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.
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.)
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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.
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.
Looks good, I subscribed!
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.