It would really make it a lot more enjoyable to vote on the book reviews if we could vote just by clicking the heart on the review-- at the time we are reading it. Then we could vote on based on our immediate reaction to the review (eg that's a great review!!! vs meh). You'd lose the rank order preference of individuals. But then people could give positive feedback on multiple reveiws if they liked them all a lot. Top winner would be the review the most people liked a lot.
Any tips on the best DNA sequencing services? What do they tend to provide? Do you get your actual genome or just some handwavy stuff like "some of your ancestors were from northern Europe" and "you're more likely to be a gambler"? What percentage of your genome do they sequence?
I tried to read through some FAQs but they tend to feature pretty pictures and quite limited info on what exactly you receive.
Thanks! It seems though that you get raw data with a lot of these websites, which is what I'm most interested in; it's just not always clear exactly what data is included.
Almost all consumer services that are cheap (~$100 or less) don't sequence the genome at all, they just look for a library of "single nucleotide polymorphisms" -- i.e. known mutations that can happen at a single location on the DNA -- and catalog the genome based on the pattern of SNPs found, and in what demographics that particular pattern is usually found.
Whole genome sequencing is done, but it's typically significantly more expensive, of order ~$1,000. Here are some leads:
I'm pretty sure homelessness in US is pretty much a consequence of stopping the institutionalization of people suffering of long term mental problems. It was probably a good decision at the time, since the conditions in (some) of the institutions were pretty bad and the standards for admission and release were less than perfect, and it's a fair debate on if it should be rescinded or not, but that's the price to pay for that decision. Personally, I'd probably lean towards restarting it on a more voluntary basis - I'm pretty sure it's both cheaper and more effective to take care of those people in a place that's set up for this, rather than leave them on the street and regularly give them absurdly expensive ambulance rides.
As for the temporary homeless, that's solvable in the usual ways, but is also a much lower problem overall.
The percentage of homeless at one point in time might not be the most relevant. If a large percentage are temporary, they can be helped by classic methods like cash transfers or housing. The (even if much smaller) percentage of people with mental health problems need dedicated help - they're both long term and non-responsive to classic approaches.
This btw is valid regardless of the direction of causality.
"When fasting insulin and the natural logarithm of c-reactive protein were included in the model, an inverse association between BMI and mortality was present"
To carry on the discussion down thread about "Christians needed to invent hospitals because they invented so many wars", here's something I had not previously heard of before: Christians burned down the Library of Antioch!
Or maybe not. But if you want to one-up someone talking about the Tragedy of the Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, here you go! "Never mind Alexandria, did you know about Antioch?"
They created so wars because they were capable of doing do. Other groups mercilessly butchered each other, its just that their abject lack of technological development meant that they couldn't do anything on a meaningfully large scale.
At times I've come across discussions asking what exactly happened to the library of Alexandria as if it were a great mystery (hence the answer: "Christians burned it", which is only one of the answers I've heard). But, as far as I can tell, books normally don't survive long, unless they are transcribed over and over. So is there really a mystery? That an immense library declines, to the point that it seems to disappear, because people fail to maintain, it is more or less what you'd expect to happen over time, especially in an era of general decline.
Modern books don't last very long, because the way most modern paper is made (directly from wood pulp) leaves the chemistry in the paper out of equilibrium, and over a fairly short timescale (5-10) years chemical reactions cause the paper to yellow and disintegrate. But books made before the mid-20th century, on paper made from cotton and rags, readily last centuries unless abused, because their chemistry is stable when created. Parchment is even more durable.
The Ptolemaic dynasty, which had been actually paying to maintain the Library, went out of business in 30 BC. And the civil war that put them out of business incidentally burned a warehouse holding the reserve collection. Given the timing, I don't think you can pin that on the Christians.
The last record of the Great Library as a functional library, was ca. 260 AD. There's your "centuries" right there; three of them. The bit with Hypatia and the pagans vs the Christians, was a century and a half after that, during which period the institution had switched from "library" to "temple".
Almost five hundred years when nobody was paying to replace or repair the books as they wore out, were eaten by worms, or wandered off in the hands of people who thought they could give them a better home. Possibly some time between 270 and 415 AD there was a bit of deliberate arson as well, but that wouldn't have made much difference to the end result.
But "centuries" is not much, in context. I didn't make it clear, but I was actually talking about ancient manuscripts, and when I said that they don't last long I meant that if they are not painstakingly transcribed they are unlikely to last more than, what, two, three centuries? That is not much.
Nobody founds a library, builds a great big limestone building, spends a lot of money to buy a lot of books...and then walks away, expecting it to last 500 years. A library is founded because people think it will be useful *today* and *next week* and *next year*. Nobody really gives a damn about "300 years from now" because they have no idea what that future will look like. It's an organization that survives, or does not, because it is steadily useful in the present (or isn't).
If the founders are correct, then people come in and use the library all the time, and they look at the books and so forth, and presumably they're willing to pay and do pay the library's costs to keep the books or scrolls or whatnot that are popular and in demand in reasonable shape[1]..
Stuff that no one finds interesting probably gets thrown out faster than it physically decays, because few libraries would have space to just keep stuff that nobody thinks will ever be used. Modern libraries cull their collections all the time, although they mostly hedge their bets by putting what looks most important on microfilm (in the old days) or digitizing it via OCR (these days) before throwing it away. Whether those records survive deep into the future -- who knows? Arguments have been made[2] digital records are more susceptible to loss over centuries than plain old books, on account of they rely on the availability of reading machines considerably more sophisticated than human eyes.
