/
Industrially frozen fish should be safe to eat raw if you thaw it safely (ideal is warming it to the desired serving temperature in a sous vide for 30-60 minutes, but overnight in the fridge or an hour or two in a basin of cold water should also be safe) and prepare and eat it promptly after thawing. I've frequently cooked Costco frozen salmon at temperatures of 115-120 ºF (well below the minimum pasteurization temperature of 129.5 ºF) with no ill effects, frozen fish is routinely used to prepare ceviche, and previously-frozen tuna steaks are commonly served seared on the outside while still raw and cold in the middle.
Some stores will sell "sushi grade" fish, but this is a marketing term that has little to do with food safety. Instead, it's the seller purporting that the characteristics of the fish (fat marbling, etc) are suitable for making sushi.
I've never figured out why frozen fish (or meat more generally) isn't supposed to be defrosted in the original packaging. It's an annoying extra hassle to put something on a plate and then cover with plastic wrap...and how is that different from it already coming frozen in plastic?
I used to get impatient and fast-thaw stuff by leaving it on the counter...not that arrogant anymore, heh. The halcyon days of youthful gastronomics.
Generally seems reasonable to me. I know a few people who make their own sushi or sashimi.
My understanding is that farm raised may or may not be cleaner, depending on the conditions at the farm. Also, I believe heavy metal concentration depends more on the type of fish and its place in the food chain rather than how it's sourced.
Shouldn't even high-food-chain predator fish have less heavy metal if they're farm-raised? I mean, I assume they're fed standardized farm-raised feed...if it's just wild chum or whatever, that seems kinda silly.
Conditions certainly matter; I at least know the suppliers we wholesale from, could maybe research them. But I'd be surprised if the conditions are worse than the wild salmon fillets I could buy instead. A bunch of those always come with ruptured packaging, so I don't trust either their packaging processes or their cold chain. This is almost never an issue with the farmed options.
Indeed! I miss catching trout on childhood family fishing trips...those were the best fish I've ever had outside high-quality sushi. There's that nice golden age where you can still fish on a parent's license for free...we pretty much stopped after that. Not a frequent enough excursion to justify the fees + equipment maintenance.
Plus I wouldn't eat anything I might possibly catch out of San Francisco Bay, lol. Even many of the local beaches have gotten kinda sketchy for fishing in recent years...there used to be some local fish farms that maintained public ponds for people to """fish""" in, which was almost as good, but I think those all went out of business. Real shame, kids these days don't know what they're missing. That's half the fun of living by the ocean...
I know animal-rights types hate them, but it's part of the culture I grew up in - "Best catch of today! Fresh!" pointing out to the server exactly which fish you wanted cooked for your restaurant dish - so it's hard not to feel defensive about. It's less and less common to see such aquariums...because of misplaced covid-origin concerns, I think. That plus the complete restaurant industry collapse, which is largely better now but still took out a huge chunk of industry capacity. I will miss being able to browse the live fish. Finding a nice lively specimen was always a better guarantor of freshness than poking at dead-on-ice fish eyeballs or whatever. (I could be objectively wrong about this, but it's part of the cultural mystique.)
I think there's a lot more room for cultural bipartisanship along the topic of "people should know where their food comes from". Liberals praise organic local farms, conservatives praise hunting and fishing. Same base principles. One doesn't have to hate factory farming to agree that there's a certain "alienation" from what we eat in many modern countries. Too many people are too many steps removed from the means of food production. It's like whenever I meet people who don't know how to cook for themselves at all...that's a totally alien way to live, for me. I can't imagine having that entire corpus of knowledge missing from my head. We spend so much of our time and money eating, so it seems just logical to take a greater interest in that vital process.
I actually assumed he meant freshest for taste. Freezing can get rid of the parasites but fish you eat largely unadorned probably needs more freshness than one buried under a beurre-blanc or under a rich marinara type sauce.
I figured you could just eat the DIY sushi for a couple of weeks and then get a prescription for Paxlovid to get rid of the parasites. I mean, it works the other way around, right? /S
Wouldn't ivermectin be better for this purpose? Certainly cheaper and more widely prescribed! And who knows, maybe it's prophylactic for covid after all.
I've been making sushis (makis at least) since college, and only stopped once:
-I learned the health risks if the fish wasn't frozen enough
-I realized I had no way to know if the fish I was buying had been frozen enough, or that the seller had no idea/would assure me it was fresh instead.
-Became panicky about it.
I'd love, in fact, to find some sort of filling (that isn't vegetarian) that don't require to be as careful as salmon.
Obviously, it's definitely not going to be as nice as a restaurant sushi, but it's very doable. It also takes some practice to roll it properly (or at least in a way that don't fall appart pathetically), and to balance the content, but I absolutely recommend giving it a try
It doesn't need to be industrially frozen, you can do it in a chest freezer (I've done it before). It takes longer, but the fish is frozen so what's the rush. 7 days at -4 F (which a chest freezer should be easily able to do [they are generally set for ~0F so it's just turning it down slightly]). My side-by-side freezer can be set down to -10 but I don't trust it temperature wise as much as a cheap chest freezer with a thermometer in it. https://www.fda.gov/media/80777/download While it's prob. not a good idea to rely on it, for ease of mind purposes note that the USDA / FDA guidelines generally have a significant safety margin built into them.
Ah, not just me - cool! May I suggest ebi? They aren't the same, but are at least category-adjacent, and I trust food processors to cook them adequately. Might need to pat dry with paper towels though. Raw shiitake is my favourite vegetarian filling...goes surprisingly well with shredded crabmeat or tobiko. Just a bit of sushi vinegar, helps bring out the mushroom flavour...
Yeah, I wouldn't be trying it at all without access to industrial-grade freezing which I'm very confident about. One nice thing about working at a grocery store is being able to throw stuff in the walk-in freezer, and monitor the temperature gauges myself. I skip the fish fillets that often come with signs of thawing (i.e. vacuum seal is no longer intact, freezer burn + air pockets in packaging)...some more regular-shaped fish are better than others, for that reason. Doesn't matter if it originally got flash-frozen, if it thawed out in transit to the store!
The rolling is actually something I learned as a child...I have no idea what the impetus was, but one of my favourite elementary school memories was being sat down by a Certified Sushi Chef to learn how to roll maki. Though, for at-home, I'm perfectly happy to settle for a donburi- style presentation.
In my opinion, if you make sushi with a non-raw fish, it tastes almost exactly the same. Certainly more similar to the original than all kinds of vegan sushis where they use some vegetable instead of the fish.... and even those still taste quite similar.
> Otherwise lotsa people would attempt this...
You mean that more people would try it at home, or in restaurants?
In my opinion, in Western culture, sushi has the image of a "magical oriental food", but if you started eating it regularly, you would probably conclude that it's nothing special. Ultimately, just rice with fish (plus wasabi and/or soy sauce). Even if you love the taste of Asian cuisine, there are many better choices.
I think the magic is that sushi is so different *visually*. But if you started eating it regularly, the magic would disappear. So I guess that most people have too much respect for the magic that they won't even try it... and the ones who make it at home a few times, stop doing it, because with the magic gone, it's just an ordinary meal.
I imagine people are not sure how to handle raw fish, so they prefer to let commercial/professionals do it. As well as reasons of laziness/convenience; it's not a foodstuff Westerners generally grow up cooking and eating at home, so it falls into the category of "restaurant food". And while I could cook a burger and chips at home for myself, sometimes I just want the McDonald's version instead.
Wait, are you telling me that *fish in general* is an unusual dish for Westerners to prepare or eat? Gosh, that would explain a lot...I totally did not know this! My whole family loves seafood, so it's something I grew up eating and cooking regularly. Everyone's favourite story from my toddlerhood is that the very first time they took me out to a restaurant, my grandparents fed me lobster. I've liked all types of seafood ever since.
It's weird cause I think anyone that can handle raw pork can handle raw fish, certainly the fatty ones (flaky white ones are harder)...it's a similar degree of delicacy.
Not fish in general, and of course the Scandinavian countries have the pickled herring thing going on. But raw, as distinct from cooked, certainly seems to be more of a rarity.
Fish-on-Friday Catholic countries would have cooked it, and trying to Google 'raw fish consumption in Europe' just gives me this result for Portugal:
"Portugal has one of the highest levels of fish consumption globally. Raw or lightly processed fish is not part of the traditional diet but the rise in popularity of such dishes worldwide means that consumption of this type of food is likely to increase in Portugal. Anisakiosis is a food-borne zoonotic disease associated with consumption of raw or undercooked fish. An increase in reported incidence of the disease has occurred in recent decades. Our survey aimed to gather data on raw fish consumption in Portugal, looking at the sociodemographic and health characteristics of the individuals who consume raw fish (n = 421), as well as the volume of raw fish consumed, species of fish consumed raw and types of raw fish dishes consumed. The volume of raw fish consumed by our survey population was 6.3 kg per person annually. It accounted for approximately 10% of all fish consumed. Salmon or trout, tuna and cod were the species of fish most frequently consumed raw and the most popular raw fish dishes were sushi or sashimi and fish spiced with vinegar and lemon or marinated. Although the number of respondents with seafood allergies only accounted for 2.6% of the study population, they were responsible for almost 7% of the total volume of raw fish consumed. Based on the volume and species of raw fish consumed, anisakiosis does pose a risk to the Portuguese population, but it would appear to be quite small. Data on Anisakis spp. prevalence are limited for some of the species of fish consumed raw and further studies on these are warranted to better characterise the disease risk in the population studied. In addition, improved risk communication and consumer education campaigns should be implemented to minimize the risk to the Portuguese population from anisakiosis."
At home; I can't imagine the Food Safety Inspectors approving DIY sushi-lite. One of the few cases where occupational licensure seems to make some sense. I've been to some fancy restaurants that tried serving tartare this or carpaccio that, and...like I'm sure it's on the level technically? But those meals somehow always had a suspiciously high percentage of diners in our party who had very unpleasant bathroom trips later. Never happens to us with legitimate sushi establishments.
Some fish tastes similar cooked, so I'm happy just having it medium-rare...tuna is still recognizably tuna, whether it's raw maguro or seared ahi steaks. But salmon...wildly different, imo. I'm pretty fond of raw sake, but dislike cooked salmon quite a bit. Honestly, for the longest time I thought I didn't like salmon entirely, entirely cause I'd only ever had it cooked (and well-done at that, sigh). The first time having sake maki though...I was like whaaaaaaaat? Is this really the same fish, I don't believe it. Ever since it's become one of the few foods I get strong-enough cravings for that I "have to" eat it sometimes. Hence the home experimentation.
(Canned fish is...always...different. I know some people love it, but my brain simply refuses to acknowledge it as actual fish...which I guess is apropos, given how often what's on the label has no relation to what's in the can. Or so they say.)
I agree that the...ritual? hype? is definitely part of the experience for many. It's a little different in my family though...Asian cuisine is our default, cause we're Chinese. But we have a fondness for non-Chinese Asian cuisines too. There's this lovely acronym, JROCK - Japanese Restaurant Owned or Operated by Chinese or Koreans. So we'd go out to sushi places, and have Totally Authentic Japanese Cuisine - while speaking Cantonese with the staff, lol...Japanese food was thus always a sort of "second home" for me, palate-wise. Very rarely cooked at home, but enjoyed thoroughly when dining out or delivered take-out. Those two cuisines make up the overwhelming majority of my restaurant food budget; the magic never really goes away, cause nostalgia is a powerfully addictive spice. You never really outgrow the tastes of home, I think.
(Ramen, to me, is the true "magical oriental food". I still enjoy it now and then, but like...there's already a hundred perfectly good pretty similar tong mein ["soup noodles"] dishes in Chinese cuisine. No one ever raves about having wonton mein for brunch though. Sorta like Vietnamese pho...my family was eating it long before it became trendy. Then everyone jacked up prices, and it went from a workaday family meal to Instagram fodder...ah, food gentrification, my lifelong gastronemesis.)
Have you tried smoked salmon? It can taste very different depending on whether it's cold-smoked (which requires cooking before eating) or hot-smoked (the method cooks the fish).
"ah, food gentrification, my lifelong gastronemesis"
Same here with black (and to a much lesser extent, white) pudding. Around 2014-2016 it became something to be included on trendy restaurant menus, which meant all kinds of weird and wonderful recipes far removed from the staple of the full Irish/British Breakfast/Ulster Fry which was, as you say, a "workaday family meal":
Again, something with a lot of regional variation; some butchers make it more 'meaty' and others more 'grainy'. I like the 'grainier' ones myself, but this is personal taste.
And it seems like there is an entire sub-reddit devoted to all the permutations of a fry-up:
Yes, I enjoy a good smoked salmon as well. Used to eat that stuff pretty regularly. It is fairly expensive per pound though, just like jerky...after teaching myself how to cure meats at home, I find myself significantly less inclined to pay store-markup prices for what's largely just a time investment. And most of their claims to Seventeen Secret Herbs And Spices(tm) I'm like...shrug? I could do better with the basic seasonings in my pantry. Smoking is of course a particular method of curing that's a bit more involved, but it's a similar process...so I end up feeling bad paying $24/lb or whatever. The high salt content is also a turnoff from eating too much...I can eat a pound of raw sushi and feel fine, but a pound of smoked salmon is gonna be Hypertension City for a good long while.
If you don't eat your smoked meats, how can you have any black pudding? My other bugaboos are oysters, lobster, catfish, and dim sum dumplings...there are other "oldschool", "country-style" foods which are still obscure enough that they haven't gone through the gentrification price-up. So even if they sometimes show up on trendy restaurant menus, I just go to what we affectionately term "hole-in-the-wall" restaurants. Mother always told me to follow the firefighters, and similarly-situated employees: they know where all the good blue-collar food is.
(And, yeah, it's not just the price increase that bugs me most...it's seeing all the weird-ass "fusion" or "reinterpretations" of something that was perfectly fine to begin with. I know that's just how market forces work, but it's always sad to see a beloved part of my past palette disappear for good. RIP McDonald's fries cooked in beef fat...)
You can semi-smoke salmon easily at home, provided you have an outdoor grill where you can make a lot of smoke. Just soak a cup or so of your choice of hardwood chips for a few hours, then add them to your charcoal just before you throw the fish on, and cover with the grill lid. In about 10-12 min (for a 2-3 lb filet) you have a fish that is part-grilled, part-smoked. Tastes great, has no more salt than you added to the marinade if any, and keeps for 7-10 days in the fridge with no degradation in taste.
Indeed. Everyone loves applewood, but I'm much more partial to mesquite myself. It's even possible to do indoors, inside a good wok, although then one must worry about proper ventilation. My place only has a...janky...DIY firepit, and I'm not gonna smoke/grill salmon on a raw slab of construction brick, lol. Maybe someday when we get a real grill. For now I'll stick to making jerky in the oven...
(Big untapped market for whoever comes up with a truly durable saltwater-corrosion-resistant grill. People on coasts the world over would be so happy.)
I'm with you on disliking shellfish. I don't have an allergy so I *can* eat them, I just dislike them so I avoid them.
I grew up beside the sea, so my father used to gather dilisk and dry it (eating that is like eating razor blades, but it's very good for you?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmaria_palmata
Also, one time in our childhood, he collected a lot of barnacles and periwinkles from the rocks and cooked them. That was not repeated because they were like rubber 😁 And another time we found a lobster cage on the beach with a lobster in it, so that got taken home and prepared.
My brother loves shrimps and prawns but I always pick them out of any meal that has them in.
Speaking of old-school, country-style foods, how about crúibíns? Pig's feet, and to me they are pure gristle, but again a food my father loved:
Butcher shops when I was young used to have half pig's heads and sometimes sheep's heads, haven't seen those on display for a *long* time now! A market one time, again when I was young, had dead rabbits (still in their pelts) for sale. And the fishwife with her crates of fish on the corner of the square every Friday, you needed to buy your fish first thing in the morning before they were sitting there all day long.
Of course, all this sort of thing is gone thanks to food safety and hygiene regulations, so probably for the best!
EDIT: " RIP McDonald's fries cooked in beef fat..."
This is why chip shop chips are the best, traditional Italian chippers still cook them in lard. Yes yes yes, horribly unhealthy, but you're not (or you shouldn't be) eating them every day 🍟
Oh, I worded that poorly, I meant "bugaboo" as in "other things that got gastronomically gentrified into unaffordability, much to my unending displeasure". Shellfish are my #1 favourite food - and I *am* allergic to them. Don't worry, the hives breakouts are purely cosmetic! I still think it's totally worth it, cause nothing can match that level of pure food enjoyment!
I've seen that red kelp stuff on local beaches. Always felt bad that it wasn't clean enough to eat here, the nutritional profile is awesome. Seaweeds and kelps are some of the only vegetables I thoroughly enjoy...can't get enough, wish they were more widely popular. It's silly to have to go to an Asian market for proper laver; the only kinds sold in American grocers are the small sheet roasted salted (seasoned...blech, teriyaki...) "snack" types. Just like the humble potato, another good base food ruined in the quest for snacking. I just want some plain dried seaweed, please!
Trotters and pig's ear are something the older generations of my family enjoy, yes. Same thing with chicken feet. They still, to this day, mock us adult children for being too white to eat "real Chinese food". There is some squick factor for me, but mostly I don't really like the taste/texture...tripe is passable in small quantities, especially in a nice collagen-heavy soup. That's about as exotic as I'm comfortable with. Agreed on snails sucking - I'm sure true escargot is tasty, but feel like that must be the butter more than the rubbery stuff.
Every once in awhile, you can still find a Chinese butcher shop or restaurant with a whole roasted pig hanging on hooks, head and feet and all. Same thing with chickens and ducks. I'm sure it's illegal or "for display only", but...I dunno, I always enjoyed such sights. Hard to explain to my more civilized white friends how Chinese cultural conceptions of food safety and hygiene differ. This is just how I grew up, I'm sorry!
I've definitely heard this anecdote before, and could swear I read a blog post or newspaper article explaining exactly what was different between American and Italian canned foods...but can't find it anymore.
Sardines and anchovies are okay canned, but that's cause I'm cooking them to hell anyway...as part of the base for soup, or perhaps roasted on top of pizza. Other than that, canned mackerel is sort of kind of decent...I think cause it's such a strong-flavoured fish to begin with, so even canning can't totally ruin it.
Well, sushi makers save on buying that fish, rice and other components in bulk. But if they are readily available at your place and you won't waste them by buying too much, and you don't mind some cooking, then go for it.
Proper rolling is much easier with a special mat, though. But they are often sold in sushi or cooking utensil shops.
Amazon has the mats, seaweed, proper sushi rice (milled short grain), and magic powder (or liquids) to make your boring rice into sushi rice. The rice and seaweed are necessary but not sufficient for good homemade sushi. Avocado is a great choice, in Japan it's sometimes called the poor man's hamachi.
Haha, I'm a heretic as one of those rare Californians who doesn't like avocados...and by extension doesn't much care for one of our local pieces of fusion food history, the "California Roll". (Avocado toast is also right out...I don't even eat bread normally, why smear gross green paste on it?)
One of my friends tells a story of meeting a Japanese exchange student who'd never had avocado before...he tried one and was all "!!! S-s-sugoi!!!" Sometimes I wish I had his tastebuds. Those damn fruits are in __so many dishes__ out here. It always makes me happy to see a bag of regular potato chips at a party, instead of the ubiquitous Chips And Guac(tm). Someone's thinking of me, at least.
Anyone else feel like they suffer from a certain kind of intellectual masochism?
By this I mean I really enjoy engaging with technical and non-technical content written by very smart people of past and present, but the more of their content I read the more I realise how inferior I am intellectually.
The way they engage with problems and process information is mostly unattainable for me, but I can't resist the lure of their wonderful ideas, leading to a feedback loop of lowered self-esteem.
On the one hand, I know I shouldn't be upset, and should be (and am) thankful that there are such brilliant people in the world. On the other hand, these brilliant people are often the kinds of people I have the most admiration for, though by that same metric I can never admire myself all that much.
Reminds me of the idea, instantiated in the book "Winner Takes All", that today the world's most talented have a global audience thanks to technology. Now that we are networked globally we are exposed to some of the smartest and most talented people in the world, and they naturally get disproportionate attention. People like Scott and Tyler Cowan have a spooky capacity to absorb information and an equally spooky ability to focus, plus a few other talents like a high level of articulacy, quirky insightfulness, and a thick skin that enables them to expose their egos to a degree most of us won't risk. Not sure how we should take that except to be grateful that what they do or build enriches us, and perhaps nudges us in good directions even if our talents are more limited and our audience smaller (for the most part).
I occasionally get a twinge of that feeling in various areas - professional accomplishment, athletics, etc. So I can identify a bit, but only a bit.
Anyway, you might try reframing the way you think about it. Compete with yourself rather than others. I would suggest something like keeping a journal of the new things you've read, the new ideas you've learned, progress you've made on understanding hard concepts, and so on. Just willing yourself to think differently won't work, but perhaps making a practice of noting how much you're learning will slowly change how you habitually frame the experience.
No. What you wrote makes absolutely no sense to me, on a really fundamental level.
I mean, I enjoy engaging with content written by very smart people of past and present, and it often makes me realize how inferior I am intellectually. But:
1. No mind is universally superior, brilliance is a result of specialization and effort. Each of the brilliant minds was one of the kind, I'll never be like them, because nobody will, and that's fine.
2. I can still use the knowledge they discovered and transmitted to the rest of us, which is much easier and much more beneficial than having their brains but having to reach their insights from earlier principles.
3. As a corollary of the preceding two - their points were already made, their discoveries discovered, there's no need for another person like them. I'm better off pursuing my own talents in my own niche. There's no reason to think specialization plus the ability to use a more up-to-date knowledge base (including their own insights) won't lift me above their level at some point, even with my vastly inferior brain hardware.
4. And if not... well, who cares. Sure, individual success and other people's admiration are great, but pursuing them as goals in themselves is extremely unhealthy, both in terms of physical health and productivity. A much more healthy goal is common good, and it's something anyone can pursue - not by individual brilliance, but by a humble dedication to discovering and proselytizing truth.
1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Bertrand Russell, and Von Neumann seem like some pretty obvious examples of minds that were almost universally superior. And I'm only half-joking when I say that.
2. Yes, their insights are easily accessible, but that makes it all the more frustrating that I can't build on them, or even fully appreciate their profundity.
3. You assume that one has a talent or niche, which I think is not the case FOR MOST PEOPLE. It's hard to stand on the shoulders giants if you have no legs. For instance, if you took a billion people and made every one them to specialise in number theory, I'm not sure more than 5 could reach the level of Terence Tao- let alone exceed it.
4. You're spot on here about the unhealthiness of pursuing admiration for its own sake, and I would agree with the surface level claim of maximizing the common good. That being said, the source of my anguish isn't the fame that comes from their brilliance, it's the brilliance itself. The ability know one thing or many things so deeply, and to be able use that knowledge to make a meaningful contribution to the world of knowledge. Funnily enough, these things often end up doing the most when it comes to maximizing the common good.
For instance, I doubt Newton (or Leibniz depening on who you ask) was thinking about all the good calculus was going to do for the world when he developed it.
1. I'm a somewhat competent programmer, while DaVinci has never written a working line of code in his life. I'm only half-joking here. I get that your point is that his intellectual faculties would have made it possible for him to become an expert programmer if he had a choice and took it. My point is that he then wouldn't be the DaVinci we know. My other point is that there's also a possible DaVinci who took a career in finances and died a rich old man after having never accomplishing anything of lasting cultural or intellectual impact. You're never going to win against a genius's potential, but that's not who you're competing with.
2. On that note, you can never win against the sum total of human insight, and I have a hunch that you're sort of trying to do exactly that. The people you admire had a lifetime of being themselves to perfect their work, whereas you're only spending hours, days, maybe weeks, on their life accomplishments. Of course your skills are not going to match theirs. I'm pretty sure that - with enough time, effort and dedication - you're perfectly capable of building upon, much less appreciating, insights of any one of them. Just not every one of them, you don't have resources for that. But then again, neither had they, having been too busy being themselves.
3. People do have talents or niches, or at least could if they didn't waste their lives in conformist stupor. It's just that, for most of them, that niche isn't at a frontier of pursuit of established scientific knowledge. And that's fine, and certainly not a reason to stop pursuing them. It's certainly a better use of their time than trying to outdo Terence Tao in number theory. Once in a blue moon, you're Marjorie Rice and your randomly acquired hobby turns into a lasting contribution to mathematics. But even if you're writing Harry Potter fanfiction instead, you're still more skilled at it than Terence Tao. And that's an intentionally extreme example, most people's interests are much more practical and useful. You'd be surprised by the level of genuine insight and expertise regular, uncredentialed people can reach on the subject of, e.g., hair care. I know I was, and I don't feel bad exploiting that expertise for my benefit without myself dedicating any effort to the topic, so why should I feel differently about Terence Tao?
4. More importantly, I'm sure the hair care people above didn't expect to become versed in biology and chemistry. It was just a natural by-product of dedicating themselves to their interests. And, even if most people would rightly view their domains of interest as inconsequential, within them, they do in fact meaningfully contribute to the sum of human knowledge. I'm convinced that's the trick. I agree Newton and Leibniz probably weren't fixated on doing good for the world, but the same reasoning leads me to suspect they weren't fixated on making a meaningful contribution to the world either. They were, fundamentally, solving problems they set out to solve.
PS: I am amused by my brain's subconscious autocorrection. I meant to type about "mental health", but it first retrieved the term from my native Polish vocabulary ("zdrowie psychiczne") then, having realized that "psychical health" isn't a thing in English, switched it for the closest thing that is, semantics be damned.
No not really, but my problem is nothing about being inferior per se. If that were the case I am inferior on a million different dimensions!
It's more about that specific domain of knowledge creation and/or knowledge exploration. It's the kind of work I admire most, hence why it probably weighs heavier on my psyche.
Yeah, I see what you mean. The best that most of us can hope for is to achieve sufficient competence in some narrow domain in order to earn enough money to pay the bills and raise a family. Worrying about anything beyond that starts to look like vanity, which is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason.
Maybe? I don't experience pleasure from intellectual pain, like, not a direct analogue to physical masochism...but there's something perversely satisfying about bashing my head against a clearly superiour intellect, knowing I Just Don't Get It, but if I *did*, there'd be some great payoff. So like e.g. I don't make a habit out of reading Robin Hanson's blog, but it's still occasionally fun to go over there and try wrestling some of those ideas to the ground. The fact that seemingly everyone else "gets it" without trouble is definitely frustrating, and I feel stupider by comparison...yet there's a certain amount of insecurity in only sticking to content I know I can grok. I "need" that occasional brain beatdown to feel like I'm trying to progress intellectually. One day maybe I, too, can sit at the Intellectual Cool Kids table.
Definitely did have an "intellectual sadism" phase growing up though. You know, the bratty precocious teen who mocks their lesser peers via academic swaggering and Scott-sized Walls of Text with a billion links...I try not to do that anymore, that is not The Way. Putting myself on the receiving end is both enlightening and also...atonement of a sort, I guess. Let the former lecturer now be lectured. Not sure if reversed sadism is masochism though, exactly.
I know exactly what you mean, and I feel the same way about intellectual and literary content. In both cases, what I like and admire is far superior to what I can produce, which leads me to find what I write of very poor quality. Intellectually, I'm perfectly aware that comparing myself to the very best people in their field is ridiculous, that I know I'm obviously not on that level and that producing things of fairly good quality should be enough, but I just can't feel that way.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Ira Glass: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Remember reading some of the classics a few years back and being so depressed at how well they could write, not to mention how effortless it appeared for them.
The worst part was when I started reading nonfiction I chose to start with Dawkins and Steven Pinker, both of whom write beautifully.
Perhaps you could cheer yourself up by reading poorly conceived ideas misspelled by halfwits. Twitter is good for that. Just remember not to post in response.
I've always thought that using the right benchmark to evaluate yourself and your life was the secret of hapinnes, but unfortunately, consciously deciding which benchmark to use seems to be impossible for me.
New "Game of Thrones" show premiere is good. I expected it to look fantastic, but the most heartening thing is that the casting is excellent all-around. Bodes well for the show.
Casting and visual direction were never the worry, it's the writing where they did abysmally the first time and where I expect them to continue to be utterly abysmal.
I don't know why, but I'm disappointed to hear this. If it sucked I could just ignore it. But if it's actually quite good, it becomes a whole cultural "thing" like the old one, it will become a whole cultural "thing" like the old one, and I'll have to watch it, and the modest amount of enjoyment I get out of the show will be outweighed by the boredom I feel listening to everyone in my social circle discussing it.
My favourite shows are the ones that I watch and nobody else I know does, or at least nobody else I know ever wants to talk about them, things like Lodge 49. (Unfortunately too few people watched Lodge 49.)
I think it will be a big hit, but I doubt it will ever have the cultural impact of the original series. You can only cross that river once, and the original GoT was such a huge success that it basically changed all of streaming/cable. "House of the Dragon" is just one of many big-budget, serialized fantasy/SF shows now, and not even the biggest in scope or budget.
Unfortunately, the hallmark of the latter season of the original GoT seasons (including the last one) were that they often had good scenes, good acting, and good visual effects that ended up less than the sum of their parts because of poor management of story, characterization, and theme. That includes the final season, where they apparently decided that it was critically important to have Dany burn down [spoiler] and be [spoiler] by [spoiler] because it happened in the books, but were indifferent to how it worked out thematically.
In general, too, the show was too fond of its ruthless characters, especially Cersei. The whole point of "A Dance with Dragons" and "A Feast for Crows" is to finally see the rotten fruits of the Lannister project bear out, while we see the benefits of Ned's legacy at work too.
A lot of folks point the finger at Season 6, but I think the rot was setting in by Season 5. The best essays on this are from Steven Attewell:
Does anyone know what actual findings of the Webb telescope challenge our current understanding of the evolution of our universe? There are lots of youtube videos but i have no idea what to believe. There is post-truth, post-belief and I assume soon post-knowledge for you. Thank you.
There's nothing major yet, just a lot of hype. It will take time for astronomers to gather and process enough data to change our understanding of the universe, a few images isn't enough for that. Plus there's the minor detail that some instruments may not be properly calibrated yet, so the data might not yet be reliable enough do that anyway.
Since Sergei does it, I'll plug my substack. I was an astrophysicist a while back and I try to explain these things a bit more clearly on my site: https://www.thequantumcat.space/
It is still early, and there are no scientifically very exciting results yet. Ignore youtube videos, check what actual astrophysicists who are good at accessible explanations say. Ethan Siegel is a good one too follow https://medium.com/@startswithabang
Well one thing to understand is that our current estimates for a lot of things are not super robust. So if we were to find out the universe was 10% older or whatever it would likely not be nearly as big of a change as it first seems. We have done a lot of extrapolating around some figures with error bars. As we refine the figures and the error bars decrease we could end up with non-trivial changes to the age/distance of objects. But that doesn't necessarily mean an actually different cosmological picture.
Probably the biggest current challenge to that AFAIK is the weird possible artifact in the CMBR where it kind of looks oriented to our solar system. Which makes it look like we have some measuring error because the alternate hypothesis (that the early universe was coincidentally oriented along the same plane as our solar system) seems not appealing.
Does anyone else share my feeling that humanity has a very rough decade ahead of it?
There is a number of crises brewing at the same time:
- we are just getting past Corona, which has exhausted the resources and patience of many countries, and is still disrupting supply lines (mainly due to China's policies)
- climate change is really making itself felt, with droughts and floods disrupting harvests
- Russia is tearing down the international order and causing further disruption to the trade with food, fertilizer, and energy
- America's politics are torn between a vile narcissistic crybully on one side, and a bunch of loony activists who want to eradicate Western civilization, no, sorry, "whiteness", on the other
- China has essentially become a techno-fascist dictatorship, and is in the first stages of the bursting of the mother of all real estate bubbles
- as a consequence, many developing countries face hunger, state bankruptcy, and a host of other problems all at the same time, with no one willing and able to help
At the very least, I expect a number of really bad civil wars (accompanied by Ruanda-style genocide, famine, disease, and refugee crises), but world war does not seem off the table.
Can anyone convince me I'm wrong, or point out what should be done to prevent the worst?
I thank you all for your perspectives. My opinion has slightly shifted towards "the world was always more or less terrible, we've had an exceptionally good run the last decades, now we have to suck it up and get through the next troubles as good as we can".
I tend to be more sanguine about many of these trends.
For all of our missteps, Covid has been a great test run for a worse pandemic, especially from a vaccine development perspective.
Technologies to mitigate climate change and provide energy abundance, especially renewables and perhaps fission/fusion, continue to make excellent progress.
Russia is declining in power due to sanctions and poor management, and the war in Ukraine has made Europe much less complacent.
In the US, much of the population is still pretty moderate, although you don't hear as much from them as the extremes.
China's stumbles raise the relative influence of capitalist democracies versus its dictatorial regime, and to the extent that the US feels less threatened by Chinese growth, it is likely to act less erratically.
It is true that developing countries bear the brunt of most global instability, but overall many of them continue to make good progress on climbing into middle income territory and reducing extreme poverty.
I would tentatively argue that the most helpful activity long-term is to promote scientific and economic progress. Better technology and greater economic abundance seem to be the most effective ways to make many people's lives better.
If you think about recent global history in ten year increments, we're looking at between average and really good, depending on the comparators. Let's look at some decades in the last 120 years, even at just some headline reporting. The details can look at lot worse.
Obviously the 1910s and 1940s have some massive world wars - talk about tearing down the international order! Spanish Flu (1918-1919) killed 50 million people, which is both a higher absolute number than COVID, but also a massively higher percentage of the world population. That's almost too easy, so let's look elsewhere.
1900s - Spanish-American War, Armenian Genocide, American President assassinated.
1920s - The rise of Mussolini and the beginnings of Hitler, as well as Stalin. Widespread support for the KKK, including their famous/infamous march on Washington. Also sees US military adventurism in Central America, including the invasion of Nicaragua.
1930s - Worldwide economic meltdown, Great Depression.
1950s - Korean War, Cold War (you could write for hours on this topic alone), massive increase in peacetime military spending. Colonial governments across the world are unstable, leading to wars on multiple continents. Massive increase in nuclear weapon testing and stockpiling.
1960s - Massive destabilization of European colonial interests - revolts take place all over the world, especially in Africa. Civil Rights-related unrest in the US. Coup in France. Vietnam War. Proxy wars between the US and USSR. Domestic terrorism in many major countries.
1970s - Vietnam war continues. Significant violence in US cities. Nixon scandals and resignation. Worldwide problems with terrorism, plane hijackings.
1980s - Significant upheaval in the Middle East and Latin America - Iran Contras, Beirut, destabilization in the USSR. USSR in war against Afghanistan.
1990s - Collapse of the USSR, first Iraq War. Collapse of Yugoslavia, civil war. Coup in Pakistan. Rwandan genocide. Russian invasion of Chechnya.
2000s - Iraq War, Afghanistan War, 9/11, 2008 recession, Darfur conflict in the Sudan.
These are just a tiny number of the major events from each decade. Arguably, each and every decade in the last 120 years was as disruptive or more disruptive than the 2020s. But that's looking at the most major events from across the world. You can also look at the most encouraging events from those decades and come up with a completely different perspective.
Bottom line, this decade is certainly no worse than normal. We're not living in a particularly interesting time (even if we are living in an interesting time).
Agree. It's always been true that bad news rises to the top--"if it bleeds, it ledes", as they say in the news business. Incremental improvements are happening all the time all over the place but we don't see them, but they accumulate. If you just consider the catalog of the big events of the last century--two catastrophic world wars, countless smaller wars, epidemics, genocides and famines that killed 10's of millions--you wouldn't guess that life expectancy would double and the world would transition from a condition where 90% of the population is barely at subsistence living down to closer to 10%, or that global inequality would shrink dramatically. This is documented for example, at the site gapminder.org, and Stephen Pinker has written about these trends in his books. Perhaps the progress has slowed, as some argue, but pessimism dominated throughout the past hardly less than it does now.
So you're saying the 1980's were pretty good? Iran/Contra was possibly the biggest nothingburger of all scandals, upheaval in the MENA and South America is another day ending in -y, so that leaves USSR/Afghanistan which undoubtedly had more lasting effects on the world than contemporary ones.
There was a lot of international terrorism, and some huge instability (especially in the USSR, which broke apart shortly after). That said, the 1980s were probably calmer and "pretty good" compared to many of the other decades. Even the 1990s were relatively calm compared to most of the rest of the list.
>Does anyone else share my feeling that humanity has a very rough decade ahead of it?
To name one important individual, Peter Turchin.
>Can anyone (...) point out what should be done to prevent the worst?
It's unlikely that any purposeful action is even possible at this point, but to rephrase your question to "what needs to happen": We need society to get to a much more cooperative and egalitarian state.
To elaborate using Turchin's theories and terminology, the problem is threefold:
- a growing economic inequality and immiseration of the commoners, leading to
- a ballooning number of the elite and growing intra-elite competition, exacerbated by
- a growing radicalization.
Radicalization is a cultural/social phenomenon and should reverse the fastest, due to a growing wariness of and opposition to the radicals and the disorder they cause. Hence, our short-term problems may indeed ease up within a decade. The structural and economic problems will persist until we get rid of most of our superfluous elites and redistribute their wealth to the commoners.
Eh, it's never been communism, and there's no reason to think it's going to be communism this time around either.
I mean, sure, it ought to be, but that's a separate discussion entirely.
Here, I'm describing Turchin's work, and if you insisted on mistaking is for ought and treating his descriptions of trend reversals as a prescription, you'd probably take him to be some kind of a neo-reactionary.
"It's no use, young man – it's Turchins all the way down!"
First of all, I don't think that to say Peter Turchin is as much as to say God; he's perfectly capable of being plain wrong, as indeed predictors of the future are almost universally wont to be. Secondly, what I was reacting to wasn't your outline of his ideas but your own claim that "The structural and economic problems will persist until we get rid of most of our superfluous elites and redistribute their wealth to the commoners", which is as foolish now as it was in 1850, 1900, 1950 and so on, and even more mulishly wrongheaded since you have even more years of failure to back it up at this point. Swallow your bitter envy; accept that you're stuck being wealthier than almost all the ancestors who came before you and accept that you're only even able to gripe about it because capitalism generates abundance so well that you've lost all connection to the struggle which is in nature.
Look, I can tell what triggered your emotional reaction, but your problem is, fundamentally, having an emotional reaction to an empirical claim. It's "no use" because, well, who cares. Knife to a gun fight.
Certainly, empirical claims are perfectly capable of being plain wrong, but, them being empirical claims, it can and needs to be demonstrated on empirical terms. (Of course, the point about invoking Turchin here is specifically his fame of having predicted a "rough decade" in the 2020s as early as the late aughts, so talking about him being "capable of being wrong" in the potential sense packs little punch.)
And you're just refusing to do that, even after I've tried to nudge you towards a precise set of empirical claims you should be responding to (Turchin's models and their underlying data), and even after I've tried to placate you by assuring you it's not about capitalism vs. communism at all. (Which it isn't. Turchin's theory of social dynamics are much more universal, essentially agnostic with regards to the underlying economic system, he developed it studying feudal societies. If I wanted to go against capitalism, I'd not be using his vaguely Marxian model of social relations, but go straight to, say, Van Bavel's direct description of how capitalism does little more than squander capital built by earlier, productive egalitarian societies.)
I mean, one can be anti communist and still prefer a world where the average person can buy a home, or even a world with less inequality period. I don't think many would accuse the Amish of communism, but they have a lot less wealth inequality than the rest of our society.
Why should the average person be able to buy a home? I am not sure that has ever been the case, and there are more people than ever and the same amount of land.
The veil of ignorance, invented by Harsanyi well before Rawls, leads in a straightforward way to maximizing average utility. Rawls didn't like that, so waved his hands and pulled "maximize the welfare of the worst off" out of the air.
What about it? Rawls isn’t magic. There is also the issue of how you define who is behind the veil.
I don’t find his intuitions about how people would/should act compelling, nor his argument about why that particular setup captures all or even most of what is supposed to being on in ethics.
"Owning a home" also implies owning a home valued at an approximate level (that seems to go up every year), which is far more valuable than historical precedents. The average home in 1950 was approximately 1,000 square feet, compared to over 2,600 now. That is also misleading, because previously to that, more people rented apartments, and there was a splurge of people moving into small detached homes. Why is the expectation ownership, or a detached house, or whatever else has become the norm/"Human Right" that people talk about?
The historical average, even post "no home" or "hand-made hut" was a fairly large multi-family home, where as many as five generations might all live together, but frequently around three generations. Within living memory, there were boarding houses for adult single people. The idea that a $200-400,000 house is even preferable is deeply weird and unsustainable. Many people even say that single-family homes are not sustainable, and that everyone should live in large apartment buildings in cities.
"Less inequality" is a vague and uncertain standard. Any society can have "less" of something like that, but I have never heard a concrete plan for what are the correct comparators (is it bad inequality for Westerners to have 80X the income of a 3rd world person, or is it only a problem within the same country?), and if there's an absolute level of prosperity that can overrule the need for relative wealth. What gets to me, ultimately, is that in the time of Marx and Communist revolution, all but the very richest people made less than average people do today. If my absolute wealth rivals minor nobles or wealthy merchants, why does it matter if it's a small percentage of the wealthy of today?
Rather than make a long comment, can I just invite readers to look at two recent Substack posts of mine that address these points directly?
This one is concerned with what might break down and how, especially in the West. It concludes that the West faces particular problems with the combination of an incapable political class and hollowed out State, confronting a never-before seen combination of problems.
And this one argues that western ability to continually remake the world according to its taste, by force if necessary, actually came to an end some time ago, but we didn't notice it. We've been coasting for some time on an economic and military dominance that finally disappeared 5-10 years ago. Europe is going to have to get used to living with a militarily powerful and pissed-off Russia, and the West in general will simply find that it can't automatically get its way any more, and will have to take account of the opinions of countries on which it is economically dependent.
A militarily powerful Russia? Pissed off, sure, but if there's any Eurasian country in terminal decline it has to be Russia. Their system is a heap of rubble, they can't even invade a podunk border nation that belonged to them a generation ago due to incompetence, corruption and dumpster morale crippling their military. If they didn't have the leftover Soviet nuclear capacity they'd be nothing and nobody, a backwater not even worth invading. That's exactly *why* they're seething now and trying to boost their self-esteem with an idiotic invasion.
There are arguments for Russian decline in certain areas - notably demographic - but not military. Most commentators have assumed that because the Russians have not tried to build US-style forces, they must be no good and not worth paying attention to. Those commentators who could be bothered to take an interest assumed that the Russian forces were still in the same deplorable state as in the 1990s. At the beginning of the invasion you may remember confident predictions that it couldn't last more than a week, because the Russians would run out of supplies and ammunition.
But ever the last fifteen yeas, the Russians have been re-building a capability for large-scale ground operations in Europe, using mainly artillery and missile, and focused on attrition warfare. The West has designed completely different forces for complete different purposes - mostly operations in Africa and the Middle East. In terms of what the Russians can field, the Europeans can only manage a handful of armoured or mechanised brigades, and the US a handful more, even if you could get them there. They are capable of operating for perhaps a week at high intensity rates of fire and supply. The Russians have been supplying much larger forces for months. According to the Ukrainians the Russians are expending some 100,000 artillery rounds a day. Even if this is an exaggeration, they obviously still have massive stocks. The Russians use missiles, not aircraft, to obtain their definition of air superiority, and they have very large stocks which would render western air operations anywhere near them suicidally costly. This is not because the Russians are supernaturally strong, but because Europe is weak all over, and the US is weak where it matters - in high-intensity land/air combat. In this essay I set out why I think that for industrial, economic and political reasons, this state of affairs is going to endure for a long time, and could only be improved, if at all, by the equivalent of WW2 mobilisation.
Before the current conflict, the Ukrainian Army was the largest and most powerful in Europe. It had around twenty mechanised/armoured/airborne brigades, compared with 2-3 for the average European country. The US has, I believe something like 4-5 equivalent brigades, which would take several years to activate. The UA was well-equipped, and had a huge amount of combat experience against the separatists on the East of the country since 2014. It also had some 300,000 reserves. The UA was extremely well trained by NATO nations, and lavishly provided with western intelligence, and all support short of direct military involvement. The UA, with NATO assistance, had been constructing lines of fortifications in the Donbas, as powerful as anything constructed in modern history, which the Russians only now appear to be finally breaking through. (There are some impressive Youtube videos of the fortifications.)
Even together, European countries can't begin to match the combat capability of Ukraine in February 2024, and the US doesn't have that much to add. Moreover, the Russians can directly threaten NATO capitals from their own airspace. They deployed MiG-31 aircraft to Kaliningrad last week with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, just as a move in the poker-game.
We don't want to fall back into the Cold War mindset of thinking the Russians are unbeatable. As I said, it's not an objective relationship of strength, but a relative one, and the West is now extremely weak where it matters. We're going to have to learn to live with that.
Good grief Moncrieff! Either your last name is Simonyan or you've been working hard to retrofit reality to your native pessimism. The Russians are focused on attrition warfare? Remember when they tried to blitz Ukraine and got their paratroopers blasted to shit over those airfields, and bogged down by their cheap shitty cost-saving Chinese tires exploding en masse on the way to Kyiv? Attrition warfare is what they're doing now because they tried everything else first and it didn't work. And everything that comes out indicates their logistics are still a catastrophe, with already-demoralized soldiers not even being provided with food properly. They're shitting up a wall.
"the West is now extremely weak where it matters. We're going to have to learn to live with that."
I agree that there's been a great and shameful degree of naive disarmament, but extremely weak? "We're going to have to learn to live with that"? Are you serious? Europe is still like 40 times as rich as Russia and would be aided by the US in any rearmament. The situation is not ideal, agreed, but we can fix it.
Kind of underwhelmed by this argument. A thousand SAM missiles are worthless when your targeting and fire-control radars can be taken out within 30 minutes of H hour by G5 aircraft (which you can't even see) lugging HARM ordnance. And once the sky is no longer yours all that artillery is just slow moving target practice for new pilots, and the enormous stationary piles of shells are (as we've kind of seen already) just big fireworks displays awaiting a joyful match.
"The Russians use missiles, not aircraft, to obtain their definition of air superiority"
This is a very flimsy argument because, at a minimum, it requires the Russians to define down air superiority. The Ukrainian air force still exists and is still flying 10-20 sorties a day. Add in that the Russians are only flying 100-200 sorties a day, and Russia's air force is no where close to what the US would call air superiority.
Despite its stock of artillery rounds, there is a very good reason why Russia remains a disaster militarily:
“In war, the moral is to the physical as ten to one.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte
Russia remains a conscript army that's poorly led and this is why they continue to fail. Their little adventures in Syria and Africa having been mostly executed by paramilitaries (paid much more handsomely than recruits) and special forces with a few one-off toys. What we're seeing in Ukraine is the application of their regular Army which is largely a disaster only maintaining ground by continuous artillery barrages.
Having seen the Russian Army up close in the Balkans in the mid-90s, I was left with the distinct impression it would dissolve if it faced a western campaign without a nuclear back-stop.
If Europe can get through the winter without caving into Russian demands, and sanctions continue to deepen dependence upon Chinese purchasing (with a parallel increase in Chinese power over Russian decision-making), we will see the continued fall of Russian power which will make them even more reliant on their nuclear weapons as their only means of wielding influence.
It did this against an opponent who knew it was coming and had months to prepare. It then accomplished something similar in 2003.
Russia was unable to overcome a force of ~100,000 that was caught mostly flat-footed by its attack. Furthermore, the Ukrainian Army was nearly non-existent for several months in 2014 [allowing Russia to walk into Crimea and the Donbas without facing resistance], so even if "together, European countries can't begin to match the combat capability of Ukraine in February 2024", that suggests that Europe would need at most 8 years (and probably far, far less) to remilitarize.
Your brigade counting is also very questionable. If we're just trying to estimate numbers of mechanized brigades, Ukraine had ~1,000 main battle tanks at start of the war whereas the US has ~2,500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_main_battle_tanks_by_country). I agree that non-American NATO countries have mostly allowed their conventional artillery and tank capabilities to erode considerably, but there is a substantial difference between "NATO countries are fielding fewer tanks than they were in 1991" and "all the NATO countries of Europe are militarily weaker than the Ukrainian military"
Overall, this seems like a Trump v. Hillary 2016 discussion. We observe that the battle between Russia and Ukraine is close-fought and bloody, with neither side possessing a decisive advantage despite one side expecting that it possessed a decisive advantage at the start of the conflict and subsequently making many stupid and costly mistakes because of that incorrect assumption. This only tells us that the two sides are closely matched. It doesn't tell us whether they are both strong or both weak.
I generally agree with your assessment, I just would put a different spin on it. Yes, rough times are ahead, but we the West is overdue for rough times, that's how one gets out of an inadequate equilibrium. Sure, that comet sucked for the dinosaurs, but it accelerated the mammals' progress by tens of millions of years, by some estimates. Climate change will cause calamities, but a warmer Earth is good for life in general. Hopefully whatever comes soon does not end up in a nuclear war, though.
2. Climate change really isn't making itself felt, people have just collectively decided that it's okay to blame every piece of lousy weather on "climate change" now. The frequency of crappy weather events hasn't significantly changed. Remember when people said that Hurricane Katrina was the new normal due to climate change? That was eighteen years ago, and there hasn't been anything particularly bad since.
3. Yeah, Russia's recent actions suck. On the upside we've learned that Russian military strength is far less than anyone anticipated.
4. Trump himself will not win another election. The next Republican president, in 2024 or 2028, is likely to have some of his strengths but few of his obvious weaknesses.
5. The Chinese government is awful, but the Chinese government has been awful for about five thousand years now so that's really nothing new.
6. Poor countries will continue to have problems. But actual starvation seems to have decreased massively over the past few decades and I don't think a disruption to the Ukranian wheat harvest is going to be enough to take us back to the 1980s.
Prediction: the next decade will look like the last few -- new problems showing up noisily to the dismay of everybody, while old problems sneak quietly out the back door, giving the impression that things are going to hell even while they're slowly and steadily getting better.
I feel like this might be a bit pessimistic? My understanding is that the current IPCC party line is that the effect of climate change on things like flooding and droughts has, so far, been too small to measure. On top of that, when it comes to harvests, I thought the consensus was that we just don't know if more CO2 means larger or smaller yields of crops? I remember doing some research on this question and deciding that different categories of plants would be effected differently (I think the terms 'C3 and C4' were involved?) but that humanity's primary food crops were in the category which would see increased yields from warmer weather and increased CO2 concentration
Re: american politics... get back to me when America sends every able bodied man between 18 and 50 to the jungle to die for essentially no reason, like it did to the previous generation. Until something like that happens again, I'm pretty much convinced that the only reason modern American politics looks bad at all is because the current generation has no idea what 'bad' actually looks like.
Same with Russia. Like, yeah, Putin is bad, and maybe our 30 year vacation from the cold war has ended... but that's not new, and this time the use of nuclear weapons isn't even being talked about. It was a lot worse for the last generation.
As far as China goes... yeah, I'm worried. But also at least they're doing non-humanitarian investment in the third world (aka the kind of investment that actually has to create lasting value, not the worthless or even harmful kind of investment). From the terms you used, I am a little worried this might be part of what you don't like about China? But the altruistic kind of investment that the West has been doing for the last 60 years pretty much ruined everything it touched, whereas China's african investments seem to be generating a great deal of prosperity for everyone.
Am I scared of social credit systems? Yeah. Am I scared of the Hundred Year Taiwan Crisis? Yeah.
But... I mean, like a lot of people in this culture, I sorta think that a general artificial intelligence might kill the entire human species pretty much any day now
It's hard to be concerned about global warming or even russia or china in the face of threats like that
Hmm. I think a nuclear war is much more likely than any AI takeover. Not that I ever hope to be the one saying “I told you so”.
China doesnt scare me. Even an invasion of Taiwan is a relatively local affair. The “rules based order” is just the US dominant order. The UN is ignored when it is convenient.
One thing I found out was that Russia and Ukraine hadn't been producing 30% of the world's wheat, it was 30% of the world's *exported* wheat. Most wheat is grown in the countries where it's eaten, so not exported. There can still be serious shortages in some places, but the situation isn't as bad as it was made to sound.
Im interested in learning more about homelessness in the U.S. —it’s causes and solutions to it. Anyone have any books (or podcasts/articles/etc) on the matter that they would recommend to someone like me?
A lot of discussion around homelessness is hopelessly muddled by conflating multiple different groups. It might be a motte & bailey, but I think most people are legitimately confused #mistaketheory.
Does anyone know if a company that came into being, created and sold a product, and then stopped (having maxed out their core competency), and either dissolved or just went into maintenance mode and switched to paying dividends?
Under the ideal model of shareholder capitalism this should happen fairly often - competence is transferable but not *that* transferable. However the closest I can think of to an example is Craigslist (which really is arguably the most successful tech company, as measured by average employee productivity).
This 'run for cash' is the default model in my field (infrastructure finance) - this doesn't help you as a retail investor very much though as they tend to be privately held.
Teledyne is probably the best example. Run by Henry Singleton, probably one of the most brilliant capital allocators of the last century (was also friends with Claude Shannon incidentally).
He did not pay dividends tho, he used buybacks. When the stock was overvalued he used it to make acquisitions, and when it was undervalued he used cash flow from those acquisitions to buy back stock.
And when one of the companies he owned with Teledyne had run its course, he would milk them for cash as much as possible until they were no longer profitable, and then shut them down.
Ended up being one of the best performing stocks of the 20th century.
Also shameless self promotion, but Metrovacesa is another example. A real estate developer in Spain that is in slow liquidation mode. Click on my last blog post to see more.
Sweden has some old companies like that. The shares very rarely come on the market, as nobody wants to sell them, just collect the dividends, but I try to get shares whenever I can. One example: Berte Qvarn started as a mill in 1569. They still are making flour. (They also have an ice cream company, SIA; I am not sure how that happened.) https://www.berteqvarn.se/ (in Swedish)
If this is something that you want to see more of, you will have to put some serious teeth in your
antitrust and hostile takeover laws. Because you cannot become this successful in your niche without some conglomerate with lots of cash coming along and trying to buy your company.
I think your scenario depends on an unrealistic assumption about how stable the business environment is or can be. Generally, companies are always either growing or shrinking, becoming more profitable or less, et cetera, if for no other reason than that exogenous factors are always changing. Periods in which revenue and costs are stable, the field of competitors is stable and nobody is catching up nor falling behind, technology isn't changing much, interest rates and taxes and regulations are stable, et cetera, are generally short-lived -- maybe 5-10 years at most.
So as a practical matter, successful business leaders are always trying to get bigger and diversify, because it's too hard to hit the sweet spot of perfect equilibrium, exactly treading water, and if you tried to hit it the odds are high you'll miss that narrow mark and end up in decline.
I hear that Whitepages is doing the maintenence mode thing - they came into being, had two decades of explosive growth, and then spun off the business units with growth potential (Hiya, Ekata) to focus on being a "mature" tech company that pays lots of dividends.
I would push back on the "competence is transferable but not *that* transferable" bit. I think that competence (organisational competence, which is not just the sum of the competence of the employees) is valuable and hard to come by, and that it's more transferable than you think. I think that when companies expand into new fields they're rarely stepping _that_ far out of their comfort zone.
If Google decides to start a social network (or Microsoft decides to start a search engine) then it doesn't mean they'll succeed, but I would argue they're more likely to succeed than the same amount of funding given to a fresh startup in a garage, because Google has already solved a bunch of problems that the garage guys haven't, like "how do we scale" and "how do we deliver new products" and "how do we hire people"?
based on your other comments I don't think this is the kind of answer you're going for but lots of single proprietor small businesses work this way. You found a business to fill a niche in your area, and then you just run that business and collect the profit, or go out of business if it stops being profitable.
I wanted to mention that Buffett, in his annual letters, talks about capital allocation and his ability to divert capital from cashflow generators to places where the capital can be invested productively. There's one letter in particular where he talks about National Indemnity which he let shrink for long time (maybe a decade) until the economics of the business changed. He's also talked about Sees Candy similarly - as it doesn't require much reinvestment but generates alot of cash. If he had to reinvest Sees' cashflow back into Sees growth I think he says he simply couldn't do it. The candy business can't grow that way - so he uses that cashflow elsewhere. Sorry I don't have links or references. I'm just going from memory - but he talks about the reinvestment problem often, and indicates Berkshires structure allows him to move free cashflow to the highest returning units rather than keep it within units that may not have much opportunity for growth.
Historically I think this was the norm (although I don't have the data to prove it). I think the modern grow-grow-grow model is a consequence of tax incentives: capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than dividends, and give more flexibility in when to realize gains, so shareholders do better if profits are somehow turned into growth instead of just paid out. So that's what happens.
Richard Martin says that it was a result of changing corporate culture from a focus on customer delight to one of increased share value. Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling proposed, in 1976, in a paper in the Journal of Financial Economics that the well understood problem that the interests of the owners of the firm (the shareholders) do not perfectly align with the interests of the agents they hire to run the firm (the executives and managers). In particular, the executives were operating in a way that made it more likely that they would get a bonus for increased sales _now_ even if it damaged the long term prospects of the firm. They weren't getting dividends, so why should they care?
This paper, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure", is the single most frequently cited article in business academia. It was, as they say, "more influential than God". It proposed to align the interests of the shareholders with the managers by rewarding and paying the managers in shares. Interests align, problem solved. This has proven to be the classic case of handing a person a can of petrol to put the fire out with. If you thought that Managers were behaving badly by fiddling the bonus figures, wait until you see what they can get up to when they not only can but are obliged to wiggle around the stock prices! Instead of getting management who liked their dividends and were in it for the long term success of the firm, we got management by people who think that 1 quarter is long term, and are perfectly pleased if there are no dividends at all. Or fudge the other way, if over-paying dividends will increase the share price.
Yes, but capital gains typically aren't taxed _at all_ until realization, which is typically not until sale*, whereas dividends are taxed in the year of distribution.
* And sometimes effectively not even then, if they are donated to a qualified charity, or are inherited and therefore receive a step up in basis eliminating the tax on gains during the deceased's lifetime (provided the total value of the estate in question is below the estate tax threshold).
That's not my experience. With dividends, I typically get hit with a withholding tax of 15% by the country the company is registered in, whereas I don't pay any taxes on regular capital gains.
Not sure if Redbox (Coinstar might be company name?) fits this mold, but they were great at the DVD vending boxes. But renting DVDs destined to become dying business with internet and Netflix on the way. I'm pretty sure the company wasted money trying to transition into other vending machine ideas like coffee - but eventually gave up and were taken out by private equity who I expect ran them as a cash cow to milk the melting icecube.
It's pretty rare that dissolution is economically optimal. Usually companies die by a firm taking them over and cannibalizing them, selling off the profitable parts of the company and closing down the unprofitable ones.
But as for going into "maintenance mode" to maximize dividend returns: Yes that happens. Well, more or less. The owner or the firm that buys it turns it into what is colloquially called a cash cow or more formally a mature business. Not usually dividend returns specifically but basically cutting expenses while keeping the core business going in order to generate as much cash as possible.
To pick a random example, Activision Blizzard was just acquired by Microsoft in large part due to its rather attractive revenue and net income figures. It was partly strategic since Microsoft has a big videogame division. But it was also simply that the company has had high but relatively stagnant net income for like a decade or two now.
This shouldn't happen much in any industry where either technology or competition is a factor in profit. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place.
I expect it's far more common in every economic system *except* "capitalism" (by which I assume you mean a combination of free markets and shareholding with limited liability). It's certainly more common with monopolies. Under feudalism (which is literally pure capitalism, defined as the system in which there is no social mobility and the owners of the means of production control them, set wages, and reap all the profits), "maintenance mode and paying dividends" was the only method of production that people were aware of. I think people believed then that "profit" in the free-market sense could be obtained only by war or exploitation.
Dissolving can happen when continuing to use an old technology until bankruptcy is more-profitable than buying into the new tech. There are also cases where a company is broken up and its possessions sold off, again because it's more-profitable, because other companies can use those resources more productively. I seem to recall that some big company was bought out 10-20 years ago purely for its customer list. Perhaps it was DEC.
My point in writing that was that the Marxist understanding of capitalism, which I think is the definition used most-often in American pop culture, actually describes feudalism better than capitalism. I usually say "free market" instead of "capitalism" because most Marxists are in a continual state of denial about the fact that Marxism requires eliminating free markets and economic freedom of choice more generally.
I'm not an entrepreneur, but when I have accomplished something that I was proud of, I was never interested in milking it dry or doing the same kind of thing forever. I alway wanted to move on to something new and different. Perhaps that's a general human tendency. The founders of large companies, having created something successful, may, by and large, feel free to sell out or retain significant ownership but then move on to the next thing.
Right. To be explicit about what brought this up, I think this is a huge problem with Google - I think they made a great search engine, then went on to make a few other decent things like docs, but then doubled down on creating an increasing number of increasingly mediocre products while neglecting their core products, which are gradually declining in quality, and that this is bad for both their users and their stock price. They do this because they are emotionally attached to the idea of being a startup that creates new things, but this is bad and would be solved by more cold-hearted shareholder capitalism.
The internal mechanics of bonuses push that trend in google. Very few people want to work on the search engine, because it is considered tall and all had, and not exciting. Anyway most of the bonuses go to new projects if they are looking successful, once a project starts to not be so successful it is abandoned internally and nobody wants to work there, because you don’t get bonuses from working on old and maintained projects. So internally Google people are always moving around to the greatest new thing, abandoning the old thing. Which explains google+, its rise and fall.