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[1] For example, you can't get the code for "Colossal Cave" on a 5.25" floppy any more, but you can get it on GitHub:
This is a pedantry, but people don't write in fonts. "Font" derives from the same word as "foundry" and refers to the casting of the lead types in a typeface which are then used to set pages; it is an element of the art of printing, not writing. (Also, a unit of size: "one font of type" denotes a certain amount of cast types.)
The Alexandrian mob and the volatile nature of politics in the three-way standoff between the Pagans, the Christians and the Jews in Alexandria at the time, coupled with the death of Hypatia (killed as collateral damage in the political tug-of-war between the governor of the city and the bishop, but then later turned into a martyr for science by anti-Catholic and then anti-Christian polemicists) means that the Burning of the Library (which seems to have sort of happened on and off over the years, it's a complicated subject) is easy fodder for the "Science versus Religion" debates and indeed anyone who wants to have a go at the church (usually the Catholic Church, nobody seems to blame the Baptists or the Seventh Day Adventists for it).
Tim O'Neill has another good post on it, as do others. Basically, it's the kind of pop culture story that some people can't resist because it has everything (sex, violence, murder, wicked Christians, wicked liturgical churches that have bishops), so it continues on despite any historical debunking because the colourful erroneous version is so much more interesting than the dull truth (it gradually faded in importance over the years as royal interest and funding dried up and eventually declined to nothingness).
Hi Rats, Prats, and -- I can't think of a third list item, drat: If anyone is following the Trump Mar-a-Lago thing, I came across this article -- unsigned but seems to be by an attorney. It goes fairly in-depth about the background and claims presented, with links so you can verify the materials yourself: https://files.catbox.moe/2erd4t.pdf
> That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law.
This is not actually true. The weight of tradition generally outranked premodern kings. Some of them weren't even allowed to legislate; the king had to enforce his people's traditional laws, but no one had the formal authority to change the laws. For example, in early France, kings were bound by Frankish law which said a kingdom is the king's property, and when a man dies his property must be split evenly between his sons. They had to find a loophole in order to leave the kingdom to a single son. Thanks to the loophole, leaving the kingdom to a single son eventually came to be considered tradition, allowing them to stop bothering with the loophole. (The loophole was that the king would appoint one of his sons as co-king (but de facto still subordinate); then when he died there was still a king so inheritance law didn't come into it.)
It's especially rich coming right after a book review on ACX that was all about how the Ming emperor was under lifelong house arrest and not allowed to do anything fun.
> Perhaps from an abstract QALY perspective, standard of living and so forth, living in independent Ukraine is about the same as living in a Ukraine which is a province of Russia; indeed it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today.
I know that's not your point and I feel a little bad about jumping on it, but.
Take whatever measure you have on life quality in the Republic of Moldova, compare it with Romania, multiply it with 30 years, and you have the real damage Russia already had on global QALY. It's as good of a natural experiment as you can design: they're the same country split at some minor river, except one part is in EU and the other not, because it was under Russian influence.
I'm also pretty sure you can do the same between Romania and Poland, btw - in some countries in Europe Russian influence in politics was more visible than in others, and it showed. Can't get into details without making this a very long post. Also Germany closing nuclear plants and relying on gas and coal.
And not to forget that a quick and successful war in Ukraine is an open invitation for Russia to go further. It's not like what they're doing now is unique - it was supposed to be a carbon copy of Czechoslovakia invasion in '68, except the part where it failed.
John pointed out the QALY of people in occupied territories, which is true. But there's also the fact that an Ukrainian surrender would at most bring less suffering in the short term. It would be a very local and unstable maxima, at best.
"it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today"
Citation very much needed. Have you been paying attention to what Russia wants to do with Ukraine after they're finished conquering it? When they're finished, there won't be any Ukrainians left in Ukraine. And while the process of de-Ukranifying people won't be 100% fatal and probably not even 10% fatal, it's going to involve some very low-quality life years for thirty million or so people. After which, none of the formerly-Ukrainian people will be allowed to be more prosperous than the poorest Russians, and Russia outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is a very poor country indeed.
"They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.
> "They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.
Uh... is this a hypothetical, or are we contending that *Curtis Yarvin* of all people fits either of those labels?
I imagine the utilitarian motte/steelman of the QALY bit is that "self-determination etc. *should* factor in to QALYs, but those bits are hard to measure and not usually labeled as 'happiness', and thus they're frequently excluded even if they're empirically sought after."
Pretty much, yeah. I think it's a similar(ish) dynamic to GDP/"happiness" calculations you see when talking about how successful various countries are. Bhutan* can boast about how it's actually measuring Average National Happiness (and doing better than everyone else, naturally), and on occasion someone hears that and thinks it might be worth doing, and then everyone shrugs and goes back to discussing GDP.
Granted, with GDP that's probably also confounded by the fact that it's useful for estimating all sorts of *other* things (e.g., tax revenue), and that I can't imagine anyone would want it to come out that they're the "least happy" nation in the world.
*May not actually be Bhutan, but that's what I'm remembering.
I am glad to announce the third of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first meeting was great, and I hope to see many of you at this one.
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (readings at the end)
1) What is open-mindedness
2) Psychedelics.
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational and frisbees. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
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. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
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) Openmindedness.
This week we will try a classic video from the Skeptic/Atheist movement. Questions to think about and discuss? Is this a good description of the reality of open-mindedness? Did it change how you thought about open-mindedness? What do you think are the essential elements of open-mindedness to rationality? Is skepticism necessary for openmindedness and when does it work against it?