You are underestimating how much work goes into maintaining ad revenue for google. They pay apple double digit billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iOS. Chrome and Android both basically exist for that reason. Also in my estimations Youtube and Google maps are probably each as important to the world as Google search.
So to be clear here, I've actually worked at Google and have a rough idea of how much effort goes into maintenance vs creating new products. Some effort does go into maintenance, it's true, but also there's a whole lot of effort that goes into refactoring/changing existing code in working products into new forms that don't work better (and are often actively worse) because it makes employees look good on their perf reviews if they've done a lot of activity.
YouTube already existed before being bought by Google, and if anything has probably declined in quality to the user since Google started optimising it for addictiveness.
Android was also acquired by Google. That doesn't change the fact that they grew it enormously. My niece is a surgeon and she watches Youtube videos of surgeries she's never done before before performing them. When I went to the motorcycle mechanic the mechanic was watching a youtube video of the repair he was doing. Youtube is something that has had an enormously positive impact whether or not people want to quibble with details of how its run. If anything Google's incompetence in optimizing it for addictiveness compared to say TikTok has been a lucky blessing.
So here's the thing: Founders are incentivized to want to grow the value of the company, often regardless of profits. This makes sense early on because when the company is worth $0 the only thing you need is to make it worth more than $0. But when you have Facebook or Google and the Founder is still the leader and a major shareholder they still have the same incentive. Additionally, people who are good at growing companies are usually good at deploying capital and not at saving it. Private Equity people do things like calculate whether having snacks in the conference room is a justifiable expense. Startup founders tend to be less focused on minor economizing.
To put it as simply as possible: 13% of Facebook (Meta) is owned by Zuckerberg. Facebook has roughly a $450 billion market cap and $40 billion net income. Let's pretend 100% of net income gets distributed as profits. If Zuckerberg raises the net income by 10% he gets an extra 500 million (4 billion * 13%). If Zuckerberg raises the valuation by 10% he gets an extra $6 billion (45 billion * 13%). Plus Zuckerberg made his money growing Facebook, not running the firm super lean to maximize profits, so it's both what he wants to do and what he's professionally good at.
I've noticed that most people who try to explain why we sleep, say it's got to do with the brain–to prune useless memories, consolidate useful ones, or <insert technobabble here> and thus grant us creativity.
But the qualia that directs us to try to sleep is tiredness. Hunger, the qualia which directs us to eat, arises when we haven't eaten recently. It seems probable that the qualia that directs us towards sleep is likewise caused by some deficiency which sleep remedies. But what causes tiredness is not thinking, but acting, with our muscles.
Almost no mental activity makes me tired. I get a qualia which I might call fatigue when I play an intense game of chess, but it isn't tiredness. It doesn't make me want to sleep; it just makes me want to stop playing chess. And chess is the only mental activity I can think of which gives me this feeling, maybe because it's the only difficult mental activity I engage in which doesn't interest me much. I've been in long, mentally brutal mathematics competitions, like the Putnam, and they rarely if ever fatigued me. I, and I think other people, fall asleep easily after a day of physical labor; but I must discipline myself to go to bed after a day of hard mental labor, or I'll keep on working until 3AM.
You might object that some people get to sleep by reading or listening to audio recordings. But they don't get to sleep by reading or listening to exciting stories; they read something familiar, or (like my mother) listen to recordings of sermons by monotonous Northern Baptists (also known as "the frozen chosen"). I nearly fall asleep whenever I try reading in the bathtub, but that isn't because it's mentally challenging; it's because the bathtub relaxes my muscles.
So I have a strong prior expectation that the primary function of sleep should have more to do with re-energizing our muscles than our brains. Could it be that all this focus on sleep as refreshing our brains is a result of a bias to value the mind above the body?
It's now known that the brain also gets "cleaned," literally. I recently read in a source I thought credible that portions of the brain, i.e., some brain cells, shrink during sleep to allow better circulation of the cerebro-spinal fluid, which cleans out waste and toxins.
I saw an argument that sleep helps people solve problems simply by making them forget. It gets them out of their rut. People interpret this as creativity, but the argument claimed it was purely negative. Similarly, "solving a problem in the shower." All I remember is this hypothesis, but there was an actual argument with claims about specific predictions.
Mental effort and learning are different. Chess professionals consume a lot of glucose playing in a tournament, but they probably learn more from deliberate practice. The hypothesis that sleep cleans out the metabolic waste products from the thinking is different from the hypothesis that dreaming helps learning.
I am rather skeptical that "solving a problem in the shower" is purely negative. In sleep, our experiences are replayed and transferred from short-term memory (hippocampus) to long-term memory (neocortex). It is pretty well established that this is a "positive" process. For example, when you learn vocabulary, then your performance improves through sleeping, compared to being busy with other things.
However, there is a hypothesis that goes into a similar direction, the homeostatic sleep hypothesis (HSH). The synapses in the brain all have a certain strengths, and "learning" is mostly adapting these strengths. During the day, the average strength goes (slightly) up, and during sleep it goes down again to baseline. The HSH builds on that and says that the learning mechanism that is activate during day can't keep the brain "in balance", and that sleep serves some renormalization purpose. (Probably not the REM sleep which consolidates and transfers memory.) The synapses need to be within a certain range to keep the brain in homeostasis, in a range where it can operate well. If the synapses end up being too strong, then you get epileptic seizures, which is bad.
But there are tons of effects of sleeping. As you say, cleaning out metabolic waste is probably also a form of maintenance that happens during sleep. We have no idea how to rank them into more or less important/urgent effects of sleep.
Sure, sleep helps with learning, but does it promote creativity? Can we distinguish what these hypotheses predict? Phil mentioned the creativity hypothesis, but I'm not sure how popular it is. Maybe I should focus on shower creativity.
Yes, the creativity hypothesis is a standard assumption, because it matches well the experience of many people. But the evidence is not much stronger than that. People do try to make experiments about it, but in this field it's generally pretty hard to find experiments that exclude competing explanations.
> It seems probable that the qualia that directs us towards sleep is likewise caused by some deficiency which sleep remedies. But what causes tiredness is not thinking, but acting, with our muscles.
Part of what makes us want to sleep is a build up of Adenosine. So it may not be a desire for something as much as having too much of something.
As a person who performs a lot of physical work, I can totally relate to that. When I work really hard, I sleep up to an hour more than when I work lighter. I assume this is the origin of the advice that people should sleep 8 hours every night: In the beginning of the 20th century many people worked so hard that they needed to sleep 8 hours. Currently, when most people work less hard, 7 hours is much more accurate.
You may want to distinguish between the telos of sleep and its mechanism. I believe the latter is controlled by a number of biochemical clocks, e.g. the melatonin cycle:
These cycles appear to mostly chug along regardless of what the brain or body might be doing: people with regular bedtimes end up being sleepy at the same time whether or not they've done a load of calculus or binge-watched Buffy all day, and whether they ran a half marathon or sat on their ass. It's just a biochemical clock.
But the "why" of sleep -- what purpose it serves in humans, why we do it at all -- is another question, and need have no relationship to the mechanism.
Sleep is pretty much universal in animals with higher (and even not so high) brain functions. This is unusual and indicates that its function is really, really important.
Now *what exactly* is important about it? Is it physical or mental?
In dolphins, they would drown if the whole brain sleeps. So the two hemisphere take turns in sleeping. Some sea birds continue flying while sleeping. So I don't think that "bodily" sleeping is as universal as "brain" sleeping. I would guess that the non-negotiable part about sleeping is mental.
Of course, for humans and most animals, sleeping has also a ton of physical effects, and these are very important, too. I just don't think they are as non-negotiable as the mental effects.
Also, if you look at heavily sleep-deprived persons (2-3 days), then the physical state deteriorates a bit, they are not quite as strong and fast. But the thing that becomes really critical is the state of mind. I would also guess that this is the reason why you die after too much time without sleep, not that the muscles or the gustatory system stops working.
I think Melvin had a good response to this. Evolved systems tend to be overloaded and used towards multiple purposes. Human sleep cycles tend to function on a circadian rhythm, so it's not simply a matter of exertion.
They've done experiments where humans are forced to stay awake and avoid REM sleep for long periods of time. There are definitely negative mental effects including effects related to memory. Some of the sleep deprived hallucinations seem to mimic dreaming while awake.
"Cognitive impairment.
The second documented consequence of sleep deprivation is performance deterioration, especially cognitive impairment. Intriguingly, there is great inter-individual variability in the susceptibility of humans to the effects of sleep deprivation, and subjects whose performance is little impaired by one task may show great impairment in another task [55,56]. Partial sleep restriction also impairs cognitive performance, although subjects may not realize that they are impaired [57,58]. Cognitive impairment is easier to study in humans than in animals, but there is now evidence that both acute sleep loss and sleep restriction affect cognitive function in flies [59], birds [60], and rodents (e.g., [61])."
I suppose that you could argue that the mental effects are secondary to some kind of physical health. A brain hemorrhage would be 'mental' in effect, but not caused by neurons, pruning, etc. It would be fundamentally cardiovascular in origin. However there are relationships between memory and REM sleep.
"The increases in REM sleep during the specific time periods predicted later memory recall and reliably separated between learners and nonlearners"
I think it's silly to try to explain sleep with reference to higher brain functions, simply because the vast majority of other terrestrial vertebrates (and some fish and invertebrates too) sleep. Does a koala or a sloth sleep twenty hours per day because its puny brain needs all that time to process four hours' worth of memories of leaf-chewing? Heck no, they sleep because being awake costs energy and they don't need to do it. Most terrestrial animals are specialised either for day or night and there's little value to being active for the other half of the day.
Having said that, once you've built scheduled downtime into your system, you wind up using it for everything; everything is easier to maintain and rebuild when you're not actively using it. So once sleep is established as part of an animal's lifestyle you'd expect it to be used for all sorts of things. Your brain does some very important tasks during sleep, and it starts going wrong if it doesn't sleep, but that doesn't mean that sleep is _for_ the brain, any more than you can say that airliners land for the purpose of having their seatback pockets vacuumed.
"the qualia that directs us to try to sleep is tiredness" I think I disagree with this. Feeling physically tired is very different from feeling sleepy, for me. Sleepiness is mental.
Huh, well not me. When I've been sleep deprived, it's my brain that seems to need to shut down. If I'm tired and have to stay awake, I have these micro sleeps. (I 'sleep' for a few (maybe 5-15) seconds.. have all this dream stuff which seems like hours, and then wake up and notice only a few seconds have passed, and I can't wait to get to my bus stop, get off, walk home and collapse.
You are very unusual, I suspect, if you only get tired from physical exercise. Try not exercising for a few days and then staying up all night for the next few.
Does anyone know the origin(s?) of wedding arches in non-Jewish weddings? I tried googling around for it and only found vague and unsubstantiated claims.
We're basically a small team of remote mercenary IT engineers, and we're looking for a new member or two. Stuff we work on covers a broad range; think everything on the spectrum from a high-performance network block device implementation, to Yet Another iPhone App, to CI/CD infrastructure deployment and management.
The base office is located in Tokyo, Japan, but we're fully remote. As long as there's reasonable overlap with JST, we're mostly agnostic about your physical location.
Members have considerable flexibility in how they design their work schedule as well as moderate flexibility in choosing what to work on. We try to shoot for a 3 day work week, plus as much socializing and leisure hacking together as desired. Even with this schedule, pay falls around the 70th percentile for Japan. It's a pretty sweet setup.
If two or more of the following blurbs fit your autobiography synopsis, then we'd definitely like to hear from you:
- Hacker at heart
- Actively works on "soft skills"
- Mad Japanese skillz
If you're interested, please contact me at this address specification:
I think that listing the pay in some currency per some time unit instead of as a percentile would be more useful for everyone who isn't fully familiar with the income distribution of Japan.
Do you find a lot of English speaking programmers who also speak Japanese? I'd always assumed they were rare and mostly worked at Crunchyroll or for the big companies like Sony.
I certainly don't have distributional data, but in the right subcultures, the intersection feels not terribly rare. However, the sigma is pretty low, so a combination of high-level Japanese+English+IT skill become quite lucrative.
How does it become quite lucrative? Aren't salaries lower in Japan? I speak some foreign languages but I've mostly been drawn to working in English on American projects because they seem to pay much better than anything abroad or even foreign adjacent. So I'm curious how you put this together.
Some of our higher earning members are in 90th percentile of Japanese annual salary, which is about twice the median here. And that, on a 3-day work week, to boot.
If you live in Japan, this provides exceptionally good financial stability.
Of course, we cannot compete with 250k USD salaries at the moment, though we do have relationships with individuals charging around 300 USD equivalent per hour, so the ceiling is pretty high.
Double the median Japanese salary is about ten million yen, isn't it? So about $100k. (Google says $70k.) That seems about right for what I meant. Still, $300 USD per hour is definitely attractive.
At any rate, I don't speak Japanese or live in Japan. So while I've worked with international Japanese/Korean/etc clients before I'm not sure if I'm a fit. I know there are some Japanese and English speaking people on DSL but I don't know if they're devs.
Google Translate is definitely helpful for raw information transfer in many cases. What I'm fishing for with "mad Japanese skillz" beyond simple language ability is cultural awareness and soft skills. Most of our clients are Japanese, so being able to directly handle those relationships is a huge boon.
Copy pasted from my own question on Economics Stack Exchange, I wonder if anyone here can give me an answer.
"Title: Why do stock returns seem to be uncorrelated with interest rate?
Since expected return of stock is risk-free rate plus risk premium, intuitively they should be correlated. Of course the size of risk premium is not constant, but it's hard to imagine why risk premium would move in a way that almost exactly cancels out the change in interest rate.
Questions:
1. Is the data correct(are they really uncorrelated)? Searching google scholar suggests so, but this is pretty hard to believe so I wouldn't be surprised if I was missing something important.
2. Are there any consensus, or at least a good theory, on why this happens?
3. Real life implications - as a retail investor with pretty strong faith in EMH[Efficient Market Hypothesis], is it rational for me to move my money from stock market to bank account because the interest rate went up?"
They're with 99%+ certainty not uncorrelated. Only my 2cts, take it for what you want. I didn't read the article but I know this for a fact. Would have to be a very convincing argument and dataset to make any dent in that believe.
It's pretty hard to measure. There are the discrete jumpy main rate decisions by e.g. the FOMC and ECB, but then there is also a more slow-burning expectation effect of those, leading to the weird scenario that a rate rise is interpreted as a rate decrease relative to expectations. You'd need to take all of that into account properly.
To convince yourself that at least some relation exists just check out the last 20 FOMC interest rate announcements and look at what the stock indices did at that time. Rates have a huge influence.
Rates effects are about unfathomable amounts of money. This is not one of the areas in which markets are inefficient.
I think you misunderstood my question. A "change" in interest rate, or expectation of change, will definitely influence the market. I'm talking about the equilibrium state, where long term interest rate is fixed. Is there a difference in expected return where interest rate is fixed at, say, 2% vs 5%, given that everything else is the same?
1.) They don't seem to be uncorrelated. They're anti-correlated. Higher interest rates mean lower stock returns. Now, this doesn't always mean an absolute change since other things besides interest rates set the price. For example, inflation tends to push nominal returns up.
2.) They're anti-correlated because higher interest rates make alternative investments more attractive and generally reduce confidence in companies and economic activity more generally by raising the cost of capital.
3.) You can take it as a signal but there's no guarantee the net effect will be without a more comprehensive analysis. For example, if deficit spending, investor/consumer confidence, and inflation remain high and this outpaces inflation it might make stocks continue to be more attractive.
Also, the expected return is the sum of all return scenarios multiplied by their probability. The equity risk premium is calculated by subtracting the risk free return from that. While you can mathematically back-calculate it that way you don't generally. Instead you calculate the ER and then subtract risk free return to see how much better the investment performs over sticking it in an index fund or government bond or whatever.
The expectation of rising interest rates will lower stock values, but once the interest rate has changed, surely everything would already have been priced in.
For example, let the risk free rate be 10%, permanently. Stock returns have historically been 7~9%. According to your logic, expected returns will be even lower since the interest rate is high. But then why would anyone invest in stocks in this situation? Shouldn't the stock price drop so that the expected return would equal 10%+risk premium?
Oh and it looks like you're right about them being anti-correlated. I must have misread the conclusion part in the study. That just makes it even stranger though.
REAL stock returns have historically been ~7%. Nominal returns have been more like 10%. Also, the traditional risk free rate of return is usually something like a bond or a treasury which is more like 3% nominal. So you can see why: 10% is higher than 3%. And as 3% becomes 5% it becomes relatively more attractive.
But yes, if you could get a 10% risk free rate of return you would expect money to flow out of stocks and into that investment since it's strictly superior being risk free and having an equivalent nominal return. If it can absorb infinite money then the stock market would be significantly hollowed out as has happened, semi-analogously, with index funds eating the entire market.
Since returns on stocks are primarily, in many cases exclusively, based on the future price of the stock I'm not sure why you think it would operate like a yield instrument like a t-note. If you buy a stock and the price drops you have negative returns. You don't get an increasing rate of return on a dropping stock unless the stock pays out dividends and the dividends remain constant while the price drops. And even on dividend stocks, future sale value is most of the return. If the market always made it so that any individual company returned 10%+risk premium then you'd expect everyone to always make money in the stock market since everything would at all times be going up... You can (as through an index fund) aggregate a bunch of stocks to basically get a long run market growth. But that's because you're spreading risk among hundreds or thousands of bets and then expecting it to still fluctuate over time.
"Since returns on stocks are primarily, in many cases exclusively, based on the future price of the stock I'm not sure why you think it would operate like a yield instrument like a t-note."
That is very different from what I know. Doesn't the value of a stock fundamentally come from its future dividend? Some stocks don't pay dividends, but even for them there is the expectation for dividends in the future. Surely, all else being equal, cheaper stocks are more attractive investments.
So my logic is basically:
1. Interest rate goes up
2. Stock valuations drop
3. Stock "yields"(in a more abstract sense than t-note, as you pointed out) go up
4. They go up until expected return becomes risk free rate+risk premium
When you watch a person on TV that person isn't really inside that little box. Instead, a signal representing an aspect of that person is received by the TV, decoded by the electronics and presented on the screen. If you mess with the electronics* then you can change the way that the signal is mapped to the screen, changing the image.
The same is true of the mind. The physical structures of the brain decode the remote consciousness** and present it to the physical world. If you change the brain (with a quart of ale for example) then you change the decoding and the consciousness to physical reality mapping changes.
* This works better with analogue electronics, but older analogue TVs usually have cathode ray tubes with alarmingly powerful capacitors that will kill you if you poke around with them, so don't.
** This remote consciousness isn't necessarily 'you'. You are just the small aspect of that larger consciousness that your physical brain filters out. Just as a radio receiver is tuned to pass only a narrow band of all the EM radiation that impinges on its antenna, your brain only passes a small portion of the larger (universal?) consciousness of which you are a part.
I don’t hold this view so I hope I’m not straw-manning, but as it has been explained to me- think of it as getting a phone call through a poor connection. The other person is there, speaking clearly, and a separate entity; but issues with the physical devices used for transition result in static and dropped words.
I imagine the question is more about buzz or lowering inhibitions or personality changes rather than lowering coordination/enunciation, so amphetamines or MDMA would be harder to dodge - drugs that make people bond and *love* each other or change feelings or personality being harder to explain away with the noisy mind-body phone connection.
But, seriously... that's the main contending answer to why we call alcohol "spirits". To a spirit/body dichotomist, alcohol clearly affects the spirit more than the body. It might have been in the 19th century that we began thinking about substances mechanistically, as chemicals, rather than animistically, as having essential properties granted by a kind of spirit or soul.
Even today, most users of LSD and mescaline still seem to think it provides spiritual insight.
The below is my perspective on H1Bs after having been involved in screening, interviewing and hiring software engineering candidates since 2014. Also, I advise other companies, and I have personal & professional connections with managers at other firms in the US tech industry. The dirty secret about H1Bs is that the vast majority of them are….. completely subpar engineers- like unhireable not only by a VC-backed startup, but unhireable by a completely boring ‘normal’ company like a bank or marketing agency. They almost always bomb technical interviews. They’re simply not ‘skilled labor’, as their visa would suggest!
They almost all have at least an impressive-sounding Master’s degree in Computer Science, but if you look more carefully all of the bad ones earned it from a college you’ve never heard of (North Dakota State, West Virginia State, etc.)- which makes me think that they’re basically running diploma mills, charging poor families in 3rd world countries very high tuition for a shot at the US H1B lottery. No, an advanced degree does not make an engineer, but they are much less able to pass interviews than a native with a Bachelor’s from even a subpar school.
All of the H1Bs who are low-quality engineers have the same job- working for a contracting firm that does some kind of outsourced development for gigantic, Fortune 200 companies. That’s it. All of their resumes follow the same format and look exactly the same. A small minority of H1Bs are actually good engineers- these are the ones who go directly to Amazon, FB, Google etc. (Strangely, you can easily tell them because they don’t follow the same resume format as the bad ones! I don’t get this at all).
Contrary to very widespread belief, I don’t find that their wages are particularly low either.
I don’t take any pleasure in reporting this, because I have vanilla center-left politics, am not a nativist, and strongly want more skilled immigration here to the US. I am just here to report that as someone in the industry, under our present system, 90+% of H1Bs are just not that- they are not ‘skilled’. I’m not 100% sure how we ended up here, or what a solution might be. Maybe visas could be parceled out via a bidding system based on what companies offer the candidate, so we use market pricing to determine who is actually worth being awarded a skilled immigrant visa. Just something to keep in mind when you hear libertarians hyperventilating about ‘we should staple a Green Card to the diploma of everyone who gets a STEM degree here’. I don’t personally have a huge issue with that, but it just encourages diploma mills (of course a middle class family in India will spend their life savings to get their child to a US college), and we are just not getting the world’s best & brightest under the current system
>"Just something to keep in mind when you hear libertarians hyperventilating about ‘we should staple a Green Card to the diploma of everyone who gets a STEM degree here’."
The implicit assumption in "a STEM degree *here*" is that ABET accreditation (or similar) determines what counts, thereby weeding out diploma mills.
There are a few very good universities (e.g. Oxbridge, some Paris ones, Munich, Zurich), where students get a really good education. The classes are just very good there because everyone from the professors to teaching assistants understand the material really well, and courses and curricula are also well-designed. I'm convinced that at my university, the engineering and CS students learn things that are not just interesting, but that are very valuable for their future work.
Bad universities try to copy the system, but they have only a superficial understanding. In particular, they are not able to copy or re-invent the thousand details that are needed to teach the students useful skills.
Example from maths (though that education is less job-oriented by design): students from good universities learn and understand what a limit, a vector space, and a derivative is. All useful insights, and all absolutely essential within maths. Students from bad universities learn rules for vector manipulation and how to compute derivatives. Completely useless outside of math, and not even thrilling within math. Stuff that students forget within days after the exam. But superficially, it looks like both sets of students learned the same thing.
I think the same happens at high school, but on teacher level. Good teachers actually provide education to their students; bad teachers, following the same curriculum, provide lessons that are pretty much worthless.
There is a twofold reason why copying works so poorly: for one, a lot of institutions and individuals don't have strong motivation or incentives to improve. Bad universities still work as diploma mills, and teachers often don't have any incentive to be good except their intrinsic motivation (which does suffice for some of them). But even if people are motivated, it's still *difficult* to copy good teaching. For high school teachers, it does help a lot if they got a good education themselves. But to provide that is a pretty big investment: they need to obtain a good understanding of their subject and its didactics, and lots of practice and feedback with their teaching. And the main issue is that those teachers need to get *good* education, so many countries face a hen-and-egg problem.
Background: I have a lot of experience with several European university systems, like UK, Germany, Switzerland - as a student at good and bad universities, as an instructor at good and bad universities, and as someone involved in designing curricula. I have no experience with the US system, so that could be different. But I suspect that it's similar.
I when it comes to STEM subjects i doubt there can be that much difference. I graduated from a university in Ireland and mastered in Oxbridge along with Oxbridge and other grads. All at the same level. As for the rest if the students. Not very bright is how i’d sum it up.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with the confounder - people who are smarter tend to go to more prestigious schools and also tend to be better at software engineering. Caplan estimates that 80% of education is signaling - that seems right in my experience, since very little of what you learn in a CS degree is directly relevant to actual SWE work.
There is certainly a signalling effect. Whether it is 80% depends on the country and the subject. In maths, it's close to 100%. In law or medicine, it's close to 0%. Is it 80% in CS? In the UK perhaps (I am rather not convinced), in Germany definitely not. Germany has a less extreme distribution of quality in universities (the top universities are not as good as the top UK ones, but a mid-tier German one is better than a mid-tier UK one). Probably that's because the UK has a history of producing university ranking, so the ranking is legible to prospective students. The ranking in Germany is much less legible, and students in Germany select much less by ranking.
Perhaps we are also not talking about the same thing. Does the 80% mean "the difference in software engineering skill between a graduate from a top university and a graduate from a mid-tier university is four times larger than between a mid-tier graduate and a high school graduate without college"? I don't know your metric, but it sounds pretty wrong in mine. Half of the CS students can't even write code when entering college.
Law and medicine are both career where where you need to pass government imposed bars to practice. That's signaling.
If you would allow people to practice medicine and law without those legal restrictions a lot of what's taught in med school and law school would also be irrelevant to the day to day practice of those professions.
The 80% means something like: -- If you took the students who completed the university and magically made them forget everything they learned at the university, they would still retain 80% of what makes them different from the random person on the street, from the perspective of the future employer.
This answers the paradox of how it is possible that university graduates are clearly more competent (on average) than random people on the street, when most of what they learned at university is irrelevant for their jobs.
The naive assumption is that the university graduates are better because of what they learned there.
The cynical assumption is that the university graduates are better simply because they passed the exams. Notice that this would actually separate the smart from the stupid even if the universities taught literally nothing.
Caplan concludes that the naive answer explains 20% and the cynical answer explains 80% of what makes the university graduates better.
I see. That's a subtly different interpretation than what I suggested.
It still strikes my as overly pessimistic. Even without Associate degrees, almost 40% of young people in the US obtain a college degree. So the college degree can signal at best "I am in the top 40% of the US population". Uhm, that is a signal, but not a strong one. And THAT is supposed to be stronger than 4 years of education?
I understand that signalling could be 80% for top colleges, because there are much fewer students there, so the signal is much stronger. But in general? Is the idea is that the signal of a college degree used to work in the old days, and nowadays it does not work anymore? And that people are just slow, and haven't reacted yet to the change?
Or is it that students who specifically choose CS signal that they are generally good at CS, and students who choose law are generally good at law? Being STEM-affine is a real thing, so that signal could be stronger. But I would have guessed that people who don't like STEM simply just don't apply for these jobs, so they don't compete in the market. And then the signal within the group of job applicants is weak again.
'the college degree can signal at best "I am in the top 40% of the US population"'
The percentage being so high is precisely why the utility is primarily from signaling. Back when a much smaller proportion of the population had degrees, companies couldn't afford to simply throw the resumes of anyone without a degree in the trash, because that would eliminate too many candidates. Now they can, because that still leaves them with far more candidates than they have time to interview.
Caplan's analogy is if, during a concert, some members of the audience started to stand up to see the stage better, but then everyone around them started to stand up as well because the people in front of them were blocking their view, and eventually everyone is standing. Everyone is less comfortable but can see the stage no better than before.
I think most of what you've said is mostly only true of H1Bs from poor countries and particularly the Indian subcontinent. If you meet an H1B from Ireland or New Zealand or Belgium then they're generally exactly the sort of skilled professionals that the visa scheme is designed for.
The obvious solution seems to be to rebalance the H1B scheme to issue more visas to people from rich countries and fewer to people from poor countries.
Also I'd add the the minimum legal salary for h1bs is still well above the median American salary - I'm sure a lot of them aren't Amazon material and a few are unusually bad, but on average they're still better than background and needed to make the economy run (otherwise the companies hiring them would either stop hiring them or go bankrupt).
Yes, the quota is what I had in mind. If the number of H1Bs is limited, companies can bid for visa holders and they are granted every year in reverse order, from highest on down.
I think the argument is that rather than bringing foreigners to 'make the economy run', we train native-born Americans to do contract Java work for Wells Fargo, AT&T, American Airlines, etc. (I.e. what 95% of the H1Bs are doing now). I am not personally into nativist arguments like this, but I can see the angle, especially politically. Realistically there's probably a hard cap somewhere as to how many visas can be granted every year, so why not save them for the Elon Musks and Sundar Pichais of the world, and save the contract work stuff for natives
I wouldn't be surprised to see the bad driving out the good, in this as well as other areas. But back in 1997 or so, my Indian colleagues on H1Bs seemed pretty decent, and likewise the French guy who may or may not still have been on an H1B.
Perhaps the opportunities for software engineers in their home countries have improved, and/or their perception of costs and risks of coming to the US has increased, such that the better ones are staying home, going to Canada, etc. etc..
Or maybe it's some commonality among the companies who've dealt with. (Location?)
The ones who graduated from an IIT tend to be very smart. Often one dimensional (IIT doesn't really emphasize anything other than STEM so don't expect *any* humanities knowledge), but pretty smart.
The downside of selecting people this way is that you wind up with people who are excellent at answering exam questions but not great at anything else.
The sort of personality you need to spend your entire youth studying really hard to excel in one set of exams doesn't necessarily translate to being able to think up creative solutions to new problems.
My IIT friend has also noted that IIT students tend to be either brilliant or grinds. Both are valuable, but grinds are much more common (which is probably true everywhere). Even bright grinds are often sufficient because few problems are truly unique. There is a gap, though, if the answer can’t be looked up.
In any case, I expect selecting students based on answering exam questions to give better results than selecting them by how rich their parents are, what their political affiliation is, or how politically active they are.
Agreed. My understanding is that, unlike the American ivy leagues, Asian countries in general believe in using standardized test scores, and nothing else, to decide who to send to the best schools.
Test scores are one thing - personally, I think they're a much better option than the American system - but if cheating on said tests is rampant..... (I have heard it is in India, but don't have any personal knowledge)
There's also some flexibility in *what* to test - eg. in Australia, University entrance is decided purely by test scores, but those end-of-high-school scores are the sum of 6 different subjects so there's a limit to how hyperspecialized someone can be and still get top marks.
Most AGI definitions require it to be agentic in some way - it can encounter a novel situation, gather information, and then apply that information to handle the situation. If a human is the only agentic part of the system, then you're basically just describing a guy with a computer. It would make more sense to describe the pairing as "a human offloading the boring calculation work to a machine" than "an AGI that offloads the decision-making to a human."
(And sure, some AI safety people do acknowledge that humans equipped with narrow AI could become dangerous long before AGI becomes a thing, but that's really more a human safety problem than an AI safety problem.)
I do wonder if you could maybe split the load, like maybe the AI recognizes when it doesn't have enough information to solve a problem and asks the human to provide appropriate training data, so that both of them participate in the learning and decision making process, but I'm not aware of anything in that vein currently.
I was thinking of the AI being less of a tool, and more of a parasite.
Something along the lines of toxoplasmosis, that makes mice attracted to cat’s urine.
It’s the AI hijacking something in our brain/society to perpetuate itself, or advance its own interests above those of ourselves. And that the resulting parasite-host entity can be considered an agent, smarter than the guy and the computer.
But how would it "know" to do it in the first place, if it's not capable of planning? Just selection pressure?
On a long enough timeline such systems of parasitic, brainless narrow AIs with humans as unwitting pawns might dominate (and this is a really cool sci fi setting). I don't think this kind of capability can evolve in the short window between now and true AGI, assuming true AGI is possible.
So now we just need to get the calculator to use the human, like a human would use a calculator? I have no idea if that's viable, given the processing you're trying to offload is very correlated with high-level decision-making and goal-setting, but it's an interesting idea.
I’m imagining expressing the AI goals aligned with something simple our lizard brain cares about, and letting ourselves figure it out from there.
Silly example: Maximize the number of paper clips, by making hoarding paper clips a symbol of status and identity, via an AI that is unreasonably good at social media campaigns and makes it the single most important issue in everyone’s life.
Maybe that particular AI cannot bootstrap itself, since it cannot figure out out how to get from the goal to the narrow AI, but once it’s set up and running, it could be reasonably thought of as a paper clip maximizer.
> Maximize the number of paper clips, by making hoarding paper clips a symbol of status and identity, via an AI that is unreasonably good at social media campaigns and makes it the single most important issue in everyone’s life.
Back in my anarchist days this was +/- exactly what people meant by "the system".
The story is from "The Other Glass Teat", a collection of weekly columns Ellison wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A longish excerpt ...
The cavalier treatment [at the auditions] that had been mild and barely acceptable in Barris’ offices, was magnified a thousandfold. We were treated like cheap foreign labor turned out to repair ten miles of bad road. Pushed here, ordered there, chivied and demeaned from the moment I (and the other two guys who were to appear with me) entered the studio.
And they made a small error. Probably because it was one of their first tapings and they hadn’t gotten the system down pat yet. I saw, actually saw the girl I was to try and coerce into going out with me.
Oh, Jesus!
Bear in mind, friends, that at that time in my life, I was a shallow, superficial, callow youth who judged women not by the enlightened standards of integrity, intelligence, and humanity inculcated in me by Mary Reinholz and Anne De Wolfe and other females of the Women’s Liberation Movement, but by wholly shameful considerations of physical beauty. Turn of ankle, height of bust, fairness of face, luster of hair, absence of moustache…these (oh, shame, shame) were my yardsticks. And by such judgments, in those days I would have decided the girl was considerably less than desirable.
Today, I’d simply call her a waste of time.
Anyhow, we were being hectored from one small waiting room to another, and we passed this peach of perfection in the corridor. My eyes widened in horror as might those of a Transylvanian peasant meeting Lawrence Talbot, The Wolf Man, in a foggy forest.
We were quickly hurtled from sight of her. But my knees had begun to shake.
Finally, we were brought out onstage, seated on high stools, and—the warm-up having been done—the show got under way.
I’ll cut to the payoff.
Here we are, these two other guys and myself, behind a modernistic backset, with pseudo-Herb Alpert music rattling, and they introduced the charmer I’d seen in the hall.
She sits down and asks the first question: “Number One, describe the worst of your bad habits.” So Number One, who looked like an out-of-work Via Veneto pimp, replied, “I snore. But you won’t have to worry about that because I know I’ll stay awake with you.” He thought that was really dynamite repartee. Then Number Two—a collegiate football hero if ever there lived one—denigrated himself with his bad habit of drinking beer and watching sports on tv every Saturday and Sunday. But he assured her that in the light of her wonderfulness, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was nowhere. Then she got to me, Number Three. “Number Three,” she said, “do you have any bad habits?”
“Well, frankly, no,” I said, smiling a Huckleberry Finn smile she was the poorer for not being able to see. “My friends say I’m without flaw, if you ignore the fact that I’m an ax murderer and rapist.
“But everybody has a few minor character flaws,” I added.
There was a hushed silence from the other side of the set. Then she recovered and went on to her second question.
“Number One, describe what we’d do if you took me out, what kind of an evening you’d consider a big date.”
The Via Veneto pimp did a fast ramadoola about how she was the kind of girl who should be treated to a fancy dinner, the theater, and dancing thereafter. One could almost mentally envision this lad squiring the lady to a series of (what he thought were) high-class places like Frascatti’s, the Victory Drive-In and the then-extant Cinnamon Cinder.
Number Two opined the lady was a “down-to-earth kinda girl who’s more interested in simple things,” and he conjured up a dream date consisting of hamburgers at McDonald’s, bowling, and making out in his car at Malibu.
It wasn’t hard to beat those two efforts.
“Well,” I said, adopting a Ronald Colman voice, “for you I would plan a formal evening with you in Pucci gown and me in tuxedo. I would have the chef at Scandia prepare for us a picnic dinner of breast of guinea hen under glass and jeroboams of champagne—Taittinger’s Blanc de Blanc ’45 possibly—and then I would have us, with our dinner, chauffeured out to the city dump where, with ivory-handled .45s, we would sip bubbly and amuse ourselves by shooting rats.”
“Shooting rats?!?!” The shriek from the muffin on the other side of the set was a ghastly thing to hear.
Again, silence.
The recovery was much longer this time.
But recover she did. And proceeded through the rest of the questions concentrating on #’s 1 and 2. Number Three was conspicuous by his silence and his satisfied smirk.
As you may have gathered, by this time I was thoroughly nauseated by the whole thing. It was demeaning, it was vapid, it was like a hiring hall for dock wallopers. It removed from male and female alike any pride in self, any sense of self as worthy, any depth or loveliness. I wanted out of there.
Finally, because it became apparent that she was ignoring me, I suppose, my potential ladylove decided to include me in a final question. It was a beauty.
“Tell me, Number One,” she began, “how you would go about convincing me I should go out with you.”
I could not believe my ears. She didn’t really ask that, did she?
But she had, and he did, and I wanted to puke. Number One did a seedy Continental number unctuous with double-entendre. Then Number Two all but fell to his baggy knees pleading with this brainless excuse for a woman to go out with him. Then she got to Number Three: “Convince me, Number Three,” she said.
“Convince you, you idiot!” I snarled. “I wouldn’t go out with a nit like you if they offered me the governorship of Hawaii as inducement. You, and this whole dumb show can go take a sunbath in a cyclotron!”
And I got up and walked off.
There were screams from the stage. The director and the tape editor and the cameramen and the producer and the emcee and the advertising men and the grips and maybe even that nifty little guy, Chuck Barris, started screaming. “Burn t
hat goddamn tape!” I heard someone shriek from back out there.
“Cut! Cut! Cut!” the floor director was shouting. It was bedlam. People were running everywhichway. I couldn’t see her, but the female contestant was hawking in a dry-heave sort of way over her chest mike. The other two guys were still sitting on their stools, dumbfounded.
I saw a horde of people advancing on me from backstage, and I ran like a thief. Got away with barely my skin intact.
The show was never aired, of course. And I got word through friends (and a secretary at Barris Productions I dated occasionally) that my name was high on the list of war criminals, on a par with nonbiodegradables, lung cancer, Minnie Pearl chicken, and Hermann Goering.
Every once in a while, even today, some new recruiter for the show, not knowing my past history with the show, will turn up my name, or see me on a talk show, or read some article I’ve written, and call me, asking if I want to go on the program. I always, very conscientiously, explain to her what happened, and then suggest she go and ask the producer of the show specifically, then get back to me if they want me on again.
I remember a post, 85% certain it was by Scott, about a choice of two pills. One essentially wireheads you, you'll have a long life and you'll experience blissful dreams of whatever you wish the entire time, but in the real world you're in a stupor that you cannot wake up from. The other makes your emotions muted and fleeting, putting you in a permanent state of equanimity, but causes you to be undeterred by any fear, doubt, guilt or anxiety you may have had so you can pursue your goals with maximum effectiveness. Anyone know which one I mean?
"You didn’t plan to become the King of Saudi Arabia, per se. It just sort of happened when your demonstration of how rebels in the military might launch a coup went better than you expected. Sometimes you forget how incompetent everybody else is. You need to keep reminding yourself of that. But not right now. Right now you’re busy building your new capital. How come nobody else is any good at urban planning?"
Scott wrote this 6 years before the Line was announced.
I started a "Read The Sequences" series of meetups with my local ACX group. Has anyone else done this and if so do you have any resources to share? In particular, I'm thinking of discussion questions/topics and updated information. If anyone has written about how the cited research stands up post-replication crisis (tangent: are we "post" the replication crisis?), I would love to see it. I know there were a lot of critiques of Thinking Fast and Slow, and this seems to cite similar research in some cases. Is there anything that experts consider outdated that I should be aware of?
Probably not what you are looking for, but Stuart Ritchie https://stuartritchie.substack.com/ has written a book about the problems with scientific research and often discusses studies that failed to replicate (if I remember correctly he was involved in some of the initial psychology studies that failed to replicate ~10 years ago).
Ritchie's book and substack are both very much worth reading! I also liked his earlier primer on IQ, but would have probably enjoyed a more in-depth treatment of the subject.
I did not run this in particular, but I ran many workshops, and if it is organized for peers, especially someone discussing something so high in complexity, the participants may enjoy being involved in the question making process. You can say that on the day, several people will be randomly asked to provide questions they prepared. Then you can ask first people to volunteer if they have especially interesting questions, and then randomly pick 1-2 people to share their questions. This way everyone is reading more carefully, as they are simultaneously coming up with questions, and they don't know if they will be asked to share, so they need to be ready just in case. It's not fool-proof, but I had good results with this method.
It occurred to me that different types of AI research mirror different ethical systems that philosophers have studied. Attempts at building AI back in the 70's were largely rule/logic based, which corresponds to deontology. Current AI, trained to minimize loss or maximize reward, corresponds to consequentialism. Attempts at AI safety seem like an effort to move in the direction of virtue ethics, whereby an AI should learn to act fairly, truthfully, reliably, etc. Is this a fruitful analogy? And if so, has this been noted before? Continuing in this vein, what does 'ideal' virtue ethical 'training' look like, both for humans and speculatively for machines?
The divide between the symbolic AI of the 1970s and the machine learning of today is a direct result of the early AI researchers being rationalists (who use ethics based on teleology, deontology, or virtue), while machine learning is entirely empiricist (and empiricists use consequentialist ethics). Attempts at AI safety inherently tend to be rationalist and use symbolic logic because they desire provability and 100% efficacy, so they're going to use the same sort of ethical systems rationalists always use. I would have thought AI safety would be more likely to use deontology (duty-based) ethics, but I've never seen any AI safety system worked out with enough specificity to say what kind of ethics they're using.
AI is just epistemology done right, in which you have to completely specify your theory of how knowledges is acquired, represented, and used, and then you have to test them. Rationalist symbolic AI gave way to empiricist machine learning so quickly because of this--the real world imposed reinforcement learning on AI researchers, rewarding people who made things that worked more than people who made things that didn't work. And in systems complex enough to need AI, empiricism works, while rationalism doesn't. This is why AI researchers became empiricists and solved all the basic mysteries of epistemology in 60 years, while philosophers are still wandering aimlessly in the dark after 2500 years.
One more angle-- I think some people interpret 10K hours to mean anyone (barring some physical limits, I suppose) can master anything given enough focused practice. Is talent actually irrelevant?
With coaching and practice, anyone reasonably young and fit can learn to throw a 70 mph fastball.
For 80mph, young and fit are more necessary, and you need some talent, but it's still something that a lot of people can do, given coaching and practice.
To get to 90mph, now you need real talent, along with the work.
To 95 mph, you need much more, and hence a much rarer level of talent, the kind that few have.
But that kid who can throw 95mph might not even crack 70 without the training.
I think it depends whether you are trying to win a tournament or learn a trade. If you want to become a competent musician (you can play your instrument well enough to be pleasant to listen to), you need some level of talent but not an astronomical level of talent. If you want to make a good living making music, you probably need more of an astronomical level of talent because the competition is so tough.
Well, it's not original to Gladwell. And obviously in some overly-literal interpretations it's not correct. But, the way I interpret it, I think it's just about right.
The way I interpret it is this: for most interesting human activities there's a competency vs time spent curve that starts off very steep and eventually flattens off and reaches a plateau. And the characteristic scale of this curve is something of the general order of magnitude of ten thousand hours. This sounds about right to me.
What would count as evidence against this? Two things: either cases where someone gets there too fast or too slow.
On the too fast side, if someone became instantly brilliant at chess or the violin within their first 100 hours of practice, and then never got significantly better, then this would be evidence against it. As I understand it, Gladwell's book (which I haven't read) is largely focused on disproving examples of this happening in practice; you might _think_ that Mozart was a musical genius at a young age, but he trained hard from birth and didn't get all that great until his twenties anyway. I would say there's some skills where you can "top out" with a small number of hours (a few hours of tic-tac-toe practice and you'll never lose a game again) but these tend to be silly or trivial skills.
On the too slow side, if we found skills where people just keep getting better and better forever, reaching a hundred thousand hours of practice and still steadily improving. This is something that Scott wrote about last week, and it doesn't seem to happen, the vast majority of skills really do seem to plateau after a single-digit number of years of experience.
I think it's popular understanding and the specific number 10000 are original to Gladwell. My understanding is that the original research never specified a number of hours but provided ranges based on the various factors they were studying. Gladwell's conclusions and implied causation were never in the original research either (from what I understand).
Also, like all of Gladwell's books, you can probably find a blog post or two that summarizes the whole thing - no need to spend 5-10 hours of your life on it.
Not. It's pretty arbitrary, five years. But we get his point: expertise is real. One thing I've noticed about young adults is they seem to have six titles. They seem to be putting the cart before the horse. I prefer it when people tell me how they spend their time. If they have six titles and spend 17 hours a day playing video games, Gladwell's point is made.
I think he's contrasting "show" (i.e. trying to make yourself big by declaring yourself chancellor of the kingdom, he of the eternal power and wisdom) and actually having accomplished something.
I read a great blog post about optimization culture (or a similar term) that talked about, for example, how all cars at similar price points drive the same now, as the availability of tons of customer preference data pushes the manufacturers to be the same. Similarly with consumer electronics etc, maybe even movies if I remember correctly. The idea is that all this data makes everything the same. I'm fairly sure that the post was on the Substack platform. Repeated googling has failed me. Ring any bells for anybody?
I'd be interested in reading this. I've noticed things like "all android phones have basically the same features" (or at least, none of them have the features _I_ want). Manufacturers seem to not be willing to differentiate on anything that is actually important. I'd love reading a deeper dive on the topic.
I can imagine companies being dumb enough to do this - all of them targeting the most common preferences, and thus producing commodity products differentiated only by advertising, rather than aiming for a large non-modal subset of customers, and having a niche of their very own.
There was a post like this from Paul Skallas (lindyman) but I think he got banned from substack a while back so it's probably been deleted. Talked about NBA basketball if I'm remembering it right. (it's also possible you're thinking of someone else who he plagiarized it from :p)
I’m sorry that don’t recall this article. So I’m replying partly to help me circle back when someone does because this thesis interests me given that on a gut level I disagree with it. So I’m also commenting in the hopes you’ll factor that in to whatever is percolating in your head. Imho product categories may be the same on the surface in so far as they can be sorted into a category, but on the margins, they are quite different. You’ll probably dislike my anecdotal example, but it illustrates my point well. The market in subcompact handguns atm is quite crowded. If you know nothing about firearms, they are all going to seem so similar as to be the same, especially given they are all the same caliber, same color, same polymer, and all functionally do the same thing. And yet manufacturers are chasing this segment of the market in a big way given the number of offerings. So what gives? Once you drill down into each different manufacturer’s version - and dismiss brand loyalty shopping since that very well can be a false preference - the various models on offer become radically different such that on any given day, a specific consumer will have very distinct preferences for very valid performance/use reasons. So did the popularity of the category cause manufacturers to produce handguns that are so much the same that they really aren’t that different from one another (circling to meet the mediocre median voter), or did the popularity of the category cause manufacturers to produce handguns that boast the key sought after feature (in this case the subcompact size) but then differentiate on the margins to produce large differences in performance? Obviously I’m arguing the latter.
I wrote an article [1] on Scott's attitudes towards mysticism. The reddit community has already helped me find a couple errors - would love to get this group's feedback as well.
I've lately been thinking about the anthropic principle. There are multiple variants of the principle, but consider just 3:
(1) Given that humans exist, the laws of physics must allow for the existence of human life. This is an uncontroversial observation, and doesn't really bother me.
(2) Given our current understanding, some of the fundamental constants of physics seem 'fine tuned' to allow for life. We can explain why they take the values they do by first positing the existence of multiple universes with different values of the fundamental parameters. We then, using Bayes' rule, condition on the fact that we are sentient observers who exist and know of our own existence. Conditional on this fact, the fundamental parameters we observe will be a draw from the posterior distribution: random in the range which would allow sentient, self-aware life to emerge. This then 'explains' fine-tuning.
(3) Given that fundamental constants seem fine-tuned, it is likely that the universe was created in order to give rise to life. So one could consider that God specified the laws of physics allowing this to happen. A more secular version of this is Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis-- if any sufficiently advanced civilization will create simulations of life, then it is likely that we exist in a simulation (or a simulation of a simulation of a ...) that was created for the express purpose of giving rise to life.
My question is: given that one is inclined to believe anthropic arguments, what, if anything, makes variant (2) more credible than (3)? Many notable physicists seem to believe or at least accept the plausibility of (2) or some variant thereof, while as far as I know, only a minority of physicists believe in (3).
I understand why (2) might be more tempting at a mathematical level, as one does not need to invoke a creator who makes particular choices. Yet, in return, one has to postulate a multitude of unobservable universes, and implicitly accept that one 'could' have counterfactually been born in a different universe (in order to justify the application of Bayes' theorem). These seem in some ways more excessive than postulating the existence of one creator.
Am I missing something? Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
My intuition in favor of (2) is that science has already shown us quantities that seemed unbelievably large...
Earth is just one of many planets, by no means the largest, and by the way it rotates around the Sun. Sun is just one of many stars, by no means the largest, and by the way it also rotates around the center of our galaxy. Our galaxy is just one of many galaxies, by no means the largest.
In the opposite direction, there are trillions of tiny organisms living in our bodies, in addition to trillions of our own cells. There are trillions of atoms in a cell.
Quantum physics tells us that (at least) at the microscopic scale, there are multiple parallel realities.
...so, given all this knowledge, if someone says "maybe there are trillions of parallel realities also at the macro scale" or "maybe there are trillions of universes with different constants of physics", considering this context, it doesn't seem to me implausible. It sounds more like the type of a thing that I would expect science to discover next.
Similarly, a multiverse where life exists only in a few very lucky universes, does not seem to me less plausible than a universe where life exists only on a few very lucky planets.
Of course, "fine tuning" is only even necessary in a universe without God. Why do theists act like God has to obey the laws of physics? He supposedly does stuff in contradiction of them all the time, including us being animated by "souls". It makes the idea of God giving us material bodies in the first place entirely absurd.
I reject (2), and I think any good empiricist would. That any physical constants are "fine tuned" is mere speculation, not supported by any observational evidence or even theoretical argument. For all we know, the fine structure constant cannot be any other number for the same reason the value of pi cannot be other than 3.14159 et sequens.
If we had two or more logically self-consistent and complete Theories of Everything, we could legitimately suspect that the fact that one of these is true and all the others false gives evidence of fine-tuning. Unfortunately, the number of self-consistent and complete ToE we currently have is zero, so we can draw no conclusions at all about whether the values of the constants could in principle be different.
Bear in mind that one interpretation of quantum mechanics posits infinitely many worlds/universes, and (in my completely amateurish opinion) is the only one that makes any sane rational sense. So multiple universes aren't that far-fetched.
Then again, QM looks to me exactly how I'd design a universe simulation for a limited number of players.
Those that we are coherent with, yes. Would it be impossible to have others, with different constants, that split off along the way and are now inaccessible to (ie decoherent with) us?
No idea how this would work and utterly over my pay grade. Popped into my head hearing "anthropic principle" and "physical constants" in the same sentence. Feel free to work out the math and earn a Nobel prize :)
Sure. But positing a quantum field that fills the space of all integers, with operators representing the measurement of various physical constants, is pretty weird. One would like some kind of argument as to why it makes the least bit of physical sense. Normally we only imagine quantum fields for stuff that has measureable physical manifestations, like a force at a given point.
I’m not sure that we know enough about the very first few seconds of the Big Bang to know if there were quantum effects. After that the universe has its initial values and the quantum universes start popping up.
I think the thing missing from your listing of options is what the "anthropic principle" is supposed to be good for - what problem it solves.
If you know for certain all the laws of physics, and know for certain how the universe formed, then what's the antrophic principle supposed to do for you? Obviously these known laws and initial conditions result in humans existing. What more is there to say?
The whole enterprise only makes sense if you are not certain what the laws of physics are, or how the universe formed. For example, you might have two theories, A and B. One day, you may be able tell which is true using the yet-to-be-built Super-duper-mega-collider, but not yet. According to the usual types of evidence available now, A and B are equally likely.
Theory A predicts that a trillion universes exist with a wide variety of characteristics, and it's likely that by chance one of these trillion will look like our universe (with humans, of course). Theory B predicts that there is just one universe, which looks like ours. Does this difference result in any preference for A or B?
We could add theory C, which is like theory A, except it produces just one universe, with randomly chosen characteristics, and hence has only about a one-in-a-trillion chance of producing humans. Does our existence make it less likely than A and/or B?
I think these are the issues that discussion of "anthropic reasoning" can sensibly address.
(2) "first positing the existence of multiple universes" -- this positing is purely hypothetical, right? That is, I think (2) works regardless of whether alternate universes with different physical laws actually exist, or merely *could* have existed instead of the actual universe.
...which is also true if you postulate an (omnipotent) creator, since surely they could have chosen to create a universe with different laws.
Depends on what you mean by theism. Classical theism has much more in common with Platonism than it does with any speculation about the physical history of the universe, but I think you're right if we're talking about God as a very powerful being who "designed" our world, which is what most people today probably have in mind.
Your arguments as articulated are correct. Postulating a creator isn’t more likely than multiple universes though. The question if where the creator comes from, particularly a God of one universe. Who created him?
(The guy running the simulation is easier to explain to begin with, just a dude in another universe. But who fine tuned his universe? Another guy in another universe running a simulation, right?, but then who fine tuned *his* universe? Its guys running simulations all the way up. This doesn’t really explain anything as they all have to be in universes fine-tuned for life, all the way up to the first ever simulation).
Compare this with multiple universes being created within other universes; many universes are abortive, some survive, very few tuned for life but some are, as a mathematical concept that does work.
(3) makes one more assumption than (2), namely that we exist in our universe because an external agent has made it so that we could. (2) simply says that we exist because we can, and makes no assumptions about the intentionality of our existence.
How do we explain rationalist thinkers in Middle Ages who claimed inspiration and insight from dreams, visions, and angels (though the insights themselves stand alone without appealing to the supernatural or non rational)? Is there anything to it? How Should we consider the suprarational claims of otherwise very rational thinkers?
When I was a kid I enjoyed reading about philosophical problems. I'd try answer them myself and when I couldn't do it on the spot I'd ask God to reveal me the answer and in a couple of days I would receive divine inspiration and understand it. I had quite a lot of these religious experiences before I figured out that it was just my brain finding answers to questions I was thinking a lot about.
It is rational to assume that any effect (like having a new idea) has a cause. What caused your brain to suddenly (from the point of view of your consciousness) produce this remarkable insight? Without consideration of a subconscious, the influence of an external consciousness is a good explanation.
1. To be clear, Rationalism as an historical philosophy is distinct from the Rationalist movement in modern times.
2. Do the origins of hypotheses really matter? What matters is whether or not a notion can be tested. It's the quality of the filter that matters much more than the quality of the source, since we could expect a large number of problematic ideas.
3. "Is there anything to it?" That's a hard question to answer without having a complete understanding of how the brain works. There are many people who experience their thoughts as external presences. To what extent would being able to chemically induce such states address the matter?
4. "How Should we consider the suprarational claims of otherwise very rational thinkers?"
Unless they lead to testable predictions, what would considering them be good for? Attributing a belief to a supernatural source could as easily be a political statement as a factual one. This is doubly true if we're dealing discussing a period with harsh censorship.
Can you elaborate on the difference between modern and historical rationalism? They look similar to me, just applied in different contexts. We even still have arguments with the empiricists.
Well, there's a distinction between what *could* happen and what *did* happen. "What could happen" is often testable. "What did happen" is far less so. Having a sense of what a possible event looks like is very helpful in interpreting history, though it requires periodic self-reflection to prevent blind spots.
Though we can still make hypotheses about history and test them against available evidence. Of course. It's not like historiography is opposed to objective evidence and testable predictions. So even if we did only care about things that are are testable (which I'm not saying) then we still wouldn't have to throw out all of history.
In any case, I'd personally argue that attributing insights to angels or demons is likely a form of political speech, as opposed to a literal statement. But it could also be a psychological issue, if a person sincerely believed their own statements. In any case, if one person holds to a political explanation and another person holds to a psychological explanation, and a third holds to a literal interpretation how would you try to resolve the matter, one way or another?
I wouldn't want to diminish the contributions of St. John of the Cross or Augustine, although I'm not sure either was strictly a rationalist. I'm too uninformed on the definition. But both men and their thinking seem to have been shaped by visions of a sort.
As someone who tries hard to be rational and has also experienced clear (for me) divine inspiration (maybe I’m in the minority on this forum), I don’t think rationality has to be separated from revelation. John Locke made this case as well in his The Reasonableness of Christianity. Rationality as inherently atheistic is a historically recent concept. I am prepared to accept some but not all claims of supernatural inspiration as a source of rational insight. Of course the closer one is to my faith tradition, and the more respectable they are, the more likely I am to take their claims seriously. I am also prepared to reject supernatural claims or to refrain from judgement, even if the claims are from others within my faith.
There are many accounts of famous scientists who came to their most groundbreaking insights in dreams, or on drugs. What is so irrational about using that source of inspiration?
The early 20th century logical positivists drew a sharp distinction between the "context of discovery" (which could be dreams or drugs) and the "context of justification" (where rational arguments are needed). Contemporary philosophers of science no longer think this distinction can be drawn as sharply as the positivists thought, but there's still something to it.
You can have an insight on drugs, but you should verify it experimentally while sober.
The discovery cannot be completely random, because a completely random process would be very unlikely to produce reasonable guesses. However, any kind of process that *occasionally* produces a good guess is okay, even if at other opportunities it produces garbage.
In other words, the *science* will not judge for your discovery process, as long as you can experimentally verify your insight. However, reality itself will punish a poor discovery process by simply not delivering valuable insights.
I once saw someone who denies the hard problem of consciousness pull out what they thought was a trump card for their side, namely, an experiment where scientists figured out how to read the contents of dreams. They even wrote down what they thought was a step by step breakdown of how the hard problem had been dissolved in that experiment. I don't remember it fully, but there was a part where the scientists asked the subject what they had been dreaming about, so they could establish which neuronal activity correlates to it. It's baffling to me how the person didn't notice the hard problem staring right at them: the scientists did not have access to the subjects experience, otherwise they wouldn't have needed to ask to begin with! The trump card seemed like a very articulate enunciation of the hard problem in the end.
I have not been able to understand what people mean when they talk about “the hard problem of consciousness” - something about the subjective experience of qualia being inexplicable? But maybe it’s similar to what I think of as the inexplicability of existence - like, how come there’s anything at all, instead of just nothing? Laws of physics, great, sure - but why should there be any of those? Do these seem like comparable or related types of “inexplicable phenomena”?
I think it's primarily that we can't observe consciousness as an object (like everything else) whatever that would mean. Some would argue the brain is the third person view of consciousness, but there seems to be a gap to that view: when we look at brains, we see neuronal activity and so on, we don't see sensations and ideas, not the way we experience them.
Ah. That does seem different from my "why should there be anything, ever, anywhere" question. Yeah, I guess we don't have a monitor-like view into anyone else's head. It's like we can see the hardware, and see whether it's running any software or not, but we can't see other players' screens - everyone only ever sees their own screen. It would surprise me if there weren't some way to hack that, but clearly we're not there yet - not even close. Thanks for the clarification!
The article itself says the patterns of neuronal activity corresponding to particular dream contents is peculiar to each individual. For the idea of this dissolving the hard problem to even get into the building, the correlation needs to be general. In fact, I would argue that an inconsistency between people in regards to what patterns of activity give rise to what experience could actually be considered a challenge to materialist theories of consciousness.
But anyway, even if a general correlation could be established, it doesn't resolve the hard problem of *explaining* consciousness. A correlation is not considered a scientific explanation unless we are dealing with fundamental physical properties, and presumably people like your friend would certainly not take consciousness to be fundamental.
And I don't understand how anyone could declare a problem "dissolved". The people who formulate and agree with the framing of the hard problem of consciousness want a reductive explanation of consciousness. Why is it up to anyone else to decide that the problem doesn't merit solving any more?
Suppose that scientists develop some new technology that allows them to guess the content of dreams without asking. Would you then agree that there is no hard problem of consciousness anymore?
If my model is correct, you would not. You would just pass the buck futher and find something else about consciousness that is yet unknown and say that this is the real hard problem. If you see this play out a hundred of times you may start to notice the trend. That we are talking about "consciousness of the gaps" and that these gaps are slowly and steadily being filled.
In my experience, it's not the case that people who deny the hard problem do not see something special about consciousness that people who believe in it do. We all have the intuition of axiomatic conscious experience since our birth. It's that the deniers saw enough of the trend to develop the stronger intuition of science being able to explain stuff, even the stuff we previously thought it will never be able to.
Maybe. There would still be the same problem though: where is the awareness? Why does a neuron lighting up result in some sort of conscious experience, however small? That's always been what the problem is.
It wasn't always just that. It used to be "how comes muscles follow the command of the mind, seemingly against the laws of thermodynamics". Or "where the decisionmaking comes from?". These questions seemed just as mysterious and unsolvable. Utill they were not. It's important to remember about this historical perspective.
The question about awareness is an interesting one. I expect the problem is that we do not yet know how to specify it properly. Currently we are doing something akin asking where does the gameplay (all gamemechanics working together) come from, looking at how electric signals go through the schemes, while the computer is running a game. There are multiple levels of abstraction that we need to cross and it may be easier to start from specific mechanics that the gameplay consists of. And it's true that gameplay is qualitively a different thing than electric signal. That doesn't mean that it can't be reduced to them.