Open-mindedness
And/or This SSC essay. “The Control group is out of control”. What are the upsides and downsides of calling paranormal studies the control group for the scientific method. Does this increase our ability to be open to correct ideas, and is it worth shutting the door on exhausted lines of investigation? Why do you think belief in psychic powers affects the results of apparently rigorously replicated experiments? What do you make of the results of the smart rat, dumb rat experiment? Did you realize that double-blind is often thrown around as a claim when the second blinding is poorly done or not done at all and what is the importance of blinding to open-mindedness?
Written The Control Group Is Out Of Control | Slate Star Codex
Audio The Control Group Is Out of Control [Classic]
2) For psychedelics:
We will dip back into some of the best descriptive research done in the 1960s on the phenomenology of psychedelics. Read chapter 1 of “The varieties of psychedelic experience.”This book has many good digests of different people's reactions and experiences with psychedelics. What types of experience most interest you? What did you not know about? What potential applications come to mind after reading these experiences? Do you agree with the taxonomy that the authors create?
the varieties of psychedelic experience.pdf
This is an interview with an experienced PTSD researcher that has been involved with the cutting-edge of PTSD treatment research about MDMA therapy. I generally like what he has to say and find his perspectives useful. I will put one caveat, which is he gets really enthusiastic about a lot of things. He is a generally more optimistic person than me.
Bessel van der Kolk on MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD: More profound than anything we have done
Finally, here are a couple of short videos by a guy that has used a lot of different drugs and ruined his life with them. He at first enthusiastically endorsed MDMA, but it did not stop him from ruining his life with other drugs or properly addressing the deep psychological issues he had to face. Psychedelics are often not enough and can even be a distraction or copium and have their own abuse potential.
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
Terra Ignota hives were based on very fast cheap personal transportation (two hours to anywhere on earth) which loosened the importance of where people are. I'm not sure whether that's sufficient for hives, but we certainly don't have it.
Countries with multiple legal systems (I've heard of this for religions) exist, but I'm not sure how thorough it can be.
In the sense of "we all declare ourselves to be part of the Utopian hive, so no matter where we live we all only have to obey Utopian rules", no. Not in our world, probably not in any world inhabited by humans. You're going to have to obey the laws of the sovereign government of the territory you're standing on, no matter what you call yourself. Or you're going to find lots of large angry men with guns saying that the new rule is that you live in this two by three meter cage for the next few years.
If you want to *also* join the Special Utopian Society, knock yourself out. You'll have to obey Utopian rules *and* US (or whatever) laws, pay Utopian membership fees *and* US (or whatever) taxes. You'll be just like the Masons or the Elks or the Mormons, except Utopian (or whatever).
The review of WWOTF mentioned that perhaps we should leave some coal lying around in case humanity has to reinvent the industrial revolution generations after some almost-extinction-level event.
The book review contest was fun! I had hoped that a weekly cycle would make me read more and more diverse book reviews, and this is what happened. Great readings and inspirations. Also, while I've always enjoyed Scott's book reviews, I admired his skills even more oftentimes during the contest - it seems so easy to make this or that 'mistake' and annoy the potential reader even in a very good review (and I certainly wouldn't have done better). Great writing is really an art.
I'd be interested to hear about your criteria for selecting your favourite.
I've thought about this a bit and I wouldn't be surprised to find there's a mechanism where anybody doing "guest post on particular beloved blog" gets a premium on how harshly they are judged. If you are here, presumably it's because you like the style here; other styles are going to be jarring. Maybe. I'm not 100% on this but it seems to fit.
You mean, they all write equally well, it's just a matter of good fit to the readers' preferences?
I agree I'm here because I like the style here ... and the same thing will go on for other blogs. There was at least one review, which I'd say was well written, but clearly not my style. But in my first comment, I was thinking about something else. There were reviews I liked a lot and I read them with pleasure ... until something small threw me off. Often those were minor things, like in some places suddenly I didn't know whether the reviewer was referencing the book's thoughts or his/her own thoughts, and this led to a small irritation and stopped my reading flow for a moment. It made me realize, that for example with Scott's reviews I (think I) always know whether he is talking about the author's ideas or his original ideas. Small things like this, but it occured quite often. I think I read those reviews pretty open minded. Well, and I really liked some of them and found most interesting to read.
So overall I think yes, there is a fit of style between blog posters and their readership *and* there also is some real craft and skill involved. And the level of the latter varies. But then finally I just called writing an *art* and who am I to judge whether it's done better or worse.
I'm saying, some art really is better or worse. And some writers are better or worse, less careful or more careful. But there's also an element of, say, a reasonably pretty girl standing next to an unbelievably beautiful girl who is also your exact type. So more I'm saying, it's possible that things you might have encountered in the wild and thought were fine might get a small debuff from being at the place you normally go to read things you find great.
I think there's definitely merit to both the taste-based and objective quality points. But when you consider that many of these reviewers likely spent a lot more time on their posts and still arguably fall short of Scott's average quality... it's kind of scary.
I mean, he's talented, highly educated, and has a ton of practice. That's a triple threat. He also has good voice, and a voice almost perfectly fitted to be "As fun as rationalists will get before they start to get mad at you for not talking in binary" - he's perfectly fitted for his audience, and broadly enjoyable for everyone else.
That's proven out in terms of him being, frankly, gigantic to the point of having overflowed out of the niche he occupies. I think when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. The more I write and see the realities of growing an audience the less likely I think that is - even if I was every bit as good, I still might not be as good of a fit to a particular audience. Even if I was a better fit, I'm likely not as good. And even if I was both, I might not be able to tether myself synergistically to a new/growing movement and become to most outsiders the voice of that movement. So on, so forth.