It's more like we're asking where is the screen (the Cartesian theatre)? You don't need to cross multiple levels of abstraction to look at your own 'screen', why can't we look at anothers 'screen'?
That's historically inaccurate. The whole ability to talk about neuralogical level at all required a lot of gaps being filled. Consciousness used to be an enormous syncretic bundle. It included all kind of stuff that we now know to be just "easy problems". For an ancient human who didn't know anything about the way retina work the ability to see and recognise objects is just as mysteriously unexplainable ability of the soul as perceiving the redness of the red. But now we know how to build machines who recognise objects. And thus the goalpost shifted. And now consciousness is a tiny inner experience thing which presumambly can be discarded without any causal interference.
Wait, so is induction valid or invalid? You can't have it both ways.
You're claiming that as we kept solving these problems throughout history, the "hard problem" just shifted to a new problem. So, by the principle of induction, this will continue to happen, and we will continue to have new "hard problems" to solve. Except that it won't, and we'll eventually solve everything? Huh?
I'm not making any general statement about the nature of induction.
What I'm saying is that what people call the hard problem is actually a set of easy problems. The whole perceived hardness is in not knoiwing how to exactly to separate the set in different parts. But this set became much smaller during the ages. Every easy question that was answered or at least known how to properly ask, used to be part of the set and now is not.
I've been a subjective idealist in my teens. I'm a reductive materialist now. And it's not that I stopped being conscious somewhere inbetween. This is typical minding of course, but our knowledge of science give us some reasons to expect it to be somewhat acceptable.
I can imagine that some people may experience stronger qualia than other people. The idea that this would not be represented in physiological activity of the bodies would be against nearly everything that we know about physiology. The idea of p-zombies doesn't make any sense.
You can establish all the physiological happenings in the world, but there's no reason to expect it to ever yield a reductive explanation of consciousness. Most other things can be explained by way of reductive explanation (the rest are taken as fundamental), but consciousness is different to everything else in the universe.
You can establish all the physical happenings in the world, but there's no reason to expect it to ever yield the fact that many particles are indistinguishable *even in principle*. What is "unexpected" or "impossible" to learn regularly becomes certain and clear in retrospect.
"I don't think anybody will figure it out" is wildly unpersuasive to anyone who isn't already persuaded.
A corollary is that "We might be able to solve this problem in the future, therefore the problem doesn't exist" is wildly unpersuasive to anyone who isn't already persuaded.
Or do you at least concede the existence of the hard problem?
If I'm reading the article right, they had to ask the subjects about their dreams for *training,* but once the classifier was trained they were able to say "you were dreaming about X" and be right about 60% of the time. So they were able to know the subject's internal state (sometimes) without needing to ask once the machine was trained.
I don't think this "solves the hard problem" - you could argue that a p-zombie would have the same neural activity and report the same internal experiences while actually not having qualia - but your argument seems to just be misreading the article.
Sure, but the machine needed to be trained first with data the subjects provided. That step was needed because of the hard problem. I also don't think it solves the hard problem, but at least one person thought it was an example of the problem being dissolved.
I don't see how needing a description of the qualia makes it invalid. Even when you experience qualia directly you still need some way to map them to descriptions. You can see something red, but you don't know that it's "red" until someone tells you the word "red" means objects that produce that sort of visual qualia.
Same with this experiment - if you accept that the machine is able to directly view qualia in the brain, then needing a human to provide labels for those qualia doesn't take away from that, and if you deny that the machine is seeing anything related to qualia then it doesn't matter if they need a label or not.
It makes it invalid because the researchers would never have needed to ask, if they could actually observe consciousness directly through the machine. Needing to map qualia to descriptions does not apply to the researchers, who already have those mappings. The experiment didn't need just any random human to provide the labels: it needed the subjects specifically, because only they can see their inner experience.
Isn't this entirely beside the point? Even if the scientists had been able to stream the subject's dreams directly to their own brains - to experience the exact same dreams - that wouldn't constitute a "solution" to the problem.
Well, that wouldn't constitute a solution, but if you could somehow see the dreams directly, as opposed to duplicating some neuronal stimulation as in your scenario, that would actually be a solution, as it would be viewing first person subjective experience as just another object.
Would you prefer to live in a multi-polar world order organized by distributed consensus protocols or a unipolar surveillance order dictated by a single superintelligence?
Have always been pretty sure of the former until reading Scott’s Meditations on Moloch. Now, not as confident.
Sounds to me you're comparing Apples and Oranges here. Distributed Consensus, in all the senses I'm aware of at least, is just a fancy way of doing democracy. PoW consensus guarantees you that a simple majority of at least 51% of nodes in a network agree on an ordered list of assertions. I believe PoS consensus does something similar but I'm not entirely solid on the details. Both of those algorithms assume that at most 49% of the nodes in the network are arbitrarily malicious : they can and will do absolutely anything in order to ruin the consensus or sway it in their favor, including coordinating with each other on a secret channel. Other consensus algorithms from distributed computing like Raft or Paxos might have more relaxed assumptions or gaurantees - Raft and Paxos assume the participating nodes won't be intentionally malicious for example - so that they can strengthen other guarantees and assumptions.
A multi-polar world using Distributed Consensus is just a better UN. This won't make it any more likely to agree, let alone agree on true or useful things. All what distributed consensus algorithms would ensure in an abortion debate is that every node is represented "fairly", where fairness is a notion defined by the algorithm (e.g. In PoW consensus, fairness is that nodes with more computing muscles have more votes accordingly. If somebody has a 10x more powerful computer, they are 10x more likely to have their way on abortion. ). Note also that Distributed Consensus is agnostic to the network it's running on (as long as it satisfies the relevant assumptions), an artificial superintelligence can very well copy itself into arbitrarily numerous copies and run a distributed consensus algorithm on the whole network to make its decisions.
As for me, I personally believe that the fundamental sin of humans is that they try to live with each other. The moment humans invented villages\cities\towns, the very concept of living with people who are not your kin, it was inevitable that you would have the clusterfuck that is the history of humans trying to govern each other. It's misguided, Evolution only built us to live with our blood kin and a very small number of other select people. What makes humans oppress each other is that they can't recognize their social protocols and cognitive architectures can't handle the more than ~1000 person living in the same social unit. To scale larger than that, they add external rules and systems (laws, constitutions, courts, money,...) but external rules and systems can always be gamed and meta-manuevered.
My preference would be a humanity shattered into a myriad of large-family-sized pockets across worlds, orbital habitats and deep space, having nothing to do with each other except to trade and other highly-formalized and constrained cooperation agreements. Failing that, I would like if humanity would cease to exist, either in the obvious sense or in a more exotic way (e.g. We lose reflective consciousness, see Peter Watts' Blindsight for more details). Failing that, I would take the superintelligence.
Perfectly aligned superintelligence has all the benefits of multipolar world without all the disadvantages. But perfectly aligned does the heavy lifting here.
This, but never mind suicide. One world government almost guarantees inefficiency and stagnation. The only thing that keeps countries honest is other countries.
I wonder what the demographics look like for how long people have been reading these blog(s). Most of the readers I would assume have been around for quite some time, but I for instance have only been around a bit (been aware for much longer, but jumped on during the substack transition). Would be easy I think to measure using age of subscriptions to the email lists and inferring how many came over from the old. Not sure
I’ve seen in a few places (e.g. Huberman lab podcast) that our brains seem to have two separate “maps”, one for “meaning” and one for other more mundane stuff. Is that understanding correct? Does anyone have any sources on what that distinction is, exactly?
In my epistemology, that would be wrong by definition. "Meaning" caches out as "useful information" or "useful correlations", and the neuronal learning mechanisms that we know about try to record useful correlations. There shouldn't be anything in the brain *but* meaning.
This is really just a semantic question. But I suspect that any definition of "meaning" which excluded any part of what's stored in our brains would be based on spiritual assumptions which privilege some activities as more sacred than others.
I don't know anything about the neurology of it, but Heidegger has something like this, maybe. A fast, heuristic, "habitual" way of dealing with the world called ready-to-hand, and a slow, calculated, "rational" way of dealing with the world called present-at-hand. The example that made it make sense to me is a doorknob: Usually, you don't think about a doorknob at all. You just enter a room. The doorknob is barely present to your awareness at all, you're just thinking about getting your jacket from your room or whatever. In its normal tool state, the ready-to-hand doorknob has become invisible. But if you're trying to enter a room with a broken doorknob, suddenly the doorknob becomes a problem you have to solve. You examine it, you become very aware of it, you think about it critically. It has become present-at-hand.
Ready-to-hand things have gotten bound up in the causal flow of some project that's meaningful to you. They get submerged in your teleology. Meaning tends to present the world as continuous flow. It's only under present-at-hand thinking, when the use of a thing has become problematic, or the meaning of a thing opaque, that it becomes discontinuous. You have to analyze it into separate things.
I don't know much about it, but that's a thread you might pull on.
There have been many replies already but I haven't seen any to make this point:
Movies have always sucked.
They've always been part of the problem. Feeling nostalgic for when movies were better is like feeling nostalgic for a time when eating junk food didn't feel disgusting both at the time and for two days afterwards (i.e. when the eater was young and ignorant). ("But Leo, there were good art films in the past!" someone might say. Nah, those were just fig leaves for the genre as a whole, like when some fancy bistro charges $30 for an organic free-range cheeseburger. They also sucked, albeit in different ways.) That's a separate question from the woke-related ones raised in the comments. But here's some more bad news:
Movies have always been woke.
They've always been subversive in comparison with the culture of the parents of the kids watching them. Don't believe me? Look up the history of how the Catholic Church had to organize a massive boycott in order to attempt to impose some kind of decency on the movie business, and check out the date when that happened.
Now, if you like movies (and -- again, different point -- like progressive values), neither of these (again unrelated -- i have to stress this for fairness's sake) points are bad. Movies are junktainment and anti-traditionalist.
Every movie ever made is worse than not watching a movie. I'll happily grant that, deprived of movies, the average movie-goer isn't going to make better use of the time. To return to the junk food metaphor, someone living in a food desert isn't going to eat better food if McDonald's burns down -- such a person will have few if any better options and no framework for evaluating them. If said person, on the other hand, escapes and is given the opportunity of widened horizons, perhaps someday junk food won't taste as good anymore. Then the question arises, "Why isn't this as good as it used to be, when I was a kid?".
Similarly, movies as such are a sweet poison. Only by stepping inside a frame that accepts poison as an ok thing to ingest in moderation (i.e. not enough for immediate death) can we say that one movie is a sweeter poison than this other, less sweet poison -- or better yet, this one is a subtle smooth bittersweet chocolaty poison with notes of cherry and espresso. Movies don't exploit our vulnerabilities to concentrated salt, sugar, and fat (though they are often or perhaps even usually paired with substances that do). Instead, they exploit our vulnerabilities to narrative, to titillation, to horror, to who knows what. However, just as with age our craving for sugar declines a bit and we can no longer imagine wanting to sit down and eat a whole plastic pumpkin full of starburst, so too do we find movies less palatable with the passage of time and wax eloquent about the cinematic masterpieces of our youth.
(Now of course, there are young people today who insist that good film ended in the 70s, but there are also young people with affectations of being dead-heads who were born too late to experience true music. Taste is flexible, after all.)
Finally, and with the utmost respect for those who suggested a plucky underdog sports movie and a hardboiled wartime propaganda piece as paragons above criticism, just remember that every movie is escapist, is brainwashing, and is escapist brainwashing. If you happen to like escape and agree with the brainwashing chosen, neither of these will seem like much of a problem.
Gioia argues that the counterculture is dead and all those predictions of a "long-tail" in various industries due to the web were dead wrong. Specific to this question, there is a chart showing that only about 35% of movies today are originals instead of sequels or remakes compared to 20 years ago when 80% of movies were originals.
"Specific to this question, there is a chart showing that only about 35% of movies today are originals instead of sequels or remakes compared to 20 years ago when 80% of movies were originals."
The chart does not have the Y-axis labelled, but it almost certainly shows that only about 35% of movie REVENUE comes from originals instead of sequels or remakes.
Roughly 800 new movies are released each year (last few years being *way* down due to covid). There aren't enough franchises for 500 of them to be sequels and remakes :-)
But this also means that there are LOTS of original movies coming out -- we just won't see them advertised as heavily as "Harry Potter vs Batman 6, the Revenge of Sith Lord Spock."
The long tail is real, but not profitable. But I still hope recommendation systems will eventually flatten out the head of that distribution.
I still think better recommendation systems can be profitable for the middleman, but they may require adjusting user behavior. Rating things 1 to 5 stars, for instance, simply doesn't give enough resolution to build a recommender system, especially since most users have a very uneven distribution of star ratings. The Netflix recommender competition in 2008 produced algorithms which were so good that most of the error in prediction was explained by the low resolution of the rating scores.
I really don't think that Gioia properly challenges the theory. I think the best way to precisify the "long tail" claim is something like this: historical sales figures formed an exponential distribution, where each title was selling (say) 80% as much as the previous title. On a distribution like this, your first three titles make up half of all sales, and the next three titles make up half of what is left, and so on. But the "long tail" distribution is given by a power law, perhaps hyperbolic. On a hyperbolic distribution, the ratio between the sales of your mth most popular title and your nth most popular title is n/m. The hyperbolic distribution has the "long tail", where there is infinitely much volume to the right, no matter how far down the tail you start. But it *also* has the "short tail" that Gioia seems to be trying to use as a counterexample to the "long tail" thesis - that is, there is infinitely much area under the initial segment of the curve, no matter how close to 0 you cut it off! The thing that distinguishes an exponential distribution from a hyperbolic distribution is that the hyperbolic distribution has infinitely much weight at both ends, while the exponential distribution has finitely much weight everywhere. So the hyperbolic distribution is greater than the exponential distribution both at the popular end and the unpopular end, while the exponential distribution is greater in the middle.
And I think this is a good fit for what's going on with the internet. The big winners are getting billions of views and billions of customers, and there's also a proliferation of incredibly niche things (just look at the blog we're on right now). But the things in the middle are having trouble (spare a thought for the poor San Francisco Chronicle or Boston Globe - not big enough to gain readers globally the way the New York Times has with digital reach, but also losing local readers to niche neighborhood blogs and tiny global publications associated with the millions of hobbies of local readers).
I think this is also what we see with movies. The few big tentpole releases are bigger than ever, and you can get niche content of whatever sort you like, while the middlebrow releases can't compete with either end.
The thing that didn't sit right with me while reading Gioia's piece (I think it got linked from one of Freddie deBoer's monthly links roundups?)...he was trying to make a mathematical argument, and maybe that's even historically correct with the benefits of decades of data analysis now. But my first introduction to the "long tail" concept was back in the 2000s: https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/
The takeaway there didn't seem to be math-based, more about __a shift in cultural canon norms__. Which absolutely did happen! Not in the specific dissected case of indie stuff eating all big players by default (or vice versa), but by completely reorienting the playing field. Long tail technological infrastructure and shifting expectations around search indexing/costs ("if it's not on Wikipedia, it doesn't exist" etc.) mean that __things are forgotten much more slowly now__. Hence my Gen Z peers streaming "Friends" or "That 70s Show" or whatever, decades after those shows stopped running on cable...which has been extremely weird for me, who grew up catching those shows on cable and expecting them to at-best live on in tacky boxed-DVD sets. That's the power of the long tail, where content doesn't go to die. (I'm genuinely curious which of today's Big Hits will still be streamed decades from now...will they have the same staying power?)
I think the narrative of "big streaming services are churning out content and opting for quantity over quality, resulting in a stream of generic sludge" is worth a second look.
I spoke to someone in the film industry the other day and was told they're being handed scripts to work with that are basically incomplete. To the extent that in places they literally have "a dramatic thing happens here" as the only instruction.
Also, I can point to a bunch of films I liked and still completely agree with the statement "modern films suck".
I don't think anyone who says "modern films suck" is conscientiously averaging out everything they've seen in recent months and summing it up, which is how some of the responses are answering them.
When I say modern films suck, I mean that I remember the sinking feeling of seeing some film or trailer and thinking, "Oh joy, more of this again," and I remember that happening more frequently in recent years than in the past. Could be rose tinted spectacles, could be a higher shit-to-diamond ratio, could be the way they're delivered.
There's a large audience that likes familiarity, reliability, and repetition. McDonald's, superhero movies, and long book series attest to this. So do Harlequin romance, and popular manga and anime. (Like, IIRC, "magic girl starts a private detective agency" was once a genre in manga.) To some people, "more of this again" is a feature, not a bug. Maybe this attitude is spreading, or maybe marketing to them is becoming more visible to you.
By "more of this again" I mean "more crap I'm not gonna enjoy". I/you can watch several completely textbook examples of a genre in a row and enjoy them all, if it's done well. Nor do I think people having a favourite genre and not wanting to leave their comfort zone is new enough as phenomena to explain this.
The new phenomenon is that if you've found a way to do the familiar thing well, you now have a market of 4 billion people to sell it to, as opposed to a market of 0.2 billion people.
I remember when I first read the His Dark Materials books, I loved them unconditionally. My friend, who was raised evangelical Christian, had a very different experience and came away feeling despondent and depressed. Years later I read them again as an adult, and this time I was able to pick up on the hundreds of little jibes and barbs the author was throwing at Christianity. Not in the "fair" sense of writing a book that highlights the dark side of something, but in the unfair sense of the author going, "It's my book and I hate Christianity so ahahaha I'm gonna make every Christian character be a paedophile or child murderer and there's nothing you can do to stop me!"
I hadn't even noticed all this stuff the first time because it wasn't my tribe Pullman was attacking. My friend felt it, but didn't put his finger on what was happening, so just came away depressed. It's only as an adult I can see that he was basically reading through a steady barrage of subliminal insults.
Modern film producers are woke. Most modern audiences are not. This might explain both why a lot of people feel that films suck now, and why the people who don't feel that also don't understand where all this is suddenly coming from.
(Don't know the etiquette for a response addressed to two comments at once so this is going up here.)
FWIW I did still enjoy His Dark Materials on the second read and it's still one of my favourite fictional worlds.
But I've read the first two Book of Dust books and my main reaction has been: y tho. It's like it's trying to completely blast the joy out of what came before - like The Last Jedi to the Star Wars trilogy - except in this case, they're both written by the same man... I don't know what to draw from that.
Also his blatant self-insert character is clearly going to end up sleeping with Lyra, which strikes me as a bit crass on the author's part. A triumph of wish fulfillment over narrative payoff.
I'm not even Christian, but the "subliminal" insults were anything but...granted, I read the first book as a tween, and didn't pick up the other two until years later in adulthood. But, wow, it's easy to feel empathy for such an obvious outgroup serving as a villainous punching bag. HDM now resides in that same headcanon space where I categorize stuff like The Matrix...it sure is a shame they never made any sequels, the first started off so well!
I think one doesn't even necessarily need to be anti-woke to feel kind of queasy about woke memes sprinkled all throughout modern media. That undercurrent of meanness, the constant apparent need to virtue-signal and show purity bona fides...it gets in the way of the actual product itself. Sure, some people consume media as a signalling device anyway, so it works out well for them. (Remember all the frenzy around "The Hunt"? Sigh.) But for people actually invested in art for art's sake...it's frustrating whenever a story gets undermined by blatant tokenism, shoehorned retrofits to current CW battles, beatdowns of easily-disputable Outgroup Strawmen. I think this is part of why I prefer Japanese anime: much less likely to see anyone blathering on about income inequality or racial equity or whatever. Leave those Modern Maladies for the news to cover, I don't usually want such troubles following me into completely-fictional escapist worlds.
Third data point: I read those books and enjoyed them, except for the extremely stupid denouement, but came away with a clear awareness that Philip Pullman is a piece of shit, which all his behavior in the years since has confirmed. So I think this is an accurate suggestion on your part.
I'm gonna join the dogpile of "They don't". In fact I think the 2010's and this start of the 2020's have been a better time for cinema than the 2000's*. Plenty of good directors popping, Riley Stearns, S. Craig Zahler, Robert Eggers, David Lowery, Yórgos Lánthimos, and some I can't think of at the time.
I don't think there's been a time in the last few years I wasn't having high expectations for a movie yet to be released.
*: on the other hands, in the 2000's, I was in highschool, and the movies we went to were always shit, so it skew my perspective a *tad bit*
[I retract this observation now, but am leaving it up bcoz of the threads beneath it.]
I think much of this impression can be accounted for by the lack of any test of time. But I think there's also been a downward trend. I remember not long ago watching a 1980s movie with some friends, and after it was over I felt refreshed, like I'd had a drink of water in the desert. It struck me then that it was the first movie I'd seen in a long time that wasn't a superhero movie and didn't have a political subtext.
I was trying to think in response of good recent movies but I realized that mostly I was thinking of recent movies by very old directors who've been working since the 70s or earlier. e.g Paul Schrader's First Reformed from 2017 or Terrence Malick's more recent films (which are all, I think, still not as good as Days of Heaven). And certainly on the popular/blockbuster level the action movies of today just aren't as good as they used to be (partly, I think, on account of the genre having been mostly eaten by superheroes).
Or perhaps the politics just passed unnoticed because they weren't the current political issues that you're constantly aware of.
(I remember watching RoboCop and thinking "the director is definitely trying to say something political about 80s America, but I'm not sure what exactly.")
Yes, exactly. It's so amazing how the people complaining about the 2016 Ghostbusters being political didn't notice that the 1984 Ghostbusters literally has the Environmental Protection Agency as the villain trying to shut down a small business in Reagan's America.
"snobs v. slobs" is inherently political. It's a pro-populist, anti-elitist message:
Look at that Slob! Yeah, he's messy and crude, but doesn't that just make him CHARMING? Doesn't that make him a REAL person, with his folksy ways and disdain for intellectualism and manners? Not like that stuck-up Snob, who thinks he's BETTER than everyone else, who thinks that he- a pencil-pushing bureaucrat!- can tell the Common Man what to do with HIS time and HIS property, little pencil-dick fascist that he is. In fact, the Slob is SMARTER than the Snob, because HE knows what the world is REALLY like!
Yes, this is a funny movie about ghosts. The funny movie about ghosts will describe a narrative, and that narrative contains implications about how the writers or directors view the world, either intentionally or unintentionally. I realize this is no longer the hip thing cool kids say and it is now the fashion to dismiss all text and subtext with "the curtains are fucking blue, you stupid intellectual", but I have never been a slave to fashion. The idea that, during an era of deregulation where the President was depicting all federal agencies as pencil-dicked tyrants running amok causing untold suffering to hard-working Americans, a depiction of a federal agent as a pencil-dicked tyrant running amok and causing untold suffering to hard-working Americans was just a zany coincidence with no political dimension is a bit hard to swallow.
Culture warriors do not err by noticing that there is a political dimension to everything- they err by assuming that because there is a political dimension to everything, therefore politics (specifically their particular hobby horse) is the ONLY thing.
Other than The Man With No Dick, every government service works perfectly, every other governmental interaction is either in the GB's favor or is so trivial in difficulty it doesn't make it onto the screen. The Mayor and Chief of police are on their side, there is no issue with building inspectors, business license issuers, getting custom plates for the GBmobile, they don't even need lawyers handling the real estate transaction of purchasing the building, and putting Annie Potts behind the telephone has zero friction with the IRS or the taxing authorities of the City and State of NY (and Yonkers if Annie is commuting).
Besides, political allegories in '80s pop culture were NOT that subtle. See the Dark Knight Trilogy, the Land of Confusion video or Tapeheads.
Politics exists now, and only exists in the past when you can dredge up some hero or villain of history's eternal theater and say: "this one is OURS/that one is THEIRS".
The problem as I see it is that the modern Culture Warrior is hypersensitive to politics. The kulturkampf has conditioned people to stringently analyze every piece of media before they allow it to enter their brain, and even the mildest contamination incites outrage and furor, as the outrage and furor (and thus the chance to show virtue) is what is desired and not enjoyment of the thing itself.
I guess that would be interesting to see, whether the culture wars around Reagan in the early 1980s produced the same kind of outraged reaction from the left around the movie Ghostbusters that the culture wars around Trump in the 2010s produced from the right around the modern movie Ghostbusters.
You err by assuming those are different iterations. It's all the kulturkampf, which has been growing like a tumor since then. True-blue Culture Warriors of our current iteration are a highly advanced form of development, the psychic cousin of the Puritan.
That could be. I tried to count apolitical movies, but there are too many good, apolitical movies, both past and present, for me to form anything beyond the vague impressions that there's been a shift from critiquing individuals (apolitical) to critiquing society (political), and that seeing technology as sinister, corporations as evil, and the future as bleak is now routine.
As a random sample, the last contemporary thing I watched was "She-Hulk, Attorney at Law", and it was funny, but had a pointed misandrist agenda (and post-modern aesthetic values, if that counts).
I think Back to the Future, The Bad News Bears, Chariots of Fire, Ordinary People, Babette's Feast, Rain Man, On Golden Pond, Amadeus, Ferris Buehler, and A New Leaf were about as apolitical as a movie can be; but then again, we could interpret Rain Man as anti-ableism, and On Golden Pond as anti age-discrimination.
But there have been lots of movies that strike me as apolitical since 2000: Napoleon Dynamite, The Fall, Birdman, Nebraska, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash. I could name more, but there's no point unless we come up with some objective way of sampling movies and rating their degree of political messaging; and I have no time for that.
ADDENDUM:
I went thru the list of Academy Award Winners for best picture, 1970-present, and tried to count the number of obviously "political" movies:
1970s: 1. But maybe treatment of mental patients was political at the time, and so "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was political.
1980s: 4?
1990s: 2, but is Schindler's List really political? I think "Nazis are bad" was hardly controversial at the time. Some people claim The English Patient was political just because it took place in a colonial setting, but my recollection is that its drama had nothing to do with colonialism.
2000s: 2 (Crash & Slumdog Millionaire). But is Gladiator political because it's about slaves? Is Chicago political because it's about corruption? Is Lord of the Rings political because of its racism? Is Hurt Locker political because it's about a war (I don't think so)?
2010s: 4? Is Catholicism political?
2020s: 0 to 2 (out of 2), depending on whether movies that increase "representation" should count as "political". I wouldn't have even thought about calling CODA political if it had come out in the 2010s.
I don't see a trend in that data, and have lots of difficulty deciding whether movies are political or not.
>1970s: 1. But maybe treatment of mental patients was political at the time, and so "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was political.
I think this one was very much political, intentionally so, and was part of the movement leading to de-institutionalization. It was part of the public conversation about an issue where the issue won so long ago it doesn't seem political.
I think Slumdog Millionaire is at least somewhat political. It starts with a poor man who's about to win a big prize legitimately, and he's taken away by the police and tortured because they suspect him of cheating.
Police abusing someone poor just because the poor person is about to succeed seems political to me. I grant that there are more and less political ways of presenting it.
>Is Lord of the Rings political because of its racism?
At the time it was written, no. And do the movies even use the "Easterlings are Asians and Haradrim are Africans and they're always evil" thing?
I mean, you can call it "racist" because orcs are a thing if you particularly want (though "racist" isn't the correct term since orcs aren't human), but I wouldn't say that calling orcs racist was a thing in 2003.
LOTR (the novels) are at least somewhat political. It's anti-industrialization, and the Scouring of the Shire is about using redistribution as an excuse for wrecking a place.
It's explicitly against capital punishment.
There's a fair amount about good guys of various sorts needing to learn to cooperate with each other.
There's a lot about the importance of ruling with a light touch when you aren't in the middle of an emergency.
Ghan buri Ghan and his people are left to live in peace in their forest, not forcibly civilized.
There may not be such a thing as a completely non-political movie. Maybe the questions are how much politics? How much is going on besides the politics?
Back to the Future is reactionary, it points out the warmth and charm of 1950s America compared to the grim decay of 1980s America.
Ferris Bueller is anarchist; all rules are arbitrary restrictions placed on us free spirits by lame guys in brown sports coats and should be disregarded.
I absolutely hated "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when I saw it, and my opinion hasn't shifted since. I have nothing against the actor (Matthew Broderick) but I hated the character. He's supposed to be charming and clever and running rings around The Man (as represented by the dean of studentsl), but I think he's a sociopath.
He's manipulative, he persuades his 'best friend' to do a lot of things that will eventually get him into trouble. He is unable to control the situation as he promised (the trick with the odometer of the car fails). He's liked by everyone in the school (save the dean) which means he's able to appeal to every sub-group by playing on their own preferences and prejudices.
He gets away with his truancy only due to his sister deciding to support him, and he is rewarded by his parents deciding he should take the next day off instead. Ferris has gone through the entire movie doing what he wants, regardless of the effects on others, and his message is supposed to be superficially uplifting and independent - "life is short, live for yourself" - but in effect he is going to continue on, gliding through life, using his charm and powers of manipulation to get others to be his patsies, until he bites off more than he can chew and his big schemes fail. And take others down with him.
Can you realistically see Ferris the family man, with a wife and kids? Or rather, Ferris who leaves a trail of wreckage behind involving an ex-wife and kids?
Babette's Feast would be viewed as extremely political by an 1870s-1890s French person. And, probably also by a Communist since it extols the virtues of an extremely bourgeois dining experience.
Robocop is at least partly a satire on the US movie industry itself, specifically its then-increasing appetite for violence as entertainment. That's why, to take the most flagrant example, the director's cut spends a full minute on the gangsters shooting Murphy, blowing body parts off him until their shotguns are empty.[1]
Later on, the NYPD recreated this scene in a sort of reverse when apprehending Amadou Diallo, demonstrating their own deliciously satirical sensibility.
The best entertainment is live play D&D. People are still acting, but in many cases the players' emotions are very real. Watching a movie or TV show full of faked emotions and pre-scripted "problems" where everybody already knows how it's going to turn out just doesn't compare. And the best in the game right now is Brennan Lee Mulligan.
This seems to imply that the likes of Critical Role aren't fully prescripted. Which they are, if not to full prompt-book level then at least Commedia-style improv cues. Nobody's actually playing these "games".
I don't like Critical Role, for exactly this reason. And The Adventure Zone sometimes loses my interest, too. If you look a bit further afield, you'll find series where the game is perfectly real. There's an unexpected character death due to unlucky dice rolls in season 5 of Dimension 20, for instance, and the emotion around it is convincing to me.
I've seen several movies just this year that didn't suck at all, and at least a couple that I'd say are fantastic. So my best guess is that you're not doing a good job filtering for the new ones?
-Everything Everywhere All At Once was great, strongly recommend it to anyone.
-The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent wasn't on the same level emotionally, but still insanely funny.
-The Batman was really good.
-The Spider-Man movie kinda requires you to have been watching Spider-Man movies for the last 20 years to fully appreciate it, but I have so I enjoyed it a lot.
-Lightyear wasn't Pixar's best work, but that's a high bar- it does some interesting stuff and I enjoyed it. I certainly wouldn't say it sucked.
-I wouldn't say Thor: Love and Thunder sucked, although I wouldn't argue too much with someone who said it did. There were definitely some big issues with the story but the jokes were really funny and there were some good moments- overall I don't regret seeing it.
Honestly, Everything Everywhere All At Once seemed amazingly derivative to me. Pretty much every kung fu comedy movie with "existentialism is the cure for nihilism" mixed in.
I mean obviously to some extent this is all subjective but I feel like if that movie in particular strikes you as too derivative your standards for originality might just be impractically high? What movie, or work in any other medium for that matter, actually meets it?
There's definitely a change in the relevance of the medium. Before DVDs, television was mostly episodic (because audiences needed to understand the episode even if they missed last week's episode), and had to fit into a broadcast schedule (so the story arcs were basically limited to 22 minutes or 44 minutes - or 30 or 60 on cable channels without ads). Once DVD box sets became accessible, and especially once shows started being released direct to streaming, television started taking on season-length story arcs. It used to be that movies were the longest form of video art, while television was mostly medium length (until the rise of music videos created a new shorter format of video art). But now movies are an intermediate length compared to longer format television, and various streaming sites have created new shorter formats that are also quite popular (and there are several shorter lengths that are popular - YouTubes from 10-20 minutes as well as some shorter YouTubes, and TikToks at whatever their length is).
One other relevant development is that the decreasing price of audiovisual equipment, as well as the rise of new home designs with dedicated media rooms, means that home theaters are stronger competition for the theater in terms of audio and video quality, but with the added comforts of home and privacy. (Even though many people also mourn the communal experience of the theater - just as streaming killed the "Monday morning water cooler conversation" about Sunday broadcasts.)
Interestingly, the rise of the "cinematic universe" means that movies are able to compete with television shows in creating longer arcs, though the movies are still somewhat episodic and need to stand alone in the way that TV episodes no longer need to.
Regardless of how these trends continue, it seems likely that there will at least occasionally be culturally significant movies, the way that there have continued to be culturally significant operas (notably the ones by John Adams and Philip Glass) and musicals (Rent, Hamilton, etc.) even though those art forms are no longer as popular as they used to be.
I think the best video creators (directors, writers, and even actors) are being sucked into television instead. To list of few shows I'm currently enjoying: Barry, Severance, What We Do In The Shadows, Derry Girls, Midnight Mass, Harley Quinn, Better Call Saul.
That said 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' is the funniest movie I've seen in at least a few years, and it's only increasing in rank the more times I watch it and notice more details. And that just came out. And 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' was more visually innovative than any animated movie I can even remember seeing my my lifetime. God damn every frame on that film is a wonder.
First, television is to novels what is movies to short stories. While both novels and short stories can be excellent pieces of art, *in general* the scope of a novel is preferable to most audiences. A lot of stories can't be adequately told in 90-180 minutes.
But more importantly, the leadership structure of television production always places writers in the highest executive positions of "creator" and/or "show-runner." With movies, a screenplay is written, a director (or executive producer) takes over, and the writer has very little to say about how the story is produced. In television, the much larger volume of storytelling requires constant involvement by the writers, so the production has to be led by one.
Television pays better and is more artistically rewarding, which is why so many of the very best writers have totally abandoned movies for television.
And, in the streaming era, TV shows are a lot more like movies. They often have a budget and production value comparable to a movie, and all the episodes are released at once, making the experience of binge-watching a show very similar to watching a long movie, just with a few seconds of interruption between episodes.
I watch almost 0 movies, but I will weigh in anyway.
Movies don't suck uniformly across space and time, so the trivial answers to your questions is "They don't, and yes they're still relevant". There is a good chance you have omitted the implied spatiotemporal context of "Hollywood mainstream movies, last 10 years", and that would make for answers more interesting.
Why do modern Hollywood productions suck donkey ass? Like I said, movies are so far down the list of Art I engage with that it's not even funny, only slightly ahead of those boring museum paintings that the rich use to launder money. But I will give a generic answer that usually turns out to be right in a lot of contexts where we ask "why X sucks?", that answer is usually "because it affords to". i.e, why *wouldn't* Hollywood suck? Who's gonna make them not suck? You?
Modern Hollywood suck because of lack of competition. They are so big and incestuously inter-connected that they can all suck donkey ass together and people will pay to watch anyway.
I have seen a lot of hypothesis on the nets for why Hollywood sucks. They are all too specific.
- Some blame the wokies and their deranged -ve IQ crusade to glorify certain groups. That's correct, explicit on-your-nose Ideological sermons very rarely make up good art. Ideological Art is called propaganda, and it needs to be done very subtly and expertly to not be pathetic. Hollywood wokies are about as subtle as a screaming stereotype of a feminist.
- Another oft blamed reason for the decline of Hollywood's Art quality is the trend of """Sequels""", focusing on a single cinematic universe and milking it for all its worth in sequels and prequels and sidequels and all other methods of cancerous expansion strategies. That's true as well, good Art is either original or so well done (acted, produced, scripted,...) that you don't mind the triteness. You should either say something new or say something old so well that people don't mind it's old.
Both of those trends, however, are special cases, the general pattern is just "Hollywood don't give a fuck". They are woke because they don't give a fuck, they can afford to shove a black trans native american muslim lesbian into their movies and still have people watch (if only to sneer), just by sheer force of market inertia and spotlight-monopoly. In situations where they aren't as strong (e.g China), they have proved to be about as woke as a tired 3 year old. Same thing for the sequels thing, they can afford to not give a shit, and not giving a shit ruins anything worth doing.
Hollywood is a business, what would make any business suck? Lack of real competitors. They are too fat, they can afford to, the fitness functon doesn't punish them enough. They need a good bit of FREE MARKET on their ass.
Is modern Hollywood Art still relevant after all that? Well yeah. Stories (and Art in general) can still be relevant even if they suck. Abrahamic religions are an example, a bunch of variable-quality stories about talking animals and a woman who fucked around and got pregnant and got away with it by blaming it on an invisible being, nothing world-class you know. And yet, Abrahamic religions are an incredibly influential stories, motivating billions and doing good and (more often) wrecking evil across societies and history. Even an atrociously bad piece of Art that manage to unite most or all of its subjects on hating it, which is extremely rare, is still very relevant and influential, it managed to evoke feelings after all, that's the entire job of Art.
The actors may be woke; their bosses are not. The old men who run Hollywood are hard-core capitalists out to make money. They make what they think will sell.
To the extent that's true, the people doing advertising and consumer research ARE extremely woke, and they are the ones telling the execs what will sell.
Yup. I tried to make same point. I’m not sure people realize what the average movie was in each decade. This is literally the history of the double feature - movie theaters had to buy a B film (which was awful) AND forced to show it with the A film or else they couldn’t show the A film. The average quality has almost definitely increased. And the top of the top is subjective, but I think many of the top films since at least 2007 or so will hold their own.
Not all movies suck, though I agree that the vast majority do. A few decent films manage to eke out each year. The medium is fine. The (overwhelming majority of) creators are shit.
I find questions like this fairly reductive and intentionally provocative. You need to frame this question far better. What do you mean “suck”? It’s a subjective art form.
In terms of the medium still being relevant: I think the answer here is a pretty resounding yes. There are at least 2 movies within the past 6 months that were bigger social phenomena than I can remember for most entertainment in a long time (top gun and everything everywhere). There are also many other movies within the past year or so that are quite talked about in tons of social circles (nope, bodies bodies bodies, the Batman, Northman, Spider-Man, licorice pizza, house of Gucci, dune). Studios are intentionally shifting back to theater experiences because of these examples and the fact that movie ticket sales are having a revival.
Your mileage on each of those movies will vary. Many of the arguments I’ve seen about movies sucking are the reliance on old IP, leaning action, and filming techniques being quite standardized. I think just that list above shows quite a good amount of variety in each of those.
I’d make the personal argument (not a huge movie buff, but have >1k movies watched on my Letterboxd), for example, that the era since about 2014 has been the best era of movies actually. We’ve had more diverse film makers, “better” (at least to me — again it’s subjective; but at minimum more realistic / immersive) acting, and better technology (sound and video technology had leaps at around the turn of the century).
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that when comparing to historical movies, you’re generally comparing the classics of old eras to an average film today (not every movie is gonna be Laurence of Arabia, but I still like a movie that won’t be remembered that way like say, sorry to bother you). Do you think an average film coming out today is worse than an average film 30 years ago? The answer is almost certainly no. And the top movies of the past 10-15 years will certainly hold their own all time for those that aren’t blinded by nostalgia.
There’s also a specific lull right now due to the pandemic that shut down filming in 2020 (most films are shot 2-3 years before release).
In sum - I’m sorry if you don’t like movies today, and it’s possible quality will die down as the trend towards big blockbusters or small horrors continues to be the most profitable studio franchise. But maybe we’ll get another studio that challenges a24 (id you don’t like their movies, I get it - they’re pretty standardized. But they are successful) for the movies in between and keep giving talented film makers the ability to make movies
Any interest in the next round of the annual SSC-diaspora Diplomacy game? We're trying to get a seven together. You can sign up here
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,7225.0.html
At least some conservatives are taking Scott up on his "Against Classism" suggestion:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/bidens-student-debt-bonfire-is-a-classist-message-to-the-uncredentialed-screw-em/
I imagine some people on the left who sweated out paying their student loans in full are going to be resentful too.
I'm a person on the left who sweated out paying my student loans in full, and I am glad that other people are getting relief. It doesn't go far enough, and we need real tuition and loan reform, but it's a good start.
And exactly what does the jubilee do to achieve either of tuition or loan reform?
It recognizes that something is dreadfully wrong.
Ah yes, the 2020s, where signaling and performance are ALL-IMPORTANT.
As long as we all vigorously indicate to each that something is dreadfully wrong, who needs to actually solve the actual problems?
Same.
Though in my case sweated out is an exaggeration. I'm old enough to have graduated with reasonable debt.
This was a "red pill" moment for me. I paid off my student loans in full recently. Boy am I a chump. Another bailout that ultimately rewards bad behavior. Seems like political suicide to me.
Ok look if you actually did pay off your loan since March 2020 or I guess at least the amount that's being cancelled and that your income was below the marked one then you can talk to your loan servicer to get that payment back, and then apply for the 10k or 20k with Pell grants.
Would there be any benefit to Mexico joining NORAD?
Okay, well...thoughts on the Biden administration's just-announced-today student loan cancellation and forgiveness?
*Risky gamble for midterms, there was some real solid Sound Policy Momentum building for a minute there.
*Exacerbates deficit and also inflation(?), largely regressive, most college-educated already lean D (including didn't-graduates in this category).
*Fairness principles, as with all means-tested benefits; plus larger concerns of those who already paid back loans, and thus partially helped pay for this bailout.
*Time discount: yes, covid + Ukraine has been an outsize destabilizing double punch, but all Future Student Debtors are left out of this jubilee. Proposed ongoing Dept. of Ed reforms will eventually equal the magnitude of front-loaded relief, but it's quite a disproportionate situation for anyone currently existing who isn't *quite* college-age yet.
*Money is fungible, this could have been spent on many more higher-ROI things. Like pandemic preparedness or international relations/foreign policy improvement to help avert getting into future situations like the current one.
As someone suddenly relatively much richer and having a positive net worth for the first time ever, I'll take the money self-interestedly, but...even most-charitably framed as some sort of unique economic-justice response (recompense for Millennials who graduated into the Great Recession), it still seems like an inefficient option within that possibility-space. There are so many worse-off and more-deserving than student debtors...and a majority of Americans never went to college, still. I don't know. This does not feel like The Way. I could be wrong though.
What struck me were the income limits. From the standpoint of the people designing the bill, an individual making only $120,000/year or a couple making only $240,000 count as poor and deserving of charity.
Ah, I see John Schilling beat me to it. Indeed - the majority of student debt (dollars; I think possibly also *debtors*, too, but unsure on that stat) are exactly those we'd usually categorize as some sort of "middle class" rather than "poor". Even me, who earns...south of $35k annually...that's only "poor" by the relative measure of SF's high CoL. Elsewhere in America that'd be enough for a mortgage or whatever. And I did manage to scrounge up the liquid cash to pay off loans in full, sans degree, working dead-end retail, which totaled around half that annual income when the original payment pause started. It's not fun, but eminently doable...so I have a hard time (morally) understanding why I get this money and not the homeless customers who shop at my store daily.
At the point where you stress out about having zero foodstamps funds, not just cause of the food, but because then you gotta pay the punishingly regressive SF $0.25 paper bag fee - *that* is poor. All those people making up to $120k/$240k...I dunno what their deal is, but it sure ain't that.
The target audience for this move is people who thought that they would automatically get a job with a six-figure starting salary just because they got a Master's Degree in, uh, let me get back to you on that. So anything less than six figures is "deserving of charity" because they are deprived of what they have rightly "earned". Throw in a bit of a cushion on that to cover the edge cases, and you get to $120K.
The guy making $60K/year from his communications degree, and paying $10K/year on his $90K of student loans, is well above any sensible definition of "poverty", and he's not going to worry where his next mean is coming from, but he's absolutely the guy whose vote Biden is trying to buy.
I listened to Elizabeth Warren sales pitch on the News Hour last night. I’m about as liberal as one can be on ACX and… oh boy. This one is going to be regarded as an unforced error in the D’s rear view mirror.
Maybe Bernie’s booming angry old man voice can make it better. <weak stab at humor>
The most optimistic steelman I can come up with is framing it as some sort of paternalistic quality control...Everybody Knows that everyone needs a college degree to access the American Dream, so it's colleges' fault when that "promise" doesn't pay out due to "misleading claims about market relevance". (Hold forth diatribe against predatory for-profit colleges here. They shall be the primary media angle, the perfect victims.) Just as gun manufacturers are to be held accountable for when their products are misused and injure people, colleges are to be held liable for degrees that don't pay out. Because we're the government, and we're here to insulate you from the capitalistic vagaries of market forces. Tertiary ed is too big to fail - we have the best universities in the world, and this helps ensure their excellence.
...sorry, I can't actually make it pass the Ideological Turing Test, but the logic is at least consistent. No matter the many erroneous factual assumptions...
True. I know a couple of those guys. They are enormously pissed at Biden today.
Two times the median household income, or 4 times for a DIC.
Meanwhile, some no-high school guy who bought a mom&pop grocery store and is working 80 hours a week cause he can't afford workers and is clearing $20k a year? That's a corporation that stole PPP money from the American taxpayer.
This is obscene.
It's a grotesque bribe to young college educated people who at least have the education if not the actual degree. It's funded from the paychecks of waitresses, janitors and plumbers who didn't go to college. It is timed for the midterms, after which Biden plans on resuming loan charges, and it adds to the deficit.
And Biden defends this...chicanery by the claim that big businesses get tax breaks.
I hope those people who are gifted with this illegal transfer do fantastic things with the windfall.
Well, if it helps you feel slightly better, I'm putting the vast majority of my fallen wind into retirement accounts and investments based on Rationalist advice. (It's thanks to places like ACX that I bothered to try attempting future-planning in the first place, instead of wallowing in hand-to-mouth hedonistic poverty...maybe I'll end up remaining poor anyway, but by George, I've got to at least make an honest go at moving up. Easiest way to ensure failure is not to try at all.)
Since a direct repayment-reversal isn't really possible, would you say voluntarily tossing those forgiven debts back into the General Fund (like on annual tax return) is the next-most-appropriate "clawback"? Not as altruistic as bednets, but I'd like to rebalance the scales from this uncomfortable "gift" someday, if possible...
Oddly enough, it does.
For me, I had zero downside financially from covid. I made enough that I only got a trivial handout from the first covid check, and I put a wad of cash in the church collection plate the next week.
If I was in your position, with debts, I think I would keep half for the debts (understanding that we aren't talking real money in the hand here) and give the rest away. Part of it to the general fund, sure. Or to maleria bednets, or in singles to the beggers at street corners, or to an animal shelter, or something.
Maybe something you think the govt should have funded instead of this, if you're pro govt spending in general.
And if you are struggling with financial planning in general, check out Dave Ramsey Financial Peace. Solid program that works for a lot of people I know.
Me either, which is certainly lucky and I know better than to do dental checkups on unexpected equines...but it's been weird to largely come out ahead as a result of covid, knowing the majority of others are suffering. (Not just abstract-others, but most of my peer group.)
Assuming that the policy proposal goes through as planned, I'm actually debt-free now...that's part of the head-spinningness, I've not been in this financial situation ever since reaching the age of majority. Less than 5 years ago, I had...triple the debt load than what just got wiped out. More debt than an entire year's worth of income. So it's like waking up one day and realizing you've been having a bad financial dream all along, and now you get out of jail free, collect $200, pass Go and start life for real. (At a much older age than you'd expected to, as a child.)
A lot of that was due to poor college choices - I knew tertiary ed wasn't for me, and still slammed into that ivory tower wall l over and over - and a lot of that was due to being the unfortunate victim of a professional con artist. Things are better now, and I've gotten much wiser quickly, yet...clearly, both parents' genetic disposition for spendthrift hoarding got passed on to me. It's something to remain vigilant about. I've been semi-successfully hacking it by getting excited about investments instead: it really is exciting to earn capital gains for the first time! But I know I can and should get consumption even lower. (It's also patriotic - fight inflation by spending less!)
Government spending..."It is the role of government to do for the people what the people cannot do for themselves." This wasn't it. The most marginal would have been better served by, say, direct checks, since perhaps student debt load isn't actually their most pressing financial need (or they don't have any!). When a man needs a fish, any fish, you really ought to give him an actual fish, rather than lowering his salmon tribute...I get the argument that this is doable vs. many other much-better more-desireable impossible-things, but. But. Guess this is why I'd make a terrible politician.
Why couldn’t those kids just work their way through school like I did? Asks the guy who paid 1,000 bucks a year as an undergrad and had grad school paid for by his employer.
Not sure how voters will react to this. It’s a politically dangerous move for sure. I don’t fully understand how the cost of a degree has jumped so dramatically since I was in school, but it really is insanely expensive now.
If there were some way to lower those costs to current students, no one would complain.
Who am I kidding? Someone will always complain not matter what any administration does, because reasons.
Even after reading various pieces like Scott's old "Considerations on Cost Disease", I'm...not really sure? There's several identifiable pieces to the puzzle - continually turning up the tap on govt-backed student loans is indeed a big one, subsidies behave exactly as expected - but they never quite add up to the full picture. Loans + credentialism arms race + non-legible/hard-to-evaluate "product" + "college experience" expectations gap + narrowing of employment tests + tedious racial gap analysis + hollowing out of non-tertiary-ed paths + teachers' unions/protectionism + school funding structure (Board of Education separate from rest of state/local govt, federal mandates) + lack of competition (largely shitty for-profits, ~no one else doing the University of Austin thing) + continual weird failures to utilize technology + administrative bloat + ...
Lotsa puzzle pieces, and they fit together to form a depressing picture, but it still doesn't *quite* map perfectly onto actual costs. Housing and healthcare seem simple to tally up by comparison...
Costs went up mostly because tuition available via loans went up. Colleges, like students, took the free money.
Loan forgiveness is nearly the exact opposite of what needed to happen.
I think it's a poor policy overall, but it's important context that most of those other priorities can't get through Congress right now, so it's basically Biden doing what he can through the mechanisms he has. The "fairness" argument is strong, except it can equally run up against the "better than nothing argument."
Politically, I doubt it will matter. People have short memories these days and this will be out of the news by November.
Isn't that just a version of Bad Thing Exists -> We Must Do Something -> This Is Something? Political capital is not as perfectly fungible as the unit of caring, but...I dunno, maybe there were Reasons behind the scenes. A limited-time opportunity or whatever. It'll certainly make a mark on history, and that doesn't count for nothing, I guess. Then again, that's still economics-style thinking versus politics-style thinking. Which is definitely not the modern modus operandi. The recent ACX re-litigation of utilitarianism must be on my mind...
Can't wait to see what other October Surprises await on the long road to Election Day.
I think maybe the logic is more:
Bad Thing Exists -> Many Things Must Be Done To Address It -> This is One of Those Things -> Ergo, This Should Be Done Even if Other Things Cannot be Done
Which makes sense in isolation, but does not factor in the possibility that Doing This Thing will hurt your ability to Do Other Things, both for fiscal reasons (i.e. spending the budget here and starving future initiatives) as well as political reasons (i.e. making people mad and hurting the chance for progress & compromise on those fronts).
To be clear, I'm not big on the policy. I think there are a lot of illogical and unhinged reactions to it but there are also good faith critiques.
I like that revised flowchart and will now think of it as the Policy Marshmallow Test.
Midterm polling numbers look scary -> something must be done -> this is something
Couple thoughts.
1) I'm broadly in favor of our new Covid/student debt policy of just throwing money out of helicopters in the vague direction of problems. No joke, I don't trust government to execute really complex policies and and as long as there's not a ton of hidden language or effects, simpler policy is better.
2) Man, how does this not feed inflation? Like, inflation literally just slowed down so we're going to give $10-20k to a group of people...not defined by wise financial decision-making.
3) This...pretty clearly feels like a sop to an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.
4) Have we just quietly accepted that student loans are busted? Because there's been an moratorium on student loan repayments since Covid started, right? And now that's getting extended again, along with the debt relief, right? So, uh, when do college debt payments go back to normal? Cuz it's been, like, 2.5 years now.
Probably aimed at increasing turnout rather than winning over swing voters. I think the people pushing for student loan cancellation would never consider voting Republican, but might stay home rather than vote for a boring establishment Democrat like Biden.
I thought the same thing, but now I squinted at it a little bit, and I'm not so sure.
First, we are a bit too far away from the midterms. In 2.5 months, either something might eclipse this, or the novelty might fade, and the people who weren't originally planning to vote might go back to not planning to vote.
Second, if you look at the polls, Republicans are quite likely to take the House, but somewhat unlikely to take the Senate. It feels as if FiveThirtyEight is actually overestimating Republicans' chances in the Senate (it has them at 1 in 3). Republicans are likely to take NC, OH, WI, but everything else - AZ, GA, NH, NV, PA - seems very unlikely. That's going to put Republicans at 49 in the Senate, or maybe, if they are super-lucky, at 50. So that enormous cash handout is not very likely to change outcomes. Are they taking FiveThirtyEight's 1 in 3 odds of Republican Senate takeover as being too high and striving to reduce them?
I'm worried that there's something I'm missing. It doesn't look like it's something about election administration, because the polls say what they say, and thus if they don't cheat, they'll probably get the results FiveThirtyEight says they would. I wonder if it's something about getting people who get the money more active in some way other than voting.
Possible - I'm pretty wary of such reasoning though, it genuinely hasn't seemed to pan out in any of the last three (or possibly more) elections: https://www.slowboring.com/p/progressives-mobilization-delusion
But who knows, I think historians will be debating the "bribe" effects of covid-era direct stimulus on vote turnout for decades to come. None of my peers were upset about the by-now several checks we've all gotten, that's for certain...and they're far more progressive than me, yet also bearish on the value of voting at all. Curious to see what happens come November.
(Relatedly, it'd be interesting to compare the median perceived effects of "eliminating debt" vs "giving out money", even for identical net amounts of money...perhaps that's the angle being worked here. Psychology and sociology, the oil to economics' water...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d96dgTAfUro
A very nice little history of polyhedral dice, but it also caused me to think about redundancy and roughage ratings for videos and texts.
Redundancy has an obvious meaning-- roughage is things like small talk between the hosts.
Some videos are very efficient and I appreciate it, some have a little personalization-- Answers with Joe is at a good level of that for me. Some have what I consider to be agonizing levels of repetition.
And then there's repetition between videos. Is there anyone who talks *about* the Fermi Paradox without explaining it yet again?
For people who follow AI more closely, why is speech generation progressing so much slower than image generation? It feels like it should be much easier to put together a synthetic voice that sounds natural than generate a realistic photo, but at least on the public-facing side of things this doesn't seem to be the case. What's the reason behind this, assuming that it's actually the case?
If you look at images generated by AI, very often, you'll notice, by looking closer/more attentively, some small glitches here and there, figures in the background that aren't really complete, or shape weirdly, unnatural body parts (typically ears or hands), etc. If you just glance at the piece, it don't really look out of place, either your brain fills the gaps, or the details are too small to notice immediately.
With text, however, if you start having nonsensical words in the middle of your sentences, then it gets glaring really, really fast. I know that, because most of the books I read on kindle were digitalized through OCR, and it fails here and there, transforming a letter into another, or a pair of others.
Your brain just has a much wider tolerance for variation in art and photography than it does with speech. In general speech generation is pretty convincing but there is something "off" that makes it sound robotic. With the human voice, even the slightest abnormality can throw you off whereas that isn't the case with art by its very nature.
What about the success of generating faces? The brain is extremely finely tuned to recognise faces, it's why we have such a strong uncanny valley reaction to ones that are even a little off, but it seems like there's been lots of progress in photorealistic face generation e.g. This Person Does Not Exist.
What if Trump removed the classified documents from the White House on January 20, 2021 and took them to Mar-a-Lago, the National Archives informed him that the action was illegal shortly thereafter, and then Trump promptly returned them to the Archives so they were only in his possession for, say, two months? Would he still be in trouble right now?
Unless he took something blatantly, obviously, undeniably off limits, I don’t expect him to have a problem now.
Which brings up the thought that the Justice Department thinks it does have something obviously off limits.
I think It was Chris Christie who first made the point that, “If you take a shot at the king, you better make sure you don’t miss.”
But again, we don’t know what they have so it’s just speculation at this point.
Is he in trouble? I'd bet (were I a betting man) that this is over, unless he has another closet with another set of documents he's still withholding and another informer tells the FBI about it. He isn't charged with anything. I'll be shocked if that changes.
What? I thought the documents were at Mar-a-Lago until the FBI removed them.
I doubt it's relevant. This case will turn on what procedures, if any, a President needs to follow to declassify documents. No one doubts the President has plenary power to declassify anything he chooses -- he derives that power straight from Article II of the Constitution, from his position as Commander in Chief, so that power can't be circumscribed by any law Congress passes. But nobody has ever had to think about what procedure the President needs to follow, because heretofore the generic procedure for declassification has boiled down to "ask the President."
Presidents routinely declassify things implicitly, and in the moment, e.g. when JFK called former President Eisenhower to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy implicitly declassified a bunch of stuff by just telling it to Eisenhower, and of course he was perfectly within his right to do so.
It would also be perfectly legal (or more correctly perfectly constitutional) for President Biden to tell former President Trump a bunch of classified stuff, or hand him some classified documents, if he wanted Trump's opinion on something. Biden wouldn't need to tell anybody about that, or write it down somewhere, or follow some procedure, he could just do it.
Here we have the decidedly weird situation where President Trump may want to assert that by his actions in "communicating" to his future former President self some classified information, he was doing essentially the same thing other Presidents have done, implicitly declassify something by communicating it to someone other than himself -- in this case, his future non-President self. It's a very weird situation, and God knows how anyone intends to resolve it.
I think any court that rules that your future self is a different person will successfully precipitate the full breakdown of law and order in the US by reducing the law to a transparent farce that protects the strong and enslaves the weak, which means I'll place like a 30% odds on it happening.
Of course Trump is a different person today. That's the whole basis for the investigation, right? When he was President, certainly he could store any number of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and he wouldn't need to ask anyone's permission or even tell anyone, and this investigation would be inherently absurd.
The issue here is Trump is *no longer* the President, he's a private citizen, and as such it is generally illegal for him to have classified documents -- unless, of course, the President said he could and declassified them for that purpose. Id est, Joe Biden could certainly have sent all those documents to Mar-a-Lago and said "Here, Donald, I want you to take a look a these and tell me what you think." That, too, everyone agrees would be legal, and Biden would not need to ask anyone's permission or even tell anyone.
I think people think there is some kind of "procedure" for declassification, laid down by statute, and even the President is subject to that. But there isn't. The President's power to declassify doesn't come from any statute, it's in the Constitution (implied by his role as Commander in Chief) so no mere law passed by Congress can limit it, or specify how it's carried out, courtesy of the Supremacy Clause. To the extent there's any procedure, it's whatever the President says it is, and it necessarily doesn't apply to himself unless he says it does.
And as I said above, we have long accepted that Presidents can declassify information implicitly, just by conveying the information to someone not previously certified as being able to have it. That's what happened when President Kennedy talked to private citizen Eisenhower about Cuba, or when GWB talked to 41 (his former President private citizen dad) about whatever secret stuff he felt like talking about. If President Obama talked over the pending killing of Osama bin Laden with his wife or kids, that too everyone agrees would be perfectly constitutional. (Whether it's advisable is another story.)
So the question is: can the President implicitly declassify stuff by conveying it to his future non-President self? Like, while still President he has a bunch of classified docs shipped to the room in which he'll know he'll wake up the next day as a private citizen. Did he just implicitly declassify them, or what?
It's a lot like the question of whether the President can pardon himself. It's definitely a weird Moebius strip kind of question, but it's neither a trivial nor (as it turns out) unimportant question. And I have no idea how anyone proposes to resolve it. Congress can't resolve it by passing a law, and no court can resolve it by pointing to an existing law, because Supremacy Clause. The Supreme Court can issue an opinion on what the Constitution says about this, and maybe that will work, but Presidents have always asserted a co-equal right to interpret the Constitution as far as their own powers go, and the Supreme Court has usually been reluctant to oppose this.
Ultimately this probably has to be decided by The People, as the only true ultimate sovereign, by their deciding which point of view they'll countenance.
It goes to mens rea. I believe the relevant standard is ‘knowingly’ (actual knowledge that you have classified info in your possession). In your scenario, Trump could say that he was unaware that files in his possession were classified and that he returned them as soon as he was informed by a credible authority. It’s not dispositive but it is certainly more helpful than keeping them once so informed.
If the standard is really ‘knowingly’, any crime could be tough to prove. Only 300 files so far have been claimed as ‘classified’ and that’s a moniker that is frequently applied to some really mundane records. I suspect if you really dove into the LBJ or Clinton or Bush presidential libraries you could come up with some technically classified material inadvertently stuck in the archives. On the other hand, if the records were highly sensitive, preserved in some highly personal safe, dealt with matters that he gained by concealing, that he’d discussed having with others and he’d failed to return the material when asked, then yeah that’s a better case.
If the document is labeled "TS//SCI", then it's an unambiguous violation of the law to take it out of a government facility and put it in your private stash. And I'm pretty sure you won't find any documents so labeled in the LBJ/Bush/Clinton archives; those archivists know their jobs.
But if there's no evidence that you meant to do anything beyond carelessly packratting your old work files, and you return them promptly on request, nobody's going to throw you in jail for that. It's when you *don't* return them promptly on demand, or otherwise behave in a manner inconsistent with this being an honest mistake, that you get in serious trouble.
A smaller subset of files were marked TS, but that doesn’t change the legal analysis. Under the statute, he has to knowingly remove classified information and then have specific intent to retain it.