But that said, I have lived a life and developed some level of voice that's distinct from Scott, and reading isn't really a zero-sum game. The same is true for you, or really anybody writing here.
That's all a little off-topic: More on topic, Scott realistically just has a ton of time in on writing. He's a statistical outlier in a lot of good qualities I already listed, but there's very likely some very talented people in the contest who might be able to write a comparably good review of something given enough "extra" production time and enough "extra" perceived importance of project. But that advantage gets negated once you realize this might be their first or tenth review, and Scott's written many hundreds of pieces that are either book reviews or cross-train into that space. Practice matters, even beyond just "being a better writer" in some nature-not-nurture way.
The point of all this is really just to say "Go out, write more stuff, if book reviews don't work for you write something different, and find your own unique soul-mate asses to kick".
I think we agree as far as 'talent, practice and being liked by your specific audiance' goes. Heck, I mean Scott's book reviews are my prototype for a book review - I didn't read many before, at least not many that I found worth remembering.
Isn't the main difference just that we come to this from different perspectives? I didn't mean for my remarks to be any critical or discouraging for any writer. Maybe they sounded like this to your ears, as you *are* actually writing and participated in the contest? I'm not (yet) doing any of those, at least not online, so I guess the meaning for me is different.
> 'when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. ' I was amazed by this statement. I sometimes thought about starting a blog, but I never thought about beating Scott in terms of size, outreach ... however, there are probably moments when I hoped I'd be able to write a book review as fluent and readable and insightful as he does. So all the small moments that disturbed me when reading the reviews I *liked* made me realize all the small things you need - which means I would need - to get right, even if writing a very good review already. Not discouraging, but maybe humbling, or else setting the right tone for a task, if you wish.
I totally agree with the 'practice' part ... for most, their 40th book review should be better than their first or second. However, I also got the impression that Scott managed to focus on activities that are close to his strenghts, and I believe that's helpful and wise and many other things more. I can't tell you how much more I'd like to *talk* to you guys in person instead of having a written conversation online. (But better online than not!) Eg. speaking to bigger audiances always came naturally to me in a way writing did not. A bit sad, as the occasions for writing are many, and yes, I did think to write a blog somewhen, maybe.
For outreach you can't underestimate the 'community' part. You're obviously better if you write for a concrete target group, and feeling at home and being known in a community sure helps a lot. If you don't have a concrete target group, which *knows* about you, all the folks that like your style have to find you somewhere in the millions of words written on the web, and that's difficult.
I guess I'm a picky reader also when not being on Scott's blog. I open a book in a bookstore, I read five lines, and I decide whether I like or dislike the tone.
Btw. I read some of what you wrote, and I found it good to read and I also felt touched by some of it, and what else can an author dream of? So, I'm glad you found your voice and, and yes, please continue writing.
100%. I pretty much agree with all points in the thread. (Had an earlier comment that said some of the same stuff but it disappeared.). Scott's average quality is insanely good, and it's crazy that any of his reviews picked at random would have an excellent chance at beating his entire readership in the contest.
That said, it *is* his audience, so the people that are here are perfectly tailored for his voice and style.
I definitely thought that some of the criticism wouldn't have been present if Scott had been the author. For example, there were a whole bunch of reviews where the comments argued over whether this was the proper way to write a book review - some of it quite heated/indignant. I doubt most of that would have cropped up for a Scott post.
To OP's point, though, I have a hard time thinking of anything by Scott that had a line/point/anecdote that jarred me out of the flow of the piece. That takes a tremendous amount of skill and is something that I struggle with a lot in my writing. As you say, practice makes perfect.
I find it interesting that no one complaining about the voting method has speculated on the reason why Scott chose FPTP. He obviously knew that people would object. He chose to do so anyways. Clearly FTPT better suits his purposes. Based on the fact that he picked some atypical reviews to add to the contest, it appears that he is selecting for variety.
We used approval voting last year, and I'd have preferred something ranked - the winner was an excellent entry and I included it in my vote, but it wasn't my favourite. Approval voting is great if you're trying to find a broadly-acceptable consensus (like "where should we go for lunch"), but for a "find the single 'best' entry" contest like this I think we want a Condorcet method, as implemented by e.g. https://www.condorcet.vote/ .
I had read >'I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked' and took that literally, so basically I took care that I always knew which one was the number one on my list. Made things very easy.
I probably wouldn't have voted in any of the more 'fancy' voting systems. I would have been fine in naming my top 3 I guess, but would have taken more time (with or without internal order).
This is bad and unacceptable. Telling people to "pick one" will just hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best. I thought Scott of all people would understand this.
I’m puzzled by your contention that voting for only one will “hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best” - could you describe the causal chain which leads to that result?
Plurality voting means that if two choices are near-identical, they are penalised compared to there only being one of them (since the vote that would have gone to either alone is instead split between them). Thus, choices that are distinct from others ("weird") are advantaged.
This is not the *only* effect, though, so Caba's statement was a bit stronger than warranted.
Yeah I was pretty surprised he didn’t use STAR voting here. That’s probably the most information rich and pretty much how books are already typically rated.
I've been travelling continuously for most of the past four years, and mostly haven't needed cash at all. This of course depends on where you go, but it's been true in rural Mexico, South Africa, Ascension Island, Panama, Portuguese Atlantic Islands and many other remote and less developed places. Almost everyone takes a Visa or Mastercard these days, and my bank gives me better or similar enough rates to any currency exchange kiosk that I just don't bother anymore. Many places I'll carry a little bit of cash just in case, and that I'll get at an ATM. Many banks are not as friendly to travelers as mine is though, beware! And often the ATM's charge a hefty fee for withdrawals from other banks, but I've usually been able to find some that doesn't. If there is a line at one ATM while other brands don't have lines, that's a sure sign.