By way of example, a former Secretary of State was found to have retained a significant store of classified info on a personal server. Unauthorized possession was not in dispute, but the DOJ declined to prosecute because they found no specific intent to retain classified information which would be the mens rea required for violation of 18 U.S.C. 1924.
That former Secretary of State. You’re talking about Kissinger, right? :)
War crimes are no big deal, but God help you if you mishandle classified documents....
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the second of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. Note this week we will meet at 3:30 not 2. The first meeting was great, and I hope to see many of you at this one. Based on the first meeting, I chose two popular topics to prompt future conversation and activities.
Saturday, 8/27/22, 3:30 pm
1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660
The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse
33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152
https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39
Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.
This week it will be at 3:30 (usually 2:00) to avoid a conflict with an online LW meetup
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (readings at the end)
1) Forecasting and predicting the future
2) Psychedelics.
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions.
C) There will be opportunities to go for a walk and talk about an hour after the meeting starts and use some gas barbeques if anyone wants to grill something. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with takeout hot food available.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed the way you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the future direction of the group. Topics, types of meetings, activities, etc…
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Prediction
Superforcasting is a review of experiments done about how well various types of experts do in predicting the future. Generalists tend to do better than specialists in prediction, but why? Groups tend to do better than individuals, but are there ways to improve the performance of groups even further? How can you train yourself to be better at prediction? How can you help others?
https://howdo.com/book-summaries/superforecasting-summary-and-review/
Or The Harvard business review application to business
https://hbr.org/2016/05/superforecasting-how-to-upgrade-your-companys-judgment
Or the ACX Review
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/04/book-review-superforecasting/
And this excerpt from Future Babble is a more critical look at prediction science.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/books/review/excerpt-future-babble-by-dan-gardner.html
For psychedelics:
The tale of two receptors is an interesting speculation as to the underlying pharmacology of psychedelics. Hypothesizing that serotonin can both help us cope with the distress of a bad situation and help us look for creative ideas out of the old mental habits that can keep us trapped in a bad situation. Conventional antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics operate on the acceptance system, while psychedelics operate on the later, lateral thinking. Is this perspective useful? Oversimplified? Can it be made into a rigorous scientific idea, or is it just another evolutionary just-so story? What possible uses and hazards does this suggest for psychedelics?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/10/ssc-journal-club-serotonin-receptors/ or https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117725915
If you want a more general introduction to psychedelics, here is a book summary of the recent popular review of psychedelics. “ How to change your mind” by Michael Pollen
https://www.hustleescape.com/book-summary-how-to-change-your-mind-by-michael-pollan/
I've been hunting around for datasets regarding stock-prices and commodities prices, but this is a very new space for me. Does anyone have any suggestions? It seems like there's nothing available that's open source.
Some commodity prices are tracked by the world bank see https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/5d903e848db1d1b83e0ec8f744e55570-0350012021/related/CMO-Pink-Sheet-February-2022.pdf
This is awesome, can't believe I didn't know about this.
Enjoy!
For both individual stocks and indices (basically anything with a ticker symbol), Yahoo! Finance has very easily downloadable historical data going back decades. It's basically the last functional thing left in the Yahoo! universe.
I started looking for such years ago, and my impression is that they just aren't available as open source. There used to be pages of daily stock prices in paper newspapers, but I'm not sure when that ended.
I'm kind of surprised no one has succeeded at cracking a source.
It's possible to extract data from Yahoo's financial data api; but that requires time and effort...but thanks for reminding me about the newspapers, maybe those prices could be OCR'd.
On Thursday 8/25 night starting at 8:00pm eastern, 7:00pm central The St. Louis Rationality Group will have an online discussion of the ACX Book Review Contest in GatherTown.
We are inviting all other ACX/Rationality readers as well.
If you haven't read all the book reviews, still come.
If you are nervous about talking to people because you find old age makes you less social, still come. If you will be late due to time zones or other obligations, still come.
If you feel awkward, still come.
It'll be fun.
Here is the link to the event, click it for more information:
https://app.gather.town/events/pXVcEMSts1dcxnOc7rqU
Let's talk ACX Book Reviews. You need not have read every book review to be part of this event, as long as you have read three or so you are good. The purpose here is to meet and learn from each other and share thoughts about this year's book reviews.
Wander from room to room and group to group and talk! No rules about group size or how long you have to stay within a group.
Here are some questions to ask each other:
Do you like or dislike the book review contest?
What makes a good book review?
Are there any books that you have read because of a great book review?
Which book reviews from this year's contest were your favorite?
Did you learn anything useful or insightful from any of the book reviews?
Is book reviewing an art?
What's the best book you've read in the past two years?
How many have signed up so far?
This sounds really cool! I'm in
I think there's too much focus on trying to design utopian cities, and there should be more focus on trying to design utopian towns first. Get things right at a small scale first, before scaling up to a megacity. If you can take a greenfield site and a budget in the single-digit billions and build a medium-sized town of twenty thousand people, and persuade twenty thousand people that they want to live there because your urban design is so wonderful, then I might believe you can do it with a larger city.
Here's my idea for a town of 20,000. I've tried to cut a middle path between standard urban design and the anti-car fundamentalism of so many "urbanist" type thinkers.
- The whole design looks like a scaled-down Adelaide (check it out) with a downtown core surrounded by a ring of parks surrounded by a ring of suburbs.
- Downtown core is dense and highly walkable. A few major streets and a bunch of narrow lanes. In general there's no parking within downtown itself, but there's space for delivery trucks etc to keep the shops supplied. A narrow river running through the centre of town would be nice.
- Next, the ring of parks, which hide underground car parking beneath. If you want to go downtown, you can park underground and walk. Supermarkets etc can be placed at the outer edges of downtown close to the carpark entrances to make grocery shopping convenient.
- Immediately outside the ring of parks, medium-density apartments and terrace housing, gradually turning into quarter-acre blocks as you go further out. Some major arterial roads head into the residential areas, but there's also tendrils of parkland with bicycle paths in them. A bunch of corner stores and cafes are sprinkled throughout the suburbs. Street layout isn't a grid, nor the cul-de-sac maze of most modern suburban developments, but some kind of haphazard mishmash of the two.
Nobody wants to live in towns, though. People move to cities because there are jobs and social life there.
20k isn't a big town. It's hard to make somewere of that size not walkable. A notable example of modern, small-scale urbanism is Poundbury, England. It's a suburb of Dorchester but it seems to have a well developed core despite its population of under 4,000. I think that in practice, you'd struggle to build a critical mass of jobs in a place below 50-100k people unless there's a bigger city nearby to commute to or a single large employer (e.g. a university).
I'd recommend laying out the parks and green space as radial wedges rather than in rings. That way it isn't an obstacle to travel between the suburbs and the centre and it allows for gradual expansion rather than constraining the CBD. It would make sense to use the river floodplain for this.
According to the first Google result I found (https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/cost-guides/cost-build-car-park/), putting your car parks underground 3-10xes the cost of building them. Could you use attractively-designed multi-story car parks instead?
I don't think that attractive multi-storey carparks are really a thing.
I don't think the cost of underground car parking is a particularly big deal on the scale of the whole project. And we're building it cut-and-cover, at large scale, on a greenfield project, and covering it with not-very-heavy parkland, so I think that's about as cheap as it gets.
I've never seen anything that really works for that.
For making multi-story car parks less fugly, or for making tunnelling less ruinously expensive? Me neither, on both counts :-(
I meant the former, but you're right of course.
One probably wants to start a line city with at least a kilometer. That's 20 buildings and about 15,000 persons. In your ballpark.
All the comment threads in this post are hidden behind “Continue Thread” links, which are wildly inconvenient to read on a mobile device: is it one uninteresting reply, or a major subthread of interesting opinions from the most prominent bloggers who follow scott? No idea, lets click on 543 slow-loading links one by one to find out!
I miss static html, and dearly wish for substack and similar single-page-application monstrosities to all shutdown, their leaders discredited, their investors bankrupted, and their developers unhireable.
I'm pretty sure Scott deliberately changed this as of the last Open Thread because people were complaining about the lag of the fully-revealed thread.
Personally, I'm not getting any lag (laptop), and I'm also not seeing the Continue Thread links, so I don't really have any beef with this either way, but something that *does* annoy the heck out of me is that if I accidentally click a link, e.g. one of the omnipresent "gift a subscription!" links, my thread-state is completely obliterated when I hit Back, notably removing the new reply markers which makes catching up very frustrating.
I can't say I like substack at all for reasons like this. I think there attempt to model conversation gets a 2/5 stars. 3/5 at best
I've entirely abandoned trying to access ACX via mobile, whether through the Substack app or via mobile webpage. Not a good look when so much of the Substack UI is Mobile First(tm)-oriented. It's almost like they didn't anticipate any blogs becoming popular enough to have hundreds or thousands of long-winded comments! Reading comments via email notifications is a decent workaround, but that's purely passive, I have to wait until I get home to reply...
...and then watch as the editor struggles to keep up, cause of idk what background process chicanery hogging CPU cycles and leading to the same issues Himaldr-2 notes. Like yeah, my laptop's old and not very powerful...but cmon, it's a blog, and Open Threads don't even have pictures. It's 99% unformatted text, man! Genuinely confused at what's causing such hang-ups. Especially frustrating cause the Open Threads are usually highlights of my weekly ACX experience, and I do enjoy browsing through the entire "stack" hunting for interesting conversations to participate in. The top-level posts definitely don't always cut it for worthiness-heuristics.
"It's almost like they didn't anticipate any blogs becoming popular enough to have hundreds or thousands of long-winded comments!"
They had no idea what Scott's commentariat are like 🤣
Oh God, this so, so, so much.
That's the worst, but there are a few more things that anger me:
This (probably Substack as a whole, but I only comment here) is also the only page wherein — and I'm not sure if due solely to how ungodly slow it becomes with a lot of comments, or some other error — I cannot select (highlight) more than a paragraph or so of text; it gets slower and slower until it finally refuses to select at all any more.
Trying to select a *small* amount is also fraught: no response, no response... SUDDENLY HUGE BLOCK HIGHLIGHTED
Too, just composing a comment at all is a chore because the letters take an eternity to show up, the cursor freezes, etc. Deleting is particularly fun.
And I don't even get to use italics or boldface, for all the slow, clunky bloat. You'd think such awful design would at least offer a bunch of features to compensate!
Edit: The edit function is the sole bright spot that's been added (IIRC, at least, it was not initially possible?) -- but of course, even that is screwy: edits don't appear until a refresh, and trying to edit again before doing so erases your first set of changes.
I think everywhere is optimising for reading on mobile devices, which is of course a pain because then the design has to fit on a narrow screen with limited scrolling down capacity.
This is why I do everything on my desktop PC like a dinosaur.
Agree 100% with maybe later. I almost never read the open thread posts because threads are so hard to follow on this website format. I would bet that there would be a lot more commenting and reader engagement if we had the classic, Slate Star Codex-type commenting format.
This link has received some valuable feedback from a few particpants in the Model Monday thread for August 1.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
This is a serious attempt at imagining a linear city. It was inspired by Neom but is different in many respects.
Our linear city:
... BUILDING BUILDING BUILDING ...
... PARK ...
... PARK ...
... PARK ...
... PARK ...
... BURIED HYPERLOOP ...
... PARK
... PARK ...
... PARK ...
... PARK ...
... BUILDING BUILDING BUILDING ...
The buildings resemble the UN building.
100 meters high, 30 stories
10 residental stories
90 meters long
25 meters thick
There are 2000 of them in the completed 100-KM city with a population of 1.5 million.
The city is 200 meters wide. The park is 150 meters wide.
I would love to see others participate in the design.
Peter
Why would you not put the parks on the outside of the line? With this layout all the places you want to go are an extra 150 meters away from a train stop.
It would also give you more room for the parks - 150 meters is not actually that big when it comes to nature. Central Park is 0.8 km wide.
Also, I still don't see how a line has benefits over a grid (or maybe a circle if there are limits to the shape of your Hyperloop), but we've beaten that horse to death in the original Neom thread already.
If you are talking about BIG PARKS, yes, they could go outside the line city.
Apparently you don't believe the central concept: most of what you want is within a six-minute walk.
Parks come in all size. The park in front of the church where I live is the size of a small block.
Can you see this?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13zHWK3LaHqTXLMxyzGOBBCWGCc1aTR62/view
Looks like about 30 meters by 50 meters. That's the main park for our beach town.
Again: a cross shape allows access to nature , and reduces transit times.
Have you written up your cross idea?
Are you talking about a cross (two intersecting lines)? Not a grid. How is this better?
Everyone has a clear view, and the maximum travel distance is halved.
I'm quite interested in your thoughts, but I'm mystified by this brief comment.
I would also like to understand your cross design, but I can't with a few words every few days.
Cool stuff. I have some ideas/questions:
- Make diagrams of the layout. The attempts at explaining the layout left me unclear on how it would look. If someone can make a simple sketch, that’s the first step to getting a diagram.
- How do you propose to acquire the land and get permission to build? The proposed location of USA has different constraints than Saudi Arabia, and solving the land acquisition and zoning is a big part of making it feasible.
- You mention: “Stores could open after the commuting peak.“ How would that work? Many people commute to work in stores. If you push back store hours, that would tend to push back peak commuting time as well.
- Is there a proposed governance structure required, or just a standard city governance proposed? The proposed location of Birmingham to Montgomery in Alabama crosses 5 or 6 counties. Any ideas about how that might work with governance?
- I remain skeptical that hyperloop-based travel makes any sense on earth. On Mars you get near vacuum for free due to little atmosphere. On earth, maintaining the vacuum over multiple lanes/airlocks/etc is not a solved problem, and planning travel around more conventional rail/maglev systems would make more sense.
>>Hyperloop will almost certainly work. There are no major technical challenges in terms of missing or infeasible technologies, we solve equal or more difficult infrastructure problems relatively frequently, and anyone who claims otherwise is speaking completely from ignorance.<<
https://www.quora.com/Isnt-it-true-that-Elon-Musks-Hyperloop-will-never-work
I’m not going to pay for Quora+ so I can’t read that. If you have a non-paywalled version somewhere I’m interested.
I don't pay for Quora.
I copied the text.
Q. Isn't it true that Elon Musk's Hyperloop will never work?
A. No, not at all.
At this point, I’ve written enough answer on the subject that I think I reasonably qualify as skeptical of both Elon Musk in general and the Hyperloop project in particular.
Let me be the first to say that the idea is completely feasible, and most of the criticism is based on ignorance. The only thing that’s really up in the air is if all the tech challenges can get worked out in a way that give it some market viability.
The skepticism surrounding Hyperloop is a complete mess, and has no real logic behind it. The general problem is that community doesn’t do enough research nor have enough knowledge to be drawing conclusions about these issues, so there’s a general trend to just insert a convincing-sounding argument that doesn’t disagree with the little bit of knowledge the person does have. That creates huge holes in people’s logic that they don’t have enough knowledge to actually address, so usually they find some way to distract from them. Appeals to authority are rampant, and arguments from incredulity are just as bad.
I would strongly suggest you ignore all of it, because at best it’ll just be confusing, and at worst you will come away with opinions that are straight-up wrong.
For example, people frequently discuss the “massive pressure” a Hyperloop tube would have to withstand, but don’t ever put it in perspective. If they did, they would realize that it isn’t actually massive at all relative to other structural loads. The pressure exerted by the atmosphere on a vacuum chamber is only about as much pressure as a tunnel that’s 9 meters underwater. This is not actually a very challenging design problem and isn’t really an unprecedented structure in any way - at worst it would be expensive to build.
Most skeptics act like it is a major obstacle though, which is almost objectively wrong.
That’s just one example, but hopefully it illustrates my point while keeping this answer brief. I could go through each of the other claims and explain in detail why they’re either oversimplified, missing critical information, or just outright wrong, but I think that would distract from the conclusion:
Hyperloop will almost certainly work. There are no major technical challenges in terms of missing or infeasible technologies, we solve equal or more difficult infrastructure problems relatively frequently, and anyone who claims otherwise is speaking completely from ignorance.
The real question is whether or not it can be done cost-effectively, and if the final product will actually get built.
Thanks (the complete text didn’t show for me).
That answer presents conclusions while skipping the argument that would justify them, so I don’t find it very convincing.
Using an existing, proven, commercially viable technology (like HSR / maglev) is more feasible than one that isn’t yet (hyperloop). If money is no object and you’re sufficiently convinced that hyperloop will be a comfortable viable means of transportation, go for it!
I kind of get where you’re coming from. I’m a proponent of nuclear power, but I think uranium-based plants are a historical artifact from focusing on refinement of payloads for weapons, and trying to use that same refinement pipeline for fuel for power generation. If the plan had been to find a better, more available, safer power generation source, I think thorium would have been chosen instead of uranium. I would love for a billionaire to make a push for thorium power, and when designing a city, I would push for thorium-based nuclear plants.
But thorium power hasn’t been implemented at scale yet, while uranium power has. If I were trying to give advice on a feasible power source for a city right now, uranium power would be my recommendation. If we had all the money to spend to push through approvals and develop the tech, thorium is the clear choice.
In this analogy HSR or maglev are uranium (established), and hyperloop is thorium (unestablished). I personally think hyperloop has a bigger gap to feasibility than thorium power, but hopefully the analogy clarifies my recommendation, and why I’m not trying to step on your hyperloop optimism (despite my pessimism).
Side note: as long as you’re collecting hyperloop feasibility articles, here’s another one: https://transsyst.ru/transj/article/view/81420
I completely understand your analogy. It is quite possible that fusion power will be perfected. Then fission power will seem like a sidetrack.
These Japanese maglev trains are huge.
https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/maglev-bullet-train
They are completely inappropriate for a system with a stop every kilometer. Hyperloop (as I envision it) can handle depositing a passenger every kilometer.
You haven't addressed this difference.
Thank you very much for your comments.
I assume you want an ink sketch of the ETT lanes, not just text characters. I will see what I can produce.
Placing the city (which I dubbed "Coosapolis") in Alabama is an attempt to get a more "grounded" feeling for the concept. Other elongated cities have developed along cities, e.g. Volgograd. I didn't get as far as governmental permissions (though that would certainly impact actual construction of a line city).
I'm dealing with the peak traffic problem right now. Richard Gadsden gave me some good data on that. More coming on that.
There are a lot of folks thinking about Hyperloop so I will leave the vacuum problem to them. I am confident it can be solved.
Running a 200 mph train every few minutes down the middle of the line city would destroy the livability IMHO. For me it's buried Hyperloop or nothing.
Here's a quick sketch of the proposed layout for a 400 m long segment. Let me know if I should correct anything (no promises, as I don't have that much time to work on this): https://twitter.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1562507083605737473?s=20&t=kzKy2y3AYfaYL439jA9c5A
Note: the yellow side-walks are 10 m wide, which is pretty wide! Sufficient for foot traffic and bike lanes both directions with room to spare so you're not right up against the buildings.
Yes to an ink sketch. I would also appreciate one of the proposed city layout (buildings, parks, etc.).
About trains: I agree that above ground train wouldn't be great, by buried High-Speed Rail or Maglev seems like it would be similar to buried Hyperloop in terms of impact on livability. You could use lower-speed lines for local trips and high-speed lines for longer trips. This makes the proposal more feasible as it reduces the number of hard problems that need to be solved to make it work.
If you don't value feasibility that highly or if you're just interested in planning what a hyperloop system could be that's fine too. It's cool stuff!
The problem with Hyperloop is that it has to move in a straight line! No problema.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/elon-musk-hyperloop/
Do you know of any critiques of Hyperloop that claim it won't work?
Yes, many exist and are easily findable.
Some of the early critiques focus on some of the embarrassing mistakes from the original paper (like this https://leancrew.com/all-this/2013/08/hyperloop/). I’m not concerned about the raised structure issues, but when your original white paper has stuff like that it’s hard for structural engineers to take it seriously.
For a more recent version (I don’t share every concern mentioned), see this: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2022.842245/full
Thank you.
See the critique I just posted. They are NOT worried about vacuum. They think Hyperloop must travel in a straight line at a constant elevation. How about that! Linear cities and hyperloop: a match made in heaven.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/badaling-great-wall-station-high-speed-railway-intl-hnk/index.html
You can't detach one pod from a conventional train.
Correct. You transfer trains by getting off a high speed one and back on a local one if needed.
I've been re-reading Meditations on Moloch. The first time I read it I remember being very struck by how profound it seemed, but looking over it again, I think its main thesis is just that "coordination problems can be very harmful and are difficult to overcome", which seems quite obvious in retrospect.
I'm pretty sure I already had a good understanding of the trouble coordination problems can cause and probably most other readers did as well. Even thinking that though I still feel like that post has some huge insights that aren't immediately obvious and maybe are difficult to articulate, and I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas about what made it so special.
I still love that piece. Maybe I could be persuaded it's overrated among Scott's fans, but coordination problems are desperately underrated by humans in general, and in particular it's even more underrated by policymakers and polticians. Moloch is the enemy.
It's possible that the post looks worse in hindsight because of the same cognitive bias described in the post "Read History of Philosophy Backwards," from 2013. Correct ideas tend to win out and eventually become regarded as common knowledge/sense, while intellectual mistakes stand out more and more over time as the world moves past them.
I read it many years ago though, so it's also entirely possible that it just actually wasn't as good as I remember.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/
I agree with this assessment about it looking worse in hindsight than it was at the time, for the same reason as in the "history backwards" post but also another:
The optimism has worn off.
2014 was a long time ago.
The reason for describing the problem as "Moloch" rather than merely as "coordination is hard" isn't just to tip the hat to Ginsberg, it's because of perverse and pervasive it is. "Moloch" in fact is too parochial a diety, but is punchier than a phrase like "hidden forces of global subversion". In any case, if in 2014 an avowed transhumanist could end a long poetically-written piece about coordination problems with a battle cry about killing god, in 2022 it seems much harder to do so. Moloch seems to be winning the alignment war, and dying with dignity seems a long shot.
So yes, the perennial portions of "Meditations on Moloch" are now more mainstream, but also the hopeful portions of it (which justify the poetic tone) are also less believable. That doesn't make it less brilliant, it just makes it something that was brilliant and went unheeded.
Can you elaborate on what you think is do different in 2022 compared to 2014. I can think of the pandemic that we failed to prevent/contain for reason maybe related to Moloch and international tensions have risen, but mostly Moloch's strength and our ability to resits don't seem that different to me. To me, the really the big historical victories for Moloch are things like the failures of Soviet central planning and western Social Democracy, which both happened quite a while ago.
If we limit our examination to the turn at the end of "Meditations on Moloch" (i.e. the possibility of using AI to defeat Moloch/Gnon), and compare the tone of the AI research/alignment 'community' in 2014 and 2022 (especially the Big Yud, but not just him), the loss of hopefulness is obvious.
The other ways in which the race to the bottom has intensified in the last 8 years (whether click-driven news, increasingly addictive entertainment, widening gaps between rich and poor, or what-have-you) add up to arguably as big a victory for Moloch as any similar 8 years in the decline of the Soviet experiment, but I won't pretend to be able to quantify such a thing.
I interpreted the concluding paragraph of Meditations on Moloch as saying something more specific than that.
> As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.
I thought this is hinting at the fact that if we get AI alignment right we may be able to overcome these kinds of coordination problems once and for all. Assuming there will be a unipolar, god-like, benevolent AI.
Regardless of whether that interpretation is correct, the ideas around coordination problems hadn't been very clear to me before reading the article, so maybe it's an example of what's described here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/
I still like the post, but perhaps it's because I'm enough of a contrarian to think Elua isn't much better a bargain than Moloch. We'll still end up eaten, it's just a matter of which god devours us and how conscious we'll be as it happens. Screaming into the brazen belly of fiery Moloch, or docilely drugged like Eloi for flower-wreathed Elua?
If "Eula" was renamed to "The Son of Man", and "eternal flower paradise" was renamed to "The Kingdom of Heaven which shall reign forever and ever, Amen", would you still describe it as being devoured?
“You!” he cried. “You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last — you are the people in power! You are the police — the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I —”
Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot. “I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’
“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least —”
He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.
“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”
As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”
I am glad that you are well-read. I am saddened you are completely uninterested in asserting a point.
Oh dear, am I not engaging in the slap-fight you anticipated? How uncouth of me to refuse to play this game!
I'm enjoying this late summer afternoon, I don't feel the need to start off an exchange of "But reelly, now, reelly whydonchu?"
And if what I quoted does not give you the point I was making, well, that obscurity is on me. Has Elua ever drunk from the cup? Can you answer that? Then we can talk about the marriage feast of the Lamb.
https://ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/086963cc31f286e9c7039ceb9f467b2013a7c217.jpg
Totally agree. I think that post is hugely overrated.
My initial reaction the first time I read it was "ok so he illustrated the prisoner's dilemma a bunch of times. Big deal." And some of the examples aren't really good. Take Las Vegas: I think it's totally reasonable that it exists. There's nothing wrong with having a place to hedonistically self-indulge.
I don't think Scott's problem with Vegas was anything to do with hedonism (that wouldn't be a coordination problem), I think his problem was that the whole city had been built off profits from gambling. Since gambling is zero sum every building represented a net loss to society as a whole and was just wasted capital.
His point was if human society was organised by a rational planner it would never even conceive of making something so wasteful, but the combined result of many individual actors following there own perceived self interest did produce a result that was collectively irrational. Kind of the whole point of the post.
I think he meant that Las Vegas is even worse than that; it's not "hedonistically self-indulg[ing]". It's people sitting in front of slot machines feeding in coin after coin like prisoners on a treadmill. That's where the bulk of the profits come from, not the James Bond-roulette-baccarat-dinner jackets and evening gowns fantasy of high-stakes glamorous gambling. It's addiction and desperation and not fun or glamorous or anything near hedonism.
It's what is described in the Harlan Ellison story "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes", where Las Vegas is its own circle of Hell.
>so he illustrated the prisoner's dilemma a bunch of times.<
But that's neither literally nor figuratively what the post is; not all coordination problems are or are equivalent to a Prisoner's Dilemma, nor was the larger point "here are some examples of the Prisoner's Dilemma". Nor was the objection to Las Vegas "people shouldn't be self-indulgent!", at all.
Perhaps this is why you didn't get too much out of the post.
Yes....but there is also no reason to have it in a desert where water is _extremely_ scarce (I don't recall meditations on moloch being anti-vegas, merely anti "let's build a giant city in one of the driest deserts on earth when there is no particular reason to have it there".
I think that post is one of those "once you have integrated the idea, it's obvious, but if you have not integrated the idea, it will radically change your worldview" kind of things. And I think that this community vastly over-indexes for people who are likely to have either encountered it already or to have figured it out on their own.
The point that "many of the world's issues are because coordination is hard" is one that most people don't get (or at least, they don't act like they do). Most of the world acts like problems are because "bad people are in charge". Realizing that most people aren't bad, that most people are trying their best, but that coordination problems and incentive structures make even "obvious" solution hard to reach can be a truly world shaking realization, if you are coming from "man if only people weren't so evil".
Wait what? Las Vegas sits at the confluence of the two largest rivers in the region for several hundred miles, the Virgin and Colorado. It has gobs of water -- or rather, it *would* have, except for the fact that 1/3 of the Colorado water is siphoned off by California and another 1/5 by Arizona.
>largest in the region
That region being a very dry desert. You've correctly identified the tallest dwarf.
I'd argue that the Colorado river doesn't have enough regular flow that _any_ large city (or large agricultural base) should be siphoning off of it. The fact that other places are also trying to drink from the same, too-small straw doesn't make Las Vegas' existence acceptable.
That's just silly. The Colorado is quite a large river -- you've seen photos of the Grand Canyon, one assumes? -- and the bulk of human urban and industrial water usage always comes from a nearby river. Only agriculture relies even partly on water falling from the sky.
So there's no general reason at all not to put a city in the desert, and some good reasons to do so -- the eternal sunshine and stable weather lends itself well to certain activities, actually including agriculture (given modern irrigation technology), flght (both transport and aircraft development and training -- note that Las Vegas is home to a substantial amount of USAF training), being a transport and distribution hub in general (which Las Vegas is), manufacturing that benefits from stable weather and a minimum of hail, snow and rain (i.e. where you're building big things that have to be outside for part of their construction), and even solar power (the Ivanpah solar power station is in Las Vegas).
The main problem is not the existence of Las Vegas per se, but the fact that the water that you might think "naturally" belongs to Las Vegas, which arrives there on two big rivers, has been siphoned off long ago by water transport infrastructure built in the 30s by two distant states -- California and Arizona -- which were built up much earlier than Nevada.
And the real solution is not to limit or reverse Las Vegas, but for California in particular to build up its own water infrastructure instead of resting on its prior claim to the Colorado water. California has metric assloads of water in the Sierra Nevada, but it hasn't built a water project since the 50s, even as the population has doubled, because of NIMBY problems and the obsession of state government with other priorities than the basic infrastructure of life. It's the same reason I-5 and CA-99 are the same size they were 40 years ago, when there were half as many cars on them, and why the electric transportation lines haven't been expanded in 40 years, and remain wholly inadequate to support the hypothetically arriving transition to EVs.
You realize the Grand Canyon took 6 million years to form and that it's size has nothing to do with the amount of water in the Colorado river in any given year, right? But I'm the one being silly.
Also, the current water storage capacity in CA is enough to capture >100% of total rainfall in some (drier) years and that in drought years >80% of total outflows from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers are diverted for other uses (which, as aforementioned represent the bulk of total CA outflows)? Water storage is not CA's problem, and it doesn't have an "assload" of water in the Sierras. The problem is that it's population and ag industry developed on assumptions of annual average rainfall that appear to be historical anomalies and that reversion to the mean + climate change are resulting in a drier climate. Building more storage won't increase the rainfall, and the wet years that exceed current storage capacities are getting fewer and farther between.
As for who uses what water, why does the upstream claim have precedence to the downstream claim? Why is positional claim more important than temporal claim? And as for "modern irrigation" technology, that mostly amounts to drawing down non-renewable aquifers.
The point is that there is not enough water in the Colorado for everyone who wants it and has some sort of claim to it (either positional or historical). So we should ask ourselves "which uses of water are _required_ to be in the place where they are? I'd argue that, among all the uses of the Colorado River, none of them are _less_ geographically based than Las Vegas.
Every one of the reasons you listed for Las Vegas being where it is is either non-unique and exists somewhere else with more water/natural resources or else is a historical accident that is where is _because_ Las Vegas is there and _also_ has nothing to do with being where Las Vegas is, and would have developed just fine somewhere else if Las Vegas never existed.
And while I agree that CA has _horrible_ NIMBY development policies, I really don't see how they have anything to do with water infrastructure.
Right, I mean if we're going to talk about cities that shouldn't exist due to the lack of a water supply then we should be talking about San Francisco, not Las Vegas. Las Vegas gets its water from a dam about twenty miles out of town; San Francisco pipes its water in from freaking two hundred miles away.
San Francisco sits at the mouth of the largest estuary on the west coast, downstream of a confluence of rivers that represent something like greater than 80% of the total outflow of CA. If San Francisco doesn't have enough water, then there is not a city in the state of CA that should exist. Not to mention the fact that >70% of water useage in CA is ag use, not urban. So CA is _also_ using too much water, but it's not because of cities.
Additionally, my point wasn't that "there isn't enough water". It's that "there isn't much water AND there is no particular reason to be _there_ specifically. San Francisco has a _very_ good reason to be exactly where it is, that couldn't be anywhere else: the aforementioned "largest port/estuary on the west coast". You can't move San Francisco Bay, so you can't move San Francisco. What natural feature does Las Vegas rely on?
So why doesn't San Francisco get its water from the Sacramento River? I'm not saying that Vallejo shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that San Francisco shouldn't exist.
Las Vegas relies on the natural feature of the Hoover Dam. Admittedly the Hoover Dam isn't strictly speaking a natural feature, but presumably that particular site was considered the optimal place for damming the Colorado River.
I've severely fallen behind in my poetry reading, so I'm looking for recommendations of decent modern (writing in the last twenty years) poets.
What I am not looking for:
(1) the standard "chopped-up prose" where it's
Because I write
The lines
Like this, that
Makes this
A
Poem.
(No, it doesn't. e.e. cummings could get away with it, but you, modern poet person, are *not* e.e. cummings).
(2) Em, this is going to sound critical, but also not whatever it was that girl poet produced for Biden's inauguration (granted, all official poets/poet laureates produce crappy stuff for the Big Official Occasions). If we're talking spoken word poetry, I'm afraid I'm stuck on John Cooper Clarke as my most recent exemplar of same (so, yeah, the 90s).
What I am looking for:
Something modern and good. Is this an impossible request? Hit me with your favourites!
(That reminds me, I've got to go re-read "The Four Quartets").
Leonard Cohen is mostly thought of as a singer, but some of his songs are good poetry.
You might, or might not, enjoy some of my poems at the back of the _Miscellany_.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Misc10/Misc10.pdf
John M Ford, if you can find a copy of his collection 'Timesteps', or the only good 9/11 poem http://www.110stories.us/
Just checking - I assume you're looking for recent poetry in English only?
Yes, please, I have no foreign language proficiency! Translations into English also welcomed, I still remember the translation of The Rose Thieves years after reading it: https://mhsteger.tumblr.com/post/751527535/vasko-popa-born-29-june-1922-died-5-january
I've enjoyed Louise Glück--maybe known for having won the Nobel prize in 2020--you can check out the poem "The Egg"
Thanks for the recommendations, I'm enjoying them all even if some of them are not my thing. But this is exactly what I need, recommendations outside what I'd usually read.
If you have any interest in spoken-word poetry, I'd recommend Shane Koyczan, Andrea Gibson, or the Narcissist Cookbook.
Most of my favorite written-word poetry is from a while ago, but some modern poems I enjoyed:
https://poets.org/poem/bird-singing-dawn
https://poets.org/poem/mercy-0
Ethan Coen's The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way doesn't quite squeak into the last twenty years, being published in 2001, but maybe it'll make a decent recommendation anyway.
If you don't like the poem of the same title, quoted at https://www.npr.org/2009/04/16/103175352/ethan-coens-recreational-writing-projects, then don't bother with the rest. If you do like it, then the book is not as good, but the poems mostly rhyme, often try to be funny, and sometimes succeed.
A great ask. But I'll ignore your request and give a recommendation of a modern poet who I think does "chopped up" prose in a way that's really successful: Dean Young. Here's his "See A Lily on Thy Brow:"
It is 1816 and you gash your hand unloading
a crate of geese, but if you keep working
you’ll be able to buy a bucket of beer
with your potatoes. You’re probably 14 although
no one knows for sure and the whore you sometimes
sleep with could be your younger sister
and when your hand throbs to twice its size
turning the fingernails green, she knots
a poultice of mustard and turkey grease
but the next morning, you wake to a yellow
world and stumble through the London streets
until your head implodes like a suffocated
fire stuffing your nose with rancid smoke.
Somehow you’re removed to Guy’s Infirmary.
It’s Tuesday. The surgeon will demonstrate
on Wednesday and you’re the demonstration.
Five guzzles of brandy then they hoist you
into the theater, into the trapped drone
and humid scuffle, the throng of students
a single body staked with a thousand peering
bulbs and the doctor begins to saw. Of course
you’ll die in a week, suppurating on a camphor-
soaked sheet but now you scream and scream
plash in a red river, in a sulfuric steam
But above you, the assistant holding you down,
trying to fix you with sad, electric eyes
is John Keats.
Thank you for that, and I hope I don't sound ungracious and ungrateful when I say I hated this poem.
So the title is lifted from "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and he's evoking Keats. Well, okay. But aren't you the great one altogether, reminding us of what the world was like pre-antibiotics and pre-anaesthesia? And just to rub our noses in the grimdark of it all, the teenage labourer may be committing incest! Why not, indeed? Of course he's going to die, because what would a modern grimdark social justice poem be without a victim in the end? Every bit as maudlin as 19th century poetry about dying maidens, and worse because it has pretensions to realism - harsh economic conditions, sex work, etc. etc. etc. let us check off the bingo card.
I'll stick to Keats, for original imagery, and if I want medical poetry, Dannie Abse, who did it first and better, Mr. Oh Yah I Studied For A Nurse. Read this poem based on an account of an operation from 1938 for real body-horror:
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/theatre/
And let me quote "The Pathology of Colours" in full:
I know the colour rose, and it is lovely,
but not when it ripens in a tumour;
and healing greens, leaves and grass, so springlike,
in limbs that fester are not springlike.
I have seen red-blue tinged with hirsute mauve
in the plum-skin face of a suicide.
I have seen white, china white almost, stare
from behaind the smashed windscreen of a car.
And the criminal, multi-coloured flash
of an H-bomb is no more beautiful
than an autopsy when the belly's opened -
to show cathedral windows never opened.
So in the simple blessing of a rainbow,
in the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror,
I have seen, visible, Death's artifact
like a soldier's ribbon on a tunic tacked
I am straying a bit from the original discussion in that it's not a poem at all but this also reminded me a lot of Georg Heym's The Dissection: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/the-dissection/ in that it tries to shock you with the description but also has a romantic undertone
Has there been any attempt to use technology to decrease the number of teachers needed in K-12 education? I.e. we could imagine a model where a high school or even entire school district only needs to hire one history teacher per grade (or 2-3 if we want honors/AP level history too) to teach all the students in that grade history via Zoom. Then, you could have part-time teaching assistants, who could range from local college students to stay-at-home parents to retirees help “tutor” kids outside of the main lessons being taught via Zoom.
Essentially, instead of needing all teachers to hold undergraduate degrees, as is the case in most school districts (although many districts are dropping this requirement already due to a shortage of qualified applicants) I’m picturing a model where 80-90% of the teaching is done by numerically fewer but “higher quality” (whether that means more credentialed like a MA or PhD or more years of experience) teachers and then the last 10-20% of tutoring being done by less credentialed tutors but in a more individualized, in-person style.
I haven’t worked out logistically exactly how this model would work - but I feel like the advent of video calls / YouTube etc. is made for this sort of more centralized, but possibly higher quality teaching + individualized tutoring system.
I know I’m not the only one who has thought of a model like this, (I think I’ve heard it proposed by a few different people on different podcasts) but I’m wondering if anyone/anywhere is actually trying to put this into place?
You might want to have the tutoring done by older students — algebra by sophomores who got good grades in freshman algebra. Teaching is a good way of learning.
My daughter tells me that Oberlin did it that way at the college level. Any student who had done well in a class could be paid to tutor students in that class. But it was a supplement, not a standard part of the system.
I think our civilization is lucky that printing books was invented before general education.
Otherwise we would be stuck in a situation where a few people keep saying: "couldn't we print books that contain school knowledge? so that kids could read the correct version even if their teacher makes a mistake, or could read the book at home again if they forget what the teacher said?" but most people would be yelling at them: "don't you dummies realize that a mere book can never replace an actual human teacher? a human can react in real time to what kids are doing or saying, can answer their questions, etc." "But we are not talking about replacing teachers with textbooks. How about having teachers *and* textbooks? That way, one teacher could perhaps teach 20 kids in a classroom at the same time, so we would need fewer teachers than we do with 1:1 tutoring." "No; education is our sacred value, and any compromises are completely unacceptable!"
Luckily, the books were invented before general education, so it is okay to use a book in the classroom. It's just not okay to use anything that was invented later, such as videos, interactive application, computer testing, etc. Don't you know that mere movie or a computer cannot replace an actual human being?
Great comment. I will just add that pretty much every classroom in the US has a TV or projector for showing videos, computers and Ipads are ubiquitous in the classroom, and adaptive computer based testing like MAP is ubiquitous. We've transitioned to using all this technology with minimum pushback from teachers and parents.
When you show up to school you recognize that you can walk out the front door or play hooky. No matter how much pressure society or your parents put on you, you know you are essentially there by choice. And standing in front of you is some lady who is inexplicably dedicated to making sure you grok Beowulf. She is relentless, and no matter how much of a nitwit goon you are, she perseveres. You don't remember anything about the bear, but you get that humans have been writing stuff for thousands of years, and in spit of modernity we are somehow the same as we always were. Plus you met this girl, and that is why you showed up semi regularly.
Zoom lectures? Most teens are not watching those, but they will still show up to the the tutoring sessions for the hang, which is going to be really tricky for those tutors to navigate. That is why the zoom lecture/tutoring method is not used more.
It is not uncommon for schools enroll students in online classes (usually specialized subjects like AP physics, IB Econ etc) A teacher will be a mentor or overseer. This does decrease the number of teachers needed, especially in smaller schools.
As Carl Pham mentions below, the problem is that while this model may work for college (because the students are older, and pre-selected for intelligence and interest in the subject, and should at least theoretically have the self-discipline to do the work), it is a much different kettle of fish for younger children.
For 12-15 year olds, I think it would be much more difficult. And for 4-12, impossible.
EDIT: You would also need to keep a very tight rein so that educational fads weren't included (and I'm not talking about the culture war "As a teacher, I am truly oppressed by not being able to tell my class about how I'm polyamorous and bisexual with my husband and girlfriend") but things like this account of the wars over teaching reading: studies showed that the old-fashioned method of phonics gave better outcomes, but teachers hated it, opposed it, and insisted on the Latest Trendy Fad. Now some teachers are trying to get the old ways back, but good luck with that:
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
Sure. There was this widget called the printing press, invented in 1450ish, which allowed the great minds to write down very carefully the best possible instruction in a subject matter and have it widely distributed at tiny cost. Eventually completed changed education, from a 1:1 (or 1:5 say) teacher:student ratio in Aristotle's day to what we have now.
But what we have now is stable for entirely different reasons, I think. It's not about the best possible delivery of the subject material -- this has long ago been delegated to the textbook, or assorted pseudo-textbooks (e.g. videos and Internet thingies). What the teacher does *now* is mostly centered around what you might call education nursing care, what an RN does for patients pre- and post-surgery in the hospital: unsnarling unexpected kinks, observing and assisting with exceptions and dysfunction, providing a human face that inspires effort by students who are wired to please authority figures, maintaining a positive social climate, keeping civil peace, tending the emotional well-being of the students.
These things all demand a certain modest teacher:student ratio because there is a limit to the bandwidth the teacher's mind has -- she can only keep track of 2-3 dozen other human beings before stuff starts to slip by even the most apparently psychic, with eyes in the back of the head and on top. In college where the students are more self-reliant, socially, you can up this to anywhere beween 100 to 1000 or probably 5000 without much harm. But at the K-12 level it's impossible for one person to keep track of the emotional state of 50 or more 10-year-olds, and have an accurate "read of the room" for social currents, so that's where we're stuck.
About the printing press. Yes, it was great, although for a further century the hand written book eclipsed the printing press for output, and not because the press was complicated to make, but people preferred the hand written volume and there were a lot of people who were trained to copy write books. But what the press did do, in terms of education, was print off Alphabet posters - in one Venetian warehouse destroyed by fire in c.1500 more than 10,000 (!) alphabet posters were discovered by modern-day archeologists. The result of the proliferation of alphabet posters was increased literacy, and the primary purpose of the posters was in pedagogy. I do not think though, that the press greatly increased the number of authors and the translation or commentary on the classics remained the primary form of writing. Our present-day need for new interpretations and for each student to say something new was not part of European education then (and is still not part of education everywhere). When all students learned the same texts, at the same time, then class sizes of 100 to 150 students were both common and efficient. Whether the individual education outcomes of the present day are superior is a matter for another discussion.
That only works *if* all the kids are on the same basic level of understanding and attainment, you've got small class sizes, and you are going for "extruded grade-attaining product" not education.
Give the kids the potted highlights curriculum so they can select the right answers on a multiple-choice test marked by machine? Perfect!
Actually teach them history (or at least, the ones who are interested in history)? Or any other subject? Nope.
The *real* teaching would be done by the 'part-time teaching assistants' and, depending on whether little Johnny gets retired Joe the former mailman or Sally, the college student doing a degree in History and doing this as a summer-vacation nixer, the level of teaching is going to vary wildly. (Lest anyone think I am looking down my nose at Joe, if he really does have a love of history, then he might be a *great* choice). But in general, if you depend on volunteers and parents, you are going to get "Ah, yeah, okay, Second World War was 1939-1945 and Hitler was the bad guy" level of teaching.
I honestly don't get what is this perpetual desire to do away with real, live teachers and replace them all by technology. "I was a smart kid who loved maths and taught myself by reading the textbooks, so every kid can do the same for every subject!" is the best guess I can make on this.
Have any of you ever stood up in front of a class of secondary school age pupils and tried teaching? (Despite having no qualifications for teaching at all, I got roped into doing this for my old school because the science teacher was out sick and since I was already doing preparing the science lab for them, I was asked to take - which really was mostly supervise - science classes. And religion. And study sessions. Look, it's a long story, the moral of which for me was "I definitely do not want to be a teacher").
You can't do it by Zoom and one teacher, preferably just a part-time unqualified supervisor, overseeing a class of fifty little peppers all full of zeal to learn the heck out of the subject. Whatever the subject. You'll have a mixed range of ability and kids who (a) hate this subject with a passion (me and maths) (b) kids who love this and want to advance (c) the bulk of the class who are just doing this because it's one of the subjects on the curriculum and they want to do the least work to get a passing grade.
Thanks for your reply. I think there are two main competing priorities, at least in my mind, we’re trying to balance and where I think technology might be able to help:
1. Class size/Instructor:student ratio
2. Cost
On 1) I believe maximizing 1:1 or as close to 1:1 in-person teaching time would lead to the best educational outcomes. I imagine we align pretty closely on the idea that in a world of high quality teacher-abundance, every K-12 student would have a personal tutor, paid for by the state, who had subject-matter knowledge and real motivation to teach. Obviously, the whole day wouldn’t just be spent with your tutor, as we want to build socialization + collaboration skills too. But the core teaching/lesson-giving/asking and answering subject questions I think benefits the most from as close to a 1:1 instructor:student ratio as possible.
On 2) Cost-efficacy of K-12 education - while I think we’d be more than justified in spending an order of magnitude more on K-12 education, I haven’t seen much evidence this is politically viable in the near-term.
Maybe all it takes to deliver higher quality education is the mean salary for teachers shooting up to six figures+, incentivizing more (and possibly more intelligent) people to go into teaching, schools having the funds to hire this hopefully near-surplus of new teachers, and the result being smaller class sizes with higher quality in-person teachers. I just honestly don’t think this is possible or is likely to become possible for a long time.
So, instead, I’m thinking about ways technology can decrease cost of education while increasing the quality. One way to do that, maybe, would be getting the “best” teachers to teach the most students. I don’t think, as the commenter above stated, this is necessarily through using lots of asynchronous content like Khan Academy (although I do think Khan Academy is an awesome resource for self-learning) so much as it is technology possibly allowing larger synchronous classes (akin to when my college lectures went online during covid but still allowed for live q&a on part of students) with the best teachers teaching core content via Zoom and then in-person tutors (themselves possibly being instructed by the super-teachers) supplementing the core lessons and facilitating in-person discussion, projects, etc.
To be clear, I have relatively low confidence (~30%) that this would definitely be a better model than our current one - but I have relatively high confidence (~75%) it would be worth trying at the high school or even middle school level and seeing what the results are. Which is why I’m curious if anyone anywhere is actually trying a model like this…
There seems to be little political will to actually improve education. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it seems not to be just "the other team" mucking things up. However, this shouldn't stop us from speculating about what systems that will never be implemented could be better. After all, the smart people in this comment section like doing things like calculating how many trains it would take on what schedules to make Neom work, with no concern whatever that the place won't be built. That having been said, I submit the solution is:
Machine Learning trending towards Machine Teaching.
Children in a virtual narrow-AI-assisted educational panopticon that tracks their eye movements and dishes out rewards and punishments in some partially game-ified manner will fully individualize learning. Unfortunately or fortunately, such children will also be evaluated in real-time for their genuine cognitive capacity, leading to enormous amounts of chagrin when it turns out that not every child is equally educable. Unfortunately or fortunately, by then we'll either be living on UBI or toiling in the paperclip mines, so this won't matter as much as anxious parents might think.
One test on this is how hard it's been to get later start times for high school students., and it's been very hard.
There's enormous political will to actually improve education. Most states spend about half their budget on public education. We have a Federal Department oF Education, notwithstanding the Constitution gives no powers at all to the Federal government with respect to it (barring the service academies). Every 2 or 3 years, we have a new school bond measure, a measure to reform education this way or that, new state standards, new state tests, curriculum reform, Federal mandates of this or that form. There are few things in which the electorate fiddles around more consistently and expensively.
But improving education for reals -- meaning the ultimate outcome is better educated adults after 13 years of effort -- is like improving physical fitness or losing weight: all the pain is up front, and all the reward is well down the line.
For people to end up more mentally fit, they have to endure increased levels of discomfort and effort, the same way they do if they to want to be more physically fit. No pain, no gain. Students need to study longer hours. They need to be compelled to learn faster, to fail more often, to come closer to the limits of their abilities. They need to feel bad because they didn't grok something more often, and be more afraid of the humiliation of being left behind, so they try much harder.
Which all sounds miserable, and it is. So just as in the case of physical fitness and losing weight, the air is absolutely filled with cons, swindles, and Get-Smart-Fast schema that promise A Free Lunch. You can lose weight *without* feeling hungry! And not only that, you can be more educated *without* feeling stupid, without staying up late sweating over incomprehensible gobbledegook until a glimmer of sense shows through. Just take this equivalent of educational amphetamines and you will feel 100% smarter right away.
"They need to feel bad because they didn't grok something more often, and be more afraid of the humiliation of being left behind, so they try much harder."
Shaming only works if the capability is there and it's laziness or lack of effort that is holding someone back. Believe you me, I cried real tears over not being able to 'grok' maths like everyone else did, and I got the "well you're perfectly capable in all the other subjects, so it must be that you are lazy not stupid" from teachers (as well as blazing rows with my father when he tried explaining the maths homework to me and I still Did. Not. Get. It).
You could have beaten me like a donkey, and you would not have improved my mathematical performance. What *did* work for my entire Junior Cert class was pure fear instilled in us by our maths teacher who had the herculean task of fitting three years' work into one year, and succeeded by terrorising us (you can't beat education by nuns!) so that everyone - including myself - at least scraped a pass in the state exam. But that was pure rote memorisation and no understanding on my part.
So yeah, your pedagogical method would certainly have worked to instill shame and humiliation in younger me, but would *not* have achieved improvement in mathematical attainment. Like tone-deafness for music, you can't make something happen if the capacity is not there originally.
(When I say "terrorised", I mean precisely that, and it was achieved not by violence - corporal punishment was not allowed in schools any more by that time - or raised voice and temper tantrums; just quiet, steely menace. We had a new teacher for the first two years of the course and he didn't cover everything adequately so our third year teacher had to revise all the course work we *should* have done as well as the new material. And when I say "fear", yes, because one time I was holding a piece of paper in my hand waiting to go up and recite the theorem we had learned, and the paper was shaking because I was trembling with fear. Oddly enough, meeting her outside of class years later, she was much more pleasant. But in the classroom? Hoo boy!)
Well, yeah, neither the carrot nor the stick works on someone who's already trying his or her best. But...you are certainly aware that this description does not, alas, apply to all students. Not even most of them.
And I only emphasized the stick because there's a large current demographic that thinks you can achieve it all with just the carrot. Unfortunately, that is also not true of human beings in general. We are generically lazy, and at some point the expense of the carrot required to get us off our asses is exorbitant compared to the price of a similarly-motivating stick. So we mortal sinners need both to do our best.
The general point I'm trying to make is that I think the major component of improved student outcomes is necessarily increased student effort, which will not be fun, for the same reason bumping up one's gym workout from once a week to thrice isn't fun.
Plus I think almost all nostrums which promise significantly improved outcomes for *no* significant increase in student effort are attractive scams just like the scams that promise to let you lose weight without eating less and exercising more.
So in general I view someone who says "We should improve educational outcomes! It would be easy! We only don't do it because of [insert conspiracy theory, conclusion that everyone's a moron, no one's ever thought of this here]" as a Pied Pier hawking snake oil, a politician taking the low road to re-election, or a naif.
I think there is a way to hack learning. Just like it's possible to get and stay fit by participating in engaging and exciting activities like hiking or group sports, there must be a way to present the material in a way that makes learning exciting and interesting. Difficult, yes, but the way a tough video game is difficult, not the way walking uphill in wet socks with pneumonia is difficult.
The problem is designing a learning experience that can actually deliver that.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue is that teaching is a mass profession. There are over 3 million teachers in the U.S. That's, like, 1% of the population. If course, if you got the top 1%, that'd be one thing but for the most part the top one percent will end up in much more lucrative and/or intellectually demanding fields.
Increasing the pay and the prestige of the teaching profession could potentially nudge things in the right direction but it would come with a huge cost, considering just how many people you'll have to recruit.
I think there's only so much "exciting! fun!" you can make of learning, there does come the part where only hard slogging will get your through. You have to grind on, learning the rules, doing the homework, practice practice practice, and the rote memorisation. If you like the subject and/or have any capacity for it, you'll put up with this to get where you want to go. If you're only doing this for good grades on a test, you'll put up with it and then, once the test is done or you've left school, with a sigh of relief promptly forget everything you crammed into your skull.
But there is that "I know tomorrow my joints will ache and my muscles burn and my socks are wet and there's another five miles to go" element of all learning, no matter how fun! exciting! modern! your educational methods.
Flipped classro style? You watch Khan Academy lectures as homework and in class you do the exercises while the teacher walks around and answers questions?
A current fad which is doing incalculable damage, that. It has the major advantages (to the educational bureaucracy) of slowing down the pace of learning, since Socratic Q-and-A necessarily delivers new information far less efficiently than a good lecture (because the organization of the material, such as it has, is from the student -- the newbie -- instead of the teacher -- the master), and it socializes the cost of ignorance, since everything is a group project and the completely clueless are dragged along by the good-to-average students around him. Both effects improve grades *and* make the students happier with their outcomes, since who wouldn't be happy with the same grade for less average effort?
But genuine learning, which is always and everywhere an individual task -- nobody can master d/dx e^-bx for you, you've got to grok the principle all by your lonesome -- suffers, I think. You end up willy nilly with a significant expansion of Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
I think you're misunderstanding the "fad". The students DO watch a lecture first. The whole point here is that live time with a teacher need not be spent on a lecture since a good lecture can be recorded and shown at any time to any number of people. Then the much more valuable time face to face with an expert can be spent on improving the understanding of tougher bits rather than delivery of the basics.
That would only be true if the total classroom time were subtantially expanded. Basically you're just talking about the lecture + recitation model, which has been in use for centuries.
The current fad is by contrast basically replacing the lecture with a bigger recitation, and not adding to the total instructional time. So the components of the lecture have to get squeezed into some other and smaller space, where they lose a significant amount of their effectiveness. Sure, maybe a video. That is considerably less valuable than an actual in-person lecture, because it is 100% passive. If you've ever given a successful talk, you know that it is highly interactive, even if the audience says nothing out loud. The good lecturer "reads the room" and adjusts his or her pace, content, and style to capture and hold the interest and information absorption rate of the audience.
Furthermore, human beings are naturally better tuned to an in-person lecture, and will pay greater attention, especially to subtle non-verbal cues that come from tone of voice, expression, gesture, and so on -- and thereby learn more. There's a darn good reason why people prefer to get critical communications in person -- why nobody likes to be fired or get a grave medical diagnosis by Zoom meeting.
Good points about the benefits of in-person lectures, however, they can be somewhat offset by a few counterpoints.
1) Due to teaching being a mass profession, a lot of the in-person lectures end up being delivered by mediocre lecturers. Online lectures can be delivered by brilliant teachers and scaled massively.
2) Online lectures allow for pausing and Googling to clarify a difficult passage or rewinding. Questions could be asked by viewers and addressed by experts, creating permanent comment threads that one could refer to at any time but that could go far more in-depth than random questions asked during the lecture.
These two points could offset the drawbacks of online instruction. Or not. A lot would depend on the actual implementation.
I don't disagree with you on those points, and if you're suggesting a more multimedia form of "textbook" for people who learn better that way, I'm all for it.
But I would view this as chipping away at the role of the textbook, not really replacing the role of the teacher. As I said elsewhere, I don't really think the role of the teacher, except at the most advanced levels, is primarily the exquisitely crafted delivery of expert information. Even in college, most instructors just pretty much follow a textbook (sometimes that they assign, sometimes that from which they learned themselves). Not until you get to the graduate seminar does it become reasonaby common to totally design your own curriculum and mode of delivery.
So by me the primary job of the teacher is to take care of the human aspects of education. Keep track of the students, get to know them, judge how much they can absorb and how fast, assess whether methods of instruction are working or not, inspire students, motivate them, place the information in context, and so on. Stuff that is for the most part outside the plain communication of info -- which, I think, is done quite well by a textbook, and I agree with you can also be done with videos for people who like to see and hear stuff more than read it.
As far as I can tell the people heavily invested in a manned mission to Mars don't expend a lot of effort trying to predict when that will happen. They may discuss the issue, argue about when it is likely to happen, but they don't try to predict. In contrast, the people heavily invested in AGI, whether or AGI itself or out of fear about AI going rogue, these people do expend a lot of effort trying to predict when AGI will happen. Why?
That is, we have two (possibly overlapping) groups of people heavily invested in two different kinds of future technology. One group tries to predict when their favored technology will emerge, the other group does not. Why the difference?
I suspect because there's basically nothing else to talk about with AGI; it's not well-enough understood. Whereas with Mars, the technical challenges are all easy for the chattering classes to understand and form opinions on.
Because a mission to Mars has no effect on 99.9999% of humans
>> Why the difference?
Well, it makes a big difference in everyone's life whether AGI happens in 2035 or 2085. By contrast, the only person who really cares whether it is 2035 or 2085 for the Mars trip is Elon Musk.
FWIW, even if mankind does have a future in space, a permanently inhabited lunar habitat is a much more significant milestone than a visit to Mars.
I haven't seen this dynamic personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is treating both groups too homogenously, but taking the premise at face value:
Perhaps it's because AGI is much more of a a pure technical question: there aren't a ton of regulatory or other hurdles in the way of AGI (at least not currently), someone could invent it in their basement, essentially. And there's various metrics you can make trendlines out of and try to predict where things are moving: AI performance metrics, network size, etc.
Whereas in the MM2M case, while there's definitely technical hurdles, it seems like the bulk of the hurdles are not technical: the main hurdle is either a government or a private company deciding that it's worth the money to try to make it happen, and you can't put a nice trendline on that.
Yeah I don't think there are actually any technical hurdles. We already know how to get people there and have them live there with some measure of safety. We just don't want to spend the resources or accept the current level of risk.
AGI might in the extreme case not even be possible.
Honestly if I were a nation state or large space firm I would already be sending people and resources up there non-stop, if only to stake a claim. Yes some people would die, but I have a secret for you, everyone dies. It is a much simpler problem if you view it as a one way trip, and there would be no shortage of recruits.
The U.S. government is the richest organization in the history of the world. It is also, not coincidently, the only organization to put people on the moon. If Musk ends up having anything to do with going to Mars, it will because NASA contracts out some of the work to him (as they have already done with the Artemis program).
Also not coincidentally, the US government is immune from the consequences of ineptitude.
Space-Ex spends what a billion a year? A little more? Don't think getting a person to Mars would take more than a couple billions. Would probably be more expensive than curiosity, though I am not sure how much (2-4X?).
Thinking over these comments plus some thoughts of my own, I observe that we know a great deal about the technical requirements of a manned mission to Mars. My sense is that the area of largest uncertainty is the mental and physical health of humans spending that much time away from earth's gravity, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. Otherwise, it's mostly a matter of whether or not we're willing to commit the resources to the job.
AGI is something else. We really don't know how to do it. If we did, there would be multiple projects targeted directly at it. As it is, all we have are ideas and theories and lots of things we don't know. So we're left trying to predict when it will happen, as though it were something outside our control in the way the weather is, or another pandemic. And, given how vague the idea is, the more elaborate prediction efforts strike me as Rube Goldbergesque in complexity, more epistemic theater than anything else.
The rocket that sent curiosity need to carry curiosity, plus the parachute. A rocket carrying people would need to carry an air-filled compartment filled with people, the equipment to keep the air fresh, enough food to last for the months-long journey, and also enough food and fuel to make it back (unless the plan is "go to Mars and starve there").
A) What is wrong with go to Mars and starve there? I don't think I would plan on anyone coming back for many many missions. Too much additional cost for little additional gain. We got more than enough people.
B) Yeah they will need food and air etc.
C) You don't need to send everything in the same launch.
Now I’m picturing Matt Damon growing potatoes. What will he use to make the barren soil fertile?
Hmm.,.
Basically.
If I were rich enough I could predict the hour the first man will land on Mars with 100% accuracy (barring any particularly nasty fatal accidents) by just... paying for the mission and setting the launch date. It's just a question of when someone will do it.
I found myself unsubscibed from this substack. Any idea why that might have happened? I thought I'd seen nothing from ACX for a while and came to this manually, that's how I knew I'd been unsubscribed. Normally, I receive an email when a new post appears.
Did you get unsubscribed, or just stop getting alerts? I am still subscribed, but I've stopped getting the posts in the substack "inbox" page. I have still not figured out how to fix this and have just been checking the substack manually every other day or so
It might be a good thing. To present myself as an extreme outlier in this regard, I'm not subscribed to anything, anywhere. If I want to see what someone is up to I have to remember that person exists and type enough words into a browser to bring up a feed. This is purely for my own benefit -- a "pull" rather than a "push". For instance instead of just being told when Rolf Degen throws something onto twitter, I have to think "i'm in the right cognitive space at the moment to read abstracts of papers that probably won't replicate, let's see what this guy has found since I checked last."