I've found the best results are normally exchanging money before you travel, followed by using a local bank. Avoid exchange services in airports or touristy spots. Paying by credit card is also usually not too bad. ATMs are normally loaded with fees.
A number of UK banks, notably the newer ones such as Chase and Starling and Revolut will convert your spendings to GBP at the interbank / Mastercard / Visa rate without commission, and without a spread between buy and sell rates. Withdrawal from ATMs is also possible at the same rate although daily &/or monthly limits can be in place and there is often a transaction charge levied by the operator of the ATM. Some of the advice here seems as old-fashioned to me as traveller cheques.
Seconded. Never use the exchange services, they almost always offer the worst rates. If you’re traveling for an extended period of time, it’s worth looking into your banking and credit card options - the difference in ATM fees can be very significant if you’re making frequent withdrawals.
When did the existential risk posed by rogue AI come to be perceived as an urgent matter? The first Terminator film put the issue before a large public in 1984, but as far as I know it didn't spark much interest in the real possibility of AI posing a threat to humanity. Yudkowsky and Bostrom were writing about the issue at the turn of the millennium, but how many were taking them up on it at that time? What about in the wake of Bostrom's Superintelligence?
I'm sympathetic to your view, but I'm interested in the activities of those tech moguls and the organizations they're funding. When did that start happening?
The book ranked #17 on The New York Times list of best selling science books for August 2014. In the same month, business magnate Elon Musk made headlines by agreeing with the book that artificial intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Bostrom's work on superintelligence has also influenced Bill Gates’s concern for the existential risks facing humanity over the coming century. In a March 2015 interview by Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said that he would "highly recommend" Superintelligence. According to the New Yorker, philosophers Peter Singer and Derek Parfit have "received it as a work of importance".
Missed opportunity: having prediction markets for the book contest winner. (Technically, one per review would be easiest, probably.)
Of course, then one would also have to come up with a way to prevent ballot stuffing, but I think this would be desirable in any case. Apart from people with botnets, it might also that some other interest group (e.g. subreddit) focused on the topic of one review (say, fusion energy, ancient china, weird poetry) first lined the book review when it came out (not objectionable), and now links the vote (probably objectionable). Some clear rules, e.g. "You should have made a good faith effort to read at least 2/3 of the contest entries" would probably deter the more honest external readers.
I don't have a good proposition how to do avoid ballot stuffing: restricting voting to the active commentariat (a la wikipedia "only accounts with at least N edits can vote") seems unfair to lurkers. One rather well defined group would be the premium members of ACX. Of course, this is also introduces biases towards the very committed and/or well-of readers, but if the membership of that population was also saved with the vote, it would allow checking for some irregularities. Just having the voting site print out a random string and asking members to post that string as a comment on a special hidden thread would serve in a pitch without any involvement of substack. (And incidentally also break anonymity, but for the book contest that might be acceptable.)
Or you could have the voters first select five reviews they have actually read, then quiz them on the content.
The first replies I've seen disappear like that were somewhat rude (I like to stir shit up, what can I say) so I assumed that was God-Emperor Scott's heavy hand, but the one linked was entirely wholesome and civil.
Yeah I deleted that myself. After I posted it, it seemed kinda presumptuous for a guy in Minnesota to add his two cents regarding Eastern European politics. Sorry for the confusion and best of luck this winter!
I think the MO of our God-Emperor is not to delete replies, but to ban the user and leave the post so it is transparent why they were banned. (Might be different with obvious spam, though.)
Of course, the users in question could also have deleted their posts themselves: that would not undo the emails sent, but make it as if the comments never had appeared. A better comment system would preserve the info that a comment was deleted and by whom, perhaps.
It sounds like these are instances of self-moderation working in its ideal sense - a commenter, upon reflection, realizes their reply was neither kind nor necessary, and deletes it themselves. I see no reason to penalize such a user for making a good decision by leaving a public notice of their momentary lapse in judgement.
Doesn't seem to be the case for current AI progress. (Of course there's obvious crossover, but the leading efforts are intentionally anti-pornographic).
Well, those are the efforts we know of. I'd be very surprised to learn that *no one* is working very hard on making AI-powered porn-chatbots, or deepfaked porn videos, or auto-generated deepfaked Turing-level Singularity porn, or...
Possibly, yes. But look at it this way: if you publish a paper about incrementally improving spam classification accuracy, you could get another science grant. If you actually improve spam classification accuracy, you could make a bit of money; on the other hand, if you improve spam generation fidelity, you could probably make a million dollars (until the previous guy catches up). But what if you found a way to auto-generate, on demand, the kind of porn that is perfectly matched to the viewer's exact interests ? Well, in that case, you could probably make *billions*. And also, should your name become known, go down in history as a legend: a demon, or a saint, or possibly both.
The incentives are just a little bit mismatched, you know ? :-)
If we're lucky, we'll end up with one of those "why wales don't die of cancer" situations (tl;dr - whales get cancer, but by the time the tumor is big enough to cause problems for the whale, the tumor has grown its own tumors that kill the first tumor). The malware AI may scoop up compute cycles from the mis-aligned top level AI that would otherwise cause problems for us.
Do you have a source for the whale cancer thing btw? That's something I'd believed to be true, but when it came up in conversation the other day I was unable to find any support for it so I switched to thinking it's an urban legend.
I suspect the explanation I'm proposing is one that one wonderfully counterintuitive paper proposed, which probably went viral on the Internets, and got into all our brains, but with just about as much support as the latest study on covid masks or correlation of vaccines and education.
Humans and whales both only rarely die of cancer during the window when they are reproductively relevant in the ancestral environment. Not sure if it's the same rate, but the fact that cancer in humans mostly occurs in people well past their childbearing years seems like it could be a big part of the puzzle.
Reminds me of a spectacularly terrible Tamil movie called Dasavataram, where Kamal plays 10 roles. In one, a bullet shot by bad guy goes through his head only to exactly get rid of a tumor he never knew he had, saving his life.
I think I stumbled across that on Youtube and yeah, it's definitely.... something. "Spectacular" is the mot juste, I can't even say it's spectacularly *terrible* because I was too dazed after watching it. "Ambitious" is another way to describe it, in the way that piling Pelion on Ossa was ambitious.
(I think my favourite bit was the George Bush imitation).
I still have not figured out how the opening persecution of Vishnu worshippers by the Shavaite king fits in with the theme of the rest of the movie, which is a SF/techno-thriller/disaster movie. But I did appreciate the ending shot where the skeleton of the guy executed in the beginning is revealed still chained to the statue, after being washed up by the sea (because that, at least, was the only part of the entire thing I understood even vaguely):
Or perhaps it's one of those good news, bad news situations. The good news is as you say. The bad news is that the anti-malware software fooms into sentience and decides a la Agent Smith that humanity itself is malware.
Ok here's another approach to if not disproving then at least neatly sidestepping the repugnant conclusion. This seems sufficiently obvious that someone must have thought of it already, but to my great annoyance I haven't seen any mention of it on this blog.
The repugnant conclusion is really a constrained optimization problem where you have some fixed amount of resources R and want to find the optimal number of people N and resource allocation function f : [1,N] -> Real assigning an amount of resources to each person in a away that maximizes the total utility over all people while not exceeding the available amount of resources. As I've seen it described, the repugnant conclusion assumes that it is very cheap to add new people with infinitesimal utility. While I don't necessarily disagree with the repugnant conclusion under those assumptions, I don't believe these assumptions hold true in our universe.
Here's another set of (also unrealistic but somewhat better) assumptions: It costs 5 resources to sustain a person. At this level of resources, the person is barely kept alive and suffering greatly. If we increase the number of resources to 10, the person is now at utility 0 and indifferent about being alive or not. From that point on, every additional resource linearly increases it's utility up to a maximum of 10. So now say we have R=1000 resources available. What the conventional conclusion to the repugnant conclusion seems to tell us is that we should maximize the number of people and have 1000 / 5 = 200 people who are all maximally suffering. Far from maximizing utility, this is actually the minimum utility we can achieve. Ok, so say we instead have 100 people with 10 resources each. Still not great, this just gives us 0 utility. If you go through the math, you'll find that under these assumptions, the optimal resource allocation is to give 20 resources each to 50 people, all maximally happy with a total utility of 500.
Now, of course, this model is also flawed. Obviously the numbers are made up and utility should probably have diminishing returns rather than increasing linearly up to the maximum. So with those adjustments, I don't think you would get only maximally happy people, the optimal point would be somewhat less than that (but still well above baseline).
Another aspect to consider is that a large fraction of utility may be derived from common goods that have very low marginal costs for each additional person, which gives a much more favorable tradeoff for adding additional people in a way that does not have to significantly diminish the utility of others. In a hypothetical society of the future that has been optimized for maximum utility, we will have a ginormous numbers of people with not that much resources each, but also mindblowingly good movies and video games, fascinating scientific insights, incredibly advanced medical technology available to everyone, superintelligent AIs that can have deep conversations with you and help you achieve enlightenment, galaxy-scale engineering projects that bring glory to humankind, etc. Doesn't sound so repugnant to me!
It doesn't really address the core ethical point i.e. "are 1000 0.01 utility people better than 1 1 utility person Y/N?", merely pointing out that that exact situation is not likely to come up IRL (though not strictly *impossible*). You can argue about the trolley problem without thinking it likely that a given person will ever literally experience it IRL.
That's why it's rarely brought up in discussions, though it's worth keeping in mind if you actually accept the RC.
I think Clemens point still holds to some degree, because I think the "core point" is largely counterintuitive because your intuition would suggest that if you had 1000, 0.01 utility people that there must be a better world available.
And even though I think 1 person at 1 utility is actually worse, I also think it's almost unimaginable that you couldn't optimize the resources needed for 1000 0.01 utility people into a world that's clearly better than the 1 1 utility case.
>are 1000 0.01 utility people better than 1 1 utility person Y/N
By model, a pure utilitarian should prefer 10 utils to 1 util. The problems are:
1. Most people's moral intuitions are not purely utilitarian, and as with the Trolley Problem or the Utility Monster, the scenario is specifically selected to highlight the differences.
2. A lot of hard questions are buried in the idea of what it means to live a 1 util life vs a 0.01 util life, especially if we intuitively judge the utility of a hypothetical life by imagining ourselves being transported into it, complete with endowment effects and hedonic adaptation to our current lifestyle. This is further complicated by the difficulty of forming correct intuitions involving comparison of very large and very small numbers.
What we use nowadays is a line drawn around the city, either reflecting the extent of the settlement, or what its extent was 20/100/800 years ago (The City of St David's, population 1600) or political squabbles over local government fiefdoms (Vegas is not in Vegas). Everything inside the line is counted and everything beyond the pale is not.
This mostly shows up in absolute population counts and densities. A city where the line is drawn tightly around it will have a lower official population and higher density than one which includes a bunch of peripheral farmland and commuter towns.