No idea. Just subscribe again.
I did! Just curious how I got unsuscibed.
@Meetups: why not publish the available list around Aug 24th as planned, and then invite a second round of applications for organizers ... and publish an extended list say two weeks later?
I might organize sth. if there isn't an organizer in my place (I guess there is), but I simply don't have the time *now* to sign up.
I think that would be worse. Not everyone reads the original announcement, and if you give people an out of "but you can do it later" then fewer people will sign up to begin with, and then they might not even remember that they meant to sign up and miss the announcement for the second round of sign-ups.
I don't believe you can't spare the few minutes that it takes to sign up. You can check the option of "don't publish my meetup if there is someone else organizing", you can leave the location as "TBD" and if it turns out you don't have time to organize it after all, you can cancel it and no one would hold it against you. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Scott wrote repeatedly about Prospera, the startup city in Honduras.
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:
Prospera Healthtech Summit, September 23-25, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/healthtech2022
Prospera Edtech Summit, October 28-30, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/edtech2022
Prospera Fintech Summit, November 18-20, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/fintech2022
Are you interested in other models?
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
I recently heard an interview with Ye Tao, founder of the MEER project which aims to reflect sunlight back into space to help cool the climate.
I was surprised by his claim that at least 1.5°C of additional global warming is already baked in, irrespective of decarbonisation, on account of a net energy influx of 1.5W per square metre. Also that if all coal plants shut now, it would actually temporarily exacerbate the problem as reflective matter produced by burning coal would dissipate from the atmosphere much faster than the cooling effect from the decreased CO2. (Note that he was not shilling for coal – he very much agrees that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, he just thinks reducing the energy influx is even more urgent.)
Does anyone know any papers supporting these claims, and more generally whether whether they are generally accepted or in conflict with the mainstream predictions for warming?
Interview here:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand#details
MEER details here:
https://www.meerreflection.com
So the reason why a certain amount of warming is "baked in" is because of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere + relatively large lag times on warming to equilibrium. Which is why a lot of people are focusing on long-ish term projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere (once we are actually done emitting it at least). Additionally, the claim that immediate stoppage of all fossil fuels would result in short term increased warming from reduction in reflective materials also seems to be pretty mainstream.
I suppose mirrors could work but I'm skeptical that A) costs would be lower than air-capture carbon and b) that there wouldn't be significant knock on effects from reflecting enough sunlight, even if you do it over the ocean.
Sunlight does things _other_ than heating the planet. Removing carbon from the air is pretty much the only way to reverse warming that we can be relatively certain won't have any significant unintended consequences, since all it's doing is reversing what we did in the first place. Every other option is just adding a new alteration on top of the existing alteration, and predicting outcomes from those changes is difficult.
I'm not necessarily against other options, but I'm going to need a fair bit of convincing to overcome my prior that the ideal scenario is
1) First stop as much carbon emitting as is reasonably possible (ideally all fossil fuel burning)
2) Begin working on removing and storing atmospheric carbon to closer to pre-industrial levels.
"Removing carbon from the air is pretty much the only way to reverse warming that we can be relatively certain won't have any significant unintended consequences, since all it's doing is reversing what we did in the first place."
Other than browning the planet? CO2 is an input to photosynthesis, and if you read the IPCC report carefully you can find the passage where they report that total coverage of the planet with plants has increased, probably due to the increase in CO2.
Also, of course, reducing the amount of CO2 reduces the yield of C3 plants — all the important crops except maize, sugarcane and sorghum, which are C4. And it makes all plants, including C4, more vulnerable to water shortages.
Climate change has both good and bad effects. The closest one can come to win/win is to keep the good effects and minimize the bad effects — dike against sea level rise, for instance.
"X degrees more warming is locked in even if we stop literally all emissions tomorrow" is a pretty mainstream talking point that I hear mostly from environmentalists and the anti-anti-global warming people don't seem to push back on it much (at least, not the ones who accept the basic model of why warming occurs).
So those facts generally line up with my understandings. And certainly large space shades/mirrors are one of the easier ways to engineer our way out of the problem. Doesn't take that much material, doesn't need widespread global cooperation, and doesn't require that much change from people, plus isn't directly fucking with the atmosphere like some designer aerosol would. Plus easy to "undo" (just make it be able to change shape).
Human induced climate change by us not being to control ourselves is bad and sort of lame and disgusting like someone shitting in a can next to their desk because they are too lazy to go to the bathroom. So if I was world dictator I would still absolutely want to put an immediate stop to unplanned climate change.
But my "hot" take is that despite the above, climate change also isn't the end of the world because I think in the long run humanity would have decided they wanted to warm the planet eventually.
A) Further "terraforming" of the earth is wildly cheaper than terraforming any other body in the solar system.
B) Much of the land on the earth is very high in the northern hemisphere or in Antarctica and is fairly unusable for comfortable human habitation. And in particular Antarctica is covered in ice.
C) Meanwhile the parts of the planet that are "hotter/wetter" generally have a higher carrying capacity and larger numbers of people in them by far than the parts that are "colder/drier". And despite what the alarmist might tell you, the main outcome of climate change is a warmer/wetter earth, not some global drought. The world will look more like India/Brazil, and less like Siberia/Canada/Antarctica.
Anyway, I think the current rate of change is probably quite sub optimal, likely causing more damage to the biosphere than needed (though I still think human activity & land use is 10 times the problem climate change is in terms of damage to biosphere). But a world with higher sea levels and high rain, and a higher temperature is just likely more suited to human use in the long run.
Yes losing most of the glaciers will be sad, and the "original setup" humanity found the earth in. But that setup was naturally changing constantly even on relatively small timescales, so my rational brain just isn't that concerned about it.
Would make for some great sci-fi movies as well: Technologically we have collapsed and the world is slowly freezing as nobody can figure out how to reach space in order to get-rid-of or redirect the mirrors floating far above us that are causing the problem....
Having looked into it a bit, I don't think this would be a problem; the mirrors would be put at an unstable Earth-Sun Lagrange point and would move out of position if not maintained.
Fortunately, thanks to sci-fi movies complete disregard for science, we can still watch Hollywood blockbusters about the earth freezing due to the disastrous mistake of placing mirrors.
Great summary! I agree pretty much with all of it.
Just a little pushback on C: that's very much a long-run perspective. I agree that globally speaking, the earth probably becomes more habitable for humans. But you don't mention that all our infrastructure is optimized for the current state of earth, and that the cost for relocating/readapting is pretty large. Not so much as a direct consequence of temperature, but because of changes in wind systems and water currents. Not all regions become wetter, a lot them are predicted to get drier. Let alone the political tensions that come from "winning" and "losing" countries. But yes, it won't be the end of the world, and for a new CivReal game I would also choose a warmer earth as starting condition.
One thing in the latest IPCC report I don't see mentioned much. Apparently some, but not all, projections find that climate change will result in greening the Sahara and Sahel.
I suspect the "a lot of places are expected to get drier" is pretty overblown. Basically the modelers picking out the 10% of the planet where things will be even slightly drier and being like "see droughts!", while most of the surface gets noticeably more rain.
The set of claims the models make just really isn't self consistent, unless the general default assumption is "wetter".
Another funny claim I see is that once the glaciers are gone we will lose the excess water from glacial melt, but of course if we got the climate back to say a 1900 baseline, we would also lose "excess glacial melt" since the glaciers would be growing not melting on average.
There is a timing element to glacial melt as well where historically there was some advantage to the glaciers melting during the dry season. But in many places they melt the most during the wet shoulder seasons, not the dry season, and cause extra flooding. Plus many rivers of significant have reservoirs at some point on them regardless. Anyway, it becomes hard to figure out the true impacts since so much of the work in this area is "ok here is a model with 20,000 point predictions, lets pick out the 10 worst most terrible ones out of those 20,000 and then all freak out". Makes it hard to evaluate the overall situation.
I remember a long research paper I read one time predicting the general forest spread in the northern US would move 50-100 miles north in the next couple decades, but acting as though you know, nothing would replace it. Like the tree mix from say Duluth will be on the Canadian border, and instead Duluth will be a barren wasteland of...the tree mix from around Eau Claire (but lets not talk about that or people won't be freaked out). A lot of attempts to make pretty minor changes seem eschatological.
I agree with your general point that a lot of people are overly hysterical about the negative impacts of Climate change. Anyone who thinks that humanity might wipe itself out, or that they shouldn't have children because of climate change is being ridiculous.
That being said, I disagree with your claim that climate change will be on-net positive. Yes, it's true that lots of places will get wetter. But wetter != better. In general, the climate will get more extreme, with the _average_ global impact being slightly warmer and slightly wetter but that mostly being "wet places get even wetter, dry places get even drier, hot seasons get hotter, cold seasons get colder".
And yes, northern latitudes might become more useable while southern latitudes become less, but there is a significant cost to moving industries, and even absent the cost, I'm still not convinced that it would be net positive. It would certainly be very _unequally_ positive.
In short: you're right that lots of people and much of the media are overly hysterical about the negative impacts of climate change. I'm pretty sure you are wrong about it being net positive, and even if you weren't, I'm not sure it would be moral/ethical to say "Russia and Canada will be better off so fuck Northern Africa/ SE Asia"
I don't know whether the net effect is positive or not, but there are large positive effects that get ignored in most of the public discussion. My estimate, using IPCC figures for the end of the century on their second highest emissions scenario, is that the amount of land shifted from "too cold for human habitation" to "warm enough for human habitation" is more than twice the current area of the U.S., and two or three magnitudes larger than land lost to SLR:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Climate/Land%20Gained%20and%20Lost.pdf
Of course, that land will still be pretty cold — but the pretty cold land just south of it will be less cold, and the land south of that ... . So the right first approximation is an increase in usable land of about 10.8 million square km.
My position would be something like:
The short term (even over a century) impact is likely a net negative, but the long term (over hundreds of years) is likely to be positive (particularly if done more intentionally/gradually).
And I wasn't talking about it in terms of particular countries, but more just general human habitation, obviously people would move around some.
I don't think that this is a fair account of the predictions of drier places. For the places where I have paid attention, the predictions are pretty consistent. For Europe, that's roughly speaking drier Southern (and partly Western) Europe and wetter Northern Europe.
It's not like someone has run some simulation, and picked the driest places. Or that it comes from some newspaper which makes a story. It's that for Southern Europe, several people have run lots of simulations, and it pretty consistently ended up drier, and that is what the IPCC reports ("medium confidence" for Southern Europe).
And for glaciers: I don't know too well about these things (I should, because I live close to the Alpes), but I am not convinced by what you say. Sure, the amount of water does not change with or without glaciers. But they give a constant supply over the whole summer, smoothing out the precipitation over many years. This sounds like a pretty important factor. Perhaps some rivers have sufficient reservoirs. But for the Rhine river, this is almost falling dry just now, and its reservoirs are at such low levels that they can't release more water. So right now, I don't feel reassured by a general appeal at reservoirs.
"Sure, the amount of water does not change with or without glaciers. But they give a constant supply over the whole summer, smoothing out the precipitation over many years. "
Why would that "smooth it out", in *most* places summers tend to be wetter than winters. This is the sort of thing I am talking about, taking the situation (when glaciers help smooth) that is beneficial, and acting like generally glaciers do that. The default assumption with glaciers would be that they generally are anti-smoothing, locking up moisture during the cold dry winter, and then releasing it during the warmer wetter months.
I notice the rainfall models you are refencing conveniently have almost all the increase participation happening over the middle of the pacific ocean and over the artic and antarctic. Maybe that is reality, seems kind of convenient.
Exactly the sort of thing you would project if you were developing the models based on the assumptions there are going to be more droughts and dryness, instead of developing them from first principles (these baked in assumptions are absolutely a problem with many of the climate models, where the models are fed in the results at the beginning and/or selected base don them conforming to expectations).
When I try and find historic rainfall data over our current period of warming (say 1900-2000), I see Italian and Czech rainfall up, and Spanish rainfall slightly down. Incidentally it is a lot harder than I would have thought to just get simple graphs of rainfall changes over time for points on the earth. Would seem like interesting/important data.
I worry a lot about the following:
"Climate change is going to be devastating to humans and there are going to be huge droughts" Model spits out that is not true. "Ok lets tweak the parameters until the increase rainfall is somehow all happening in place outside the OECD." Model now conforms to priors about apocalypse. "There see increased droughts and desertification from a phenomenon that is primarily going to cause more rainfall!"
Now if this wasn't such a politicized/religious issue I might take that data at face value, but too many decades of reading the main Pop-sci magazines, and listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks and such have made it crystal clear that climate alarmism is more an ideology than some reasoned position to most researchers. You have people acting like a world without the North Quebec Forest Beetle is somehow going to lead to global agricultural collapse, when really it is just going to lead to the collapse of the need for people who spend their full time researching the North Quebec Forest Beetle.
IDK if there were betting market futures on rainfall amounts in the US and Europe I would take the overs above general public or even climate scientist perceptions, and probably over the IPCC models, in pretty large amounts. There is some decent chance I am wrong, but while I have zero skepticism about climate change, I have a lot of skepticism about the supposed devastating nature of it (especially since we are like halfway through hit and the climate seems quite pleasant).
Obviously we have very different opinions on how much the IPCC can be trusted on which things. In particular, how climate models are formed. But I don't want to get into an argument here, so I'll leave it at that.
For precipitation in summer vs winter, I can easily think of lots of cases where water usage had to be restricted in summer, but I don't seem to remember a single case where it was restricted in winter. Perhaps I am wrong about the balance of water availability vs consumption in summer and winter, I haven't looked into that. But I can assure you that you are wrong with your assumption on how I formed the hypothesis.
You might want to think about how much sea level rise it takes to eliminate most coastal cities. The current IPCC projections imply about a meter at the high end by the end of the century. London's average elevation is about ten meters, and I think the lowest city in the Netherlands is eight or ten meters below sea level. Flooding coastal bits of cities with a meter of SLR is believable, losing major coastal cities everywhere is dystopian sf.
Human civilization currently exists across a wide range of climates. Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa won't make in uninhabitable.
>Human civilization is pretty optimized for the climate we've had for the past few thousand years.
Well most of that time the climate was warmer than it was in say 1900. Closer to what it was today (though not where we are headed). Also I don't think the statement is true.
> I mean, Scandinavia has done OK being cold for all of recorded history.
Sure it has. But the population of Scandinavia is smaller than the population of Florida, in large part because most people find it unpleasant (and I live somewhere very similar and don't find it unpleasant, but I am well aware that isn't the norm).
>fat-tail risks triggering much greater warming or a much worse outcome that currently predicted.
Doesn't seem to be much evidence for those, but if they did happen we do have some easy remedies in terms of engineering if needed.
I often hear about how American land was taken from indigenous peoples, but I don't know what the goal of those conversations are. When I say "hear", it's usually either in the context of a land acknowledgement ("The land we stand on belonged/belongs to the XYZ nation.") or something more general. It's hard to tell whether most of these aim to just inform people, or come with the hidden call-to-action that we should return the land to the given nation. It always falls short of being meaningful for the former, but I'm more curious about the second option.
Most of this land has been developed and inhabited by people *other* than those who initially took it. That doesn't make it right to *not* give it back, but taking it away from the current inhabitants doesn't feel right either. I was born and have been inside the USA's borders for all but one week of my life. Both of my parents (and, I believe, all of my grandparents) were natural-born citizens. Any connections I have to a "home country" in Europe are distant enough that I don't even know any relatives there. If I "returned" my land to indigenous peoples, I wouldn't have anywhere at all.
I've never seen anyone explicitly argue for returning land, but it feels like it's being heavily hinted at. Do I have that right? Has anyone written on the topic before? Are there other ideas that are out there that don't run into this issue?
The only argument I've ever heard for land acknowledgements and thought was legit is that if you're in a field that works heavily with native americans, then it's a way of showing respect to them and showing that you're on their side. Like if you're working with native american artifacts and repatriation or something. Other than that, I hate to sound like a conflict theorist, but I do think that it's likely just virtue signaling, stemming from memetically entrenched modes of thinking that all originated with Moloch. These modes of thinking generally dislike the West, and work heavily on modern Americans' and Europeans' propensity to feel guilty. That is to say, I don't think 99% of people who say this are really barking up any actionable tree to actually return land to native americans. They just want to simultaneously jump on the woke train and create an environment that's further hostile to anti-woke modes of thought.
i think to move forward with a relationship you should acknowledge the past. this does not mean a 'return of land'
It's not a healthy relationship if someone makes the other constantly again and again say that they wronged the other one. That sounds like an abusive relationship, one in which one party is leveraging their past hurt to manipulate the other party.
Well and particularly when neither party is the same party. It is like a relationship where one party keeps demanding apologies for the other party's great grandfather's adultery.
I think it's pettier and more cynical than that. I don't think it's about Native Americans at all. I suspect a lot of it has to do with status signalling; being concerned with human rights and being seen as empathetic is high status. If these people actually cared about Native American land they'd return it, but of course most of them are never going to (unless it's in a remote location nobody wants to live in anyway).
You see the same thing in Canada. How many of these people would actually give back the land where Toronto is built on? It's a charade.
Most responses so far fall into 'the acknowledgement is not meaningful,' 'it's actually a measure of conformity like Havel's greengrocer's sign', or 'the ultimate goal is the return of the land and/or the delegitimization of the state'. Or some combination.
There is a fourth interpretation. Why are a lot of university buildings named after rich people? Usually because those rich people donated to the university. Land acknowledgments can be seen as akin to donor recognition: a low-cost way of showing respect.
I'm having a hard time squaring "choosing the cheapest possible acknowledgement" with "showing respect." I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the concept -- I'd be delighted to show respect for the law by putting a "Blue Lives Matter!" bumper sticker on my car, instead of obeying the speed limit -- but I just can't seem to make it work out in practice.
The police have the power to actually arrest you for breaking the law. Native Americans, for the most part, only have the power to make you feel ashamed of yourself. So, what's the cheapest thing you can do that makes you not feel ashamed of yourself no matter what your local Native American activist says? Once you've done that, you can stop worrying about what can't hurt you.
For a fair number of people, that's a "land acknowledgement".
Well, if your goal is "feel good about yourself" I might argue that the cheapest possible thing you can do is pour out a stiff bourbon :)
But if your goal is to have local Native Americans not despise you, I would suggest a land acknowledgment is actually going in the wrong direction. I'm not personally of American Indian descent, but if I *were* I would hold these pious useless statements in contempt, and they would make me think less of the people making them, not more. It would feel -- as perhaps it actually is, in many cases -- like my history and heritage was being exploited to make the managerial class feel better about themselves, in which case, fuck you assholes, it's bad enough you took the land in the first place, now just shut off the self-serving crocodile tears already.
I would agree, but I don't think most of the people doing land acknowledgements have enough contact with the local Native Americans to understand whether they're despised or not. And I don't think they much care. So long as their ingroup says "you're good", they're good. If their outgroup says "how dare you!", even better. The Indians on the Rez, are the fargroup. There might be a few Native American campus activists in the ingroup, but they won't be at all representative.
Yeah, I bet you're right about that. Bah.
There are a few calls-to-action that can come with those kinds of land acknowledgements.
One of them is, yes, return the land. Or at least, some of the land. Obviously returning all of the land is never going to happen, but it's not all-or-nothing: even giving back small parcels of land to individual tribes can be meaningful to those tribes, especially if the land in question is culturally significant or if owning it gives them access to profitable resources. And the land doesn't have to be "taken" from anybody: it can be donated, or bought. This has already happened in a few forms:
Private individuals donating land back to local tribes, e.g.:
https://www.capecod.com/newscenter/native-land-conservancy-receives-first-gift-of-land/
https://boldnebraska.org/in-historic-first-nebraska-farmer-returns-land-to-ponca-tribe-along-trail-of-tears/
Or stuff like this: a local tribe was given ownership of one of the parcels of land in California formerly owned by PG&E when PG&E went bankrupt:
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article213494354.html
In some cases, tribes are willing to buy land back - in this case the argument would be that if someone is selling land that was previously stolen from a tribe, that tribe should be given the right of first refusal, or otherwise prioritized as potential purchasers. California already requires utilities selling off land to do this.
I have also seen requests for other forms of reparations. For example, land taxes or other forms of cash reparations given to the tribes. I don't think this is legally required anywhere, but land acknowledgments can be one way of guilting people to donate voluntarily. And I mentioned this in another comment in this thread, but some state university systems are moving towards providing tuition waivers or other scholarships to Native American students as a form of reparations.
So yes, some people do argue for returning land, or use land acknowledgements as leverage ("ethically, you really should give back the land, but since we all know you aren't going to do that, at least give university scholarships to the descendants of the people who the land was taken from"). But you're right that it's not going to look like land being seized from the people who currently own it.
Thanks for sharing these data points. It's nice to see some actionable and in my opinion reasonable outcomes come out of all this, instead of just cynical deflections or performative statements.
"I've never seen anyone explicitly argue for returning land"
I have. Those arguments are very easy to find if you look for them in academia.
...Or on tumblr, or on lefty twitter. Google "landback", OP. It's... well, it's a thing.
Seriously, if I wasn't well versed in how political memes (in the original sense) have a selection pressure towards their most inflammatory version, I'd think the "landback" movement was some right-wing troll's proposal to intentionally make the left look ridiculous.
Oooh! If we're going to look overseas for examples, we can point to actual race-based land seizures by leftists then!
The thing about the academic left's views on "indigenous peoples" is that if you change the target ethnicities it suddenly turns into the views of the extreme right.
In this case, the maximally offensive and off putting form is the only one that's really obvious or makes sense with the mantra being used.
It's a LOT more complicated (and tortured) to interpret "Land back" as meaning "Scholarships and free tuition" as opposed to meaning "Land, back."
The bulk of the left intelligentsia sort of hates the west, and is stuck in a childish 1970s over-reaction to the late 19th century and early 20th century "manifest destiny/white man's burden" lens/story of history and the humanities. Reacting so strongly against that and what they correctly identify as widespread historic injustice (though they seem fairly blind if it isn't committed by Europeans) that they fail to really engage their brains.
It is part of the broader "religion" that is taking hold of the left and filling in the gap that the dwindling traditional religions are leaving in people's lives. They want original sin, they want the righteous and the wicked.
I think of it like children, when children are fighting on the playground and committing injustices against each other, do you engage in a lot of soul searching and a detailed examination of what started it and who harmed who, nurturing and detailing the pain. No you do not, it is counterproductive. Instead you tell them to stop hitting each other and to forget about what happened. I really do think the "colorblind" "we are all one" method was the better long term way forward than the reigning dogma. But the problem is it leaves the people in the humanities with a lot less to do, and they need topics for their "research" papers.
Out of curiosity, why does it fall short of being meaningful as an acknowledgement?
I'll admit I was being subjective with that, but give my reasoning. Quite often, it feels like a fill-in-the-blanks statement or an item on a ceremonial checklist instead of actually talking about the topic. You say it at the start of your meeting or event, then proceed to do and say nothing even tangentially related to it for the rest of it. It's like saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, or singing the national anthem at a sporting event (though arguably, the national American pastime of baseball is still a somewhat relevant context).
In other words, it feels performative.
Isn't that the point? It's a way for an external observer to quickly see who is and isn't loyal, who does - and more importantly *does not* - habitually bend the knee. The reason it feels like part of a checklist is because it is part of a checklist, just for quickly inspecting people instead of things. That's the point being made by Ninety-Three about Havel's Greengrocer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Havel's_greengrocer), things like this were invented by bureaucracies looking to make people legible (a la James C. Scott's "Seeing Like A State").
Performance has meaning too. When a Soviet greengrocer puts up a sign saying "Workers of the world, unite!" that's different from putting up no sign, even if everyone knows the man doesn't really care about the workers of the world. The message is that he behaves as authority expects him to.
Because "We acknowledge we stole your stuff but we're not going to give it back" is satisfactory to nobody. If your car is stolen, you expect to get it back (or claim the insurance). Having the chop shop issue a letter saying "We stole it, we admit it was your car" and then hang on to the money they made from stealing and selling it on, without any other consequence to them - and that it is expected everyone will congratulate them on issuing such a letter acknowledging the theft! - is ridiculous.
I have heard of this 'land acknowledgement' in the context of universities. So what are they actually doing, about this 'stolen land'? Are they handing the keys over to the remaining tribespeople? Are they paying them rent? Is this anything more than liberal white people doing virtue signalling which costs them nothing in real terms?
Starting this fall, the entire University of California system (both graduate and undergraduate programs) will waive all tuition and fees for California residents who belong to a federally-recognized tribe, as reparations for the stolen land. The Montana University system already does something similar, and I expect we'll see more universities creating similar programs as time goes on - I think Colorado is already considering it.
Basically: activists push for land acknowledgements, universities adopt them because it seems easy, and then activists can point out the ridiculousness that you mention as a way to pressure them into doing something more substantial.
I guess my perspective is: land acknowledgements have a 0% chance of leading to the US no longer existing, but a >0% chance of convincing university administrators or state legislators to give tuition benefits to Native Americans.
I don't see how it is a 0% chance though? When all the authorities open every formal event with a "Land acknowledgement" that attacks the legitimacy of the State and the legitimacy of most ethnic groups even residing there, and this movement has significant elite support, and no one willing to argue back against it...
I don't see how such a movement can logically end with anything other than the dissolution of the state and the expulsion of people of European, Asian and African ethnicity unless it's defeated. And no one seems willing to argue against it.
I would upvote this or give you a like if I had any idea how to do it.
What you said is exactly how I feel about this: "We stole, it, yep, and we're keeping it" as a point of signalling seems odd.
The 4th of July is when we publicly acknowledge that we stole land from Britain. It's probably offensive to Britains, but I celebrate it.
One use is to refute Libertarian arguments that taxation is theft: if the land itself isn't legitimately owned, then the any other idea of private property is on shaky foundations.
I don't think this is particularly true. It might be a use to which such declarations are occasionally put, but I strongly doubt it enters the mind of most people making them or hearing them.
To be blunt, the idea that taxation is theft isn't that well known, and even most of the people who have heard it reject it out of hand. It's far enough outside the overton window that most folks don't stop and reason out a rejection in their heads, they just say something like, "Huh? What? No, that's dumb.", and move on.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it's a fully generalizable argument, i.e. it could be used against *any* political and economic system that Westerners set up anywhere in the Americas. Libertarian notions of private property would be illegitimate, sure, but so would social democratic notions of redistributive government and progressive taxation and the welfare state. Just about *anything* Westerners do in Native American lands would be illegitimate, short of giving the entirety of the continent back to the Natives (which no one on either side of the political divide is seriously proposing). That makes leftist attempts to use this rhetorical weapon exclusively against right-libertarians seem transparently disingenuous.
Indeed, it would be the same almost anywhere. Very few places on Earth were never conquered by anyone.
"so would social democratic notions of redistributive government and progressive taxation and the welfare state"
I don't see why. If the legitimacy and illegitmacy of property, taxation etc, is decided by the state, then any arrangement the state wishes to make is legitimate. Libertarians need a notion of legitimacy separate from the state to be able to complain that state actions are illegitimate. Statists don't.
How is the state that sits on stolen land and maintains its power with stolen property legitimate?
Having some justification other than being a landlord.
Theft needs to be a very specific kind of deligitmizing if stolen land can host legitimate government but not legitimate libertarian industry. Seems disingenuous.
"Libertarian enclaves are illegitimate" is not the argument. The argument is that taxation is not theft.
Hold on, that's not the argument! "All land is stolen" points to "all property is theft" but you can't get from there to "taxation *isn't* theft". Taxation might arguably not be theft if it was in service of returning the thing in question but if you tax settlers and spend it on something other than natives that's just stealing stolen property a second time.
Some property survives that objection. Sure my claim to own a car is complicated if the car was made with metal from stolen land, but the Harry Potter IP isn't derived from land (yes technically Rowling had to sit somewhere while she wrote, but the land wasn't *relevant* to the production like it was for physical goods).
I don't actually think so-called "intellectual property" is really property in the same way that land is, though. Copyright, trademarks and patents are all limited privileges granted by the government to encourage creation, to help consumers make purchase decisions, or to spur the public disclosure of inventions - but morally, they aren't and can't be regarded as similar physical property rights.
If they were like physical property rights, I would ask why all of them except for trademarks have limited duration? Just as one can pass on a parcel of land in perpetuity (barring imminent domain, or failure to pay property taxes), shouldn't one be able to pass on intellectual property rights in perpetuity then?
But aside from some self-important artists, and some greedy companies most people recognize that this isn't how things should work. Ideas being owned by one family line, or one corporation for all of time is a terrible way to set things up - especially if all of the modern baggage of derivative works comes with it. Over time, the number of legally expressible ideas would shrink and shrink until all of the ideas had been mined, and no one would be able to say almost anything worth saying anymore.
I think the similarity is a bit deeper. When a copyright or patent expires, that does not actually give people the right to your creation. If you have, for example, kept it secret, nobody can demand it from you, as they could demand access to a piece of public land on which you were squatting. So as long as you "defend" your property by keeping enough of it private that no one can duplicate it (and all property needs an active defense to remain yours, including land), you are entitled to sole use of it in any way you see fit. Nobody can compel you to reveal it, or use it in any way, or at all.
I think perhaps a better view of patents and copyrights is that they are like a real estate sale and rent-back. The state buys your intellectual property from you (in the interest of fostering other inventions, and for the public good generally), and your payment is a multiyear leasehold on your (former) property, with the burden of its defense now resting to a large extent on the state -- you no longer have to try to keep it secret, you can merely notify[1] the state someone has attempted to copy your work and the state will enjoin that by force.
But you are not *obliged* to sell your creative work to the state. You can keep it a trade secret[2] if you prefer, and maintain your control over it forever. (Obviously this poses practical difficulties of significance, but the principle is clear enough.)
--------------------
[1] Which of course might be very expensive on an objective basis.
[2] Note that idea of trade secrets as property is well established, which is why you can recover damages from someone who reveals yours in breach of some agreement.
Are you sure that most people agree with you on IP? Neither side has an overwhelming majority but when you get down to the basics, a *lot* of people share the instinct of "I made that, you can't just take it" even when the thing is as abstract as literature.
I don't think most people have thought very deeply about IP, and many of those that supposedly have only think about what IP law means for their own works, not the health of the overall media environment of society.
I think *physical* property already has a problem of sorts, after the homesteading phase. Once all the virgin soil has been claimed by people, what incentive does the rest of society have to accept a world where they don't and can't own sufficient land holdings to eek out a living because of an accident of their birth, while large parcels of land owned by absentee landlords never gets properly developed? (And there's the additional issue of, why should farmers who do all of the work on a piece of land have to pay rent to a guy whose great great grandfather homesteaded it, and got lucky several generations back? If the initial act of claiming and developing land is sufficient for a property claim, morally why is the person actually doing the work today not entitled to more than whatever a landlord can extort from him?)
How much more so would this happen with so-called "intellectual property" if it was perpetual? There'd be no Disney, because all of the folklore they got big off of would have belonged to someone forever. Maybe people would like that, but it would affect all smaller creators as well. Should the distant relative of Shakespeare have veto rights over his great-whatever ancestor's creation, just because of an accident of birth meant that he inherited the rights to those works, even though he wasn't involved in their creation at all?
I think the solution in both these regards is some sort of wealth tax. Though it is kind of a nightmare to setup and enforce. Basically people can only afford to hold property they are making active use of.
Though the sunset of IP after some number of decades has been a fairly good solution there.
But for material property the main levers against accumulation that seem to make sense are wealth taxes and making sure externalities are properly accounted for and taxed.
If the land isn't legitimately owned, the idea that the government has the right to levy taxes from people on land it never justly acquired is on even shakier foundations.
Not if the govt/state is a source of legitimacy.
If the government is the source of legitimacy and can declare taxation to not be theft, why can it not simply declare the seizure of land from natives to not be theft? Of course that's kind of a moot point, seeing as that's exactly what has happened in practice. But if theft is "taking something from others by force, but it doesn't count when the government says it's ok" then the land in question cannot be stolen by definition, seeing as the government at the time explicitly approved of the seizure and to this day enforces contracts in favor of the non native owners.
The point is that there is more than one source of legitimacy, not that democratic assent is the only source.
It's not deriving it's legitimacy from land.
This is because in the US you have an obvious line separating evil white settlers from noble natives.
Meanwhile Europe has always been a clusterfuck of borders and states with varying degrees of legitimacy. The city I live in historically had like four different ethnic majorities over its lifetime, and had five political affilitations in the last century. Around here the reasonable response to "give back the territories" is "to whom?".
That only increases the potential for trolling. Like, imagine giving a lecture at a university in Slovakia, and starting by solemnly saying: "We acknowledge that the land this university is standing on traditionally belongs to the Hungarian empire."
I was surprised to read through these replies and not see anybody point this out earlier. Those indians stole the land from other indians, they're not some sort of paragons of virtue. I think it's all part of the extremely strong tendency of the left toward a noble-savage narrative where they conveniently fumble away things like the habitual torture of captives and which, as usual, ends with the lefties in question needing to have a paternalistic oversight over the holy innocents and also everybody else.
I guess that's why Trebuchet got all these responses and also why people were happy to restate *other* equally obvious historical realities for discussion, eh.
"imaginary 'leftist academics'"
There's something in this testy denial of another obvious historical and contemporary reality that reminds me of De Boer's https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what. Presumably you must actually know that academia is in fact about 97% leftist and that all of these corrosive, ridiculous reality-denying ideas on the left have come out of it. Nothing imaginary about that. So why try to deny it anyway? "The right started the Culture War!"
What the widespread adoption of this strategy suggests to me is that you don't think you can win if others can see the situation clearly.
I know personally one (1) leftist academic who studies intelligence and knows very well that it's hereditary like every other trait. That in no way means that blank-slatism isn't a product of the wider left-academic culture. Besides, who do *you* claim is pushing these silly ideologies? Right-wing oil barons? Independent manual laborers? You must know very well which class and political alignment this guff is emanating from. I don't care whether you think the horse is dead; the bare fact is it's still up and running, so hand me my club.
"as opposed to just believing they were savages period and it's a good thing we displaced them and destroyed their cultures?"
No, it doesn't have to be a good thing to make land acknowledgments silly and idiotic, just a neutral thing. Our stealing the land from Tribe A wasn't better, just *not worse* than them stealing it from Tribe B. Thus we have nothing to be ashamed of visavi Tribe A, and we owe them nothing.
Are you claiming that while pre-Columbian actions of native tribes do not damage their claim to the land, the post-Columbian European conquest does damage Europeans' claim to the land?
Why do you consider the fact that pre-Columbian conquests occurred irrelevant?
This is something that really bothers me here in Australia. There's a little plaque in a park near my house which mentions (as part of a general explanation of local history) that the area was occupied for 25,000 people by the [Local Tribe] people.
This is, of course, almost certainly bullshit. Tribes move around, they split, they combine, and they change their names. We don't know how long any specific tribe had been in any specific area prior to when they were first recorded in the 18th-19th centuries.
In the Southwest, shouldn't we acknowledge that the land was stolen from Mexico -- and then shouldn't it be Mexico's responsibility to acknowledge they stole it from Spain and then Spain's responsibility to thumb their noses at the Native Americans? We know in what order what was stolen from whom -- can't we acknowledge it all?
Viva la Reconquista!
It could be worse. Wikipedia tells me the ownership of Transylvania has (in reverse order) been claimed (violently) by the Romanians, Nazis, Hungarians, Austrians, Hungarians again, Mongols, Hungarians, Bulgurs, Slavs, Avars, Gepids, Huns, Visigoths, Carpi, Romans, Dacians, Noua, Wietenberg, Monteoru, Otomani, Periam-Pecica, and Baden cultures in the Bronze Age, Gornesti, Decea, Petresti, Turdas and Starcevo-Cris cultures in the late Stone Age, and probably some Neanderthals before that.
No evidence that *anybody* legitimately bought and paid for Transylvania, and registered a deed down at the court house, if only in cuneiform on a clay tablet. Certainly the only fair thing to do is distribute Transylvania to all the red-headed people of Europe, presumably the closest living descendants of the Neanderthals. There are about 30 million redheads in all of Europe, assuming 4% of a population of 740 million, and Transylvania is about 100,000 km^2, so it looks everybody gets deed to about 1/2 to 3/4 of an acre, if we leave a little room for rivers and mountains.
Precisely. Conquest and empire-building has existed on every piece of usefully inhabitable land for all of human history. It's very silly to assert that the actions of conquerors four generations in the past require reparations today, while the actions of conquerors six (or ten, or etc) do not.
It's much wiser to focus all that energy on these attempting conquest and empire-building *right now* (China, et al).
That's something that bothers me as well, as it seems to be part of a broader tacit assumption that indigenous cultures existed in some kind of stasis before Europeans showed up.
To the contrary, there was considerable turnover in polities, cultures, and ethnicities in the Americas prior to 1492. The biggest examples are probably the Aztec and Incan Empires were less than a century old, having started their respective expansions in 1428 and 1438, and even the city-states from which they grew were only a century or two older (~1325 for Tenochtitlan and some time in the early 1200s for Cusco).
For that matter, Viking settlement in Greenland might actually predate the arrival of the Thule Culture ancestors of modern Native Greenlanders: the Norse settlers originally found southern Greenland uninhabited with ruins of prior Early Dorset Culture settlement that had died off or been abandoned quite some time previously. Part of northern Greenland had since been resettled by members of the Late Dorset Culture, which was replaced by the apparently-unrelated Thule Culture within a century or two in either direction of the arrival of the Norse settlers in the South. Norse sagas record contact via sea trade (and a failed attempt to colonize the Dorset-inhabited coast of Vinland/Newfoundland) with both the Dorset Culture and the Thule Culture.
This doesn't justify the conduct of post-1492 European conquistadors and settlers, of course, nor should it be read to minimize the impact: invaders with muskets and cannons are going to tend to do a lot more damage than invaders with bows and spears.
Why does it matter whether your tribe is wiped out to the last child by guys with guns or guys with bows?
The guys with guns are more likely to succeed in wiping my tribe out to the last child.
Go tell it to the ghost of Genghis Khan. Or the Arawak.
What Rwanda showed is that given local military dominance, militiamen with machetes backed up by soldiers with guns are capable of massacring large numbers of completely unarmed civilians. But I'd expect some kind of local military military dominance to be a necessary precondition for retail genocide.
My claim in not that guns are a necessary or sufficient condition for conquest or genocide, which I absolutely agree they are not. My claim is that European weaponry in the 16th and 17th century was substantially qualitatively better than the weaponry of the natives they encountered, and that advantage served as a significant force multiplier that made European colonization considerably harsher on the natives than had they shown up with comparable military technology to the natives.
I mean... yes, literally — some conflicts *were* undoubtedly spurred by European contact somewhere — but what relevance: the *exact same thing* had been happening previously too.
The Arawak were on their last legs before Columbus; the Iroquois had been fighting Algic neighbors forever; the Comanche were pushing back the Apache before the Spanish got anywhere close; the entire continent had been taken from an even earlier "Paleo-Amerindian" population by the ancestors of all these peoples, who were in the process of losing it to yet a third wave of invaders, the Na-Dene tribes.
Interestingly, there is a growing contingent of the same "land back" people who are trying to revise the historical record to state that horses never went extinct in the Americas and were kept in domestication by the native tribes here throughout that 10,000 year period.
This is now being taught to school children as fact here in Canada.
https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/cedar-tea-and-rare-spirit-ponies-at-indigenous-festival-sigwan
Found the article about the school visit. https://news.knowledia.com/CA/en/articles/critically-endangered-ojibwe-spirit-horses-visit-seaforth-ps-f3b4ebe961cf5ecfd56c37e65c1af85b13cc47ec
Couldn't find the article where this group was at a school, but that was what originally clued me in.
The thing is, this sort of thing is getting zero pushback. And it's one of the less offensive and less commonly known lies. A full scale revisionism of my country's history is taking place with little regard for fact. It worries me.
Are you trying to argue that there was no warfare/conquest in the Americas previous to Europeans moving to the continet? You realize that Indigenous people are still humans right?
I'm sure that a lot of movement/conquest/displacement _was_ initiated by Europeans taking eastern land. But I can also guarantee you that there was conquest previous to that. That's what humans do.
It's not a smart game to play if you care about exonerating Europeans from their own theft. But what if you just want to actually understand the ethics of the situation? Presumably sometime land changes hands ethically and sometimes it doesn't. I think it's probably important to know the actual details of the history of ownership changes if you want to actually figure out what should be done in an ideal world
on the other hand, I think the main point the european-exonerators are making is missed by your summary. I suspect that they are arguing that, in the counterfactual world where the europeans never came, the wars between the aboriginals would have continued much as they had for the previous thousand years, and so the lands would have been stolen anyway. The main difference with the euros is that they were strong enough to keep the land forever once they conquered it.
Well I think the much better point from a European perspective especially in North America is: Partly due to disease, but partly as just pre-existing reality, the populations and settlement density up here were simply not that high and so there were not robust property ownership or distinct territories in a lot of areas. Huge areas of land were simply in no way "stolen".
There was some fighting and conquest, a lot over the centuries.
But so many of the interactions seemed to be more along the lines of "Hey look at these morons settling on that fairly worthless land and building a permanent settlement they cannot support. Oh well it is just a couple hundred and we can avoid them or trade with them as needed. Uh oh two generations later there are now a couple thousand of them and they keep taking up more and more area. I wish members of my tribe would quit trading away land for technology and luxuries. Uh oh another generation later it is clear we are going to be totally displaced so we will side with their enemies in a war. Crap we lost the war and now we are being told to move 100 miles west."
Not that there wasn't also some fair amount of "stealing" and breaking promises, especially as time went on. But there were also a lot of "fair" trades, and simple settlement of areas that were being very lightly used with no real "property" structure and it tends to all get lumped together as though it was one thing.
The natives at times thought they were fleecing the settlers, "selling" areas they had no real interest in or use of.
Where I was growing up the natives were both very small in number when European contact started in the mid 1500s, but by the time of settlement the "natives" were mostly immigrants (granted from European settlement drivers) from over 1000 miles away.
In the place of a half dozen or dozen villages of a with a total of maybe twenty thousand people, with some scattered groups traveling around, instead there are a million people using the land at a much more comprehensive and intense level. And the number of natives is higher today than it was then, with half living on reservations and half living in the bigger cities.
The Native Americans absolutely got a raw deal, but that is um historically the deal pretty much everyone got in their situation until extremely recently.
Or until another group of Euros showed up to conquer it from them. Conquest was still the order of the day all across the known world.
REQUEST: Mathematician who knows about measure theory or Bayes's Theorem for mixed variables.
Setting: Millikan's oil drop experiment.
Millikan announces a surprising discovery that all charges are integer multiples of some smallest charge ! What must his priors have been for this discovery to have been consistent with Bayes's Theorem?
For an experimental measurement, you might expect that the result could be any real number. In this case, your prior would be the Lebesgue measure. But then your prior would assign zero probability to the set of integers: there are infinitely many real numbers for each integer. A Bayesian Millikan would not have believed that charges are integers after any finite amount of experiment data, if his prior was the Lebesgue measure or any other continuous probability density. The interval 1±0.1 contains one integer and infinitely many real numbers, but so does the interval 1±0.00001. Increasing the precision of your experiment doesn't get you to an integer.
What would Millikan's priors have to have been for this announcement to have been rational (in a Bayesian sense)?
Perhaps his priors were a combination between the Lebesgue measure and a sum of Dirac deltas, each of which is centered at an integer.
I'm worried that this doesn't work. Dirac deltas are notoriously ill-defined. Does the continuous Bayes Theorem still apply in a function space that includes Dirac deltas? You can't just multiply and divide by Dirac deltas and expect that everything still works. Maybe there's something that can be done with Bayes's Theorem with mixed random variables instead?
As an extension of this problem, what if we wanted to prefer the rationals instead of just the integers? The prior distribution might involve Dirichlet's or Thomae's function, or it might involve a weighted infinite sum of Dirac deltas, centered at all the rational numbers. This seems like an even worse thing to try to plug into Bayes's Theorem.
You are over-thinking this. You can't possibly arrive at the conclusion that the true values of your observables are exact integers, if your prior is that they are continuously distributed. But simply eyeballing the results will tell you that it certainly looks that way. So you estimate the error in your measurements -- say, normally distributed with standard deviation sigma. Then you adopt a Null Hypothesis of the form "measurements are no more likely to fall within sigma of an integer than would be expected by chance". You can do a chi-squared test on this, and by getting enough measurements you can make your confidence level as large as you like.
You conclude that the true values lie close enough to integers that experiment can't refute their integerness. Then you can just invoke Occam's Razor to postulate that the true values are _exactly_ integers.
There is no need for Lebesgue measure or Dirac delta functions.
This is undoubtedly closer to what Millikan was thinking. This style of thinking might have even been important for allowing the discovery of quantum mechanics.
This also feels like a serious criticism of Bayesian thinking. In this case, science advanced because Millikan used an intuitionist approach to scientific statistics, when a Bayesian approach would have failed.
I would guess Millikan already understood that the charge was quantized -- after all, the success of the experiment relies on that -- because he would have known about Thomson's measurement of the charge-to-mass ratio in 1897, which was fixed. It would be very strange indeed to imagine that the charge on Thomson's "corpuscles" could take on any value -- but whatever it was, it was always exactly matched by a similarly varying mass so that the ratio came out to the same number, every time.
Also, I would say the discovery of quantum mechanics was driven by an unusually high level of empiricism. Planck invented the photon to correctly predict the black body spectrum, but even he himself for years regarded it as just a mathematical trick representing in a crude way some as-yet-unknown facet of classical physics. He remained no less skeptical of the new quantum mechanics than Einstein. Somewhat similarly, when Bohr explained the spectrum of hydrogen, he just said let's just *say* the energy between orbits has to be a multiple of hv, and let's just *say* no other orbit is possible, even though we know darn well that contradicts big chunks of the physics we know, and see what happens.
In each case, I would say progress would've been impossible if those concerns had not been willing to believe experiment so strongly that even the most persuasive possible rigorous argument from well-established theory could be set aside. From a Bayesian point of view, I guess, they had to be willing to set their priors to zero and go where the evidence led no matter how strange to intuition.
Presumably Millikan's priors allowed for some finite probability that electric charge comes in finite units. (Perhaps a very high probability, given that he chose do do this experiment.) Enough so that if his results were 1.000674562, 3.000007659, 4.000243758... the most likely scenario from a Bayesian perspective was that the charges were 1, 3 and 4 times the minimum unit.
You're not really doing a Bayesian analysis unless you consider ALL the priors, though of course it gets hard to do so in an absolute vacuum.
"Presumably Millikan's priors allowed for some finite probability that electric charge comes in finite units."
Yes. I am trying to figure out the mathematical details of how that works.
"You're not really doing a Bayesian analysis unless you consider ALL the priors"
In this case, no one has ever done Bayesian analysis. A tool that can't be used is not a useful tool.
I think you’re confusing the prior for the charge of a drop and the prior for the possible model of physics. The model “discrete units of charge” could have some probability and so could “continuous charge”. Atoms had been postulated for millennia at that point so a nonzero prior on the discrete case would be reasonable. His prior for the charge of a droplet would be relatively unimportant in comparison: even if discrete, he wouldn’t know what it’s a multiple of and so the prior wouldn’t have mass at any given integer either.
I'm reminded of a story I heard one time about a question asked in an introductory probability class:
Why is the probability of rolling a 2 on a fair die equal to 1/6 instead of 1/2? It might be 1/2. There are two possible outcomes: rolling a 2 and not rolling a 2.
The answer is that the probabilities aren't equal simply because there are that many sides of the die. It's because all of the sides of the die are symmetric. The possibilities 2 and not 2 are not symmetric, so their probabilities don't have to be equal.
Discrete charge and continuous charge are also not symmetric. One of these theories has infinitely many more variations than the other one. Why shouldn't we give the one infinitely more weight in our priors than the other?
Even if we should only apply Bayesian analysis at the level of theories, I don't think that this solves the problem. There are infinitely many possible theories of electric charge. For example, there could be two fundamental charges that are not rational multiples of each other. Or charge could be close to discrete, but not quite, like how the masses of atoms are close to, but not quite, an integer multiple of the mass of hydrogen (because the mass depends on both the components of the atom and the binding energy). How should we decide which of these possible theories get nonzero weight in our priors?
You could get some mixture of Lebesgue measure and Dirac deltas to work. You’re right though in thinking that it would be difficult.
That being said all sorts of integer valued distributions exist. For example you could use the Poisson distribution. It would be fairly straightforward to work with a mixture of poisson any normal distributions. In fact there’s a prior called spike and slab that is commonly used in practice that’s a mixture of a point mass at zero and a fairly flat density elsewhere.
You could do similar things with the rationals. For example a ratio of Poissons might work.
The root of the issue is that although commonly expressed in the form of densities, Bayes theorem is really about the behavior of probability measures. It’s derived form the properties of probabilities of subsets. As long as the probability measure is well defined, you can use the appropriate version of Bayes theorem.
Thank you !
Treating Bayes theorem entirely in terms of subsets would probably be more effective here. Do you know of an introduction to Bayes theorem using infinite subsets?
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good. They derive Bayes theorem using subsets. This https://youtu.be/HZGCoVF3YvM is probably also pretty good.
I'm looking for organizations that might be willing to donate IFAKs or their components to our organization, so we can use them to train and equip Ukrainian soldiers. Any advice about how to go about this search?
Could you be more specific? IFAKs are just a designation and their price ranges from almost nothing to hundreds of dollars. Are you looking for military surplus or certain supplies or what?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/834005614895300628/1011265723412250764/Screen_Shot_2022-08-22_at_4.28.33_PM.png
Ideally complete kits, but we can assemble from components too.
Anyone else in Lviv?
I'm not in Lviv, but I'm open to persuasion.
It's a beautiful city, lots of ice cream. Hasn't gotten bombed in months as far as I know.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I'd like to point out that I've been lackadaisically posting to http://reluctantentrepreneur.substack.com about medicine, technology, and dharma.
Admittedly, there is not much in the way of Dharma yet, but some suff on entrepreneurialism.
More subscribers would, I feel sure, inspire me to write more. All welcome!
Many thanks
DJ
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?
Methylphenidate also works on healthy people, in a dramatic way. It cures ADHD in the same sense pouring a bucket of cold water on a sleeping person cures hypersomnia.
As far as I know SSRIs do nothing for healthy people, other than making them really easy to get drunk (come to think of it, how does _that_ work?).
It seems that inhibiting reuptake of serotonin doesn't do much while inhibiting reuptake of dopamine does a whole lot, which suggests very different downstream signaling. I don't think it's possible to get far here without a systems biology approach, for which I expect we lack both understanding and raw data.
> Why don't we prescribe exocytosis-promoting molecules such as MDMA when initiating SSRI treatments?
MDMA has a lot of therapeutic uses, and the reluctance of the establishment to prescribe it has nothing to do with biochemistry.
> Methylphenidate also works on healthy people, in a dramatic way
Could you source this statement?
The last time I checked the studies, they seemed to conclude that MPH didn't really improve the executive parts of the IQ tests for normal people under normal conditions (e.g. not sleep-deprived, no depression, etc.)
Source: all the people using it recreationally - https://erowid.org/pharms/methylphenidate/methylphenidate.shtml .
The difference between therapeutic and recreational use seems to be one of degree, not kind. I have ADHD but don't take any medication, and occasionally trying small therapeutic doses of MPH (~25 mg) gives me a very noticeable high, hypomania, vasoconstriction etc. I imagine with a bit of tolerance it would reduce to whatever state the psychiatrists intend, but it's still just basically microdosing a recreational drug.
See also Scott's take on ADHD: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
the real question is why does atomoxetine take 4 weeks to work for ADHD. you can say that it takes that long for the alpha-2a autoreceptors to downregulate, but do they really downregulate more presynaptically than postsynaptically? and on postsynaptic terminals these are what we wanna target, ie the reason guanfacine works
This paper gives some leads: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349559/
Hey, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the idea that the 4 week delay in treatment efficacy is due to the requirement for presynaptic 5ht1a to downregulate first is just one hypothesis of many, and hasn't actually been confirmed. Especially since extrasynapric 5HT levels and serotonergics firing rate in the dorsal raphe seem to be elevated immediately when treatment starts. Alternative hypotheses involve downstream effects taking weeks. These might involve BDNF, downregulation of 5HT2a/2c receptors, or changes in accumbal dopamine levels.
I think 2 is cool. I assume you're talking about the cheese effect etc. Not sure how you would block tyramine/octopamine/PEA though. You can antagonize the trace amine receptor, but the trace amines will still be taken up into dopaminergic neurons causing competitive reuptake inhibition of dopamine.
I think the thing with SSRIs and MDMA is that SSRIs are causing internalization of 5HT transporters, whereas MDMA actually relies on these transporters for its mechanism of action, because it has to be taken up into the neuron by the transporter (all amphetamines are alpha-methylated trace amines I believe) where it inhibits VMAT2 and displaces serotonin, as well as activating TAAR1 I think.
Not too sure about 4. It only makes sense of the autoreceptor theory of the 4 week delay is correct. But under this theory the autoreceptors take mere weeks to downregulate. So presumably they upregulate upon antagonism, quickly nullifying the benefit of this? But maybe this effect is mitigated by the downregulatory force due to ssri treatment? a lot of variables, would require some mouse studies first but I feel like I've heard this idea elsewhere so probably someone has looked into it or is looking into it
> extrasynapric 5HT levels and serotonergics firing rate in the dorsal raphe seem to be elevated immediately when treatment starts
1) Could you source this statement? Is the increase clinically significant?
> downregulation of 5HT2a/2c receptors, or changes in accumbal dopamine levels
2) Could you source this statement?
> I assume you're talking about the cheese effect etc. Not sure how you would block tyramine/octopamine/PEA though
3) I recently found out that this has actually already been explored in the literature. TCAs with low SRI properties & high NET affinity are safe to combine with MAOIs and reduce the stressor response.
See https://www.psychotropical.com/maois-swapping-combining/#:~:text=This%20leads%20to,is%20pharmacological%20fact.
> the thing with SSRIs and MDMA is that SSRIs are causing internalization of 5HT transporters, whereas MDMA actually relies on these transporters for its mechanism of action, because it has to be taken up into the neuron by the transporter
4) Knowing that the SETs are not fully occupied by SSRIs at clinical doses, doesn't this just mean that you just need to give more MDMA to achieve the wanted exocytosis effect? If the MDMA dosage needs to be high it may cause serotonin toxicity (aka serotonin syndrome) if the patient stops the SSRI.
> So presumably they upregulate upon antagonism, quickly nullifying the benefit of this? But maybe this effect is mitigated by the downregulatory force due to ssri treatment?
5) Good point. I'm not quite sure how the desensitization (or downregulation, I'm not sure that either is the scientific consensus) works in the details. I'll look into it.
Have you thought posting those questions on biology.stackexchange or psychology.stackexchange?
I haven't. Thanks for the tip!
After more than 15 years of living overseas (mostly in African countries) I am thinking about moving to Silicon Valley to teach in public schools. I am getting a lot of family pressure to move there (my Dad is in Palo Alto).
Does anyone think this is a good place to raise my ten year old daughters? Are the cultural opportunities and prospects of being part of a community really great?
I like the area, but I have not spent much time there and I feel like it might be a hyper competitive, rat race environment for my kids. I would get help buying a house, but probably only enough to be in East Palo Alto, or San Jose.
That seems like a very expensive area to choose to be a public schools teacher, but maybe money isn't an issue for you.
I too used to live in African countries and I find all the regs in California way too oppressive after living so free and cheap in the motherland. So I considered the Bay Area and LA for a bit, but eventually moved to the Miami area and it’s been a much easier transition because it’s much closer here to being like Africa. My daughter is 14 and seems happy. Lots of diversity, lots to do, great weather all year round, less rules, cheaper labor, no state taxes.
thanks, this is the kind of feedback that is useful!
What should I do in Milan today?
If you're still there, the cemetery is really impressive, though the aesthetics are all over the place.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monumental-cemetery-of-milan
If you see my cousin Miuccia, say hi.
No, I’m not actually related but share her surname. My debit card causes some raised eyebrows from folks much more interested in fashion than I am.
So bad i only saw this now, if you are still there there is a ton of stuff to do
Obviously visit the duomo in the centre of the city and the vittorio emanuele gallery that begins in the duomo square, the sforzesco castle and the brera quarter. Then, there is Leonardo's last supper. Another lesser known but beautiful church is sant Ambrogio, one of the oldest in Milan.
Then there are a ton of museums. If you like modern art there is the museum of the novecento in the duomo square. I personally am not a fan, but there is one of the most important pieces of late '800s italian painting, the fourth estate. More on ancient art, there is the brera museum which is really famous. A little less known but quite nice nevertheless there is the Poldi-Pezzoli painting museum.
If you like modern architecture, porta nuova (just outside Milan Garibaldi station) is quite striking (at least for italian standards). Also citylife, but this is a bit outside.
Go see some things or have some experiences that are hard to have elsewhere.
Can anyone recommend smaller EA/rationality-aligned blogs? I think I've located all the bigger ones. I'm really curious about the underdogs, though!
There's Parrhesia's blog, at https://parrhesiasubstack.com.
Thanks
Looks good, I subscribed!
https://coldbuttonissues.substack.com is doing some interesting work
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Just to mention that I did a podcast about nuclear war with two ACX stalwarts, Battleship Bean and John Schilling. The basic idea was to discuss nuclear war taking Dr Strangelove as a jumping off point. They talked about things like how powerful are modern nuclear weapons? Would they knock out electrical systems world wide? Would such a war result in nuclear winter?
https://pod.link/1436447503/episode/f5853da56114f46a20f255089b965e3a
Saw that you had other interesting episode topics so subscribed on Spotify.
Yes, Russell pretty consistently talks about interesting things with interesting people. It was a privilege joining him for this one.
I wrote a paper about one possible mechanism through which social media fuels intolerance towards other points of view (aka "culture wars"). I sum it up in this blog post: https://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=2179
The even shorter TL;DR is:
- We make reasonable assumptions about the fundamental characteristics of the system: echo chambers, confirmation bias, etc.
- We assume that people want to convince others to behave according to their values and would apply whatever strategy that can lead to that result.
- The main action they have at their disposal is punishing content they disagree with, depending on their level of tolerance.
The result is that both sides learn quickly that there is a (low) level of tolerance that represents an inadequate equilibrium (to use a term from Yud). In this equilibrium, everyone is a jerk because, if they weren't, the other side would nudge content producers to go to their side under the threat of online punishment.
This is true even if they both originally started with high levels of tolerance.
Would love to hear some thoughts. Pardon the self promotion, but I think this is a topic people here are interested in.
Just commenting to say that I think you've written something really good and valuable, and that it reminded me of what Taleb said about intolerance spirals (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 - The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority). When you put it like that (people punish views they disagree with; there is no cost to doing so; doing so will intimidate some people into falling into line and feel great, while not doing so will feel terrible and intimidating; and so everyone will try to harshly punish everyone else because it's free and it works), it's so obvious, even though it was so hard to see before. That's the mark of good writing, and I applaud it.
These are very kind words, thanks! And I wasn't familiar with this specific claim from Taleb, it's nice to see that there is somebody very smart who can put it down in words better than I can :-)
This is a great insight. I have a theory that this phenomenon is driven by the lack of a real attention currency on social media. If partisans can punish the other side at no cost to themselves, then of course they'll push the "punish" button every chance they get.
If instead, users had a limited "attention currency," with which they could promote or demote content, then users would have to be much more selective about the punishment and rewards they dole out. Two opposing partisans would then also have a choice: they can spend all of their currency canceling each other out, or they can go their separate ways and be free to promote content they actually care about.
Apologies for also self-promoting, but this is the motivation behind the voting mechanism on my site https://sigilspace.com.
Very interesting project!
Of course there is some sort of attention currency online, but it is different in nature to what you're after. There is decade-long research about how limited time and attention promotes / demotes certain type of content. "Competition among memes in a world with limited attention" by Weng et al. (2012) is the first thing that comes to mind.
I assume the "flags" you're talking about are standing in for reports, not downvotes. If the flag acts to quietly make the post less visible, I would expect out-of-window content to quietly fade away without much opposition. Non-dominant groups in the set will be left feeling isolated and wondering what happened.
If the flag is an active signal, like a downvote, then different blocs can see what's being done to their content and will have the opportunity to react. A group X member won't suddenly wake up to feel like an outsider - but they will wake up to find themselves at war.
And if the only way to "flag" a post is to create counter-content - even if it's as simple as a comment that says "you suck" - then that opens the door to much noisier and even less satisfying equilibria.
This is great work and I am indeed very interested in this line of research. What are you going to look at next?
Yes, they are reports, but they are in a sense visible: the model is a bit more complicated than a simple user-user interaction, there is also the "news source" agent class. The flags go to a news source, which sees them and tries to minimize them, so that's why you get this visible effects.
The next step we're interested in is whether this effect we see only works with negative/retaliatory behavior (flagging), or if it also works with positive behavior (likes/shares). So far we were enamored with the idea of studying culture wars, but arguably content-producers chase approval, besides escaping trouble.
Awesome. I'm interested in culture wars, too, of course, since I'm apparently not allowed to opt out of them and all knowledge is power in war.
But I'm more excited by the idea of finding rules and principles that promote higher quality content creation - whether that's jokes/memes, discussion, or proper creative efforts like stories, films and artwork.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons -- it is bad, so the reasonable people mostly avoid it, which makes it even worse...
The optimal strategy is to write your opinion as a separate article, and only share the link on the social media. Or not bother writing anything, if you have nothing substantial to add; possibly just link someone else's article.
This is actually an interesting take because the model has a sort of "silent majority" effect we didn't really program in it: at the beginning most users are moderate and they hardly flag anything. Most trouble comes from the fringes which dominate the discussion and make the environment look worse than it is.
And in a previous version of the model we actually saw that, when there is low tolerance, many users end up removing all their friends' connections, which is an equivalent of leaving the platform -- again something we didn't program into the simulation, but emerged as a "choice" the agents made, they just found a way not to interact.
Food sanity check request: so, sushi is great, but also pretty expensive. On the other hand, it's ultimately just...raw fish. So is there some red flag risk for simply...buying raw fish, slicing it myself, and eating it? Safety caveats:
*Farm raised, for minimized heavy metal/toxin load.
*Industrially frozen 24hrs minimum, preferably flash frozen on boat, to minimize pathogen load.
This still feels like cheating, somehow, so I suspect I'm overlooking something. Otherwise lotsa people would attempt this...
I work in a Japanese Restaurant running their kitchen(so I do everything that isn't assembling sushi there), and I do a lot of the prep work taking apart fish and getting ingredients ready.
Sushi is expensive, but so is buying precut fish at the supermarket or the fishmonger. You can definitely save a bunch of money if you buy a whole fish, scale it, clean it, debone it, and slice it yourself, but that's a lot of work, and it requires some skill and specific tools to be done efficiently.
Six pieces of salmon sashimi, fully prepared, is going to be roughly 250 grams. That costs 13 bucks where I live, so sushi joints are selling salmon sashimi for $23/lb or so. That's for farmed Atlantic salmon.
On the other hand, buying from the grocery store is exactly $17.21 for a pound of fresh farmed Atlantic salmon. So the savings would be roughly 25% buying precut fish from the supermarket instead of getting it at a sushi joint.
A quick check online says that a 10-12lb whole fresh farmed Atlantic Salmon would cost me 114 dollars to have shipped. From experience breaking them down, if that comes gutted(it should), there's about a 75% yield on the meat. So you get about 7.5-8lb of meat for 114, which is about $15/lb. You also get the scraps if you want to make a fish stock.
So if you buy a whole salmon gutted, prepare it yourself, you are saving 35% over the sushi restaurant prices(since my workplace buys wholesale, it costs about 100 bucks for a 10-12lb salmon, so our margin before operating costs is about 75%, which is actually kinda low. It shouldn't be a surprise that most non-chain sushi restaurants are owner operated. My boss does the majority of all the sashimi, nigiri, and maki that goes out.).
How long will it take you to break down a fish? Only you know your own proficiency, but I'd suggest budgeting yourself 5 minutes to scale it, and 15 minutes to remove the loin and debone it if you are already proficient with knives and general cookery. You'll also want a descaling tool(the scales on a 10-12 salmon are too big to remove easily with something like a metal scrubber). Of course, it's actually a fairly skilful task to minimize the amount of meat you lose to errors with your knifework and excess left on the skin/spine(though once you scale it the skin is edible, gets nice and crisp when you pan fry it, so you can still make a meal out of it, especially if you wraps some of the flesh in it.)
Once you get it finished, you can just cut it into chunks big enough for one portion and freeze them individually, then defrost them as necessary(I don't actually know how long salmon lasts in the freezer though, we turn over everything we bring in within a week, and our farmed salmon is so popular we just bring in fish every day and use it that day, so we don't freeze it).
I value my general labour at 30 bucks an hour personally(that is, anything I'm not trained and skilled in), so if it takes twenty minutes to take apart a fish I'd add 10 bucks to the price to account for it when weighing it's value.
That to me isn't really worth it. On the other hand, maybe it is to you, the prices may be different where you live, and you may enjoy preparing food at home more than I do(doing it professionally takes the fun out of doing it at home for me).
On the other other hand, you can set yourself up with a reasonable fishing rod, tackle box, license, and everything else you need for under 150 bucks(at least where I am), so if you enjoy fishing as a hobby, then suddenly if you catch two decent salmon you've basically brought your costs down to an afternoon of relaxation.
Finally, if you are looking at doing nigiri(or maki) sushi, and not just sashimi, you'll need to learn how to make a decent sushi rice, which actually takes some work. Decent sushi places will have their own blend for vinegar, and every time you open a new bag of rice you have to adjust the ratio of rice to water to make it work. Plus you'll need a high quality sushi rice(calrose works well for this and is widely available).
Hey, I appreciate the professional-grade reply! Always been curious about some of the numbers behind-the-counter, so that's fascinating data.
Whole fish isn't a realistic option for my living situation...in addition to grossing out my vegetarian roommate, I don't have the fridge/freezer storage space for that much fish all at once. (It's shared between 3 people, and my two roommates hoard food to the max, so I get maybe 1/4th the total space...) The price point is definitely better, and I know I could go to places with a fresh-fish counter who'd happily do all the cleaning for me. However, I *also* can't drive, and lugging around a whole raw fish on the bus...yeah....
Prices for fresh farmed Atlantic salmon are much lower out here, more like $12.99/lb or thereabouts at my grocery store? Take off another 20% for employee discount. Sake sashimi goes for similar rates as yours, so buying precut fish at the store is already >50% savings. It comes skin-on too, which both makes the final slicing easier and is a pleasure to eat, even raw...I personally enjoy that bit of crunchiness.
I feel you on the "hate making my own food cause it's my job" thing...that was my major reason to never attempt culinary school. Cooking saves me a lot of money, and it's a near-daily habit, so I don't particularly consider it a labour cost...insofar as I'm gonna be cooking meals anyway, I only "price" labour above and beyond what I'd normally do. More than an hour on a workday = not acceptable; weekends I don't mind investing multiple hours for special projects. Actual fishing is infeasible for me at this time, but would definitely be a nice option if available...
Regarding the rice, I figured that out long ago. I don't try to get it exactly the same as a restaurant would - because I think they use a little too much vinegar + sugar by default. I prefer a more mildly seasoned rice. Calrose is indeed my favourite (yay living in California). After that...good Japanese rice cooker from Zojirushi, some rice vinegar, dash of mirin, pinch of Accent, sometimes a little garlic powder. Occasionally I'll also cheat by using nori furikake...it's not the nicest presentation-wise, but I can't always be bothered to buy nori sheets separately. And sesame seeds are never a bad addition to sushi.
https://www.fda.gov/media/80777/download is the FDA guidelines on freezing to kill parasites in fish. 7 days at -4F (easily doable in a chest freezer) is sufficient and I've done it before (particularly for salmon roe which I really like, technically they say you can just rinse the row well since the parasites are only in the skein around the roe rather than in the eggs themselves, but it freezes totally fine so why risk it, I can wait a week or two).
https://seafood.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/snic/freezing-to-kill-nematode-parasites-in-fish-products-implications-for-haccp.pdf summarizes some of the actual research. Note that reaching -17C internal temperature for several hours is sufficient to kill/cripple the parasites of concern. The -20C (-4F) 7 day recommendation is safety padding to allow for thermometers being off and for thermal equilibrium to be reached (a thick piece of fish or several stuck together can take a while to reach equilibrium). The EU specifies 24 hours rather than 7 days.
Yeah, I was gonna be like "7 days????????" Just like the CDC always recommends steaks and turkey be cooked to well-done...because someone, somewhere, might get salmonella or whatever. If it's good enough for the EU safety regulators, then it's good enough for me (unlike insulin).
Unfortunately I don't have kitchen space for an extra freezer, and I don't trust the temperature controls on either our regular fridge or freezer...roommates abuse it by stuffing everything to the max, so half of the time stuff in the *fridge* freezes solid. There is a temperature dial to adjust it downwards, but due to this super annoying circumstance I prefer to leave it at the default setting (or slightly higher). Hate having ice chunks in my orange juice...the industrial walk-in at work is sufficient.
The only thing I can't figure out is whether the "fresh" farm-raised salmon I can buy at work is previously frozen or not. I thought all fresh fish were previously frozen, and it usually says so on the package somewhere, but not these ones...we buy wholesale from Anderson Seafood. I don't know how they process their fillets though: https://www.shopandersonseafoods.com/
Industrially frozen fish should be safe to eat raw if you thaw it safely (ideal is warming it to the desired serving temperature in a sous vide for 30-60 minutes, but overnight in the fridge or an hour or two in a basin of cold water should also be safe) and prepare and eat it promptly after thawing. I've frequently cooked Costco frozen salmon at temperatures of 115-120 ºF (well below the minimum pasteurization temperature of 129.5 ºF) with no ill effects, frozen fish is routinely used to prepare ceviche, and previously-frozen tuna steaks are commonly served seared on the outside while still raw and cold in the middle.
Some stores will sell "sushi grade" fish, but this is a marketing term that has little to do with food safety. Instead, it's the seller purporting that the characteristics of the fish (fat marbling, etc) are suitable for making sushi.
I've never figured out why frozen fish (or meat more generally) isn't supposed to be defrosted in the original packaging. It's an annoying extra hassle to put something on a plate and then cover with plastic wrap...and how is that different from it already coming frozen in plastic?
I used to get impatient and fast-thaw stuff by leaving it on the counter...not that arrogant anymore, heh. The halcyon days of youthful gastronomics.
Generally seems reasonable to me. I know a few people who make their own sushi or sashimi.
My understanding is that farm raised may or may not be cleaner, depending on the conditions at the farm. Also, I believe heavy metal concentration depends more on the type of fish and its place in the food chain rather than how it's sourced.
Shouldn't even high-food-chain predator fish have less heavy metal if they're farm-raised? I mean, I assume they're fed standardized farm-raised feed...if it's just wild chum or whatever, that seems kinda silly.
Conditions certainly matter; I at least know the suppliers we wholesale from, could maybe research them. But I'd be surprised if the conditions are worse than the wild salmon fillets I could buy instead. A bunch of those always come with ruptured packaging, so I don't trust either their packaging processes or their cold chain. This is almost never an issue with the farmed options.
Freshest fish is the one you slaughter yourself.
Indeed! I miss catching trout on childhood family fishing trips...those were the best fish I've ever had outside high-quality sushi. There's that nice golden age where you can still fish on a parent's license for free...we pretty much stopped after that. Not a frequent enough excursion to justify the fees + equipment maintenance.
Plus I wouldn't eat anything I might possibly catch out of San Francisco Bay, lol. Even many of the local beaches have gotten kinda sketchy for fishing in recent years...there used to be some local fish farms that maintained public ponds for people to """fish""" in, which was almost as good, but I think those all went out of business. Real shame, kids these days don't know what they're missing. That's half the fun of living by the ocean...
Do you have an opinion about fish from aquariums in Chinese shops?
I know animal-rights types hate them, but it's part of the culture I grew up in - "Best catch of today! Fresh!" pointing out to the server exactly which fish you wanted cooked for your restaurant dish - so it's hard not to feel defensive about. It's less and less common to see such aquariums...because of misplaced covid-origin concerns, I think. That plus the complete restaurant industry collapse, which is largely better now but still took out a huge chunk of industry capacity. I will miss being able to browse the live fish. Finding a nice lively specimen was always a better guarantor of freshness than poking at dead-on-ice fish eyeballs or whatever. (I could be objectively wrong about this, but it's part of the cultural mystique.)
I think there's a lot more room for cultural bipartisanship along the topic of "people should know where their food comes from". Liberals praise organic local farms, conservatives praise hunting and fishing. Same base principles. One doesn't have to hate factory farming to agree that there's a certain "alienation" from what we eat in many modern countries. Too many people are too many steps removed from the means of food production. It's like whenever I meet people who don't know how to cook for themselves at all...that's a totally alien way to live, for me. I can't imagine having that entire corpus of knowledge missing from my head. We spend so much of our time and money eating, so it seems just logical to take a greater interest in that vital process.
This isn't just about freshness, it's about lack of parasites.
I actually assumed he meant freshest for taste. Freezing can get rid of the parasites but fish you eat largely unadorned probably needs more freshness than one buried under a beurre-blanc or under a rich marinara type sauce.
I figured you could just eat the DIY sushi for a couple of weeks and then get a prescription for Paxlovid to get rid of the parasites. I mean, it works the other way around, right? /S
Wouldn't ivermectin be better for this purpose? Certainly cheaper and more widely prescribed! And who knows, maybe it's prophylactic for covid after all.
>Otherwise lotsa people would attempt this
I've been making sushis (makis at least) since college, and only stopped once:
-I learned the health risks if the fish wasn't frozen enough
-I realized I had no way to know if the fish I was buying had been frozen enough, or that the seller had no idea/would assure me it was fresh instead.
-Became panicky about it.
I'd love, in fact, to find some sort of filling (that isn't vegetarian) that don't require to be as careful as salmon.
Obviously, it's definitely not going to be as nice as a restaurant sushi, but it's very doable. It also takes some practice to roll it properly (or at least in a way that don't fall appart pathetically), and to balance the content, but I absolutely recommend giving it a try
It doesn't need to be industrially frozen, you can do it in a chest freezer (I've done it before). It takes longer, but the fish is frozen so what's the rush. 7 days at -4 F (which a chest freezer should be easily able to do [they are generally set for ~0F so it's just turning it down slightly]). My side-by-side freezer can be set down to -10 but I don't trust it temperature wise as much as a cheap chest freezer with a thermometer in it. https://www.fda.gov/media/80777/download While it's prob. not a good idea to rely on it, for ease of mind purposes note that the USDA / FDA guidelines generally have a significant safety margin built into them.
Ah, not just me - cool! May I suggest ebi? They aren't the same, but are at least category-adjacent, and I trust food processors to cook them adequately. Might need to pat dry with paper towels though. Raw shiitake is my favourite vegetarian filling...goes surprisingly well with shredded crabmeat or tobiko. Just a bit of sushi vinegar, helps bring out the mushroom flavour...
Yeah, I wouldn't be trying it at all without access to industrial-grade freezing which I'm very confident about. One nice thing about working at a grocery store is being able to throw stuff in the walk-in freezer, and monitor the temperature gauges myself. I skip the fish fillets that often come with signs of thawing (i.e. vacuum seal is no longer intact, freezer burn + air pockets in packaging)...some more regular-shaped fish are better than others, for that reason. Doesn't matter if it originally got flash-frozen, if it thawed out in transit to the store!
The rolling is actually something I learned as a child...I have no idea what the impetus was, but one of my favourite elementary school memories was being sat down by a Certified Sushi Chef to learn how to roll maki. Though, for at-home, I'm perfectly happy to settle for a donburi- style presentation.
In my opinion, if you make sushi with a non-raw fish, it tastes almost exactly the same. Certainly more similar to the original than all kinds of vegan sushis where they use some vegetable instead of the fish.... and even those still taste quite similar.
> Otherwise lotsa people would attempt this...
You mean that more people would try it at home, or in restaurants?
In my opinion, in Western culture, sushi has the image of a "magical oriental food", but if you started eating it regularly, you would probably conclude that it's nothing special. Ultimately, just rice with fish (plus wasabi and/or soy sauce). Even if you love the taste of Asian cuisine, there are many better choices.
I think the magic is that sushi is so different *visually*. But if you started eating it regularly, the magic would disappear. So I guess that most people have too much respect for the magic that they won't even try it... and the ones who make it at home a few times, stop doing it, because with the magic gone, it's just an ordinary meal.
There are "make it at home" sushi kits on sale in supermarkets round here, so *somebody* must be making their own sushi at home https://www.tesco.ie/groceries/en-IE/products/289828402
I imagine people are not sure how to handle raw fish, so they prefer to let commercial/professionals do it. As well as reasons of laziness/convenience; it's not a foodstuff Westerners generally grow up cooking and eating at home, so it falls into the category of "restaurant food". And while I could cook a burger and chips at home for myself, sometimes I just want the McDonald's version instead.
Wait, are you telling me that *fish in general* is an unusual dish for Westerners to prepare or eat? Gosh, that would explain a lot...I totally did not know this! My whole family loves seafood, so it's something I grew up eating and cooking regularly. Everyone's favourite story from my toddlerhood is that the very first time they took me out to a restaurant, my grandparents fed me lobster. I've liked all types of seafood ever since.
It's weird cause I think anyone that can handle raw pork can handle raw fish, certainly the fatty ones (flaky white ones are harder)...it's a similar degree of delicacy.
Not fish in general, and of course the Scandinavian countries have the pickled herring thing going on. But raw, as distinct from cooked, certainly seems to be more of a rarity.
Fish-on-Friday Catholic countries would have cooked it, and trying to Google 'raw fish consumption in Europe' just gives me this result for Portugal:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956713522000032
"Portugal has one of the highest levels of fish consumption globally. Raw or lightly processed fish is not part of the traditional diet but the rise in popularity of such dishes worldwide means that consumption of this type of food is likely to increase in Portugal. Anisakiosis is a food-borne zoonotic disease associated with consumption of raw or undercooked fish. An increase in reported incidence of the disease has occurred in recent decades. Our survey aimed to gather data on raw fish consumption in Portugal, looking at the sociodemographic and health characteristics of the individuals who consume raw fish (n = 421), as well as the volume of raw fish consumed, species of fish consumed raw and types of raw fish dishes consumed. The volume of raw fish consumed by our survey population was 6.3 kg per person annually. It accounted for approximately 10% of all fish consumed. Salmon or trout, tuna and cod were the species of fish most frequently consumed raw and the most popular raw fish dishes were sushi or sashimi and fish spiced with vinegar and lemon or marinated. Although the number of respondents with seafood allergies only accounted for 2.6% of the study population, they were responsible for almost 7% of the total volume of raw fish consumed. Based on the volume and species of raw fish consumed, anisakiosis does pose a risk to the Portuguese population, but it would appear to be quite small. Data on Anisakis spp. prevalence are limited for some of the species of fish consumed raw and further studies on these are warranted to better characterise the disease risk in the population studied. In addition, improved risk communication and consumer education campaigns should be implemented to minimize the risk to the Portuguese population from anisakiosis."
At home; I can't imagine the Food Safety Inspectors approving DIY sushi-lite. One of the few cases where occupational licensure seems to make some sense. I've been to some fancy restaurants that tried serving tartare this or carpaccio that, and...like I'm sure it's on the level technically? But those meals somehow always had a suspiciously high percentage of diners in our party who had very unpleasant bathroom trips later. Never happens to us with legitimate sushi establishments.
Some fish tastes similar cooked, so I'm happy just having it medium-rare...tuna is still recognizably tuna, whether it's raw maguro or seared ahi steaks. But salmon...wildly different, imo. I'm pretty fond of raw sake, but dislike cooked salmon quite a bit. Honestly, for the longest time I thought I didn't like salmon entirely, entirely cause I'd only ever had it cooked (and well-done at that, sigh). The first time having sake maki though...I was like whaaaaaaaat? Is this really the same fish, I don't believe it. Ever since it's become one of the few foods I get strong-enough cravings for that I "have to" eat it sometimes. Hence the home experimentation.
(Canned fish is...always...different. I know some people love it, but my brain simply refuses to acknowledge it as actual fish...which I guess is apropos, given how often what's on the label has no relation to what's in the can. Or so they say.)
I agree that the...ritual? hype? is definitely part of the experience for many. It's a little different in my family though...Asian cuisine is our default, cause we're Chinese. But we have a fondness for non-Chinese Asian cuisines too. There's this lovely acronym, JROCK - Japanese Restaurant Owned or Operated by Chinese or Koreans. So we'd go out to sushi places, and have Totally Authentic Japanese Cuisine - while speaking Cantonese with the staff, lol...Japanese food was thus always a sort of "second home" for me, palate-wise. Very rarely cooked at home, but enjoyed thoroughly when dining out or delivered take-out. Those two cuisines make up the overwhelming majority of my restaurant food budget; the magic never really goes away, cause nostalgia is a powerfully addictive spice. You never really outgrow the tastes of home, I think.
(Ramen, to me, is the true "magical oriental food". I still enjoy it now and then, but like...there's already a hundred perfectly good pretty similar tong mein ["soup noodles"] dishes in Chinese cuisine. No one ever raves about having wonton mein for brunch though. Sorta like Vietnamese pho...my family was eating it long before it became trendy. Then everyone jacked up prices, and it went from a workaday family meal to Instagram fodder...ah, food gentrification, my lifelong gastronemesis.)
Have you tried smoked salmon? It can taste very different depending on whether it's cold-smoked (which requires cooking before eating) or hot-smoked (the method cooks the fish).
"ah, food gentrification, my lifelong gastronemesis"
Same here with black (and to a much lesser extent, white) pudding. Around 2014-2016 it became something to be included on trendy restaurant menus, which meant all kinds of weird and wonderful recipes far removed from the staple of the full Irish/British Breakfast/Ulster Fry which was, as you say, a "workaday family meal":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_pudding
Again, something with a lot of regional variation; some butchers make it more 'meaty' and others more 'grainy'. I like the 'grainier' ones myself, but this is personal taste.
And it seems like there is an entire sub-reddit devoted to all the permutations of a fry-up:
https://old.reddit.com/r/fryup/
Yes, I enjoy a good smoked salmon as well. Used to eat that stuff pretty regularly. It is fairly expensive per pound though, just like jerky...after teaching myself how to cure meats at home, I find myself significantly less inclined to pay store-markup prices for what's largely just a time investment. And most of their claims to Seventeen Secret Herbs And Spices(tm) I'm like...shrug? I could do better with the basic seasonings in my pantry. Smoking is of course a particular method of curing that's a bit more involved, but it's a similar process...so I end up feeling bad paying $24/lb or whatever. The high salt content is also a turnoff from eating too much...I can eat a pound of raw sushi and feel fine, but a pound of smoked salmon is gonna be Hypertension City for a good long while.
If you don't eat your smoked meats, how can you have any black pudding? My other bugaboos are oysters, lobster, catfish, and dim sum dumplings...there are other "oldschool", "country-style" foods which are still obscure enough that they haven't gone through the gentrification price-up. So even if they sometimes show up on trendy restaurant menus, I just go to what we affectionately term "hole-in-the-wall" restaurants. Mother always told me to follow the firefighters, and similarly-situated employees: they know where all the good blue-collar food is.
(And, yeah, it's not just the price increase that bugs me most...it's seeing all the weird-ass "fusion" or "reinterpretations" of something that was perfectly fine to begin with. I know that's just how market forces work, but it's always sad to see a beloved part of my past palette disappear for good. RIP McDonald's fries cooked in beef fat...)
You can semi-smoke salmon easily at home, provided you have an outdoor grill where you can make a lot of smoke. Just soak a cup or so of your choice of hardwood chips for a few hours, then add them to your charcoal just before you throw the fish on, and cover with the grill lid. In about 10-12 min (for a 2-3 lb filet) you have a fish that is part-grilled, part-smoked. Tastes great, has no more salt than you added to the marinade if any, and keeps for 7-10 days in the fridge with no degradation in taste.
Indeed. Everyone loves applewood, but I'm much more partial to mesquite myself. It's even possible to do indoors, inside a good wok, although then one must worry about proper ventilation. My place only has a...janky...DIY firepit, and I'm not gonna smoke/grill salmon on a raw slab of construction brick, lol. Maybe someday when we get a real grill. For now I'll stick to making jerky in the oven...
(Big untapped market for whoever comes up with a truly durable saltwater-corrosion-resistant grill. People on coasts the world over would be so happy.)
I'm with you on disliking shellfish. I don't have an allergy so I *can* eat them, I just dislike them so I avoid them.
I grew up beside the sea, so my father used to gather dilisk and dry it (eating that is like eating razor blades, but it's very good for you?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmaria_palmata
Also, one time in our childhood, he collected a lot of barnacles and periwinkles from the rocks and cooked them. That was not repeated because they were like rubber 😁 And another time we found a lobster cage on the beach with a lobster in it, so that got taken home and prepared.
My brother loves shrimps and prawns but I always pick them out of any meal that has them in.
Speaking of old-school, country-style foods, how about crúibíns? Pig's feet, and to me they are pure gristle, but again a food my father loved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crubeens
Butcher shops when I was young used to have half pig's heads and sometimes sheep's heads, haven't seen those on display for a *long* time now! A market one time, again when I was young, had dead rabbits (still in their pelts) for sale. And the fishwife with her crates of fish on the corner of the square every Friday, you needed to buy your fish first thing in the morning before they were sitting there all day long.
Of course, all this sort of thing is gone thanks to food safety and hygiene regulations, so probably for the best!
EDIT: " RIP McDonald's fries cooked in beef fat..."
This is why chip shop chips are the best, traditional Italian chippers still cook them in lard. Yes yes yes, horribly unhealthy, but you're not (or you shouldn't be) eating them every day 🍟
Oh, I worded that poorly, I meant "bugaboo" as in "other things that got gastronomically gentrified into unaffordability, much to my unending displeasure". Shellfish are my #1 favourite food - and I *am* allergic to them. Don't worry, the hives breakouts are purely cosmetic! I still think it's totally worth it, cause nothing can match that level of pure food enjoyment!
I've seen that red kelp stuff on local beaches. Always felt bad that it wasn't clean enough to eat here, the nutritional profile is awesome. Seaweeds and kelps are some of the only vegetables I thoroughly enjoy...can't get enough, wish they were more widely popular. It's silly to have to go to an Asian market for proper laver; the only kinds sold in American grocers are the small sheet roasted salted (seasoned...blech, teriyaki...) "snack" types. Just like the humble potato, another good base food ruined in the quest for snacking. I just want some plain dried seaweed, please!
Trotters and pig's ear are something the older generations of my family enjoy, yes. Same thing with chicken feet. They still, to this day, mock us adult children for being too white to eat "real Chinese food". There is some squick factor for me, but mostly I don't really like the taste/texture...tripe is passable in small quantities, especially in a nice collagen-heavy soup. That's about as exotic as I'm comfortable with. Agreed on snails sucking - I'm sure true escargot is tasty, but feel like that must be the butter more than the rubbery stuff.
Every once in awhile, you can still find a Chinese butcher shop or restaurant with a whole roasted pig hanging on hooks, head and feet and all. Same thing with chickens and ducks. I'm sure it's illegal or "for display only", but...I dunno, I always enjoyed such sights. Hard to explain to my more civilized white friends how Chinese cultural conceptions of food safety and hygiene differ. This is just how I grew up, I'm sorry!
American canned tuna tasted and tastes weird to me-- it has a flavor I don't like and can't identify.
Italian canned tuna at least doesn't taste weird.
I've definitely heard this anecdote before, and could swear I read a blog post or newspaper article explaining exactly what was different between American and Italian canned foods...but can't find it anymore.
Sardines and anchovies are okay canned, but that's cause I'm cooking them to hell anyway...as part of the base for soup, or perhaps roasted on top of pizza. Other than that, canned mackerel is sort of kind of decent...I think cause it's such a strong-flavoured fish to begin with, so even canning can't totally ruin it.
Well, sushi makers save on buying that fish, rice and other components in bulk. But if they are readily available at your place and you won't waste them by buying too much, and you don't mind some cooking, then go for it.
Proper rolling is much easier with a special mat, though. But they are often sold in sushi or cooking utensil shops.
Amazon has the mats, seaweed, proper sushi rice (milled short grain), and magic powder (or liquids) to make your boring rice into sushi rice. The rice and seaweed are necessary but not sufficient for good homemade sushi. Avocado is a great choice, in Japan it's sometimes called the poor man's hamachi.
Haha, I'm a heretic as one of those rare Californians who doesn't like avocados...and by extension doesn't much care for one of our local pieces of fusion food history, the "California Roll". (Avocado toast is also right out...I don't even eat bread normally, why smear gross green paste on it?)
One of my friends tells a story of meeting a Japanese exchange student who'd never had avocado before...he tried one and was all "!!! S-s-sugoi!!!" Sometimes I wish I had his tastebuds. Those damn fruits are in __so many dishes__ out here. It always makes me happy to see a bag of regular potato chips at a party, instead of the ubiquitous Chips And Guac(tm). Someone's thinking of me, at least.
Anyone else feel like they suffer from a certain kind of intellectual masochism?
By this I mean I really enjoy engaging with technical and non-technical content written by very smart people of past and present, but the more of their content I read the more I realise how inferior I am intellectually.
The way they engage with problems and process information is mostly unattainable for me, but I can't resist the lure of their wonderful ideas, leading to a feedback loop of lowered self-esteem.
On the one hand, I know I shouldn't be upset, and should be (and am) thankful that there are such brilliant people in the world. On the other hand, these brilliant people are often the kinds of people I have the most admiration for, though by that same metric I can never admire myself all that much.
Anyone know what I mean?
Reminds me of the idea, instantiated in the book "Winner Takes All", that today the world's most talented have a global audience thanks to technology. Now that we are networked globally we are exposed to some of the smartest and most talented people in the world, and they naturally get disproportionate attention. People like Scott and Tyler Cowan have a spooky capacity to absorb information and an equally spooky ability to focus, plus a few other talents like a high level of articulacy, quirky insightfulness, and a thick skin that enables them to expose their egos to a degree most of us won't risk. Not sure how we should take that except to be grateful that what they do or build enriches us, and perhaps nudges us in good directions even if our talents are more limited and our audience smaller (for the most part).
The largest audiences are for women with big butts, cute cats and trainers. There’s only so much the average guy can do to compete.
If you work hard enough at it, you can acquire all those things. Live the dream.
I occasionally get a twinge of that feeling in various areas - professional accomplishment, athletics, etc. So I can identify a bit, but only a bit.
Anyway, you might try reframing the way you think about it. Compete with yourself rather than others. I would suggest something like keeping a journal of the new things you've read, the new ideas you've learned, progress you've made on understanding hard concepts, and so on. Just willing yourself to think differently won't work, but perhaps making a practice of noting how much you're learning will slowly change how you habitually frame the experience.
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least
Well its a fools game to compare yourself to the greatest writers ever. If you want to feel superior read some popular trash.
For me I’m often actually amazed at some of the fuzzy thinking that goes in non-scientific subjects.
No. What you wrote makes absolutely no sense to me, on a really fundamental level.
I mean, I enjoy engaging with content written by very smart people of past and present, and it often makes me realize how inferior I am intellectually. But:
1. No mind is universally superior, brilliance is a result of specialization and effort. Each of the brilliant minds was one of the kind, I'll never be like them, because nobody will, and that's fine.
2. I can still use the knowledge they discovered and transmitted to the rest of us, which is much easier and much more beneficial than having their brains but having to reach their insights from earlier principles.
3. As a corollary of the preceding two - their points were already made, their discoveries discovered, there's no need for another person like them. I'm better off pursuing my own talents in my own niche. There's no reason to think specialization plus the ability to use a more up-to-date knowledge base (including their own insights) won't lift me above their level at some point, even with my vastly inferior brain hardware.
4. And if not... well, who cares. Sure, individual success and other people's admiration are great, but pursuing them as goals in themselves is extremely unhealthy, both in terms of physical health and productivity. A much more healthy goal is common good, and it's something anyone can pursue - not by individual brilliance, but by a humble dedication to discovering and proselytizing truth.
1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Bertrand Russell, and Von Neumann seem like some pretty obvious examples of minds that were almost universally superior. And I'm only half-joking when I say that.
2. Yes, their insights are easily accessible, but that makes it all the more frustrating that I can't build on them, or even fully appreciate their profundity.
3. You assume that one has a talent or niche, which I think is not the case FOR MOST PEOPLE. It's hard to stand on the shoulders giants if you have no legs. For instance, if you took a billion people and made every one them to specialise in number theory, I'm not sure more than 5 could reach the level of Terence Tao- let alone exceed it.
4. You're spot on here about the unhealthiness of pursuing admiration for its own sake, and I would agree with the surface level claim of maximizing the common good. That being said, the source of my anguish isn't the fame that comes from their brilliance, it's the brilliance itself. The ability know one thing or many things so deeply, and to be able use that knowledge to make a meaningful contribution to the world of knowledge. Funnily enough, these things often end up doing the most when it comes to maximizing the common good.
For instance, I doubt Newton (or Leibniz depening on who you ask) was thinking about all the good calculus was going to do for the world when he developed it.
1. I'm a somewhat competent programmer, while DaVinci has never written a working line of code in his life. I'm only half-joking here. I get that your point is that his intellectual faculties would have made it possible for him to become an expert programmer if he had a choice and took it. My point is that he then wouldn't be the DaVinci we know. My other point is that there's also a possible DaVinci who took a career in finances and died a rich old man after having never accomplishing anything of lasting cultural or intellectual impact. You're never going to win against a genius's potential, but that's not who you're competing with.
2. On that note, you can never win against the sum total of human insight, and I have a hunch that you're sort of trying to do exactly that. The people you admire had a lifetime of being themselves to perfect their work, whereas you're only spending hours, days, maybe weeks, on their life accomplishments. Of course your skills are not going to match theirs. I'm pretty sure that - with enough time, effort and dedication - you're perfectly capable of building upon, much less appreciating, insights of any one of them. Just not every one of them, you don't have resources for that. But then again, neither had they, having been too busy being themselves.
3. People do have talents or niches, or at least could if they didn't waste their lives in conformist stupor. It's just that, for most of them, that niche isn't at a frontier of pursuit of established scientific knowledge. And that's fine, and certainly not a reason to stop pursuing them. It's certainly a better use of their time than trying to outdo Terence Tao in number theory. Once in a blue moon, you're Marjorie Rice and your randomly acquired hobby turns into a lasting contribution to mathematics. But even if you're writing Harry Potter fanfiction instead, you're still more skilled at it than Terence Tao. And that's an intentionally extreme example, most people's interests are much more practical and useful. You'd be surprised by the level of genuine insight and expertise regular, uncredentialed people can reach on the subject of, e.g., hair care. I know I was, and I don't feel bad exploiting that expertise for my benefit without myself dedicating any effort to the topic, so why should I feel differently about Terence Tao?
4. More importantly, I'm sure the hair care people above didn't expect to become versed in biology and chemistry. It was just a natural by-product of dedicating themselves to their interests. And, even if most people would rightly view their domains of interest as inconsequential, within them, they do in fact meaningfully contribute to the sum of human knowledge. I'm convinced that's the trick. I agree Newton and Leibniz probably weren't fixated on doing good for the world, but the same reasoning leads me to suspect they weren't fixated on making a meaningful contribution to the world either. They were, fundamentally, solving problems they set out to solve.
PS: I am amused by my brain's subconscious autocorrection. I meant to type about "mental health", but it first retrieved the term from my native Polish vocabulary ("zdrowie psychiczne") then, having realized that "psychical health" isn't a thing in English, switched it for the closest thing that is, semantics be damned.
Do you feel equally inadequate when you watch professional sports? If not, why not?
No not really, but my problem is nothing about being inferior per se. If that were the case I am inferior on a million different dimensions!
It's more about that specific domain of knowledge creation and/or knowledge exploration. It's the kind of work I admire most, hence why it probably weighs heavier on my psyche.
Yeah, I see what you mean. The best that most of us can hope for is to achieve sufficient competence in some narrow domain in order to earn enough money to pay the bills and raise a family. Worrying about anything beyond that starts to look like vanity, which is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason.
Maybe? I don't experience pleasure from intellectual pain, like, not a direct analogue to physical masochism...but there's something perversely satisfying about bashing my head against a clearly superiour intellect, knowing I Just Don't Get It, but if I *did*, there'd be some great payoff. So like e.g. I don't make a habit out of reading Robin Hanson's blog, but it's still occasionally fun to go over there and try wrestling some of those ideas to the ground. The fact that seemingly everyone else "gets it" without trouble is definitely frustrating, and I feel stupider by comparison...yet there's a certain amount of insecurity in only sticking to content I know I can grok. I "need" that occasional brain beatdown to feel like I'm trying to progress intellectually. One day maybe I, too, can sit at the Intellectual Cool Kids table.
Definitely did have an "intellectual sadism" phase growing up though. You know, the bratty precocious teen who mocks their lesser peers via academic swaggering and Scott-sized Walls of Text with a billion links...I try not to do that anymore, that is not The Way. Putting myself on the receiving end is both enlightening and also...atonement of a sort, I guess. Let the former lecturer now be lectured. Not sure if reversed sadism is masochism though, exactly.
I know exactly what you mean, and I feel the same way about intellectual and literary content. In both cases, what I like and admire is far superior to what I can produce, which leads me to find what I write of very poor quality. Intellectually, I'm perfectly aware that comparing myself to the very best people in their field is ridiculous, that I know I'm obviously not on that level and that producing things of fairly good quality should be enough, but I just can't feel that way.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Ira Glass: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I was thinking of exactly this quote! Ira really laid it out beautifully (as you'd expect, man has decades of practice making excellent radio)
Remember reading some of the classics a few years back and being so depressed at how well they could write, not to mention how effortless it appeared for them.
The worst part was when I started reading nonfiction I chose to start with Dawkins and Steven Pinker, both of whom write beautifully.
Perhaps you could cheer yourself up by reading poorly conceived ideas misspelled by halfwits. Twitter is good for that. Just remember not to post in response.
Lol, you are right!
I've always thought that using the right benchmark to evaluate yourself and your life was the secret of hapinnes, but unfortunately, consciously deciding which benchmark to use seems to be impossible for me.
New "Game of Thrones" show premiere is good. I expected it to look fantastic, but the most heartening thing is that the casting is excellent all-around. Bodes well for the show.
Casting and visual direction were never the worry, it's the writing where they did abysmally the first time and where I expect them to continue to be utterly abysmal.
The writing is good so far. They actually remembered that it should be character-driven, and it is.
I don't know why, but I'm disappointed to hear this. If it sucked I could just ignore it. But if it's actually quite good, it becomes a whole cultural "thing" like the old one, it will become a whole cultural "thing" like the old one, and I'll have to watch it, and the modest amount of enjoyment I get out of the show will be outweighed by the boredom I feel listening to everyone in my social circle discussing it.
My favourite shows are the ones that I watch and nobody else I know does, or at least nobody else I know ever wants to talk about them, things like Lodge 49. (Unfortunately too few people watched Lodge 49.)
I think it will be a big hit, but I doubt it will ever have the cultural impact of the original series. You can only cross that river once, and the original GoT was such a huge success that it basically changed all of streaming/cable. "House of the Dragon" is just one of many big-budget, serialized fantasy/SF shows now, and not even the biggest in scope or budget.
Yeah, this. GoT was the Seinfeld of its genre/style of show.
Unfortunately, the hallmark of the latter season of the original GoT seasons (including the last one) were that they often had good scenes, good acting, and good visual effects that ended up less than the sum of their parts because of poor management of story, characterization, and theme. That includes the final season, where they apparently decided that it was critically important to have Dany burn down [spoiler] and be [spoiler] by [spoiler] because it happened in the books, but were indifferent to how it worked out thematically.
In general, too, the show was too fond of its ruthless characters, especially Cersei. The whole point of "A Dance with Dragons" and "A Feast for Crows" is to finally see the rotten fruits of the Lannister project bear out, while we see the benefits of Ned's legacy at work too.
A lot of folks point the finger at Season 6, but I think the rot was setting in by Season 5. The best essays on this are from Steven Attewell:
https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/stannis-endgame-book-vs-show/
https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/the-kings-landing-endgame-book-v-show/
Does anyone know what actual findings of the Webb telescope challenge our current understanding of the evolution of our universe? There are lots of youtube videos but i have no idea what to believe. There is post-truth, post-belief and I assume soon post-knowledge for you. Thank you.
There's nothing major yet, just a lot of hype. It will take time for astronomers to gather and process enough data to change our understanding of the universe, a few images isn't enough for that. Plus there's the minor detail that some instruments may not be properly calibrated yet, so the data might not yet be reliable enough do that anyway.
Since Sergei does it, I'll plug my substack. I was an astrophysicist a while back and I try to explain these things a bit more clearly on my site: https://www.thequantumcat.space/
Thank you
It is still early, and there are no scientifically very exciting results yet. Ignore youtube videos, check what actual astrophysicists who are good at accessible explanations say. Ethan Siegel is a good one too follow https://medium.com/@startswithabang
Thank you. So the finding of a galaxy whose age is older than what we understand the universe’s age to be is total bullshit? Got it.
Well one thing to understand is that our current estimates for a lot of things are not super robust. So if we were to find out the universe was 10% older or whatever it would likely not be nearly as big of a change as it first seems. We have done a lot of extrapolating around some figures with error bars. As we refine the figures and the error bars decrease we could end up with non-trivial changes to the age/distance of objects. But that doesn't necessarily mean an actually different cosmological picture.
I wonder how flexible those error bars would need to be before we had a major questioning of the anthromorphic principle.
Probably the biggest current challenge to that AFAIK is the weird possible artifact in the CMBR where it kind of looks oriented to our solar system. Which makes it look like we have some measuring error because the alternate hypothesis (that the early universe was coincidentally oriented along the same plane as our solar system) seems not appealing.
Nothing so far, honestly.
Does anyone else share my feeling that humanity has a very rough decade ahead of it?
There is a number of crises brewing at the same time:
- we are just getting past Corona, which has exhausted the resources and patience of many countries, and is still disrupting supply lines (mainly due to China's policies)
- climate change is really making itself felt, with droughts and floods disrupting harvests
- Russia is tearing down the international order and causing further disruption to the trade with food, fertilizer, and energy
- America's politics are torn between a vile narcissistic crybully on one side, and a bunch of loony activists who want to eradicate Western civilization, no, sorry, "whiteness", on the other
- China has essentially become a techno-fascist dictatorship, and is in the first stages of the bursting of the mother of all real estate bubbles
- as a consequence, many developing countries face hunger, state bankruptcy, and a host of other problems all at the same time, with no one willing and able to help
At the very least, I expect a number of really bad civil wars (accompanied by Ruanda-style genocide, famine, disease, and refugee crises), but world war does not seem off the table.
Can anyone convince me I'm wrong, or point out what should be done to prevent the worst?
I thank you all for your perspectives. My opinion has slightly shifted towards "the world was always more or less terrible, we've had an exceptionally good run the last decades, now we have to suck it up and get through the next troubles as good as we can".
I tend to be more sanguine about many of these trends.
For all of our missteps, Covid has been a great test run for a worse pandemic, especially from a vaccine development perspective.
Technologies to mitigate climate change and provide energy abundance, especially renewables and perhaps fission/fusion, continue to make excellent progress.
Russia is declining in power due to sanctions and poor management, and the war in Ukraine has made Europe much less complacent.
In the US, much of the population is still pretty moderate, although you don't hear as much from them as the extremes.
China's stumbles raise the relative influence of capitalist democracies versus its dictatorial regime, and to the extent that the US feels less threatened by Chinese growth, it is likely to act less erratically.
It is true that developing countries bear the brunt of most global instability, but overall many of them continue to make good progress on climbing into middle income territory and reducing extreme poverty.
I would tentatively argue that the most helpful activity long-term is to promote scientific and economic progress. Better technology and greater economic abundance seem to be the most effective ways to make many people's lives better.
If you think about recent global history in ten year increments, we're looking at between average and really good, depending on the comparators. Let's look at some decades in the last 120 years, even at just some headline reporting. The details can look at lot worse.
Obviously the 1910s and 1940s have some massive world wars - talk about tearing down the international order! Spanish Flu (1918-1919) killed 50 million people, which is both a higher absolute number than COVID, but also a massively higher percentage of the world population. That's almost too easy, so let's look elsewhere.
1900s - Spanish-American War, Armenian Genocide, American President assassinated.
1920s - The rise of Mussolini and the beginnings of Hitler, as well as Stalin. Widespread support for the KKK, including their famous/infamous march on Washington. Also sees US military adventurism in Central America, including the invasion of Nicaragua.
1930s - Worldwide economic meltdown, Great Depression.
1950s - Korean War, Cold War (you could write for hours on this topic alone), massive increase in peacetime military spending. Colonial governments across the world are unstable, leading to wars on multiple continents. Massive increase in nuclear weapon testing and stockpiling.
1960s - Massive destabilization of European colonial interests - revolts take place all over the world, especially in Africa. Civil Rights-related unrest in the US. Coup in France. Vietnam War. Proxy wars between the US and USSR. Domestic terrorism in many major countries.
1970s - Vietnam war continues. Significant violence in US cities. Nixon scandals and resignation. Worldwide problems with terrorism, plane hijackings.
1980s - Significant upheaval in the Middle East and Latin America - Iran Contras, Beirut, destabilization in the USSR. USSR in war against Afghanistan.
1990s - Collapse of the USSR, first Iraq War. Collapse of Yugoslavia, civil war. Coup in Pakistan. Rwandan genocide. Russian invasion of Chechnya.
2000s - Iraq War, Afghanistan War, 9/11, 2008 recession, Darfur conflict in the Sudan.
These are just a tiny number of the major events from each decade. Arguably, each and every decade in the last 120 years was as disruptive or more disruptive than the 2020s. But that's looking at the most major events from across the world. You can also look at the most encouraging events from those decades and come up with a completely different perspective.
Bottom line, this decade is certainly no worse than normal. We're not living in a particularly interesting time (even if we are living in an interesting time).
Agree. It's always been true that bad news rises to the top--"if it bleeds, it ledes", as they say in the news business. Incremental improvements are happening all the time all over the place but we don't see them, but they accumulate. If you just consider the catalog of the big events of the last century--two catastrophic world wars, countless smaller wars, epidemics, genocides and famines that killed 10's of millions--you wouldn't guess that life expectancy would double and the world would transition from a condition where 90% of the population is barely at subsistence living down to closer to 10%, or that global inequality would shrink dramatically. This is documented for example, at the site gapminder.org, and Stephen Pinker has written about these trends in his books. Perhaps the progress has slowed, as some argue, but pessimism dominated throughout the past hardly less than it does now.
So you're saying the 1980's were pretty good? Iran/Contra was possibly the biggest nothingburger of all scandals, upheaval in the MENA and South America is another day ending in -y, so that leaves USSR/Afghanistan which undoubtedly had more lasting effects on the world than contemporary ones.
There was a lot of international terrorism, and some huge instability (especially in the USSR, which broke apart shortly after). That said, the 1980s were probably calmer and "pretty good" compared to many of the other decades. Even the 1990s were relatively calm compared to most of the rest of the list.
>Does anyone else share my feeling that humanity has a very rough decade ahead of it?
To name one important individual, Peter Turchin.
>Can anyone (...) point out what should be done to prevent the worst?
It's unlikely that any purposeful action is even possible at this point, but to rephrase your question to "what needs to happen": We need society to get to a much more cooperative and egalitarian state.
To elaborate using Turchin's theories and terminology, the problem is threefold:
- a growing economic inequality and immiseration of the commoners, leading to
- a ballooning number of the elite and growing intra-elite competition, exacerbated by
- a growing radicalization.
Radicalization is a cultural/social phenomenon and should reverse the fastest, due to a growing wariness of and opposition to the radicals and the disorder they cause. Hence, our short-term problems may indeed ease up within a decade. The structural and economic problems will persist until we get rid of most of our superfluous elites and redistribute their wealth to the commoners.
This time the solution *definitely is* Communism, huh?
Unbelievable that this rickety old player piano still works.
Eh, it's never been communism, and there's no reason to think it's going to be communism this time around either.
I mean, sure, it ought to be, but that's a separate discussion entirely.
Here, I'm describing Turchin's work, and if you insisted on mistaking is for ought and treating his descriptions of trend reversals as a prescription, you'd probably take him to be some kind of a neo-reactionary.
"It's no use, young man – it's Turchins all the way down!"
First of all, I don't think that to say Peter Turchin is as much as to say God; he's perfectly capable of being plain wrong, as indeed predictors of the future are almost universally wont to be. Secondly, what I was reacting to wasn't your outline of his ideas but your own claim that "The structural and economic problems will persist until we get rid of most of our superfluous elites and redistribute their wealth to the commoners", which is as foolish now as it was in 1850, 1900, 1950 and so on, and even more mulishly wrongheaded since you have even more years of failure to back it up at this point. Swallow your bitter envy; accept that you're stuck being wealthier than almost all the ancestors who came before you and accept that you're only even able to gripe about it because capitalism generates abundance so well that you've lost all connection to the struggle which is in nature.
Look, I can tell what triggered your emotional reaction, but your problem is, fundamentally, having an emotional reaction to an empirical claim. It's "no use" because, well, who cares. Knife to a gun fight.
Certainly, empirical claims are perfectly capable of being plain wrong, but, them being empirical claims, it can and needs to be demonstrated on empirical terms. (Of course, the point about invoking Turchin here is specifically his fame of having predicted a "rough decade" in the 2020s as early as the late aughts, so talking about him being "capable of being wrong" in the potential sense packs little punch.)
And you're just refusing to do that, even after I've tried to nudge you towards a precise set of empirical claims you should be responding to (Turchin's models and their underlying data), and even after I've tried to placate you by assuring you it's not about capitalism vs. communism at all. (Which it isn't. Turchin's theory of social dynamics are much more universal, essentially agnostic with regards to the underlying economic system, he developed it studying feudal societies. If I wanted to go against capitalism, I'd not be using his vaguely Marxian model of social relations, but go straight to, say, Van Bavel's direct description of how capitalism does little more than squander capital built by earlier, productive egalitarian societies.)
I mean, one can be anti communist and still prefer a world where the average person can buy a home, or even a world with less inequality period. I don't think many would accuse the Amish of communism, but they have a lot less wealth inequality than the rest of our society.
The last 50 years have seen the biggest contraction in global inequality in world history. See my post above, and see gapminder.org.
Why should the average person be able to buy a home? I am not sure that has ever been the case, and there are more people than ever and the same amount of land.
I can answer that in three words: "veil of ignorance".
The veil of ignorance, invented by Harsanyi well before Rawls, leads in a straightforward way to maximizing average utility. Rawls didn't like that, so waved his hands and pulled "maximize the welfare of the worst off" out of the air.
What about it? Rawls isn’t magic. There is also the issue of how you define who is behind the veil.
I don’t find his intuitions about how people would/should act compelling, nor his argument about why that particular setup captures all or even most of what is supposed to being on in ethics.
"Owning a home" also implies owning a home valued at an approximate level (that seems to go up every year), which is far more valuable than historical precedents. The average home in 1950 was approximately 1,000 square feet, compared to over 2,600 now. That is also misleading, because previously to that, more people rented apartments, and there was a splurge of people moving into small detached homes. Why is the expectation ownership, or a detached house, or whatever else has become the norm/"Human Right" that people talk about?
The historical average, even post "no home" or "hand-made hut" was a fairly large multi-family home, where as many as five generations might all live together, but frequently around three generations. Within living memory, there were boarding houses for adult single people. The idea that a $200-400,000 house is even preferable is deeply weird and unsustainable. Many people even say that single-family homes are not sustainable, and that everyone should live in large apartment buildings in cities.
"Less inequality" is a vague and uncertain standard. Any society can have "less" of something like that, but I have never heard a concrete plan for what are the correct comparators (is it bad inequality for Westerners to have 80X the income of a 3rd world person, or is it only a problem within the same country?), and if there's an absolute level of prosperity that can overrule the need for relative wealth. What gets to me, ultimately, is that in the time of Marx and Communist revolution, all but the very richest people made less than average people do today. If my absolute wealth rivals minor nobles or wealthy merchants, why does it matter if it's a small percentage of the wealthy of today?
>'Less inequality' is a vague and uncertain standard
By far the fastest and easiest way to level out global inequality is total nuclear war.
Rather than make a long comment, can I just invite readers to look at two recent Substack posts of mine that address these points directly?
This one is concerned with what might break down and how, especially in the West. It concludes that the West faces particular problems with the combination of an incapable political class and hollowed out State, confronting a never-before seen combination of problems.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/when-sorrows-come
And this one argues that western ability to continually remake the world according to its taste, by force if necessary, actually came to an end some time ago, but we didn't notice it. We've been coasting for some time on an economic and military dominance that finally disappeared 5-10 years ago. Europe is going to have to get used to living with a militarily powerful and pissed-off Russia, and the West in general will simply find that it can't automatically get its way any more, and will have to take account of the opinions of countries on which it is economically dependent.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-hinges-of-history-creak
Other essays explore some of these ideas in more detaiL.
Do by all means leave comments.
A militarily powerful Russia? Pissed off, sure, but if there's any Eurasian country in terminal decline it has to be Russia. Their system is a heap of rubble, they can't even invade a podunk border nation that belonged to them a generation ago due to incompetence, corruption and dumpster morale crippling their military. If they didn't have the leftover Soviet nuclear capacity they'd be nothing and nobody, a backwater not even worth invading. That's exactly *why* they're seething now and trying to boost their self-esteem with an idiotic invasion.
There are arguments for Russian decline in certain areas - notably demographic - but not military. Most commentators have assumed that because the Russians have not tried to build US-style forces, they must be no good and not worth paying attention to. Those commentators who could be bothered to take an interest assumed that the Russian forces were still in the same deplorable state as in the 1990s. At the beginning of the invasion you may remember confident predictions that it couldn't last more than a week, because the Russians would run out of supplies and ammunition.
But ever the last fifteen yeas, the Russians have been re-building a capability for large-scale ground operations in Europe, using mainly artillery and missile, and focused on attrition warfare. The West has designed completely different forces for complete different purposes - mostly operations in Africa and the Middle East. In terms of what the Russians can field, the Europeans can only manage a handful of armoured or mechanised brigades, and the US a handful more, even if you could get them there. They are capable of operating for perhaps a week at high intensity rates of fire and supply. The Russians have been supplying much larger forces for months. According to the Ukrainians the Russians are expending some 100,000 artillery rounds a day. Even if this is an exaggeration, they obviously still have massive stocks. The Russians use missiles, not aircraft, to obtain their definition of air superiority, and they have very large stocks which would render western air operations anywhere near them suicidally costly. This is not because the Russians are supernaturally strong, but because Europe is weak all over, and the US is weak where it matters - in high-intensity land/air combat. In this essay I set out why I think that for industrial, economic and political reasons, this state of affairs is going to endure for a long time, and could only be improved, if at all, by the equivalent of WW2 mobilisation.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/after-the-cavalry-didnt-charge
Before the current conflict, the Ukrainian Army was the largest and most powerful in Europe. It had around twenty mechanised/armoured/airborne brigades, compared with 2-3 for the average European country. The US has, I believe something like 4-5 equivalent brigades, which would take several years to activate. The UA was well-equipped, and had a huge amount of combat experience against the separatists on the East of the country since 2014. It also had some 300,000 reserves. The UA was extremely well trained by NATO nations, and lavishly provided with western intelligence, and all support short of direct military involvement. The UA, with NATO assistance, had been constructing lines of fortifications in the Donbas, as powerful as anything constructed in modern history, which the Russians only now appear to be finally breaking through. (There are some impressive Youtube videos of the fortifications.)
Even together, European countries can't begin to match the combat capability of Ukraine in February 2024, and the US doesn't have that much to add. Moreover, the Russians can directly threaten NATO capitals from their own airspace. They deployed MiG-31 aircraft to Kaliningrad last week with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, just as a move in the poker-game.
We don't want to fall back into the Cold War mindset of thinking the Russians are unbeatable. As I said, it's not an objective relationship of strength, but a relative one, and the West is now extremely weak where it matters. We're going to have to learn to live with that.
Good grief Moncrieff! Either your last name is Simonyan or you've been working hard to retrofit reality to your native pessimism. The Russians are focused on attrition warfare? Remember when they tried to blitz Ukraine and got their paratroopers blasted to shit over those airfields, and bogged down by their cheap shitty cost-saving Chinese tires exploding en masse on the way to Kyiv? Attrition warfare is what they're doing now because they tried everything else first and it didn't work. And everything that comes out indicates their logistics are still a catastrophe, with already-demoralized soldiers not even being provided with food properly. They're shitting up a wall.
"the West is now extremely weak where it matters. We're going to have to learn to live with that."
I agree that there's been a great and shameful degree of naive disarmament, but extremely weak? "We're going to have to learn to live with that"? Are you serious? Europe is still like 40 times as rich as Russia and would be aided by the US in any rearmament. The situation is not ideal, agreed, but we can fix it.
Kind of underwhelmed by this argument. A thousand SAM missiles are worthless when your targeting and fire-control radars can be taken out within 30 minutes of H hour by G5 aircraft (which you can't even see) lugging HARM ordnance. And once the sky is no longer yours all that artillery is just slow moving target practice for new pilots, and the enormous stationary piles of shells are (as we've kind of seen already) just big fireworks displays awaiting a joyful match.
++agree
"The Russians use missiles, not aircraft, to obtain their definition of air superiority"
This is a very flimsy argument because, at a minimum, it requires the Russians to define down air superiority. The Ukrainian air force still exists and is still flying 10-20 sorties a day. Add in that the Russians are only flying 100-200 sorties a day, and Russia's air force is no where close to what the US would call air superiority.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/what-ukraine-needs-to-win-the-war/
Despite its stock of artillery rounds, there is a very good reason why Russia remains a disaster militarily:
“In war, the moral is to the physical as ten to one.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte
Russia remains a conscript army that's poorly led and this is why they continue to fail. Their little adventures in Syria and Africa having been mostly executed by paramilitaries (paid much more handsomely than recruits) and special forces with a few one-off toys. What we're seeing in Ukraine is the application of their regular Army which is largely a disaster only maintaining ground by continuous artillery barrages.
Having seen the Russian Army up close in the Balkans in the mid-90s, I was left with the distinct impression it would dissolve if it faced a western campaign without a nuclear back-stop.
If Europe can get through the winter without caving into Russian demands, and sanctions continue to deepen dependence upon Chinese purchasing (with a parallel increase in Chinese power over Russian decision-making), we will see the continued fall of Russian power which will make them even more reliant on their nuclear weapons as their only means of wielding influence.
In 1991, the US managed to decisively defeat and rout an army of 650,000 while suffering ~1500 total casualties (killed + wounded).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
It did this against an opponent who knew it was coming and had months to prepare. It then accomplished something similar in 2003.
Russia was unable to overcome a force of ~100,000 that was caught mostly flat-footed by its attack. Furthermore, the Ukrainian Army was nearly non-existent for several months in 2014 [allowing Russia to walk into Crimea and the Donbas without facing resistance], so even if "together, European countries can't begin to match the combat capability of Ukraine in February 2024", that suggests that Europe would need at most 8 years (and probably far, far less) to remilitarize.
Your brigade counting is also very questionable. If we're just trying to estimate numbers of mechanized brigades, Ukraine had ~1,000 main battle tanks at start of the war whereas the US has ~2,500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_main_battle_tanks_by_country). I agree that non-American NATO countries have mostly allowed their conventional artillery and tank capabilities to erode considerably, but there is a substantial difference between "NATO countries are fielding fewer tanks than they were in 1991" and "all the NATO countries of Europe are militarily weaker than the Ukrainian military"
Overall, this seems like a Trump v. Hillary 2016 discussion. We observe that the battle between Russia and Ukraine is close-fought and bloody, with neither side possessing a decisive advantage despite one side expecting that it possessed a decisive advantage at the start of the conflict and subsequently making many stupid and costly mistakes because of that incorrect assumption. This only tells us that the two sides are closely matched. It doesn't tell us whether they are both strong or both weak.
I generally agree with your assessment, I just would put a different spin on it. Yes, rough times are ahead, but we the West is overdue for rough times, that's how one gets out of an inadequate equilibrium. Sure, that comet sucked for the dinosaurs, but it accelerated the mammals' progress by tens of millions of years, by some estimates. Climate change will cause calamities, but a warmer Earth is good for life in general. Hopefully whatever comes soon does not end up in a nuclear war, though.
Reasons to be cheerful, part three:
1. Corona is over. Supply chains are recovering.
2. Climate change really isn't making itself felt, people have just collectively decided that it's okay to blame every piece of lousy weather on "climate change" now. The frequency of crappy weather events hasn't significantly changed. Remember when people said that Hurricane Katrina was the new normal due to climate change? That was eighteen years ago, and there hasn't been anything particularly bad since.
3. Yeah, Russia's recent actions suck. On the upside we've learned that Russian military strength is far less than anyone anticipated.
4. Trump himself will not win another election. The next Republican president, in 2024 or 2028, is likely to have some of his strengths but few of his obvious weaknesses.
5. The Chinese government is awful, but the Chinese government has been awful for about five thousand years now so that's really nothing new.
6. Poor countries will continue to have problems. But actual starvation seems to have decreased massively over the past few decades and I don't think a disruption to the Ukranian wheat harvest is going to be enough to take us back to the 1980s.
Prediction: the next decade will look like the last few -- new problems showing up noisily to the dismay of everybody, while old problems sneak quietly out the back door, giving the impression that things are going to hell even while they're slowly and steadily getting better.
You missed the “culture wars”.
I feel like this might be a bit pessimistic? My understanding is that the current IPCC party line is that the effect of climate change on things like flooding and droughts has, so far, been too small to measure. On top of that, when it comes to harvests, I thought the consensus was that we just don't know if more CO2 means larger or smaller yields of crops? I remember doing some research on this question and deciding that different categories of plants would be effected differently (I think the terms 'C3 and C4' were involved?) but that humanity's primary food crops were in the category which would see increased yields from warmer weather and increased CO2 concentration
Re: american politics... get back to me when America sends every able bodied man between 18 and 50 to the jungle to die for essentially no reason, like it did to the previous generation. Until something like that happens again, I'm pretty much convinced that the only reason modern American politics looks bad at all is because the current generation has no idea what 'bad' actually looks like.
Same with Russia. Like, yeah, Putin is bad, and maybe our 30 year vacation from the cold war has ended... but that's not new, and this time the use of nuclear weapons isn't even being talked about. It was a lot worse for the last generation.