But there can also be other distortions. The nice bits of the Nottingham urban area are located outside the city proper, even when they are contigious with it. This makes the city look poorer and more deprived than it is.
I'm no geographer but my guess would be to use more fine-grained statistics to create a model of how cities change as distance from the centre increases, and then use the parameters needed to fit a particular city to those curves as a metric of what the city is like. A very cursory google reveals this non-paywalled paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316428846_Scaling_evidence_of_the_homothetic_nature_of_cities as the kind of thing I'd want to build upon.
Each "urban area" consists of a set of "census blocks" that meet particular criteria. I believe (all numbers are rough guesses) they start with any block that has a population density over 1000 people per square mile, and add in adjacent blocks that are at least 40% impervious ground cover (i.e., buildings or parking lots), and add in any blocks that are fully surrounded by these up to 5 sq mi (i.e., parks) and then agglomerate resulting chunks that are separated by no more than a mile of straight line distance over land or five miles over water or ice, provided that there is substantial commuter flow between them.
They haven't done the full calculation of urban areas for the 2020 census yet, but the Wikipedia list of US urban areas from the 2010 census is one of the most frequent Wikipedia pages I visit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas).
When you look at urban areas sorted by population you get a list that probably lines up roughly intuitively with judgments of significance (though Austin is probably lower than you expect, Virginia Beach is higher than you expect, and there are a few other oddities).
The list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area) is roughly similar when sorted by population, but it gets very odd results for anything that has to do with areas, because an MSA is made up out of counties rather than census blocks. Riverside County and San Bernardino County in California, Maricopa and Pima Counties in Arizona, and Clark County in Nevada end up making the MSAs of Riverside/San Bernardino, Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas look gigantic, and thus extremely low density, even though the Las Vegas urban area is actually the tenth densest.
There are some counterintuitive results on density for urban areas too, in that New York is actually the fifth densest urban area, after Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and tiny Delano, CA. This is because the New York urban area includes a gigantic sprawl of low-density suburbs on acre or multi-acre lots, while the California urban areas are mostly penned in by mountains, ocean, and desert. You can restore these to a more understandable order by taking a weighted average of the population density of the census blocks, where the blocks are weighted by population instead of by area, though for some reason I only see this for MSAs and not for Urban Areas: https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/the-50-densest-american-metropolitan-areas-by-weighted-density.html
(I think once you're doing weighted density, it doesn't matter so much which definition you use, because the difference between an urban area and an MSA is a bunch of census blocks whose total population is quite small.)
In the United States, the Office of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau deal with this issue by using metropolitan statistical areas and combined statistical areas (MSAs and CSAs). MSAs sound a lot like what you are looking for. They define an area by employment and commuting between counties, where those meet certain thresholds. This method does have at least one major drawback, in that it relies upon political (county) boundaries to define an area. This can be a problem when, for instance, a county such as the one I live in is in between to MSAs, and so gets categorized as belonging to just one of them. Using my county as an example, this means that I am classified as being in MSA x, but the area of the county I live in, abutting MSA y, has far more ties to MSA y than to x; basically, counties aren't fine-grained enough to reflect on-the-ground realities of the smaller subsets of a county. Still, MSAs are an improvement over just city jurisdictions, which created absurdities such as the example you gave of the Vegas strip not actually being in Las Vegas.
MSAs/CSAs does kind of work for some purposes. It more or less successfully allows us to compare different urban areas for instance, and in that way provides a truer picture than would just the actual official core-city populations.
It is definitely a kludge though with a lot of limitations. It also sometimes creates additional confusion because people, including the people who work in news media organizations, often mix up the terminologies ("MSA" or "metro area" is not at all intuitive to most people the way "city" is).
I also suspect that the recent noticeable shift in commuting patterns (more people in more professions working from home more often) will undermine some of the logic by which MSAs are technically defined.
> political squabbles over local government fiefdoms (Vegas is not in Vegas). Everything inside the line is counted and everything beyond the pale is not.
This is your issue. Draw the line where it makes the most sense. Historical boundraries can factor into that, but if it's urban for kilometers on both sides then that probably isn't the line you're looking for. Why the heck this would get 'political', or why you couldn't resolve the damn politics and find a way to do the right thing, *that* is your issue. You can try papering over it with better metrics, I guess, but there's still something broken there.
I guess the fine-grained way would be to use blocks as the basic units.
We have to remember that the way statistics was born was to handle big numbers in a quick easy-to-calculate way. We don't have that need anymore as we can handle massive amounts of data.
Computers have got much better at handling massive amounts of data but I can't absorb a whole spreadsheet full of numbers into my brain.
Sure I can import lower level super output area data and visualise it with QGIS but often there's value in compressing everything into a few high-level variables. Especially when you want to compare between cities or compare the same city at different points in time.
I want a more meaningful value for the population of NYC than 8,008,278 but more concise than 'Bronx CB 1: 91497, Bronx CB 2: 52246, Bronx CB 3: 79762...'
I'm surprised the Canberra one merits a mention and Melbourne doesn't - is there really such an overconcentration of Rats there that it outweighs the fact Melbourne is >10x Canberra's population?
Heartily agree, I am the organiser for the Canberra meetup and am feeling very chuffed at the mention! Especially since at the time of the post I had 2 'maybes' and 1 confirmed 'going'. Got to say, since the mention I have had a huge uptick in attendees - thanks Scott!
If it helps I don't think it's deliberate, I think it's probably something with the way they did their look up, probably just ctrl-f for August on the list and look at the top ones? Anyway, hey from up North, if you're ever in Canberra let us know, we can get an over-priced coffee and I can show off the pride and joy of our town, the National Rock Collection.