As far as China goes... yeah, I'm worried. But also at least they're doing non-humanitarian investment in the third world (aka the kind of investment that actually has to create lasting value, not the worthless or even harmful kind of investment). From the terms you used, I am a little worried this might be part of what you don't like about China? But the altruistic kind of investment that the West has been doing for the last 60 years pretty much ruined everything it touched, whereas China's african investments seem to be generating a great deal of prosperity for everyone.
Am I scared of social credit systems? Yeah. Am I scared of the Hundred Year Taiwan Crisis? Yeah.
But... I mean, like a lot of people in this culture, I sorta think that a general artificial intelligence might kill the entire human species pretty much any day now
It's hard to be concerned about global warming or even russia or china in the face of threats like that
Hmm. I think a nuclear war is much more likely than any AI takeover. Not that I ever hope to be the one saying “I told you so”.
China doesnt scare me. Even an invasion of Taiwan is a relatively local affair. The “rules based order” is just the US dominant order. The UN is ignored when it is convenient.
One thing I found out was that Russia and Ukraine hadn't been producing 30% of the world's wheat, it was 30% of the world's *exported* wheat. Most wheat is grown in the countries where it's eaten, so not exported. There can still be serious shortages in some places, but the situation isn't as bad as it was made to sound.
any ACXers in Siem Reap, Cambodia?
Im interested in learning more about homelessness in the U.S. —it’s causes and solutions to it. Anyone have any books (or podcasts/articles/etc) on the matter that they would recommend to someone like me?
A lot of discussion around homelessness is hopelessly muddled by conflating multiple different groups. It might be a motte & bailey, but I think most people are legitimately confused #mistaketheory.
Bryan Caplan has written about it. For example, from a quick search:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/08/the_power_of_pe.html
https://www.econlib.org/homeless-camping-in-austin-a-modest-proposal/
Chris Arnade wrote a book titled "Dignity" which is not so much about homelessness as about struggling people, some of whom are homeless.
...and Arnade did an interview with EconTalk, which has done a series of episodes on poverty and homelessness. Try starting here: https://www.econtalk.org/erica-sandberg-on-homelessness-and-downtown-streets-team/
Does anyone know if a company that came into being, created and sold a product, and then stopped (having maxed out their core competency), and either dissolved or just went into maintenance mode and switched to paying dividends?
Under the ideal model of shareholder capitalism this should happen fairly often - competence is transferable but not *that* transferable. However the closest I can think of to an example is Craigslist (which really is arguably the most successful tech company, as measured by average employee productivity).
This 'run for cash' is the default model in my field (infrastructure finance) - this doesn't help you as a retail investor very much though as they tend to be privately held.
Teledyne is probably the best example. Run by Henry Singleton, probably one of the most brilliant capital allocators of the last century (was also friends with Claude Shannon incidentally).
He did not pay dividends tho, he used buybacks. When the stock was overvalued he used it to make acquisitions, and when it was undervalued he used cash flow from those acquisitions to buy back stock.
And when one of the companies he owned with Teledyne had run its course, he would milk them for cash as much as possible until they were no longer profitable, and then shut them down.
Ended up being one of the best performing stocks of the 20th century.
See an overview here:
http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Dr.-Singleton-and-Teledyne-A-Study-of-an-Excellent-Capital-Allocator.pdf
Edit:
Also shameless self promotion, but Metrovacesa is another example. A real estate developer in Spain that is in slow liquidation mode. Click on my last blog post to see more.
Interesting guy.
Sweden has some old companies like that. The shares very rarely come on the market, as nobody wants to sell them, just collect the dividends, but I try to get shares whenever I can. One example: Berte Qvarn started as a mill in 1569. They still are making flour. (They also have an ice cream company, SIA; I am not sure how that happened.) https://www.berteqvarn.se/ (in Swedish)
If this is something that you want to see more of, you will have to put some serious teeth in your
antitrust and hostile takeover laws. Because you cannot become this successful in your niche without some conglomerate with lots of cash coming along and trying to buy your company.
Aren't the big US car companies (Ford, GM, etc) today examples?
I think your scenario depends on an unrealistic assumption about how stable the business environment is or can be. Generally, companies are always either growing or shrinking, becoming more profitable or less, et cetera, if for no other reason than that exogenous factors are always changing. Periods in which revenue and costs are stable, the field of competitors is stable and nobody is catching up nor falling behind, technology isn't changing much, interest rates and taxes and regulations are stable, et cetera, are generally short-lived -- maybe 5-10 years at most.
https://youtu.be/vudqr4gxRoM
So as a practical matter, successful business leaders are always trying to get bigger and diversify, because it's too hard to hit the sweet spot of perfect equilibrium, exactly treading water, and if you tried to hit it the odds are high you'll miss that narrow mark and end up in decline.
I hear that Whitepages is doing the maintenence mode thing - they came into being, had two decades of explosive growth, and then spun off the business units with growth potential (Hiya, Ekata) to focus on being a "mature" tech company that pays lots of dividends.
I would push back on the "competence is transferable but not *that* transferable" bit. I think that competence (organisational competence, which is not just the sum of the competence of the employees) is valuable and hard to come by, and that it's more transferable than you think. I think that when companies expand into new fields they're rarely stepping _that_ far out of their comfort zone.
If Google decides to start a social network (or Microsoft decides to start a search engine) then it doesn't mean they'll succeed, but I would argue they're more likely to succeed than the same amount of funding given to a fresh startup in a garage, because Google has already solved a bunch of problems that the garage guys haven't, like "how do we scale" and "how do we deliver new products" and "how do we hire people"?
Except. Google did fail at a social network.
Bing is hanging around, but it's pretty decidedly second-place.
based on your other comments I don't think this is the kind of answer you're going for but lots of single proprietor small businesses work this way. You found a business to fill a niche in your area, and then you just run that business and collect the profit, or go out of business if it stops being profitable.
Or when you want to retire if the kids don't want to take it over.
I wanted to mention that Buffett, in his annual letters, talks about capital allocation and his ability to divert capital from cashflow generators to places where the capital can be invested productively. There's one letter in particular where he talks about National Indemnity which he let shrink for long time (maybe a decade) until the economics of the business changed. He's also talked about Sees Candy similarly - as it doesn't require much reinvestment but generates alot of cash. If he had to reinvest Sees' cashflow back into Sees growth I think he says he simply couldn't do it. The candy business can't grow that way - so he uses that cashflow elsewhere. Sorry I don't have links or references. I'm just going from memory - but he talks about the reinvestment problem often, and indicates Berkshires structure allows him to move free cashflow to the highest returning units rather than keep it within units that may not have much opportunity for growth.
Historically I think this was the norm (although I don't have the data to prove it). I think the modern grow-grow-grow model is a consequence of tax incentives: capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than dividends, and give more flexibility in when to realize gains, so shareholders do better if profits are somehow turned into growth instead of just paid out. So that's what happens.
Richard Martin says that it was a result of changing corporate culture from a focus on customer delight to one of increased share value. Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling proposed, in 1976, in a paper in the Journal of Financial Economics that the well understood problem that the interests of the owners of the firm (the shareholders) do not perfectly align with the interests of the agents they hire to run the firm (the executives and managers). In particular, the executives were operating in a way that made it more likely that they would get a bonus for increased sales _now_ even if it damaged the long term prospects of the firm. They weren't getting dividends, so why should they care?
This paper, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure", is the single most frequently cited article in business academia. It was, as they say, "more influential than God". It proposed to align the interests of the shareholders with the managers by rewarding and paying the managers in shares. Interests align, problem solved. This has proven to be the classic case of handing a person a can of petrol to put the fire out with. If you thought that Managers were behaving badly by fiddling the bonus figures, wait until you see what they can get up to when they not only can but are obliged to wiggle around the stock prices! Instead of getting management who liked their dividends and were in it for the long term success of the firm, we got management by people who think that 1 quarter is long term, and are perfectly pleased if there are no dividends at all. Or fudge the other way, if over-paying dividends will increase the share price.
See *Fixing the Game* https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game for a long, not very technical discussion and with concrete proposals about what we can do about it.
You are incorrect about the tax incentives. Dividends are taxed as capital gains in most instances.
Yes, but capital gains typically aren't taxed _at all_ until realization, which is typically not until sale*, whereas dividends are taxed in the year of distribution.
* And sometimes effectively not even then, if they are donated to a qualified charity, or are inherited and therefore receive a step up in basis eliminating the tax on gains during the deceased's lifetime (provided the total value of the estate in question is below the estate tax threshold).
That's not my experience. With dividends, I typically get hit with a withholding tax of 15% by the country the company is registered in, whereas I don't pay any taxes on regular capital gains.
Which country is that? If it's the US you need a better accountant. You want to move them into qualified dividends.
It's Malta, but I think 15% is pretty standard in double-taxation agreements. I just avoid investing in companies that pay dividends.
Not sure if Redbox (Coinstar might be company name?) fits this mold, but they were great at the DVD vending boxes. But renting DVDs destined to become dying business with internet and Netflix on the way. I'm pretty sure the company wasted money trying to transition into other vending machine ideas like coffee - but eventually gave up and were taken out by private equity who I expect ran them as a cash cow to milk the melting icecube.
Redbox just got bought by the company behind Chicken Soup for the Soul, which just sold some of its own stock to acquire Redbox's debt.
It's pretty rare that dissolution is economically optimal. Usually companies die by a firm taking them over and cannibalizing them, selling off the profitable parts of the company and closing down the unprofitable ones.
But as for going into "maintenance mode" to maximize dividend returns: Yes that happens. Well, more or less. The owner or the firm that buys it turns it into what is colloquially called a cash cow or more formally a mature business. Not usually dividend returns specifically but basically cutting expenses while keeping the core business going in order to generate as much cash as possible.
To pick a random example, Activision Blizzard was just acquired by Microsoft in large part due to its rather attractive revenue and net income figures. It was partly strategic since Microsoft has a big videogame division. But it was also simply that the company has had high but relatively stagnant net income for like a decade or two now.
This shouldn't happen much in any industry where either technology or competition is a factor in profit. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place.
I expect it's far more common in every economic system *except* "capitalism" (by which I assume you mean a combination of free markets and shareholding with limited liability). It's certainly more common with monopolies. Under feudalism (which is literally pure capitalism, defined as the system in which there is no social mobility and the owners of the means of production control them, set wages, and reap all the profits), "maintenance mode and paying dividends" was the only method of production that people were aware of. I think people believed then that "profit" in the free-market sense could be obtained only by war or exploitation.
Dissolving can happen when continuing to use an old technology until bankruptcy is more-profitable than buying into the new tech. There are also cases where a company is broken up and its possessions sold off, again because it's more-profitable, because other companies can use those resources more productively. I seem to recall that some big company was bought out 10-20 years ago purely for its customer list. Perhaps it was DEC.
Just a correction: feudalism is *very* different from capitalism (at least the standard definition of private property and free markets).
My point in writing that was that the Marxist understanding of capitalism, which I think is the definition used most-often in American pop culture, actually describes feudalism better than capitalism. I usually say "free market" instead of "capitalism" because most Marxists are in a continual state of denial about the fact that Marxism requires eliminating free markets and economic freedom of choice more generally.
I'm not an entrepreneur, but when I have accomplished something that I was proud of, I was never interested in milking it dry or doing the same kind of thing forever. I alway wanted to move on to something new and different. Perhaps that's a general human tendency. The founders of large companies, having created something successful, may, by and large, feel free to sell out or retain significant ownership but then move on to the next thing.
Right. To be explicit about what brought this up, I think this is a huge problem with Google - I think they made a great search engine, then went on to make a few other decent things like docs, but then doubled down on creating an increasing number of increasingly mediocre products while neglecting their core products, which are gradually declining in quality, and that this is bad for both their users and their stock price. They do this because they are emotionally attached to the idea of being a startup that creates new things, but this is bad and would be solved by more cold-hearted shareholder capitalism.
The internal mechanics of bonuses push that trend in google. Very few people want to work on the search engine, because it is considered tall and all had, and not exciting. Anyway most of the bonuses go to new projects if they are looking successful, once a project starts to not be so successful it is abandoned internally and nobody wants to work there, because you don’t get bonuses from working on old and maintained projects. So internally Google people are always moving around to the greatest new thing, abandoning the old thing. Which explains google+, its rise and fall.
You are underestimating how much work goes into maintaining ad revenue for google. They pay apple double digit billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iOS. Chrome and Android both basically exist for that reason. Also in my estimations Youtube and Google maps are probably each as important to the world as Google search.
So to be clear here, I've actually worked at Google and have a rough idea of how much effort goes into maintenance vs creating new products. Some effort does go into maintenance, it's true, but also there's a whole lot of effort that goes into refactoring/changing existing code in working products into new forms that don't work better (and are often actively worse) because it makes employees look good on their perf reviews if they've done a lot of activity.
YouTube already existed before being bought by Google, and if anything has probably declined in quality to the user since Google started optimising it for addictiveness.
Android was also acquired by Google. That doesn't change the fact that they grew it enormously. My niece is a surgeon and she watches Youtube videos of surgeries she's never done before before performing them. When I went to the motorcycle mechanic the mechanic was watching a youtube video of the repair he was doing. Youtube is something that has had an enormously positive impact whether or not people want to quibble with details of how its run. If anything Google's incompetence in optimizing it for addictiveness compared to say TikTok has been a lucky blessing.
So here's the thing: Founders are incentivized to want to grow the value of the company, often regardless of profits. This makes sense early on because when the company is worth $0 the only thing you need is to make it worth more than $0. But when you have Facebook or Google and the Founder is still the leader and a major shareholder they still have the same incentive. Additionally, people who are good at growing companies are usually good at deploying capital and not at saving it. Private Equity people do things like calculate whether having snacks in the conference room is a justifiable expense. Startup founders tend to be less focused on minor economizing.
To put it as simply as possible: 13% of Facebook (Meta) is owned by Zuckerberg. Facebook has roughly a $450 billion market cap and $40 billion net income. Let's pretend 100% of net income gets distributed as profits. If Zuckerberg raises the net income by 10% he gets an extra 500 million (4 billion * 13%). If Zuckerberg raises the valuation by 10% he gets an extra $6 billion (45 billion * 13%). Plus Zuckerberg made his money growing Facebook, not running the firm super lean to maximize profits, so it's both what he wants to do and what he's professionally good at.
Lichess?
I've noticed that most people who try to explain why we sleep, say it's got to do with the brain–to prune useless memories, consolidate useful ones, or <insert technobabble here> and thus grant us creativity.
But the qualia that directs us to try to sleep is tiredness. Hunger, the qualia which directs us to eat, arises when we haven't eaten recently. It seems probable that the qualia that directs us towards sleep is likewise caused by some deficiency which sleep remedies. But what causes tiredness is not thinking, but acting, with our muscles.
Almost no mental activity makes me tired. I get a qualia which I might call fatigue when I play an intense game of chess, but it isn't tiredness. It doesn't make me want to sleep; it just makes me want to stop playing chess. And chess is the only mental activity I can think of which gives me this feeling, maybe because it's the only difficult mental activity I engage in which doesn't interest me much. I've been in long, mentally brutal mathematics competitions, like the Putnam, and they rarely if ever fatigued me. I, and I think other people, fall asleep easily after a day of physical labor; but I must discipline myself to go to bed after a day of hard mental labor, or I'll keep on working until 3AM.
You might object that some people get to sleep by reading or listening to audio recordings. But they don't get to sleep by reading or listening to exciting stories; they read something familiar, or (like my mother) listen to recordings of sermons by monotonous Northern Baptists (also known as "the frozen chosen"). I nearly fall asleep whenever I try reading in the bathtub, but that isn't because it's mentally challenging; it's because the bathtub relaxes my muscles.
So I have a strong prior expectation that the primary function of sleep should have more to do with re-energizing our muscles than our brains. Could it be that all this focus on sleep as refreshing our brains is a result of a bias to value the mind above the body?
It's now known that the brain also gets "cleaned," literally. I recently read in a source I thought credible that portions of the brain, i.e., some brain cells, shrink during sleep to allow better circulation of the cerebro-spinal fluid, which cleans out waste and toxins.
Might ALL cells shrink, to allow better clearage by lymphatic circulation?
I saw an argument that sleep helps people solve problems simply by making them forget. It gets them out of their rut. People interpret this as creativity, but the argument claimed it was purely negative. Similarly, "solving a problem in the shower." All I remember is this hypothesis, but there was an actual argument with claims about specific predictions.
Mental effort and learning are different. Chess professionals consume a lot of glucose playing in a tournament, but they probably learn more from deliberate practice. The hypothesis that sleep cleans out the metabolic waste products from the thinking is different from the hypothesis that dreaming helps learning.
I am rather skeptical that "solving a problem in the shower" is purely negative. In sleep, our experiences are replayed and transferred from short-term memory (hippocampus) to long-term memory (neocortex). It is pretty well established that this is a "positive" process. For example, when you learn vocabulary, then your performance improves through sleeping, compared to being busy with other things.
However, there is a hypothesis that goes into a similar direction, the homeostatic sleep hypothesis (HSH). The synapses in the brain all have a certain strengths, and "learning" is mostly adapting these strengths. During the day, the average strength goes (slightly) up, and during sleep it goes down again to baseline. The HSH builds on that and says that the learning mechanism that is activate during day can't keep the brain "in balance", and that sleep serves some renormalization purpose. (Probably not the REM sleep which consolidates and transfers memory.) The synapses need to be within a certain range to keep the brain in homeostasis, in a range where it can operate well. If the synapses end up being too strong, then you get epileptic seizures, which is bad.
But there are tons of effects of sleeping. As you say, cleaning out metabolic waste is probably also a form of maintenance that happens during sleep. We have no idea how to rank them into more or less important/urgent effects of sleep.
Sure, sleep helps with learning, but does it promote creativity? Can we distinguish what these hypotheses predict? Phil mentioned the creativity hypothesis, but I'm not sure how popular it is. Maybe I should focus on shower creativity.
Yes, the creativity hypothesis is a standard assumption, because it matches well the experience of many people. But the evidence is not much stronger than that. People do try to make experiments about it, but in this field it's generally pretty hard to find experiments that exclude competing explanations.
> It seems probable that the qualia that directs us towards sleep is likewise caused by some deficiency which sleep remedies. But what causes tiredness is not thinking, but acting, with our muscles.
Part of what makes us want to sleep is a build up of Adenosine. So it may not be a desire for something as much as having too much of something.
As a person who performs a lot of physical work, I can totally relate to that. When I work really hard, I sleep up to an hour more than when I work lighter. I assume this is the origin of the advice that people should sleep 8 hours every night: In the beginning of the 20th century many people worked so hard that they needed to sleep 8 hours. Currently, when most people work less hard, 7 hours is much more accurate.
You may want to distinguish between the telos of sleep and its mechanism. I believe the latter is controlled by a number of biochemical clocks, e.g. the melatonin cycle:
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/role-melatonin-circadian-rhythm-sleep-wake-cycle
These cycles appear to mostly chug along regardless of what the brain or body might be doing: people with regular bedtimes end up being sleepy at the same time whether or not they've done a load of calculus or binge-watched Buffy all day, and whether they ran a half marathon or sat on their ass. It's just a biochemical clock.
But the "why" of sleep -- what purpose it serves in humans, why we do it at all -- is another question, and need have no relationship to the mechanism.
Sleep is pretty much universal in animals with higher (and even not so high) brain functions. This is unusual and indicates that its function is really, really important.
Now *what exactly* is important about it? Is it physical or mental?
In dolphins, they would drown if the whole brain sleeps. So the two hemisphere take turns in sleeping. Some sea birds continue flying while sleeping. So I don't think that "bodily" sleeping is as universal as "brain" sleeping. I would guess that the non-negotiable part about sleeping is mental.
Of course, for humans and most animals, sleeping has also a ton of physical effects, and these are very important, too. I just don't think they are as non-negotiable as the mental effects.
Also, if you look at heavily sleep-deprived persons (2-3 days), then the physical state deteriorates a bit, they are not quite as strong and fast. But the thing that becomes really critical is the state of mind. I would also guess that this is the reason why you die after too much time without sleep, not that the muscles or the gustatory system stops working.
I think Melvin had a good response to this. Evolved systems tend to be overloaded and used towards multiple purposes. Human sleep cycles tend to function on a circadian rhythm, so it's not simply a matter of exertion.
They've done experiments where humans are forced to stay awake and avoid REM sleep for long periods of time. There are definitely negative mental effects including effects related to memory. Some of the sleep deprived hallucinations seem to mimic dreaming while awake.
"Cognitive impairment.
The second documented consequence of sleep deprivation is performance deterioration, especially cognitive impairment. Intriguingly, there is great inter-individual variability in the susceptibility of humans to the effects of sleep deprivation, and subjects whose performance is little impaired by one task may show great impairment in another task [55,56]. Partial sleep restriction also impairs cognitive performance, although subjects may not realize that they are impaired [57,58]. Cognitive impairment is easier to study in humans than in animals, but there is now evidence that both acute sleep loss and sleep restriction affect cognitive function in flies [59], birds [60], and rodents (e.g., [61])."
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060216#s5
I suppose that you could argue that the mental effects are secondary to some kind of physical health. A brain hemorrhage would be 'mental' in effect, but not caused by neurons, pruning, etc. It would be fundamentally cardiovascular in origin. However there are relationships between memory and REM sleep.
"The increases in REM sleep during the specific time periods predicted later memory recall and reliably separated between learners and nonlearners"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768102/
I think it's silly to try to explain sleep with reference to higher brain functions, simply because the vast majority of other terrestrial vertebrates (and some fish and invertebrates too) sleep. Does a koala or a sloth sleep twenty hours per day because its puny brain needs all that time to process four hours' worth of memories of leaf-chewing? Heck no, they sleep because being awake costs energy and they don't need to do it. Most terrestrial animals are specialised either for day or night and there's little value to being active for the other half of the day.
Having said that, once you've built scheduled downtime into your system, you wind up using it for everything; everything is easier to maintain and rebuild when you're not actively using it. So once sleep is established as part of an animal's lifestyle you'd expect it to be used for all sorts of things. Your brain does some very important tasks during sleep, and it starts going wrong if it doesn't sleep, but that doesn't mean that sleep is _for_ the brain, any more than you can say that airliners land for the purpose of having their seatback pockets vacuumed.
"the qualia that directs us to try to sleep is tiredness" I think I disagree with this. Feeling physically tired is very different from feeling sleepy, for me. Sleepiness is mental.
Huh, well not me. When I've been sleep deprived, it's my brain that seems to need to shut down. If I'm tired and have to stay awake, I have these micro sleeps. (I 'sleep' for a few (maybe 5-15) seconds.. have all this dream stuff which seems like hours, and then wake up and notice only a few seconds have passed, and I can't wait to get to my bus stop, get off, walk home and collapse.
You are very unusual, I suspect, if you only get tired from physical exercise. Try not exercising for a few days and then staying up all night for the next few.
Does anyone know the origin(s?) of wedding arches in non-Jewish weddings? I tried googling around for it and only found vague and unsubstantiated claims.
Not sure if it's kosher to post hiring posts here, so please delete if I'm breaking The Code.
Homepage: https://rainlab.co.jp/
We're basically a small team of remote mercenary IT engineers, and we're looking for a new member or two. Stuff we work on covers a broad range; think everything on the spectrum from a high-performance network block device implementation, to Yet Another iPhone App, to CI/CD infrastructure deployment and management.
The base office is located in Tokyo, Japan, but we're fully remote. As long as there's reasonable overlap with JST, we're mostly agnostic about your physical location.
Members have considerable flexibility in how they design their work schedule as well as moderate flexibility in choosing what to work on. We try to shoot for a 3 day work week, plus as much socializing and leisure hacking together as desired. Even with this schedule, pay falls around the 70th percentile for Japan. It's a pretty sweet setup.
If two or more of the following blurbs fit your autobiography synopsis, then we'd definitely like to hear from you:
- Hacker at heart
- Actively works on "soft skills"
- Mad Japanese skillz
If you're interested, please contact me at this address specification:
local-part: wilson
domain: rainlab.co.jp
I think that listing the pay in some currency per some time unit instead of as a percentile would be more useful for everyone who isn't fully familiar with the income distribution of Japan.
Do you find a lot of English speaking programmers who also speak Japanese? I'd always assumed they were rare and mostly worked at Crunchyroll or for the big companies like Sony.
I certainly don't have distributional data, but in the right subcultures, the intersection feels not terribly rare. However, the sigma is pretty low, so a combination of high-level Japanese+English+IT skill become quite lucrative.
How does it become quite lucrative? Aren't salaries lower in Japan? I speak some foreign languages but I've mostly been drawn to working in English on American projects because they seem to pay much better than anything abroad or even foreign adjacent. So I'm curious how you put this together.
Some of our higher earning members are in 90th percentile of Japanese annual salary, which is about twice the median here. And that, on a 3-day work week, to boot.
Income distribution by the MHLW: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/k-tyosa/k-tyosa09/2-2.html
If you live in Japan, this provides exceptionally good financial stability.
Of course, we cannot compete with 250k USD salaries at the moment, though we do have relationships with individuals charging around 300 USD equivalent per hour, so the ceiling is pretty high.
Double the median Japanese salary is about ten million yen, isn't it? So about $100k. (Google says $70k.) That seems about right for what I meant. Still, $300 USD per hour is definitely attractive.
At any rate, I don't speak Japanese or live in Japan. So while I've worked with international Japanese/Korean/etc clients before I'm not sure if I'm a fit. I know there are some Japanese and English speaking people on DSL but I don't know if they're devs.
Please repeat the question in Japanese. Google Translate is your friend. ;-)
Google Translate is definitely helpful for raw information transfer in many cases. What I'm fishing for with "mad Japanese skillz" beyond simple language ability is cultural awareness and soft skills. Most of our clients are Japanese, so being able to directly handle those relationships is a huge boon.
Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto?
おいおい、僕を誰だと思ってるの？日本語を話すアニメオタク？
Copy pasted from my own question on Economics Stack Exchange, I wonder if anyone here can give me an answer.
"Title: Why do stock returns seem to be uncorrelated with interest rate?
Since expected return of stock is risk-free rate plus risk premium, intuitively they should be correlated. Of course the size of risk premium is not constant, but it's hard to imagine why risk premium would move in a way that almost exactly cancels out the change in interest rate.
Questions:
1. Is the data correct(are they really uncorrelated)? Searching google scholar suggests so, but this is pretty hard to believe so I wouldn't be surprised if I was missing something important.
2. Are there any consensus, or at least a good theory, on why this happens?
3. Real life implications - as a retail investor with pretty strong faith in EMH[Efficient Market Hypothesis], is it rational for me to move my money from stock market to bank account because the interest rate went up?"
They're with 99%+ certainty not uncorrelated. Only my 2cts, take it for what you want. I didn't read the article but I know this for a fact. Would have to be a very convincing argument and dataset to make any dent in that believe.
It's pretty hard to measure. There are the discrete jumpy main rate decisions by e.g. the FOMC and ECB, but then there is also a more slow-burning expectation effect of those, leading to the weird scenario that a rate rise is interpreted as a rate decrease relative to expectations. You'd need to take all of that into account properly.
To convince yourself that at least some relation exists just check out the last 20 FOMC interest rate announcements and look at what the stock indices did at that time. Rates have a huge influence.
Rates effects are about unfathomable amounts of money. This is not one of the areas in which markets are inefficient.
I think you misunderstood my question. A "change" in interest rate, or expectation of change, will definitely influence the market. I'm talking about the equilibrium state, where long term interest rate is fixed. Is there a difference in expected return where interest rate is fixed at, say, 2% vs 5%, given that everything else is the same?
1.) They don't seem to be uncorrelated. They're anti-correlated. Higher interest rates mean lower stock returns. Now, this doesn't always mean an absolute change since other things besides interest rates set the price. For example, inflation tends to push nominal returns up.
2.) They're anti-correlated because higher interest rates make alternative investments more attractive and generally reduce confidence in companies and economic activity more generally by raising the cost of capital.
3.) You can take it as a signal but there's no guarantee the net effect will be without a more comprehensive analysis. For example, if deficit spending, investor/consumer confidence, and inflation remain high and this outpaces inflation it might make stocks continue to be more attractive.
Also, the expected return is the sum of all return scenarios multiplied by their probability. The equity risk premium is calculated by subtracting the risk free return from that. While you can mathematically back-calculate it that way you don't generally. Instead you calculate the ER and then subtract risk free return to see how much better the investment performs over sticking it in an index fund or government bond or whatever.
The expectation of rising interest rates will lower stock values, but once the interest rate has changed, surely everything would already have been priced in.
For example, let the risk free rate be 10%, permanently. Stock returns have historically been 7~9%. According to your logic, expected returns will be even lower since the interest rate is high. But then why would anyone invest in stocks in this situation? Shouldn't the stock price drop so that the expected return would equal 10%+risk premium?
Oh and it looks like you're right about them being anti-correlated. I must have misread the conclusion part in the study. That just makes it even stranger though.
REAL stock returns have historically been ~7%. Nominal returns have been more like 10%. Also, the traditional risk free rate of return is usually something like a bond or a treasury which is more like 3% nominal. So you can see why: 10% is higher than 3%. And as 3% becomes 5% it becomes relatively more attractive.
But yes, if you could get a 10% risk free rate of return you would expect money to flow out of stocks and into that investment since it's strictly superior being risk free and having an equivalent nominal return. If it can absorb infinite money then the stock market would be significantly hollowed out as has happened, semi-analogously, with index funds eating the entire market.
Since returns on stocks are primarily, in many cases exclusively, based on the future price of the stock I'm not sure why you think it would operate like a yield instrument like a t-note. If you buy a stock and the price drops you have negative returns. You don't get an increasing rate of return on a dropping stock unless the stock pays out dividends and the dividends remain constant while the price drops. And even on dividend stocks, future sale value is most of the return. If the market always made it so that any individual company returned 10%+risk premium then you'd expect everyone to always make money in the stock market since everything would at all times be going up... You can (as through an index fund) aggregate a bunch of stocks to basically get a long run market growth. But that's because you're spreading risk among hundreds or thousands of bets and then expecting it to still fluctuate over time.
"Since returns on stocks are primarily, in many cases exclusively, based on the future price of the stock I'm not sure why you think it would operate like a yield instrument like a t-note."
That is very different from what I know. Doesn't the value of a stock fundamentally come from its future dividend? Some stocks don't pay dividends, but even for them there is the expectation for dividends in the future. Surely, all else being equal, cheaper stocks are more attractive investments.
So my logic is basically:
1. Interest rate goes up
2. Stock valuations drop
3. Stock "yields"(in a more abstract sense than t-note, as you pointed out) go up
4. They go up until expected return becomes risk free rate+risk premium
Can you tell me where the problem is?
How do people who believe in a mind-body division explain the effect of alcohol?
Like this perhaps...?
When you watch a person on TV that person isn't really inside that little box. Instead, a signal representing an aspect of that person is received by the TV, decoded by the electronics and presented on the screen. If you mess with the electronics* then you can change the way that the signal is mapped to the screen, changing the image.
The same is true of the mind. The physical structures of the brain decode the remote consciousness** and present it to the physical world. If you change the brain (with a quart of ale for example) then you change the decoding and the consciousness to physical reality mapping changes.
* This works better with analogue electronics, but older analogue TVs usually have cathode ray tubes with alarmingly powerful capacitors that will kill you if you poke around with them, so don't.
** This remote consciousness isn't necessarily 'you'. You are just the small aspect of that larger consciousness that your physical brain filters out. Just as a radio receiver is tuned to pass only a narrow band of all the EM radiation that impinges on its antenna, your brain only passes a small portion of the larger (universal?) consciousness of which you are a part.
I don’t hold this view so I hope I’m not straw-manning, but as it has been explained to me- think of it as getting a phone call through a poor connection. The other person is there, speaking clearly, and a separate entity; but issues with the physical devices used for transition result in static and dropped words.
I imagine the question is more about buzz or lowering inhibitions or personality changes rather than lowering coordination/enunciation, so amphetamines or MDMA would be harder to dodge - drugs that make people bond and *love* each other or change feelings or personality being harder to explain away with the noisy mind-body phone connection.
Alcohol is a spirit.
Sounds spiritual.
But, seriously... that's the main contending answer to why we call alcohol "spirits". To a spirit/body dichotomist, alcohol clearly affects the spirit more than the body. It might have been in the 19th century that we began thinking about substances mechanistically, as chemicals, rather than animistically, as having essential properties granted by a kind of spirit or soul.
Even today, most users of LSD and mescaline still seem to think it provides spiritual insight.
I'm sure I read somewhere that certain cultures think of alcohol intoxication as a way of communicating with the gods.
The below is my perspective on H1Bs after having been involved in screening, interviewing and hiring software engineering candidates since 2014. Also, I advise other companies, and I have personal & professional connections with managers at other firms in the US tech industry. The dirty secret about H1Bs is that the vast majority of them are….. completely subpar engineers- like unhireable not only by a VC-backed startup, but unhireable by a completely boring ‘normal’ company like a bank or marketing agency. They almost always bomb technical interviews. They’re simply not ‘skilled labor’, as their visa would suggest!
They almost all have at least an impressive-sounding Master’s degree in Computer Science, but if you look more carefully all of the bad ones earned it from a college you’ve never heard of (North Dakota State, West Virginia State, etc.)- which makes me think that they’re basically running diploma mills, charging poor families in 3rd world countries very high tuition for a shot at the US H1B lottery. No, an advanced degree does not make an engineer, but they are much less able to pass interviews than a native with a Bachelor’s from even a subpar school.
All of the H1Bs who are low-quality engineers have the same job- working for a contracting firm that does some kind of outsourced development for gigantic, Fortune 200 companies. That’s it. All of their resumes follow the same format and look exactly the same. A small minority of H1Bs are actually good engineers- these are the ones who go directly to Amazon, FB, Google etc. (Strangely, you can easily tell them because they don’t follow the same resume format as the bad ones! I don’t get this at all).
Contrary to very widespread belief, I don’t find that their wages are particularly low either.
I don’t take any pleasure in reporting this, because I have vanilla center-left politics, am not a nativist, and strongly want more skilled immigration here to the US. I am just here to report that as someone in the industry, under our present system, 90+% of H1Bs are just not that- they are not ‘skilled’. I’m not 100% sure how we ended up here, or what a solution might be. Maybe visas could be parceled out via a bidding system based on what companies offer the candidate, so we use market pricing to determine who is actually worth being awarded a skilled immigrant visa. Just something to keep in mind when you hear libertarians hyperventilating about ‘we should staple a Green Card to the diploma of everyone who gets a STEM degree here’. I don’t personally have a huge issue with that, but it just encourages diploma mills (of course a middle class family in India will spend their life savings to get their child to a US college), and we are just not getting the world’s best & brightest under the current system
>"Just something to keep in mind when you hear libertarians hyperventilating about ‘we should staple a Green Card to the diploma of everyone who gets a STEM degree here’."
The implicit assumption in "a STEM degree *here*" is that ABET accreditation (or similar) determines what counts, thereby weeding out diploma mills.
I have a model where this comes from.
There are a few very good universities (e.g. Oxbridge, some Paris ones, Munich, Zurich), where students get a really good education. The classes are just very good there because everyone from the professors to teaching assistants understand the material really well, and courses and curricula are also well-designed. I'm convinced that at my university, the engineering and CS students learn things that are not just interesting, but that are very valuable for their future work.
Bad universities try to copy the system, but they have only a superficial understanding. In particular, they are not able to copy or re-invent the thousand details that are needed to teach the students useful skills.
Example from maths (though that education is less job-oriented by design): students from good universities learn and understand what a limit, a vector space, and a derivative is. All useful insights, and all absolutely essential within maths. Students from bad universities learn rules for vector manipulation and how to compute derivatives. Completely useless outside of math, and not even thrilling within math. Stuff that students forget within days after the exam. But superficially, it looks like both sets of students learned the same thing.
I think the same happens at high school, but on teacher level. Good teachers actually provide education to their students; bad teachers, following the same curriculum, provide lessons that are pretty much worthless.
There is a twofold reason why copying works so poorly: for one, a lot of institutions and individuals don't have strong motivation or incentives to improve. Bad universities still work as diploma mills, and teachers often don't have any incentive to be good except their intrinsic motivation (which does suffice for some of them). But even if people are motivated, it's still *difficult* to copy good teaching. For high school teachers, it does help a lot if they got a good education themselves. But to provide that is a pretty big investment: they need to obtain a good understanding of their subject and its didactics, and lots of practice and feedback with their teaching. And the main issue is that those teachers need to get *good* education, so many countries face a hen-and-egg problem.
Background: I have a lot of experience with several European university systems, like UK, Germany, Switzerland - as a student at good and bad universities, as an instructor at good and bad universities, and as someone involved in designing curricula. I have no experience with the US system, so that could be different. But I suspect that it's similar.
I when it comes to STEM subjects i doubt there can be that much difference. I graduated from a university in Ireland and mastered in Oxbridge along with Oxbridge and other grads. All at the same level. As for the rest if the students. Not very bright is how i’d sum it up.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with the confounder - people who are smarter tend to go to more prestigious schools and also tend to be better at software engineering. Caplan estimates that 80% of education is signaling - that seems right in my experience, since very little of what you learn in a CS degree is directly relevant to actual SWE work.
There is certainly a signalling effect. Whether it is 80% depends on the country and the subject. In maths, it's close to 100%. In law or medicine, it's close to 0%. Is it 80% in CS? In the UK perhaps (I am rather not convinced), in Germany definitely not. Germany has a less extreme distribution of quality in universities (the top universities are not as good as the top UK ones, but a mid-tier German one is better than a mid-tier UK one). Probably that's because the UK has a history of producing university ranking, so the ranking is legible to prospective students. The ranking in Germany is much less legible, and students in Germany select much less by ranking.
Perhaps we are also not talking about the same thing. Does the 80% mean "the difference in software engineering skill between a graduate from a top university and a graduate from a mid-tier university is four times larger than between a mid-tier graduate and a high school graduate without college"? I don't know your metric, but it sounds pretty wrong in mine. Half of the CS students can't even write code when entering college.
Law and medicine are both career where where you need to pass government imposed bars to practice. That's signaling.
If you would allow people to practice medicine and law without those legal restrictions a lot of what's taught in med school and law school would also be irrelevant to the day to day practice of those professions.
I'm confused. Did you want to write that the bars for law and medicine are *not* signalling?
The 80% means something like: -- If you took the students who completed the university and magically made them forget everything they learned at the university, they would still retain 80% of what makes them different from the random person on the street, from the perspective of the future employer.
This answers the paradox of how it is possible that university graduates are clearly more competent (on average) than random people on the street, when most of what they learned at university is irrelevant for their jobs.
The naive assumption is that the university graduates are better because of what they learned there.
The cynical assumption is that the university graduates are better simply because they passed the exams. Notice that this would actually separate the smart from the stupid even if the universities taught literally nothing.
Caplan concludes that the naive answer explains 20% and the cynical answer explains 80% of what makes the university graduates better.
I see. That's a subtly different interpretation than what I suggested.
It still strikes my as overly pessimistic. Even without Associate degrees, almost 40% of young people in the US obtain a college degree. So the college degree can signal at best "I am in the top 40% of the US population". Uhm, that is a signal, but not a strong one. And THAT is supposed to be stronger than 4 years of education?
I understand that signalling could be 80% for top colleges, because there are much fewer students there, so the signal is much stronger. But in general? Is the idea is that the signal of a college degree used to work in the old days, and nowadays it does not work anymore? And that people are just slow, and haven't reacted yet to the change?
Or is it that students who specifically choose CS signal that they are generally good at CS, and students who choose law are generally good at law? Being STEM-affine is a real thing, so that signal could be stronger. But I would have guessed that people who don't like STEM simply just don't apply for these jobs, so they don't compete in the market. And then the signal within the group of job applicants is weak again.
'the college degree can signal at best "I am in the top 40% of the US population"'
The percentage being so high is precisely why the utility is primarily from signaling. Back when a much smaller proportion of the population had degrees, companies couldn't afford to simply throw the resumes of anyone without a degree in the trash, because that would eliminate too many candidates. Now they can, because that still leaves them with far more candidates than they have time to interview.
Caplan's analogy is if, during a concert, some members of the audience started to stand up to see the stage better, but then everyone around them started to stand up as well because the people in front of them were blocking their view, and eventually everyone is standing. Everyone is less comfortable but can see the stage no better than before.
I think most of what you've said is mostly only true of H1Bs from poor countries and particularly the Indian subcontinent. If you meet an H1B from Ireland or New Zealand or Belgium then they're generally exactly the sort of skilled professionals that the visa scheme is designed for.
The obvious solution seems to be to rebalance the H1B scheme to issue more visas to people from rich countries and fewer to people from poor countries.
This is incredibly easily resolvable in a win-win way - just switch from a lottery system to giving out the quota to the highest salary applications.
Also I'd add the the minimum legal salary for h1bs is still well above the median American salary - I'm sure a lot of them aren't Amazon material and a few are unusually bad, but on average they're still better than background and needed to make the economy run (otherwise the companies hiring them would either stop hiring them or go bankrupt).
Yes, the quota is what I had in mind. If the number of H1Bs is limited, companies can bid for visa holders and they are granted every year in reverse order, from highest on down.
I think the argument is that rather than bringing foreigners to 'make the economy run', we train native-born Americans to do contract Java work for Wells Fargo, AT&T, American Airlines, etc. (I.e. what 95% of the H1Bs are doing now). I am not personally into nativist arguments like this, but I can see the angle, especially politically. Realistically there's probably a hard cap somewhere as to how many visas can be granted every year, so why not save them for the Elon Musks and Sundar Pichais of the world, and save the contract work stuff for natives
I wouldn't be surprised to see the bad driving out the good, in this as well as other areas. But back in 1997 or so, my Indian colleagues on H1Bs seemed pretty decent, and likewise the French guy who may or may not still have been on an H1B.
Perhaps the opportunities for software engineers in their home countries have improved, and/or their perception of costs and risks of coming to the US has increased, such that the better ones are staying home, going to Canada, etc. etc..
Or maybe it's some commonality among the companies who've dealt with. (Location?)
They definitely aren't going to Canada, at least the high-skill ones. Salaries in the US are dramatically (~3x) higher.
The ones who graduated from an IIT tend to be very smart. Often one dimensional (IIT doesn't really emphasize anything other than STEM so don't expect *any* humanities knowledge), but pretty smart.
The downside of selecting people this way is that you wind up with people who are excellent at answering exam questions but not great at anything else.
The sort of personality you need to spend your entire youth studying really hard to excel in one set of exams doesn't necessarily translate to being able to think up creative solutions to new problems.
My IIT friend has also noted that IIT students tend to be either brilliant or grinds. Both are valuable, but grinds are much more common (which is probably true everywhere). Even bright grinds are often sufficient because few problems are truly unique. There is a gap, though, if the answer can’t be looked up.
There's been a lot of research into just what "IQ" or "g" is, and how it correlates with creativity. Conclusions are mixed, but there is general agreement that higher IQ correlates positively with higher creativity. The disagreement is over the shape of the curve of that correlation. One popular theory is that there is a threshold IQ of 120, beyond which IQ no longer correlates with creativity. A more-recent review, which I have read only the summary of, gives a more-complex picture: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245030070_The_relationship_between_intelligence_and_creativity_New_support_for_the_threshold_hypothesis_by_means_of_empirical_breakpoint_detection
In any case, I expect selecting students based on answering exam questions to give better results than selecting them by how rich their parents are, what their political affiliation is, or how politically active they are.
Agreed. My understanding is that, unlike the American ivy leagues, Asian countries in general believe in using standardized test scores, and nothing else, to decide who to send to the best schools.
Test scores are one thing - personally, I think they're a much better option than the American system - but if cheating on said tests is rampant..... (I have heard it is in India, but don't have any personal knowledge)
There's also some flexibility in *what* to test - eg. in Australia, University entrance is decided purely by test scores, but those end-of-high-school scores are the sum of 6 different subjects so there's a limit to how hyperspecialized someone can be and still get top marks.
I have friends who went to IIT. Test scores are how IIT decides admissions. I *think* China and Japan do the same thing for their elite schools.
My best IIT friend has commented on his lack of humanities (literature, history, ...) knowledge. He doesn't view the lack as a virtue.
I’ve been wondering if AI could offload the GI part to people and become an AGI in a non trivial way.
Most AGI definitions require it to be agentic in some way - it can encounter a novel situation, gather information, and then apply that information to handle the situation. If a human is the only agentic part of the system, then you're basically just describing a guy with a computer. It would make more sense to describe the pairing as "a human offloading the boring calculation work to a machine" than "an AGI that offloads the decision-making to a human."
(And sure, some AI safety people do acknowledge that humans equipped with narrow AI could become dangerous long before AGI becomes a thing, but that's really more a human safety problem than an AI safety problem.)
I do wonder if you could maybe split the load, like maybe the AI recognizes when it doesn't have enough information to solve a problem and asks the human to provide appropriate training data, so that both of them participate in the learning and decision making process, but I'm not aware of anything in that vein currently.
I was thinking of the AI being less of a tool, and more of a parasite.
Something along the lines of toxoplasmosis, that makes mice attracted to cat’s urine.
It’s the AI hijacking something in our brain/society to perpetuate itself, or advance its own interests above those of ourselves. And that the resulting parasite-host entity can be considered an agent, smarter than the guy and the computer.
But how would it "know" to do it in the first place, if it's not capable of planning? Just selection pressure?
On a long enough timeline such systems of parasitic, brainless narrow AIs with humans as unwitting pawns might dominate (and this is a really cool sci fi setting). I don't think this kind of capability can evolve in the short window between now and true AGI, assuming true AGI is possible.
EDIT: also, corporations as unaligned AI
That’s really interesting. Can you say a little more about what you mean by offloading the GI part to people?
Something along the lines of an AI using people as a subroutine, with people’s lizard brains as an interface.
So that the AI can offload things it doesn’t know how to do.
A human with a calculator is awfully intelligent at intricate math problems, compared to either the human or the calculator.
So now we just need to get the calculator to use the human, like a human would use a calculator? I have no idea if that's viable, given the processing you're trying to offload is very correlated with high-level decision-making and goal-setting, but it's an interesting idea.
Isn't Recaptcha basically doing this as a way of producing ML training data?
I’m imagining expressing the AI goals aligned with something simple our lizard brain cares about, and letting ourselves figure it out from there.
Silly example: Maximize the number of paper clips, by making hoarding paper clips a symbol of status and identity, via an AI that is unreasonably good at social media campaigns and makes it the single most important issue in everyone’s life.
Maybe that particular AI cannot bootstrap itself, since it cannot figure out out how to get from the goal to the narrow AI, but once it’s set up and running, it could be reasonably thought of as a paper clip maximizer.
> Maximize the number of paper clips, by making hoarding paper clips a symbol of status and identity, via an AI that is unreasonably good at social media campaigns and makes it the single most important issue in everyone’s life.
Back in my anarchist days this was +/- exactly what people meant by "the system".
i have a small 'based' but rat friendly dinner club here in austin. drop me a line if you are interested
On that note, if anyone wants to form a small, based, rat-friendly club in the midlands, UK, hit me up.
"i have a small 'based' but rat friendly dinner club here in austin..."
I'm not in Austin and i don't like rats ... :-)
This sounds like the Harlan Ellison story about when he was on The Dating Game.
I though I knew most things about Harlan Ellison, but I never heard this story - please share!
The story is from "The Other Glass Teat", a collection of weekly columns Ellison wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A longish excerpt ...
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The cavalier treatment [at the auditions] that had been mild and barely acceptable in Barris’ offices, was magnified a thousandfold. We were treated like cheap foreign labor turned out to repair ten miles of bad road. Pushed here, ordered there, chivied and demeaned from the moment I (and the other two guys who were to appear with me) entered the studio.
And they made a small error. Probably because it was one of their first tapings and they hadn’t gotten the system down pat yet. I saw, actually saw the girl I was to try and coerce into going out with me.
Oh, Jesus!
Bear in mind, friends, that at that time in my life, I was a shallow, superficial, callow youth who judged women not by the enlightened standards of integrity, intelligence, and humanity inculcated in me by Mary Reinholz and Anne De Wolfe and other females of the Women’s Liberation Movement, but by wholly shameful considerations of physical beauty. Turn of ankle, height of bust, fairness of face, luster of hair, absence of moustache…these (oh, shame, shame) were my yardsticks. And by such judgments, in those days I would have decided the girl was considerably less than desirable.
Today, I’d simply call her a waste of time.
Anyhow, we were being hectored from one small waiting room to another, and we passed this peach of perfection in the corridor. My eyes widened in horror as might those of a Transylvanian peasant meeting Lawrence Talbot, The Wolf Man, in a foggy forest.
We were quickly hurtled from sight of her. But my knees had begun to shake.
Finally, we were brought out onstage, seated on high stools, and—the warm-up having been done—the show got under way.
I’ll cut to the payoff.
Here we are, these two other guys and myself, behind a modernistic backset, with pseudo-Herb Alpert music rattling, and they introduced the charmer I’d seen in the hall.
She sits down and asks the first question: “Number One, describe the worst of your bad habits.” So Number One, who looked like an out-of-work Via Veneto pimp, replied, “I snore. But you won’t have to worry about that because I know I’ll stay awake with you.” He thought that was really dynamite repartee. Then Number Two—a collegiate football hero if ever there lived one—denigrated himself with his bad habit of drinking beer and watching sports on tv every Saturday and Sunday. But he assured her that in the light of her wonderfulness, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was nowhere. Then she got to me, Number Three. “Number Three,” she said, “do you have any bad habits?”
“Well, frankly, no,” I said, smiling a Huckleberry Finn smile she was the poorer for not being able to see. “My friends say I’m without flaw, if you ignore the fact that I’m an ax murderer and rapist.
“But everybody has a few minor character flaws,” I added.
There was a hushed silence from the other side of the set. Then she recovered and went on to her second question.
“Number One, describe what we’d do if you took me out, what kind of an evening you’d consider a big date.”
The Via Veneto pimp did a fast ramadoola about how she was the kind of girl who should be treated to a fancy dinner, the theater, and dancing thereafter. One could almost mentally envision this lad squiring the lady to a series of (what he thought were) high-class places like Frascatti’s, the Victory Drive-In and the then-extant Cinnamon Cinder.
Number Two opined the lady was a “down-to-earth kinda girl who’s more interested in simple things,” and he conjured up a dream date consisting of hamburgers at McDonald’s, bowling, and making out in his car at Malibu.
It wasn’t hard to beat those two efforts.
“Well,” I said, adopting a Ronald Colman voice, “for you I would plan a formal evening with you in Pucci gown and me in tuxedo. I would have the chef at Scandia prepare for us a picnic dinner of breast of guinea hen under glass and jeroboams of champagne—Taittinger’s Blanc de Blanc ’45 possibly—and then I would have us, with our dinner, chauffeured out to the city dump where, with ivory-handled .45s, we would sip bubbly and amuse ourselves by shooting rats.”
“Shooting rats?!?!” The shriek from the muffin on the other side of the set was a ghastly thing to hear.
Again, silence.
The recovery was much longer this time.
But recover she did. And proceeded through the rest of the questions concentrating on #’s 1 and 2. Number Three was conspicuous by his silence and his satisfied smirk.
As you may have gathered, by this time I was thoroughly nauseated by the whole thing. It was demeaning, it was vapid, it was like a hiring hall for dock wallopers. It removed from male and female alike any pride in self, any sense of self as worthy, any depth or loveliness. I wanted out of there.
Finally, because it became apparent that she was ignoring me, I suppose, my potential ladylove decided to include me in a final question. It was a beauty.
“Tell me, Number One,” she began, “how you would go about convincing me I should go out with you.”
I could not believe my ears. She didn’t really ask that, did she?
But she had, and he did, and I wanted to puke. Number One did a seedy Continental number unctuous with double-entendre. Then Number Two all but fell to his baggy knees pleading with this brainless excuse for a woman to go out with him. Then she got to Number Three: “Convince me, Number Three,” she said.
“Convince you, you idiot!” I snarled. “I wouldn’t go out with a nit like you if they offered me the governorship of Hawaii as inducement. You, and this whole dumb show can go take a sunbath in a cyclotron!”
And I got up and walked off.
There were screams from the stage. The director and the tape editor and the cameramen and the producer and the emcee and the advertising men and the grips and maybe even that nifty little guy, Chuck Barris, started screaming. “Burn t
hat goddamn tape!” I heard someone shriek from back out there.
“Cut! Cut! Cut!” the floor director was shouting. It was bedlam. People were running everywhichway. I couldn’t see her, but the female contestant was hawking in a dry-heave sort of way over her chest mike. The other two guys were still sitting on their stools, dumbfounded.
I saw a horde of people advancing on me from backstage, and I ran like a thief. Got away with barely my skin intact.
The show was never aired, of course. And I got word through friends (and a secretary at Barris Productions I dated occasionally) that my name was high on the list of war criminals, on a par with nonbiodegradables, lung cancer, Minnie Pearl chicken, and Hermann Goering.
Every once in a while, even today, some new recruiter for the show, not knowing my past history with the show, will turn up my name, or see me on a talk show, or read some article I’ve written, and call me, asking if I want to go on the program. I always, very conscientiously, explain to her what happened, and then suggest she go and ask the producer of the show specifically, then get back to me if they want me on again.
To date, those calls have never been returned.
You show up and Razib serves you a plate of small rats sauteed in a nice sodium hydroxide solution.
I remember a post, 85% certain it was by Scott, about a choice of two pills. One essentially wireheads you, you'll have a long life and you'll experience blissful dreams of whatever you wish the entire time, but in the real world you're in a stupor that you cannot wake up from. The other makes your emotions muted and fleeting, putting you in a permanent state of equanimity, but causes you to be undeterred by any fear, doubt, guilt or anxiety you may have had so you can pursue your goals with maximum effectiveness. Anyone know which one I mean?
It's not this one, but you might enjoy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/
I'm curious what story you're thinking of so I hope someone recognizes it!
Thanks to Dan L on the previous Open Thread I found it! https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/
I also had it completely backwards somehow.
"You didn’t plan to become the King of Saudi Arabia, per se. It just sort of happened when your demonstration of how rebels in the military might launch a coup went better than you expected. Sometimes you forget how incompetent everybody else is. You need to keep reminding yourself of that. But not right now. Right now you’re busy building your new capital. How come nobody else is any good at urban planning?"
Scott wrote this 6 years before the Line was announced.
I started a "Read The Sequences" series of meetups with my local ACX group. Has anyone else done this and if so do you have any resources to share? In particular, I'm thinking of discussion questions/topics and updated information. If anyone has written about how the cited research stands up post-replication crisis (tangent: are we "post" the replication crisis?), I would love to see it. I know there were a lot of critiques of Thinking Fast and Slow, and this seems to cite similar research in some cases. Is there anything that experts consider outdated that I should be aware of?
Probably not what you are looking for, but Stuart Ritchie https://stuartritchie.substack.com/ has written a book about the problems with scientific research and often discusses studies that failed to replicate (if I remember correctly he was involved in some of the initial psychology studies that failed to replicate ~10 years ago).
Very interesting substack. Not exactly what I was looking for but thanks for sharing.
Ritchie's book and substack are both very much worth reading! I also liked his earlier primer on IQ, but would have probably enjoyed a more in-depth treatment of the subject.
I did not run this in particular, but I ran many workshops, and if it is organized for peers, especially someone discussing something so high in complexity, the participants may enjoy being involved in the question making process. You can say that on the day, several people will be randomly asked to provide questions they prepared. Then you can ask first people to volunteer if they have especially interesting questions, and then randomly pick 1-2 people to share their questions. This way everyone is reading more carefully, as they are simultaneously coming up with questions, and they don't know if they will be asked to share, so they need to be ready just in case. It's not fool-proof, but I had good results with this method.
I like this idea. Thanks!
It occurred to me that different types of AI research mirror different ethical systems that philosophers have studied. Attempts at building AI back in the 70's were largely rule/logic based, which corresponds to deontology. Current AI, trained to minimize loss or maximize reward, corresponds to consequentialism. Attempts at AI safety seem like an effort to move in the direction of virtue ethics, whereby an AI should learn to act fairly, truthfully, reliably, etc. Is this a fruitful analogy? And if so, has this been noted before? Continuing in this vein, what does 'ideal' virtue ethical 'training' look like, both for humans and speculatively for machines?
The divide between the symbolic AI of the 1970s and the machine learning of today is a direct result of the early AI researchers being rationalists (who use ethics based on teleology, deontology, or virtue), while machine learning is entirely empiricist (and empiricists use consequentialist ethics). Attempts at AI safety inherently tend to be rationalist and use symbolic logic because they desire provability and 100% efficacy, so they're going to use the same sort of ethical systems rationalists always use. I would have thought AI safety would be more likely to use deontology (duty-based) ethics, but I've never seen any AI safety system worked out with enough specificity to say what kind of ethics they're using.
AI is just epistemology done right, in which you have to completely specify your theory of how knowledges is acquired, represented, and used, and then you have to test them. Rationalist symbolic AI gave way to empiricist machine learning so quickly because of this--the real world imposed reinforcement learning on AI researchers, rewarding people who made things that worked more than people who made things that didn't work. And in systems complex enough to need AI, empiricism works, while rationalism doesn't. This is why AI researchers became empiricists and solved all the basic mysteries of epistemology in 60 years, while philosophers are still wandering aimlessly in the dark after 2500 years.
Does anyone give Gladwell’s 10000 hour "rule" the time of day any more?
https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/curious-realizer-10000-hours-to-what
One more angle-- I think some people interpret 10K hours to mean anyone (barring some physical limits, I suppose) can master anything given enough focused practice. Is talent actually irrelevant?
Analogy I've always liked.
With coaching and practice, anyone reasonably young and fit can learn to throw a 70 mph fastball.
For 80mph, young and fit are more necessary, and you need some talent, but it's still something that a lot of people can do, given coaching and practice.
To get to 90mph, now you need real talent, along with the work.
To 95 mph, you need much more, and hence a much rarer level of talent, the kind that few have.
But that kid who can throw 95mph might not even crack 70 without the training.
I think it depends whether you are trying to win a tournament or learn a trade. If you want to become a competent musician (you can play your instrument well enough to be pleasant to listen to), you need some level of talent but not an astronomical level of talent. If you want to make a good living making music, you probably need more of an astronomical level of talent because the competition is so tough.
I don't think talent is irrelevant but without discipline, coaching and feedback you probably won't realize the full potential of that talent.
Well, it's not original to Gladwell. And obviously in some overly-literal interpretations it's not correct. But, the way I interpret it, I think it's just about right.
The way I interpret it is this: for most interesting human activities there's a competency vs time spent curve that starts off very steep and eventually flattens off and reaches a plateau. And the characteristic scale of this curve is something of the general order of magnitude of ten thousand hours. This sounds about right to me.
What would count as evidence against this? Two things: either cases where someone gets there too fast or too slow.
On the too fast side, if someone became instantly brilliant at chess or the violin within their first 100 hours of practice, and then never got significantly better, then this would be evidence against it. As I understand it, Gladwell's book (which I haven't read) is largely focused on disproving examples of this happening in practice; you might _think_ that Mozart was a musical genius at a young age, but he trained hard from birth and didn't get all that great until his twenties anyway. I would say there's some skills where you can "top out" with a small number of hours (a few hours of tic-tac-toe practice and you'll never lose a game again) but these tend to be silly or trivial skills.
On the too slow side, if we found skills where people just keep getting better and better forever, reaching a hundred thousand hours of practice and still steadily improving. This is something that Scott wrote about last week, and it doesn't seem to happen, the vast majority of skills really do seem to plateau after a single-digit number of years of experience.
I think it's popular understanding and the specific number 10000 are original to Gladwell. My understanding is that the original research never specified a number of hours but provided ranges based on the various factors they were studying. Gladwell's conclusions and implied causation were never in the original research either (from what I understand).
Also, like all of Gladwell's books, you can probably find a blog post or two that summarizes the whole thing - no need to spend 5-10 hours of your life on it.
It must be true. I saw him on TV.
Not. It's pretty arbitrary, five years. But we get his point: expertise is real. One thing I've noticed about young adults is they seem to have six titles. They seem to be putting the cart before the horse. I prefer it when people tell me how they spend their time. If they have six titles and spend 17 hours a day playing video games, Gladwell's point is made.
What does "six titles" mean?
Poet, physicist, cab driver, activist, mother, uncle.
I think he's contrasting "show" (i.e. trying to make yourself big by declaring yourself chancellor of the kingdom, he of the eternal power and wisdom) and actually having accomplished something.
I think he means that they get to invent the words that you must refer to them by. Used to be one had to earn those things.
Poets should have to drive cab for a while. Now they just buy a new hat, and declare themself a poet.
Absolutely not, from a basic safety standpoint. Poets can't drive.
And publish verse at their own expense.
Saw this article the other day on Hacker News which seems to cut against it (though it's an anecdotal account)
https://sive.rs/kimo
I read a great blog post about optimization culture (or a similar term) that talked about, for example, how all cars at similar price points drive the same now, as the availability of tons of customer preference data pushes the manufacturers to be the same. Similarly with consumer electronics etc, maybe even movies if I remember correctly. The idea is that all this data makes everything the same. I'm fairly sure that the post was on the Substack platform. Repeated googling has failed me. Ring any bells for anybody?
This one? https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d
Great article, whether or not it's the one FDB was thinking of
Much better fit than the ones I remembered. YAY!
I'd be interested in reading this. I've noticed things like "all android phones have basically the same features" (or at least, none of them have the features _I_ want). Manufacturers seem to not be willing to differentiate on anything that is actually important. I'd love reading a deeper dive on the topic.
This one? https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/unremarkable-clothes or https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/where-did-the-long-tail-go
I remember this too, so if neither of those are the hits we might compare what substacks we have in common for a more vigorous search.
Sounds like every Substack post ever by anybody.
I can imagine companies being dumb enough to do this - all of them targeting the most common preferences, and thus producing commodity products differentiated only by advertising, rather than aiming for a large non-modal subset of customers, and having a niche of their very own.
But I can't help you find the relevant blog post.
There was a post like this from Paul Skallas (lindyman) but I think he got banned from substack a while back so it's probably been deleted. Talked about NBA basketball if I'm remembering it right. (it's also possible you're thinking of someone else who he plagiarized it from :p)
Wow, what got him banned from the platform?
Incredibly egregious and repeated plagiarism.
So who was the interesting post plagiarized from?
I’m sorry that don’t recall this article. So I’m replying partly to help me circle back when someone does because this thesis interests me given that on a gut level I disagree with it. So I’m also commenting in the hopes you’ll factor that in to whatever is percolating in your head. Imho product categories may be the same on the surface in so far as they can be sorted into a category, but on the margins, they are quite different. You’ll probably dislike my anecdotal example, but it illustrates my point well. The market in subcompact handguns atm is quite crowded. If you know nothing about firearms, they are all going to seem so similar as to be the same, especially given they are all the same caliber, same color, same polymer, and all functionally do the same thing. And yet manufacturers are chasing this segment of the market in a big way given the number of offerings. So what gives? Once you drill down into each different manufacturer’s version - and dismiss brand loyalty shopping since that very well can be a false preference - the various models on offer become radically different such that on any given day, a specific consumer will have very distinct preferences for very valid performance/use reasons. So did the popularity of the category cause manufacturers to produce handguns that are so much the same that they really aren’t that different from one another (circling to meet the mediocre median voter), or did the popularity of the category cause manufacturers to produce handguns that boast the key sought after feature (in this case the subcompact size) but then differentiate on the margins to produce large differences in performance? Obviously I’m arguing the latter.
I wrote an article [1] on Scott's attitudes towards mysticism. The reddit community has already helped me find a couple errors - would love to get this group's feedback as well.
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-mysticism-of-scott-alexander
Did you know about John Yates, Culadas’s problems with accusations of sexual impropriety?
I was considering booking a retreat when he was kicked out of his center because of the accusations.
Yeah Scott addressed it in a later article. It's at the bottom of my piece. Crazy stuff.
I've lately been thinking about the anthropic principle. There are multiple variants of the principle, but consider just 3:
(1) Given that humans exist, the laws of physics must allow for the existence of human life. This is an uncontroversial observation, and doesn't really bother me.
(2) Given our current understanding, some of the fundamental constants of physics seem 'fine tuned' to allow for life. We can explain why they take the values they do by first positing the existence of multiple universes with different values of the fundamental parameters. We then, using Bayes' rule, condition on the fact that we are sentient observers who exist and know of our own existence. Conditional on this fact, the fundamental parameters we observe will be a draw from the posterior distribution: random in the range which would allow sentient, self-aware life to emerge. This then 'explains' fine-tuning.
(3) Given that fundamental constants seem fine-tuned, it is likely that the universe was created in order to give rise to life. So one could consider that God specified the laws of physics allowing this to happen. A more secular version of this is Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis-- if any sufficiently advanced civilization will create simulations of life, then it is likely that we exist in a simulation (or a simulation of a simulation of a ...) that was created for the express purpose of giving rise to life.
My question is: given that one is inclined to believe anthropic arguments, what, if anything, makes variant (2) more credible than (3)? Many notable physicists seem to believe or at least accept the plausibility of (2) or some variant thereof, while as far as I know, only a minority of physicists believe in (3).
I understand why (2) might be more tempting at a mathematical level, as one does not need to invoke a creator who makes particular choices. Yet, in return, one has to postulate a multitude of unobservable universes, and implicitly accept that one 'could' have counterfactually been born in a different universe (in order to justify the application of Bayes' theorem). These seem in some ways more excessive than postulating the existence of one creator.
Am I missing something? Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
My intuition in favor of (2) is that science has already shown us quantities that seemed unbelievably large...
Earth is just one of many planets, by no means the largest, and by the way it rotates around the Sun. Sun is just one of many stars, by no means the largest, and by the way it also rotates around the center of our galaxy. Our galaxy is just one of many galaxies, by no means the largest.
In the opposite direction, there are trillions of tiny organisms living in our bodies, in addition to trillions of our own cells. There are trillions of atoms in a cell.
Quantum physics tells us that (at least) at the microscopic scale, there are multiple parallel realities.
...so, given all this knowledge, if someone says "maybe there are trillions of parallel realities also at the macro scale" or "maybe there are trillions of universes with different constants of physics", considering this context, it doesn't seem to me implausible. It sounds more like the type of a thing that I would expect science to discover next.
Similarly, a multiverse where life exists only in a few very lucky universes, does not seem to me less plausible than a universe where life exists only on a few very lucky planets.
Of course, "fine tuning" is only even necessary in a universe without God. Why do theists act like God has to obey the laws of physics? He supposedly does stuff in contradiction of them all the time, including us being animated by "souls". It makes the idea of God giving us material bodies in the first place entirely absurd.
I reject (2), and I think any good empiricist would. That any physical constants are "fine tuned" is mere speculation, not supported by any observational evidence or even theoretical argument. For all we know, the fine structure constant cannot be any other number for the same reason the value of pi cannot be other than 3.14159 et sequens.
If we had two or more logically self-consistent and complete Theories of Everything, we could legitimately suspect that the fact that one of these is true and all the others false gives evidence of fine-tuning. Unfortunately, the number of self-consistent and complete ToE we currently have is zero, so we can draw no conclusions at all about whether the values of the constants could in principle be different.
Bear in mind that one interpretation of quantum mechanics posits infinitely many worlds/universes, and (in my completely amateurish opinion) is the only one that makes any sane rational sense. So multiple universes aren't that far-fetched.
Then again, QM looks to me exactly how I'd design a universe simulation for a limited number of players.
The QM universes would all have the same initial conditions.
Those that we are coherent with, yes. Would it be impossible to have others, with different constants, that split off along the way and are now inaccessible to (ie decoherent with) us?
No idea how this would work and utterly over my pay grade. Popped into my head hearing "anthropic principle" and "physical constants" in the same sentence. Feel free to work out the math and earn a Nobel prize :)
Sure. But positing a quantum field that fills the space of all integers, with operators representing the measurement of various physical constants, is pretty weird. One would like some kind of argument as to why it makes the least bit of physical sense. Normally we only imagine quantum fields for stuff that has measureable physical manifestations, like a force at a given point.
I’m not sure that we know enough about the very first few seconds of the Big Bang to know if there were quantum effects. After that the universe has its initial values and the quantum universes start popping up.
I think the thing missing from your listing of options is what the "anthropic principle" is supposed to be good for - what problem it solves.
If you know for certain all the laws of physics, and know for certain how the universe formed, then what's the antrophic principle supposed to do for you? Obviously these known laws and initial conditions result in humans existing. What more is there to say?
The whole enterprise only makes sense if you are not certain what the laws of physics are, or how the universe formed. For example, you might have two theories, A and B. One day, you may be able tell which is true using the yet-to-be-built Super-duper-mega-collider, but not yet. According to the usual types of evidence available now, A and B are equally likely.
Theory A predicts that a trillion universes exist with a wide variety of characteristics, and it's likely that by chance one of these trillion will look like our universe (with humans, of course). Theory B predicts that there is just one universe, which looks like ours. Does this difference result in any preference for A or B?
We could add theory C, which is like theory A, except it produces just one universe, with randomly chosen characteristics, and hence has only about a one-in-a-trillion chance of producing humans. Does our existence make it less likely than A and/or B?
I think these are the issues that discussion of "anthropic reasoning" can sensibly address.
Simple, the answer is that (3) just pushes the can down the road.
It's clearer if you think about it in more barebones terms
Who created sentience?
(1) and (2) it is inevitable that it be created.
(3) more sentience.
(2) "first positing the existence of multiple universes" -- this positing is purely hypothetical, right? That is, I think (2) works regardless of whether alternate universes with different physical laws actually exist, or merely *could* have existed instead of the actual universe.
...which is also true if you postulate an (omnipotent) creator, since surely they could have chosen to create a universe with different laws.
The difference between the simulation hypothesis and (bare) theism has always seemed semantic to me.
Depends on what you mean by theism. Classical theism has much more in common with Platonism than it does with any speculation about the physical history of the universe, but I think you're right if we're talking about God as a very powerful being who "designed" our world, which is what most people today probably have in mind.
Yes, I read the first anthropic principle books as 18th century Deism with modern physics. The Great Architect of the Universe.
Your arguments as articulated are correct. Postulating a creator isn’t more likely than multiple universes though. The question if where the creator comes from, particularly a God of one universe. Who created him?
(The guy running the simulation is easier to explain to begin with, just a dude in another universe. But who fine tuned his universe? Another guy in another universe running a simulation, right?, but then who fine tuned *his* universe? Its guys running simulations all the way up. This doesn’t really explain anything as they all have to be in universes fine-tuned for life, all the way up to the first ever simulation).
Compare this with multiple universes being created within other universes; many universes are abortive, some survive, very few tuned for life but some are, as a mathematical concept that does work.
(3) makes one more assumption than (2), namely that we exist in our universe because an external agent has made it so that we could. (2) simply says that we exist because we can, and makes no assumptions about the intentionality of our existence.
"(2) simply says that we exist because we can, and makes no assumptions about the intentionality of our existence. "
And the anthropic principle says that BECAUSE/SINCE we exist we are around to contemplate WHY we exist.
"Am I missing something? Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks."
I would approach the anthropic principle as a "conditional probability" problem.
GIVEN that humans exist in a universe that allows for humans ...
Any stage of a process looks like the end of the process. Whether it is.
So if the anthropics are right, it's still hard for them to prove we aren't just a stage the whole shebang is going through.
If they are wrong it's hard to prove them wrong, because this stage is the latest.
How do we explain rationalist thinkers in Middle Ages who claimed inspiration and insight from dreams, visions, and angels (though the insights themselves stand alone without appealing to the supernatural or non rational)? Is there anything to it? How Should we consider the suprarational claims of otherwise very rational thinkers?
I don't see how "I dreamed it" is any less rational than "I thought of it"
When I was a kid I enjoyed reading about philosophical problems. I'd try answer them myself and when I couldn't do it on the spot I'd ask God to reveal me the answer and in a couple of days I would receive divine inspiration and understand it. I had quite a lot of these religious experiences before I figured out that it was just my brain finding answers to questions I was thinking a lot about.
It is rational to assume that any effect (like having a new idea) has a cause. What caused your brain to suddenly (from the point of view of your consciousness) produce this remarkable insight? Without consideration of a subconscious, the influence of an external consciousness is a good explanation.
1. To be clear, Rationalism as an historical philosophy is distinct from the Rationalist movement in modern times.
2. Do the origins of hypotheses really matter? What matters is whether or not a notion can be tested. It's the quality of the filter that matters much more than the quality of the source, since we could expect a large number of problematic ideas.
3. "Is there anything to it?" That's a hard question to answer without having a complete understanding of how the brain works. There are many people who experience their thoughts as external presences. To what extent would being able to chemically induce such states address the matter?
4. "How Should we consider the suprarational claims of otherwise very rational thinkers?"
Unless they lead to testable predictions, what would considering them be good for? Attributing a belief to a supernatural source could as easily be a political statement as a factual one. This is doubly true if we're dealing discussing a period with harsh censorship.
Can you elaborate on the difference between modern and historical rationalism? They look similar to me, just applied in different contexts. We even still have arguments with the empiricists.
If we only care about things that are testable, then I guess we have to throw out all of history.
Well, there's a distinction between what *could* happen and what *did* happen. "What could happen" is often testable. "What did happen" is far less so. Having a sense of what a possible event looks like is very helpful in interpreting history, though it requires periodic self-reflection to prevent blind spots.
Though we can still make hypotheses about history and test them against available evidence. Of course. It's not like historiography is opposed to objective evidence and testable predictions. So even if we did only care about things that are are testable (which I'm not saying) then we still wouldn't have to throw out all of history.
In any case, I'd personally argue that attributing insights to angels or demons is likely a form of political speech, as opposed to a literal statement. But it could also be a psychological issue, if a person sincerely believed their own statements. In any case, if one person holds to a political explanation and another person holds to a psychological explanation, and a third holds to a literal interpretation how would you try to resolve the matter, one way or another?
I wouldn't want to diminish the contributions of St. John of the Cross or Augustine, although I'm not sure either was strictly a rationalist. I'm too uninformed on the definition. But both men and their thinking seem to have been shaped by visions of a sort.
As someone who tries hard to be rational and has also experienced clear (for me) divine inspiration (maybe I’m in the minority on this forum), I don’t think rationality has to be separated from revelation. John Locke made this case as well in his The Reasonableness of Christianity. Rationality as inherently atheistic is a historically recent concept. I am prepared to accept some but not all claims of supernatural inspiration as a source of rational insight. Of course the closer one is to my faith tradition, and the more respectable they are, the more likely I am to take their claims seriously. I am also prepared to reject supernatural claims or to refrain from judgement, even if the claims are from others within my faith.
There are many accounts of famous scientists who came to their most groundbreaking insights in dreams, or on drugs. What is so irrational about using that source of inspiration?
The early 20th century logical positivists drew a sharp distinction between the "context of discovery" (which could be dreams or drugs) and the "context of justification" (where rational arguments are needed). Contemporary philosophers of science no longer think this distinction can be drawn as sharply as the positivists thought, but there's still something to it.
You can have an insight on drugs, but you should verify it experimentally while sober.
The discovery cannot be completely random, because a completely random process would be very unlikely to produce reasonable guesses. However, any kind of process that *occasionally* produces a good guess is okay, even if at other opportunities it produces garbage.
In other words, the *science* will not judge for your discovery process, as long as you can experimentally verify your insight. However, reality itself will punish a poor discovery process by simply not delivering valuable insights.
Would love to hear about specific examples.
They were salesmen?
I once saw someone who denies the hard problem of consciousness pull out what they thought was a trump card for their side, namely, an experiment where scientists figured out how to read the contents of dreams. They even wrote down what they thought was a step by step breakdown of how the hard problem had been dissolved in that experiment. I don't remember it fully, but there was a part where the scientists asked the subject what they had been dreaming about, so they could establish which neuronal activity correlates to it. It's baffling to me how the person didn't notice the hard problem staring right at them: the scientists did not have access to the subjects experience, otherwise they wouldn't have needed to ask to begin with! The trump card seemed like a very articulate enunciation of the hard problem in the end.
This is the research in question: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22031074
To those who deny there is a hard problem, can you see it now?
I have not been able to understand what people mean when they talk about “the hard problem of consciousness” - something about the subjective experience of qualia being inexplicable? But maybe it’s similar to what I think of as the inexplicability of existence - like, how come there’s anything at all, instead of just nothing? Laws of physics, great, sure - but why should there be any of those? Do these seem like comparable or related types of “inexplicable phenomena”?
I think it's primarily that we can't observe consciousness as an object (like everything else) whatever that would mean. Some would argue the brain is the third person view of consciousness, but there seems to be a gap to that view: when we look at brains, we see neuronal activity and so on, we don't see sensations and ideas, not the way we experience them.
Ah. That does seem different from my "why should there be anything, ever, anywhere" question. Yeah, I guess we don't have a monitor-like view into anyone else's head. It's like we can see the hardware, and see whether it's running any software or not, but we can't see other players' screens - everyone only ever sees their own screen. It would surprise me if there weren't some way to hack that, but clearly we're not there yet - not even close. Thanks for the clarification!
The article itself says the patterns of neuronal activity corresponding to particular dream contents is peculiar to each individual. For the idea of this dissolving the hard problem to even get into the building, the correlation needs to be general. In fact, I would argue that an inconsistency between people in regards to what patterns of activity give rise to what experience could actually be considered a challenge to materialist theories of consciousness.
But anyway, even if a general correlation could be established, it doesn't resolve the hard problem of *explaining* consciousness. A correlation is not considered a scientific explanation unless we are dealing with fundamental physical properties, and presumably people like your friend would certainly not take consciousness to be fundamental.
And I don't understand how anyone could declare a problem "dissolved". The people who formulate and agree with the framing of the hard problem of consciousness want a reductive explanation of consciousness. Why is it up to anyone else to decide that the problem doesn't merit solving any more?
Suppose that scientists develop some new technology that allows them to guess the content of dreams without asking. Would you then agree that there is no hard problem of consciousness anymore?
If my model is correct, you would not. You would just pass the buck futher and find something else about consciousness that is yet unknown and say that this is the real hard problem. If you see this play out a hundred of times you may start to notice the trend. That we are talking about "consciousness of the gaps" and that these gaps are slowly and steadily being filled.
In my experience, it's not the case that people who deny the hard problem do not see something special about consciousness that people who believe in it do. We all have the intuition of axiomatic conscious experience since our birth. It's that the deniers saw enough of the trend to develop the stronger intuition of science being able to explain stuff, even the stuff we previously thought it will never be able to.
Maybe. There would still be the same problem though: where is the awareness? Why does a neuron lighting up result in some sort of conscious experience, however small? That's always been what the problem is.
It wasn't always just that. It used to be "how comes muscles follow the command of the mind, seemingly against the laws of thermodynamics". Or "where the decisionmaking comes from?". These questions seemed just as mysterious and unsolvable. Utill they were not. It's important to remember about this historical perspective.
The question about awareness is an interesting one. I expect the problem is that we do not yet know how to specify it properly. Currently we are doing something akin asking where does the gameplay (all gamemechanics working together) come from, looking at how electric signals go through the schemes, while the computer is running a game. There are multiple levels of abstraction that we need to cross and it may be easier to start from specific mechanics that the gameplay consists of. And it's true that gameplay is qualitively a different thing than electric signal. That doesn't mean that it can't be reduced to them.
It's more like we're asking where is the screen (the Cartesian theatre)? You don't need to cross multiple levels of abstraction to look at your own 'screen', why can't we look at anothers 'screen'?
No gaps are being filled in. All you're doing is explaining behavior at a neural level. That's the easy problems.
That's historically inaccurate. The whole ability to talk about neuralogical level at all required a lot of gaps being filled. Consciousness used to be an enormous syncretic bundle. It included all kind of stuff that we now know to be just "easy problems". For an ancient human who didn't know anything about the way retina work the ability to see and recognise objects is just as mysteriously unexplainable ability of the soul as perceiving the redness of the red. But now we know how to build machines who recognise objects. And thus the goalpost shifted. And now consciousness is a tiny inner experience thing which presumambly can be discarded without any causal interference.
Wait, so is induction valid or invalid? You can't have it both ways.
You're claiming that as we kept solving these problems throughout history, the "hard problem" just shifted to a new problem. So, by the principle of induction, this will continue to happen, and we will continue to have new "hard problems" to solve. Except that it won't, and we'll eventually solve everything? Huh?
I'm not making any general statement about the nature of induction.
What I'm saying is that what people call the hard problem is actually a set of easy problems. The whole perceived hardness is in not knoiwing how to exactly to separate the set in different parts. But this set became much smaller during the ages. Every easy question that was answered or at least known how to properly ask, used to be part of the set and now is not.
"In my experience" - how do you know what they experience from your own experience?
Maybe Daniel Dennett is actually just a p-zombie.
I've been a subjective idealist in my teens. I'm a reductive materialist now. And it's not that I stopped being conscious somewhere inbetween. This is typical minding of course, but our knowledge of science give us some reasons to expect it to be somewhat acceptable.
I can imagine that some people may experience stronger qualia than other people. The idea that this would not be represented in physiological activity of the bodies would be against nearly everything that we know about physiology. The idea of p-zombies doesn't make any sense.
You can establish all the physiological happenings in the world, but there's no reason to expect it to ever yield a reductive explanation of consciousness. Most other things can be explained by way of reductive explanation (the rest are taken as fundamental), but consciousness is different to everything else in the universe.
You can establish all the physical happenings in the world, but there's no reason to expect it to ever yield the fact that many particles are indistinguishable *even in principle*. What is "unexpected" or "impossible" to learn regularly becomes certain and clear in retrospect.
"I don't think anybody will figure it out" is wildly unpersuasive to anyone who isn't already persuaded.
A corollary is that "We might be able to solve this problem in the future, therefore the problem doesn't exist" is wildly unpersuasive to anyone who isn't already persuaded.
Or do you at least concede the existence of the hard problem?
If I'm reading the article right, they had to ask the subjects about their dreams for *training,* but once the classifier was trained they were able to say "you were dreaming about X" and be right about 60% of the time. So they were able to know the subject's internal state (sometimes) without needing to ask once the machine was trained.
I don't think this "solves the hard problem" - you could argue that a p-zombie would have the same neural activity and report the same internal experiences while actually not having qualia - but your argument seems to just be misreading the article.
Sure, but the machine needed to be trained first with data the subjects provided. That step was needed because of the hard problem. I also don't think it solves the hard problem, but at least one person thought it was an example of the problem being dissolved.
I don't see how needing a description of the qualia makes it invalid. Even when you experience qualia directly you still need some way to map them to descriptions. You can see something red, but you don't know that it's "red" until someone tells you the word "red" means objects that produce that sort of visual qualia.
Same with this experiment - if you accept that the machine is able to directly view qualia in the brain, then needing a human to provide labels for those qualia doesn't take away from that, and if you deny that the machine is seeing anything related to qualia then it doesn't matter if they need a label or not.
It makes it invalid because the researchers would never have needed to ask, if they could actually observe consciousness directly through the machine. Needing to map qualia to descriptions does not apply to the researchers, who already have those mappings. The experiment didn't need just any random human to provide the labels: it needed the subjects specifically, because only they can see their inner experience.
Isn't this entirely beside the point? Even if the scientists had been able to stream the subject's dreams directly to their own brains - to experience the exact same dreams - that wouldn't constitute a "solution" to the problem.
Well, that wouldn't constitute a solution, but if you could somehow see the dreams directly, as opposed to duplicating some neuronal stimulation as in your scenario, that would actually be a solution, as it would be viewing first person subjective experience as just another object.
No, but it also does almost nothing to explain how the *feeling* of pain can exist.
Would you prefer to live in a multi-polar world order organized by distributed consensus protocols or a unipolar surveillance order dictated by a single superintelligence?
Have always been pretty sure of the former until reading Scott’s Meditations on Moloch. Now, not as confident.
>distributed consensus protocols
>superintelligence
Sounds to me you're comparing Apples and Oranges here. Distributed Consensus, in all the senses I'm aware of at least, is just a fancy way of doing democracy. PoW consensus guarantees you that a simple majority of at least 51% of nodes in a network agree on an ordered list of assertions. I believe PoS consensus does something similar but I'm not entirely solid on the details. Both of those algorithms assume that at most 49% of the nodes in the network are arbitrarily malicious : they can and will do absolutely anything in order to ruin the consensus or sway it in their favor, including coordinating with each other on a secret channel. Other consensus algorithms from distributed computing like Raft or Paxos might have more relaxed assumptions or gaurantees - Raft and Paxos assume the participating nodes won't be intentionally malicious for example - so that they can strengthen other guarantees and assumptions.
A multi-polar world using Distributed Consensus is just a better UN. This won't make it any more likely to agree, let alone agree on true or useful things. All what distributed consensus algorithms would ensure in an abortion debate is that every node is represented "fairly", where fairness is a notion defined by the algorithm (e.g. In PoW consensus, fairness is that nodes with more computing muscles have more votes accordingly. If somebody has a 10x more powerful computer, they are 10x more likely to have their way on abortion. ). Note also that Distributed Consensus is agnostic to the network it's running on (as long as it satisfies the relevant assumptions), an artificial superintelligence can very well copy itself into arbitrarily numerous copies and run a distributed consensus algorithm on the whole network to make its decisions.
As for me, I personally believe that the fundamental sin of humans is that they try to live with each other. The moment humans invented villages\cities\towns, the very concept of living with people who are not your kin, it was inevitable that you would have the clusterfuck that is the history of humans trying to govern each other. It's misguided, Evolution only built us to live with our blood kin and a very small number of other select people. What makes humans oppress each other is that they can't recognize their social protocols and cognitive architectures can't handle the more than ~1000 person living in the same social unit. To scale larger than that, they add external rules and systems (laws, constitutions, courts, money,...) but external rules and systems can always be gamed and meta-manuevered.
My preference would be a humanity shattered into a myriad of large-family-sized pockets across worlds, orbital habitats and deep space, having nothing to do with each other except to trade and other highly-formalized and constrained cooperation agreements. Failing that, I would like if humanity would cease to exist, either in the obvious sense or in a more exotic way (e.g. We lose reflective consciousness, see Peter Watts' Blindsight for more details). Failing that, I would take the superintelligence.
Joseph Henrich in "The Secret of Our Success" would disagree with you. Living with non-kin is very common among hunter-gatherers.
Perfectly aligned superintelligence has all the benefits of multipolar world without all the disadvantages. But perfectly aligned does the heavy lifting here.
I'll take a thousand politically independent ring-shaped space habitats please.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/11/world-government-risks-collective-suicide.html
This, but never mind suicide. One world government almost guarantees inefficiency and stagnation. The only thing that keeps countries honest is other countries.
Depends entirely on what values that superintelligence runs on.
Meditations on Moloch put me firmly in the latter camp.
I wonder what the demographics look like for how long people have been reading these blog(s). Most of the readers I would assume have been around for quite some time, but I for instance have only been around a bit (been aware for much longer, but jumped on during the substack transition). Would be easy I think to measure using age of subscriptions to the email lists and inferring how many came over from the old. Not sure
Scott also does reader surveys on a pretty regular basis that include a lot of demographic information.
We never got the 2021 survey results on ACX proper. IIRC Scott said a bunch of the people hadn't gotten back to him.
I’ve seen in a few places (e.g. Huberman lab podcast) that our brains seem to have two separate “maps”, one for “meaning” and one for other more mundane stuff. Is that understanding correct? Does anyone have any sources on what that distinction is, exactly?
In my epistemology, that would be wrong by definition. "Meaning" caches out as "useful information" or "useful correlations", and the neuronal learning mechanisms that we know about try to record useful correlations. There shouldn't be anything in the brain *but* meaning.
This is really just a semantic question. But I suspect that any definition of "meaning" which excluded any part of what's stored in our brains would be based on spiritual assumptions which privilege some activities as more sacred than others.
I don't know anything about the neurology of it, but Heidegger has something like this, maybe. A fast, heuristic, "habitual" way of dealing with the world called ready-to-hand, and a slow, calculated, "rational" way of dealing with the world called present-at-hand. The example that made it make sense to me is a doorknob: Usually, you don't think about a doorknob at all. You just enter a room. The doorknob is barely present to your awareness at all, you're just thinking about getting your jacket from your room or whatever. In its normal tool state, the ready-to-hand doorknob has become invisible. But if you're trying to enter a room with a broken doorknob, suddenly the doorknob becomes a problem you have to solve. You examine it, you become very aware of it, you think about it critically. It has become present-at-hand.
Ready-to-hand things have gotten bound up in the causal flow of some project that's meaningful to you. They get submerged in your teleology. Meaning tends to present the world as continuous flow. It's only under present-at-hand thinking, when the use of a thing has become problematic, or the meaning of a thing opaque, that it becomes discontinuous. You have to analyze it into separate things.
I don't know much about it, but that's a thread you might pull on.
Why do new movies suck? Is the medium still relevant?
There have been many replies already but I haven't seen any to make this point:
Movies have always sucked.
They've always been part of the problem. Feeling nostalgic for when movies were better is like feeling nostalgic for a time when eating junk food didn't feel disgusting both at the time and for two days afterwards (i.e. when the eater was young and ignorant). ("But Leo, there were good art films in the past!" someone might say. Nah, those were just fig leaves for the genre as a whole, like when some fancy bistro charges $30 for an organic free-range cheeseburger. They also sucked, albeit in different ways.) That's a separate question from the woke-related ones raised in the comments. But here's some more bad news:
Movies have always been woke.
They've always been subversive in comparison with the culture of the parents of the kids watching them. Don't believe me? Look up the history of how the Catholic Church had to organize a massive boycott in order to attempt to impose some kind of decency on the movie business, and check out the date when that happened.
Now, if you like movies (and -- again, different point -- like progressive values), neither of these (again unrelated -- i have to stress this for fairness's sake) points are bad. Movies are junktainment and anti-traditionalist.
This seems pretty cynical to me. How would you savage say, “Breaking Away” 1979?
"Movies have always sucked.
They've always been part of the problem."
You haven't specified but do you mean:
a) ALL movies have always sucked
b) MOST movies have always sucked
c) AT LEAST one movie per year has always sucked.
If (a) then I'd be very interested to know what you object to in Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain and Roman Holiday.
Every movie ever made is worse than not watching a movie. I'll happily grant that, deprived of movies, the average movie-goer isn't going to make better use of the time. To return to the junk food metaphor, someone living in a food desert isn't going to eat better food if McDonald's burns down -- such a person will have few if any better options and no framework for evaluating them. If said person, on the other hand, escapes and is given the opportunity of widened horizons, perhaps someday junk food won't taste as good anymore. Then the question arises, "Why isn't this as good as it used to be, when I was a kid?".
Similarly, movies as such are a sweet poison. Only by stepping inside a frame that accepts poison as an ok thing to ingest in moderation (i.e. not enough for immediate death) can we say that one movie is a sweeter poison than this other, less sweet poison -- or better yet, this one is a subtle smooth bittersweet chocolaty poison with notes of cherry and espresso. Movies don't exploit our vulnerabilities to concentrated salt, sugar, and fat (though they are often or perhaps even usually paired with substances that do). Instead, they exploit our vulnerabilities to narrative, to titillation, to horror, to who knows what. However, just as with age our craving for sugar declines a bit and we can no longer imagine wanting to sit down and eat a whole plastic pumpkin full of starburst, so too do we find movies less palatable with the passage of time and wax eloquent about the cinematic masterpieces of our youth.
(Now of course, there are young people today who insist that good film ended in the 70s, but there are also young people with affectations of being dead-heads who were born too late to experience true music. Taste is flexible, after all.)
Finally, and with the utmost respect for those who suggested a plucky underdog sports movie and a hardboiled wartime propaganda piece as paragons above criticism, just remember that every movie is escapist, is brainwashing, and is escapist brainwashing. If you happen to like escape and agree with the brainwashing chosen, neither of these will seem like much of a problem.
Well, do they suck?
The Lighthouse and Midsommar, both from 2019, are excellent. Dune was considerably better than I expected an adaptation of the book to possibly be.
I don't really see the problem.
This link posted above by Laura Creighton in response to a different question offers an answer: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/where-did-the-long-tail-go
Gioia argues that the counterculture is dead and all those predictions of a "long-tail" in various industries due to the web were dead wrong. Specific to this question, there is a chart showing that only about 35% of movies today are originals instead of sequels or remakes compared to 20 years ago when 80% of movies were originals.
"Specific to this question, there is a chart showing that only about 35% of movies today are originals instead of sequels or remakes compared to 20 years ago when 80% of movies were originals."
The chart does not have the Y-axis labelled, but it almost certainly shows that only about 35% of movie REVENUE comes from originals instead of sequels or remakes.
Roughly 800 new movies are released each year (last few years being *way* down due to covid). There aren't enough franchises for 500 of them to be sequels and remakes :-)
But this also means that there are LOTS of original movies coming out -- we just won't see them advertised as heavily as "Harry Potter vs Batman 6, the Revenge of Sith Lord Spock."
The long tail is real, but not profitable. But I still hope recommendation systems will eventually flatten out the head of that distribution.
I still think better recommendation systems can be profitable for the middleman, but they may require adjusting user behavior. Rating things 1 to 5 stars, for instance, simply doesn't give enough resolution to build a recommender system, especially since most users have a very uneven distribution of star ratings. The Netflix recommender competition in 2008 produced algorithms which were so good that most of the error in prediction was explained by the low resolution of the rating scores.
I really don't think that Gioia properly challenges the theory. I think the best way to precisify the "long tail" claim is something like this: historical sales figures formed an exponential distribution, where each title was selling (say) 80% as much as the previous title. On a distribution like this, your first three titles make up half of all sales, and the next three titles make up half of what is left, and so on. But the "long tail" distribution is given by a power law, perhaps hyperbolic. On a hyperbolic distribution, the ratio between the sales of your mth most popular title and your nth most popular title is n/m. The hyperbolic distribution has the "long tail", where there is infinitely much volume to the right, no matter how far down the tail you start. But it *also* has the "short tail" that Gioia seems to be trying to use as a counterexample to the "long tail" thesis - that is, there is infinitely much area under the initial segment of the curve, no matter how close to 0 you cut it off! The thing that distinguishes an exponential distribution from a hyperbolic distribution is that the hyperbolic distribution has infinitely much weight at both ends, while the exponential distribution has finitely much weight everywhere. So the hyperbolic distribution is greater than the exponential distribution both at the popular end and the unpopular end, while the exponential distribution is greater in the middle.
Here it is graphed on Wolfram Alpha (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2Fx%2C+y%3D.8%5Ex%2C+x+from+0+to+20 )
And I think this is a good fit for what's going on with the internet. The big winners are getting billions of views and billions of customers, and there's also a proliferation of incredibly niche things (just look at the blog we're on right now). But the things in the middle are having trouble (spare a thought for the poor San Francisco Chronicle or Boston Globe - not big enough to gain readers globally the way the New York Times has with digital reach, but also losing local readers to niche neighborhood blogs and tiny global publications associated with the millions of hobbies of local readers).
I think this is also what we see with movies. The few big tentpole releases are bigger than ever, and you can get niche content of whatever sort you like, while the middlebrow releases can't compete with either end.
The thing that didn't sit right with me while reading Gioia's piece (I think it got linked from one of Freddie deBoer's monthly links roundups?)...he was trying to make a mathematical argument, and maybe that's even historically correct with the benefits of decades of data analysis now. But my first introduction to the "long tail" concept was back in the 2000s: https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/
The takeaway there didn't seem to be math-based, more about __a shift in cultural canon norms__. Which absolutely did happen! Not in the specific dissected case of indie stuff eating all big players by default (or vice versa), but by completely reorienting the playing field. Long tail technological infrastructure and shifting expectations around search indexing/costs ("if it's not on Wikipedia, it doesn't exist" etc.) mean that __things are forgotten much more slowly now__. Hence my Gen Z peers streaming "Friends" or "That 70s Show" or whatever, decades after those shows stopped running on cable...which has been extremely weird for me, who grew up catching those shows on cable and expecting them to at-best live on in tacky boxed-DVD sets. That's the power of the long tail, where content doesn't go to die. (I'm genuinely curious which of today's Big Hits will still be streamed decades from now...will they have the same staying power?)
I think the narrative of "big streaming services are churning out content and opting for quantity over quality, resulting in a stream of generic sludge" is worth a second look.
I spoke to someone in the film industry the other day and was told they're being handed scripts to work with that are basically incomplete. To the extent that in places they literally have "a dramatic thing happens here" as the only instruction.
Also, I can point to a bunch of films I liked and still completely agree with the statement "modern films suck".
I don't think anyone who says "modern films suck" is conscientiously averaging out everything they've seen in recent months and summing it up, which is how some of the responses are answering them.
When I say modern films suck, I mean that I remember the sinking feeling of seeing some film or trailer and thinking, "Oh joy, more of this again," and I remember that happening more frequently in recent years than in the past. Could be rose tinted spectacles, could be a higher shit-to-diamond ratio, could be the way they're delivered.
There's a large audience that likes familiarity, reliability, and repetition. McDonald's, superhero movies, and long book series attest to this. So do Harlequin romance, and popular manga and anime. (Like, IIRC, "magic girl starts a private detective agency" was once a genre in manga.) To some people, "more of this again" is a feature, not a bug. Maybe this attitude is spreading, or maybe marketing to them is becoming more visible to you.
By "more of this again" I mean "more crap I'm not gonna enjoy". I/you can watch several completely textbook examples of a genre in a row and enjoy them all, if it's done well. Nor do I think people having a favourite genre and not wanting to leave their comfort zone is new enough as phenomena to explain this.
The new phenomenon is that if you've found a way to do the familiar thing well, you now have a market of 4 billion people to sell it to, as opposed to a market of 0.2 billion people.
Another thought, different direction:
I remember when I first read the His Dark Materials books, I loved them unconditionally. My friend, who was raised evangelical Christian, had a very different experience and came away feeling despondent and depressed. Years later I read them again as an adult, and this time I was able to pick up on the hundreds of little jibes and barbs the author was throwing at Christianity. Not in the "fair" sense of writing a book that highlights the dark side of something, but in the unfair sense of the author going, "It's my book and I hate Christianity so ahahaha I'm gonna make every Christian character be a paedophile or child murderer and there's nothing you can do to stop me!"
I hadn't even noticed all this stuff the first time because it wasn't my tribe Pullman was attacking. My friend felt it, but didn't put his finger on what was happening, so just came away depressed. It's only as an adult I can see that he was basically reading through a steady barrage of subliminal insults.
Modern film producers are woke. Most modern audiences are not. This might explain both why a lot of people feel that films suck now, and why the people who don't feel that also don't understand where all this is suddenly coming from.
(Don't know the etiquette for a response addressed to two comments at once so this is going up here.)
FWIW I did still enjoy His Dark Materials on the second read and it's still one of my favourite fictional worlds.
But I've read the first two Book of Dust books and my main reaction has been: y tho. It's like it's trying to completely blast the joy out of what came before - like The Last Jedi to the Star Wars trilogy - except in this case, they're both written by the same man... I don't know what to draw from that.
Also his blatant self-insert character is clearly going to end up sleeping with Lyra, which strikes me as a bit crass on the author's part. A triumph of wish fulfillment over narrative payoff.
I'm not even Christian, but the "subliminal" insults were anything but...granted, I read the first book as a tween, and didn't pick up the other two until years later in adulthood. But, wow, it's easy to feel empathy for such an obvious outgroup serving as a villainous punching bag. HDM now resides in that same headcanon space where I categorize stuff like The Matrix...it sure is a shame they never made any sequels, the first started off so well!
I think one doesn't even necessarily need to be anti-woke to feel kind of queasy about woke memes sprinkled all throughout modern media. That undercurrent of meanness, the constant apparent need to virtue-signal and show purity bona fides...it gets in the way of the actual product itself. Sure, some people consume media as a signalling device anyway, so it works out well for them. (Remember all the frenzy around "The Hunt"? Sigh.) But for people actually invested in art for art's sake...it's frustrating whenever a story gets undermined by blatant tokenism, shoehorned retrofits to current CW battles, beatdowns of easily-disputable Outgroup Strawmen. I think this is part of why I prefer Japanese anime: much less likely to see anyone blathering on about income inequality or racial equity or whatever. Leave those Modern Maladies for the news to cover, I don't usually want such troubles following me into completely-fictional escapist worlds.
Third data point: I read those books and enjoyed them, except for the extremely stupid denouement, but came away with a clear awareness that Philip Pullman is a piece of shit, which all his behavior in the years since has confirmed. So I think this is an accurate suggestion on your part.
>Why do new movies suck?
I'm gonna join the dogpile of "They don't". In fact I think the 2010's and this start of the 2020's have been a better time for cinema than the 2000's*. Plenty of good directors popping, Riley Stearns, S. Craig Zahler, Robert Eggers, David Lowery, Yórgos Lánthimos, and some I can't think of at the time.
I don't think there's been a time in the last few years I wasn't having high expectations for a movie yet to be released.
*: on the other hands, in the 2000's, I was in highschool, and the movies we went to were always shit, so it skew my perspective a *tad bit*
[I retract this observation now, but am leaving it up bcoz of the threads beneath it.]
I think much of this impression can be accounted for by the lack of any test of time. But I think there's also been a downward trend. I remember not long ago watching a 1980s movie with some friends, and after it was over I felt refreshed, like I'd had a drink of water in the desert. It struck me then that it was the first movie I'd seen in a long time that wasn't a superhero movie and didn't have a political subtext.
What is the 1980s movie?
I don't remember! :|
Dammit.
If you remember even a tiny detail or two, there are movie butts who would be delighted to figure out what movie it might be.
I was trying to think in response of good recent movies but I realized that mostly I was thinking of recent movies by very old directors who've been working since the 70s or earlier. e.g Paul Schrader's First Reformed from 2017 or Terrence Malick's more recent films (which are all, I think, still not as good as Days of Heaven). And certainly on the popular/blockbuster level the action movies of today just aren't as good as they used to be (partly, I think, on account of the genre having been mostly eaten by superheroes).
Or perhaps the politics just passed unnoticed because they weren't the current political issues that you're constantly aware of.
(I remember watching RoboCop and thinking "the director is definitely trying to say something political about 80s America, but I'm not sure what exactly.")
Yes, exactly. It's so amazing how the people complaining about the 2016 Ghostbusters being political didn't notice that the 1984 Ghostbusters literally has the Environmental Protection Agency as the villain trying to shut down a small business in Reagan's America.
I would say that the EPA v. Ghostbusters was much less political and much more the "snobs v. slobs" trope of earlier Murray/Ackroyd/Ramis comedies.
"snobs v. slobs" is inherently political. It's a pro-populist, anti-elitist message:
Look at that Slob! Yeah, he's messy and crude, but doesn't that just make him CHARMING? Doesn't that make him a REAL person, with his folksy ways and disdain for intellectualism and manners? Not like that stuck-up Snob, who thinks he's BETTER than everyone else, who thinks that he- a pencil-pushing bureaucrat!- can tell the Common Man what to do with HIS time and HIS property, little pencil-dick fascist that he is. In fact, the Slob is SMARTER than the Snob, because HE knows what the world is REALLY like!
Yes, this is a funny movie about ghosts. The funny movie about ghosts will describe a narrative, and that narrative contains implications about how the writers or directors view the world, either intentionally or unintentionally. I realize this is no longer the hip thing cool kids say and it is now the fashion to dismiss all text and subtext with "the curtains are fucking blue, you stupid intellectual", but I have never been a slave to fashion. The idea that, during an era of deregulation where the President was depicting all federal agencies as pencil-dicked tyrants running amok causing untold suffering to hard-working Americans, a depiction of a federal agent as a pencil-dicked tyrant running amok and causing untold suffering to hard-working Americans was just a zany coincidence with no political dimension is a bit hard to swallow.
Culture warriors do not err by noticing that there is a political dimension to everything- they err by assuming that because there is a political dimension to everything, therefore politics (specifically their particular hobby horse) is the ONLY thing.
Except that doesn't track in context.
Other than The Man With No Dick, every government service works perfectly, every other governmental interaction is either in the GB's favor or is so trivial in difficulty it doesn't make it onto the screen. The Mayor and Chief of police are on their side, there is no issue with building inspectors, business license issuers, getting custom plates for the GBmobile, they don't even need lawyers handling the real estate transaction of purchasing the building, and putting Annie Potts behind the telephone has zero friction with the IRS or the taxing authorities of the City and State of NY (and Yonkers if Annie is commuting).
Besides, political allegories in '80s pop culture were NOT that subtle. See the Dark Knight Trilogy, the Land of Confusion video or Tapeheads.
Politics exists now, and only exists in the past when you can dredge up some hero or villain of history's eternal theater and say: "this one is OURS/that one is THEIRS".
The problem as I see it is that the modern Culture Warrior is hypersensitive to politics. The kulturkampf has conditioned people to stringently analyze every piece of media before they allow it to enter their brain, and even the mildest contamination incites outrage and furor, as the outrage and furor (and thus the chance to show virtue) is what is desired and not enjoyment of the thing itself.
I guess that would be interesting to see, whether the culture wars around Reagan in the early 1980s produced the same kind of outraged reaction from the left around the movie Ghostbusters that the culture wars around Trump in the 2010s produced from the right around the modern movie Ghostbusters.
You err by assuming those are different iterations. It's all the kulturkampf, which has been growing like a tumor since then. True-blue Culture Warriors of our current iteration are a highly advanced form of development, the psychic cousin of the Puritan.
Having been there, I don't recall that it did.
It wasn't so much of a culture war then though. Not enough space for one when one side owns all the mass media.
That could be. I tried to count apolitical movies, but there are too many good, apolitical movies, both past and present, for me to form anything beyond the vague impressions that there's been a shift from critiquing individuals (apolitical) to critiquing society (political), and that seeing technology as sinister, corporations as evil, and the future as bleak is now routine.
As a random sample, the last contemporary thing I watched was "She-Hulk, Attorney at Law", and it was funny, but had a pointed misandrist agenda (and post-modern aesthetic values, if that counts).
I think Back to the Future, The Bad News Bears, Chariots of Fire, Ordinary People, Babette's Feast, Rain Man, On Golden Pond, Amadeus, Ferris Buehler, and A New Leaf were about as apolitical as a movie can be; but then again, we could interpret Rain Man as anti-ableism, and On Golden Pond as anti age-discrimination.
But there have been lots of movies that strike me as apolitical since 2000: Napoleon Dynamite, The Fall, Birdman, Nebraska, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash. I could name more, but there's no point unless we come up with some objective way of sampling movies and rating their degree of political messaging; and I have no time for that.
ADDENDUM:
I went thru the list of Academy Award Winners for best picture, 1970-present, and tried to count the number of obviously "political" movies:
1970s: 1. But maybe treatment of mental patients was political at the time, and so "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was political.
1980s: 4?
1990s: 2, but is Schindler's List really political? I think "Nazis are bad" was hardly controversial at the time. Some people claim The English Patient was political just because it took place in a colonial setting, but my recollection is that its drama had nothing to do with colonialism.
2000s: 2 (Crash & Slumdog Millionaire). But is Gladiator political because it's about slaves? Is Chicago political because it's about corruption? Is Lord of the Rings political because of its racism? Is Hurt Locker political because it's about a war (I don't think so)?
2010s: 4? Is Catholicism political?
2020s: 0 to 2 (out of 2), depending on whether movies that increase "representation" should count as "political". I wouldn't have even thought about calling CODA political if it had come out in the 2010s.
I don't see a trend in that data, and have lots of difficulty deciding whether movies are political or not.
Tatiana Masitlay's earlier series (Orphan Black) was one of the most breathtakingly woke TV shows. It featured:
-Literal toxic masculinity. As in, if the male siblings had sex with a woman, the woman died.
-All male siblings must be destroyed.
-All female siblings must be forgiven, no matter the extent or victims of their crimes, 'cause sisterhood.
-Your personality, sexuality, or gender expression have absolutely nothing to do with your genetic makeup.
And yet it was a really good show. Tatiana can act in the same way Bruce Lee could fight.
>1970s: 1. But maybe treatment of mental patients was political at the time, and so "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was political.
I think this one was very much political, intentionally so, and was part of the movement leading to de-institutionalization. It was part of the public conversation about an issue where the issue won so long ago it doesn't seem political.
I think Slumdog Millionaire is at least somewhat political. It starts with a poor man who's about to win a big prize legitimately, and he's taken away by the police and tortured because they suspect him of cheating.
Police abusing someone poor just because the poor person is about to succeed seems political to me. I grant that there are more and less political ways of presenting it.
>Is Lord of the Rings political because of its racism?
At the time it was written, no. And do the movies even use the "Easterlings are Asians and Haradrim are Africans and they're always evil" thing?
I mean, you can call it "racist" because orcs are a thing if you particularly want (though "racist" isn't the correct term since orcs aren't human), but I wouldn't say that calling orcs racist was a thing in 2003.
LOTR (the novels) are at least somewhat political. It's anti-industrialization, and the Scouring of the Shire is about using redistribution as an excuse for wrecking a place.
It's explicitly against capital punishment.
There's a fair amount about good guys of various sorts needing to learn to cooperate with each other.
There's a lot about the importance of ruling with a light touch when you aren't in the middle of an emergency.
Ghan buri Ghan and his people are left to live in peace in their forest, not forcibly civilized.
There may not be such a thing as a completely non-political movie. Maybe the questions are how much politics? How much is going on besides the politics?
Back to the Future is reactionary, it points out the warmth and charm of 1950s America compared to the grim decay of 1980s America.
Ferris Bueller is anarchist; all rules are arbitrary restrictions placed on us free spirits by lame guys in brown sports coats and should be disregarded.
I absolutely hated "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when I saw it, and my opinion hasn't shifted since. I have nothing against the actor (Matthew Broderick) but I hated the character. He's supposed to be charming and clever and running rings around The Man (as represented by the dean of studentsl), but I think he's a sociopath.
He's manipulative, he persuades his 'best friend' to do a lot of things that will eventually get him into trouble. He is unable to control the situation as he promised (the trick with the odometer of the car fails). He's liked by everyone in the school (save the dean) which means he's able to appeal to every sub-group by playing on their own preferences and prejudices.
He gets away with his truancy only due to his sister deciding to support him, and he is rewarded by his parents deciding he should take the next day off instead. Ferris has gone through the entire movie doing what he wants, regardless of the effects on others, and his message is supposed to be superficially uplifting and independent - "life is short, live for yourself" - but in effect he is going to continue on, gliding through life, using his charm and powers of manipulation to get others to be his patsies, until he bites off more than he can chew and his big schemes fail. And take others down with him.
Can you realistically see Ferris the family man, with a wife and kids? Or rather, Ferris who leaves a trail of wreckage behind involving an ex-wife and kids?
YES YES YES
And don't get me started on Harold and Maude.
And while The Grand Budapest Hotel isn't *very* political it does I think at least come down pretty firmly on the position that fascism is bad.
What a brave statement by
Babette's Feast would be viewed as extremely political by an 1870s-1890s French person. And, probably also by a Communist since it extols the virtues of an extremely bourgeois dining experience.
[NOTE: JOKE]
Robocop is at least partly a satire on the US movie industry itself, specifically its then-increasing appetite for violence as entertainment. That's why, to take the most flagrant example, the director's cut spends a full minute on the gangsters shooting Murphy, blowing body parts off him until their shotguns are empty.[1]
Later on, the NYPD recreated this scene in a sort of reverse when apprehending Amadou Diallo, demonstrating their own deliciously satirical sensibility.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgXE7jyHWzk; ideally don't watch this if you're uncomfortable with the description. It's deliberately graphic.
The best entertainment is live play D&D. People are still acting, but in many cases the players' emotions are very real. Watching a movie or TV show full of faked emotions and pre-scripted "problems" where everybody already knows how it's going to turn out just doesn't compare. And the best in the game right now is Brennan Lee Mulligan.
This seems to imply that the likes of Critical Role aren't fully prescripted. Which they are, if not to full prompt-book level then at least Commedia-style improv cues. Nobody's actually playing these "games".
I don't like Critical Role, for exactly this reason. And The Adventure Zone sometimes loses my interest, too. If you look a bit further afield, you'll find series where the game is perfectly real. There's an unexpected character death due to unlucky dice rolls in season 5 of Dimension 20, for instance, and the emotion around it is convincing to me.
Are you comparing new movies in general to the best of older movies?
The “Marvel Cinematic Universe” doesn’t help matters much. Geez. These are comic books after all.
Endlessly milking the Star Ward franchise doesn’t give me hope either.
Hmm, Star Ward would make for a sellable daytime soap opera.
It just might. Set it in one of those posh celebrity rehab clinics…
I've seen several movies just this year that didn't suck at all, and at least a couple that I'd say are fantastic. So my best guess is that you're not doing a good job filtering for the new ones?
Good recommendations are hard to find, would you mind sharing what the best ones were?
-Everything Everywhere All At Once was great, strongly recommend it to anyone.
-The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent wasn't on the same level emotionally, but still insanely funny.
-The Batman was really good.
-The Spider-Man movie kinda requires you to have been watching Spider-Man movies for the last 20 years to fully appreciate it, but I have so I enjoyed it a lot.
-Lightyear wasn't Pixar's best work, but that's a high bar- it does some interesting stuff and I enjoyed it. I certainly wouldn't say it sucked.
-I wouldn't say Thor: Love and Thunder sucked, although I wouldn't argue too much with someone who said it did. There were definitely some big issues with the story but the jokes were really funny and there were some good moments- overall I don't regret seeing it.
Honestly, Everything Everywhere All At Once seemed amazingly derivative to me. Pretty much every kung fu comedy movie with "existentialism is the cure for nihilism" mixed in.
I mean obviously to some extent this is all subjective but I feel like if that movie in particular strikes you as too derivative your standards for originality might just be impractically high? What movie, or work in any other medium for that matter, actually meets it?
Amadeus? The Umbrella Academy? The Prisoner?
There's definitely a change in the relevance of the medium. Before DVDs, television was mostly episodic (because audiences needed to understand the episode even if they missed last week's episode), and had to fit into a broadcast schedule (so the story arcs were basically limited to 22 minutes or 44 minutes - or 30 or 60 on cable channels without ads). Once DVD box sets became accessible, and especially once shows started being released direct to streaming, television started taking on season-length story arcs. It used to be that movies were the longest form of video art, while television was mostly medium length (until the rise of music videos created a new shorter format of video art). But now movies are an intermediate length compared to longer format television, and various streaming sites have created new shorter formats that are also quite popular (and there are several shorter lengths that are popular - YouTubes from 10-20 minutes as well as some shorter YouTubes, and TikToks at whatever their length is).
One other relevant development is that the decreasing price of audiovisual equipment, as well as the rise of new home designs with dedicated media rooms, means that home theaters are stronger competition for the theater in terms of audio and video quality, but with the added comforts of home and privacy. (Even though many people also mourn the communal experience of the theater - just as streaming killed the "Monday morning water cooler conversation" about Sunday broadcasts.)
Interestingly, the rise of the "cinematic universe" means that movies are able to compete with television shows in creating longer arcs, though the movies are still somewhat episodic and need to stand alone in the way that TV episodes no longer need to.
Regardless of how these trends continue, it seems likely that there will at least occasionally be culturally significant movies, the way that there have continued to be culturally significant operas (notably the ones by John Adams and Philip Glass) and musicals (Rent, Hamilton, etc.) even though those art forms are no longer as popular as they used to be.
I think the best video creators (directors, writers, and even actors) are being sucked into television instead. To list of few shows I'm currently enjoying: Barry, Severance, What We Do In The Shadows, Derry Girls, Midnight Mass, Harley Quinn, Better Call Saul.
That said 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' is the funniest movie I've seen in at least a few years, and it's only increasing in rank the more times I watch it and notice more details. And that just came out. And 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' was more visually innovative than any animated movie I can even remember seeing my my lifetime. God damn every frame on that film is a wonder.
@Victor Hatch - If you haven't seen it yet, check out Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. I suspect you'll love it as much as I did.
This is the correct answer.
First, television is to novels what is movies to short stories. While both novels and short stories can be excellent pieces of art, *in general* the scope of a novel is preferable to most audiences. A lot of stories can't be adequately told in 90-180 minutes.
But more importantly, the leadership structure of television production always places writers in the highest executive positions of "creator" and/or "show-runner." With movies, a screenplay is written, a director (or executive producer) takes over, and the writer has very little to say about how the story is produced. In television, the much larger volume of storytelling requires constant involvement by the writers, so the production has to be led by one.
Television pays better and is more artistically rewarding, which is why so many of the very best writers have totally abandoned movies for television.
And, in the streaming era, TV shows are a lot more like movies. They often have a budget and production value comparable to a movie, and all the episodes are released at once, making the experience of binge-watching a show very similar to watching a long movie, just with a few seconds of interruption between episodes.
I watch almost 0 movies, but I will weigh in anyway.
Movies don't suck uniformly across space and time, so the trivial answers to your questions is "They don't, and yes they're still relevant". There is a good chance you have omitted the implied spatiotemporal context of "Hollywood mainstream movies, last 10 years", and that would make for answers more interesting.
Why do modern Hollywood productions suck donkey ass? Like I said, movies are so far down the list of Art I engage with that it's not even funny, only slightly ahead of those boring museum paintings that the rich use to launder money. But I will give a generic answer that usually turns out to be right in a lot of contexts where we ask "why X sucks?", that answer is usually "because it affords to". i.e, why *wouldn't* Hollywood suck? Who's gonna make them not suck? You?
Modern Hollywood suck because of lack of competition. They are so big and incestuously inter-connected that they can all suck donkey ass together and people will pay to watch anyway.
I have seen a lot of hypothesis on the nets for why Hollywood sucks. They are all too specific.
- Some blame the wokies and their deranged -ve IQ crusade to glorify certain groups. That's correct, explicit on-your-nose Ideological sermons very rarely make up good art. Ideological Art is called propaganda, and it needs to be done very subtly and expertly to not be pathetic. Hollywood wokies are about as subtle as a screaming stereotype of a feminist.
- Another oft blamed reason for the decline of Hollywood's Art quality is the trend of """Sequels""", focusing on a single cinematic universe and milking it for all its worth in sequels and prequels and sidequels and all other methods of cancerous expansion strategies. That's true as well, good Art is either original or so well done (acted, produced, scripted,...) that you don't mind the triteness. You should either say something new or say something old so well that people don't mind it's old.
Both of those trends, however, are special cases, the general pattern is just "Hollywood don't give a fuck". They are woke because they don't give a fuck, they can afford to shove a black trans native american muslim lesbian into their movies and still have people watch (if only to sneer), just by sheer force of market inertia and spotlight-monopoly. In situations where they aren't as strong (e.g China), they have proved to be about as woke as a tired 3 year old. Same thing for the sequels thing, they can afford to not give a shit, and not giving a shit ruins anything worth doing.
Hollywood is a business, what would make any business suck? Lack of real competitors. They are too fat, they can afford to, the fitness functon doesn't punish them enough. They need a good bit of FREE MARKET on their ass.
Is modern Hollywood Art still relevant after all that? Well yeah. Stories (and Art in general) can still be relevant even if they suck. Abrahamic religions are an example, a bunch of variable-quality stories about talking animals and a woman who fucked around and got pregnant and got away with it by blaming it on an invisible being, nothing world-class you know. And yet, Abrahamic religions are an incredibly influential stories, motivating billions and doing good and (more often) wrecking evil across societies and history. Even an atrociously bad piece of Art that manage to unite most or all of its subjects on hating it, which is extremely rare, is still very relevant and influential, it managed to evoke feelings after all, that's the entire job of Art.
> They are woke because they don't give a fuck
The actors may be woke; their bosses are not. The old men who run Hollywood are hard-core capitalists out to make money. They make what they think will sell.
To the extent that's true, the people doing advertising and consumer research ARE extremely woke, and they are the ones telling the execs what will sell.
Hollywood is not a monopoly, there are multiple studios competing with each other.
"Why do new movies suck? Is the medium still relevant?"
Because time hasn't thrown out the 90-95% that are bad.
Hollywood produced an enormous number of terrible movies in the 1930s, 1940s, ...
We just don't watch those today.
Yup. I tried to make same point. I’m not sure people realize what the average movie was in each decade. This is literally the history of the double feature - movie theaters had to buy a B film (which was awful) AND forced to show it with the A film or else they couldn’t show the A film. The average quality has almost definitely increased. And the top of the top is subjective, but I think many of the top films since at least 2007 or so will hold their own.
Not all movies suck, though I agree that the vast majority do. A few decent films manage to eke out each year. The medium is fine. The (overwhelming majority of) creators are shit.
I find questions like this fairly reductive and intentionally provocative. You need to frame this question far better. What do you mean “suck”? It’s a subjective art form.
In terms of the medium still being relevant: I think the answer here is a pretty resounding yes. There are at least 2 movies within the past 6 months that were bigger social phenomena than I can remember for most entertainment in a long time (top gun and everything everywhere). There are also many other movies within the past year or so that are quite talked about in tons of social circles (nope, bodies bodies bodies, the Batman, Northman, Spider-Man, licorice pizza, house of Gucci, dune). Studios are intentionally shifting back to theater experiences because of these examples and the fact that movie ticket sales are having a revival.
Your mileage on each of those movies will vary. Many of the arguments I’ve seen about movies sucking are the reliance on old IP, leaning action, and filming techniques being quite standardized. I think just that list above shows quite a good amount of variety in each of those.
I’d make the personal argument (not a huge movie buff, but have >1k movies watched on my Letterboxd), for example, that the era since about 2014 has been the best era of movies actually. We’ve had more diverse film makers, “better” (at least to me — again it’s subjective; but at minimum more realistic / immersive) acting, and better technology (sound and video technology had leaps at around the turn of the century).
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that when comparing to historical movies, you’re generally comparing the classics of old eras to an average film today (not every movie is gonna be Laurence of Arabia, but I still like a movie that won’t be remembered that way like say, sorry to bother you). Do you think an average film coming out today is worse than an average film 30 years ago? The answer is almost certainly no. And the top movies of the past 10-15 years will certainly hold their own all time for those that aren’t blinded by nostalgia.
There’s also a specific lull right now due to the pandemic that shut down filming in 2020 (most films are shot 2-3 years before release).
In sum - I’m sorry if you don’t like movies today, and it’s possible quality will die down as the trend towards big blockbusters or small horrors continues to be the most profitable studio franchise. But maybe we’ll get another studio that challenges a24 (id you don’t like their movies, I get it - they’re pretty standardized. But they are successful) for the movies in between and keep giving talented film makers the ability to make movies
I mean, these are all very convincing arguments, and I would agree with all of them, but you are Ryan Gosling, so... [/joke]