Disappointed by the lack of a fancy voting system. In my opinion there were four approximately equal reviews. Seems a shame to not be able to distinguish between my second favourite (which I thought was excellent) and my least favourite (which I couldn't even finish).
It also incentivises me to vote tactically which I don't really want to do.
I think you are "supposed" to vote for the best book review. But since there's a difference between "best book review" and "review I liked best" (I might like a review better if it reviews a book that sounds really interesting, but a review might in fact be better if it gives me a proper understanding of the content and context of a book I'm not quite as interested in), and since different people will be voting differently, I think at best we'll get a rough average of a bunch of related questions.
How do I get Substack to stop sending me emails but NOT stop showing me newly published articles from people I subscribe to when I go to their webpage or use the app?
The whole thing is a mess. There's some sort of difference between Substacks that I pay for and those that I don't, and some difference between the webpage and the app. The result is that my email box is filled up with fucking dozens of substack emails every day. I can't even stay ahead of them to delete them. But when I unclick "send me email" it ALSO stops updating the app. If that makes sense.
I set up a folder for especially for Substack emails and a rule that diverts newly published article emails into it. Comment replies come into the main inbox as normal but I don't usually comment much.
It's not quite what you are looking for but it might help.
I turned off “email” under the “notifications” section of my profile on the app. I’m hoping that that will work - clicking on each subscription individually failed.
It looks like it won’t though. I can still access what might be all my subscriptions through the website, but right now it looks like the app didn’t update. Your plan is probably the safest.
Doesn’t this seem like a big lack of basic functionality? It’s frustrating. I have a hard enough time getting to important emails on a normal day. Now they’re even more buried
I stumbled across the life of William U’Ren recently. I bet Oregonians know of him, but not being from Oregon I had never heard of him, although I was familiar with some of the reforms he promoted, e.g. direct election of senators. I think a few others here might find him intriguing because of his efforts at voting reform and because he was a Georgist.
How did I come across him? I was researching cherry trees for my backyard. Apparently William U’Ren once had an asthma attack while down on his luck, and was taken in by Seth Luelling, the politically progressive horticulturalist who developed the Bing cherry. Seth and his brother Henderson Luelling would rank high on the ACX “Puritan scale”, although they were in fact Quakers. After attempting to run a utopian community elsewhere, they founded the first commercial fruit tree nursery in the Pacific Northwest. The Luellings were staunch abolitionists and might have maintained a stop on the Underground Railroad, though this can’t be proven.
One parent variety of the Bing cherry is the “Black Republican” cherry, which Luelling named in support of Abraham Lincoln. A “Black Republican” back then was one who supported emancipation.
But the famous Bing cherry we see in supermarkets was named for Ah Bing, Seth Luelling’s Chinese orchard foreman. After 35 years working for Luelling, Bing went back to China for a visit in the 1880s and was prohibited to return to the US under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Now there's a phrase I never expected to read! Who knew developing new strains of cherry tree was so exciting and fraught?
I had to look the man up because the name (U'Ren) is so unusual, and you haven't even included all the juicy bits:
" There U'Ren became involved both in reform politics and spiritualism — a major intellectual fad of the era — and became involved with the prominent Luelling family, who were actively interested in both pursuits.
In 1890, he campaigned vigorously for the Australian Ballot, which won in 1891. It was while he was involved in this campaign that he attended a séance, and met Mrs. Laure Durkee."
So fruit cultivation, reform politics, and spiritualism all went hand-in-hand. And who was Mrs. Durkee? The article gives no further information, and I'd love to know.
And for anyone who's wondering, the "Australian Ballot" means that when you go into the voting booth, they give you a piece of paper that has the names of the candidates on it, you indicate one, and you deposit it secretly in the ballot box. If you want to know how voting worked before, this New Yorker article from several years ago was pretty good (and shocking!): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/rock-paper-scissors
If anyone finds it helpful, I've made a tier list for the book reviews where I've been keeping track of which ones I've liked over the course of the contest.
How do proponents of converting the US to multimember districts think this is going to, like, work? Globally the average size for multimember districts is 3-7 representatives- right now the US House has 435 members. At 1305 members it would be either the world's largest lower house, or certainly among them- at 3045 members.... we are entering 'patently ridiculous' territory. To be fair, you could still probably keep 1-2 reps for smaller states (Wyoming, etc.) and just use multimember for the bigger ones, but there's absolutely no way that you end up with less 1300-1400 members of the House. I don't see the American people accepting this.
The right way to do multimember, if the US were starting from scratch, would be to simply use larger districts than we have now. I.e. Illinois just to pick a random example has 18 House members right now, this would be reduced to say 6. But that seems politically impossible to force on the country- people like having local representatives for their little fiefdom, they don't want to share representation with 'those people on the other side of the state, ugh'. Voters would be apoplectic if you shrunk the number of state districts.
So, multimember proponents- you're proposing 1500 or so House reps, is that it? How would this work?
I’ve been saying for a while that I think the House should be much, much larger.
I don’t favor multi member districts though. Just think that fixing the size of the House at an arbitrary number is a foolish idea and that it ought to be more purely democratic, thus opposing the Senate which should be less so—Senators should be elected by state legislatures again. Probably the upper limit should be 100k people to each House member.
As I see it the biggest problem is that they obviously won’t fit well in their current chambers, but it’s been a while since we’ve done any substantial architecture in DC and there are plenty of ugly buildings there which could be torn down.
I'm in favor of multimember districts and I'm in favor of substantially increasingly the size of the House, but I mostly view the two questions as orthogonal to one another: refactoring the existing House size into larger districts (except in the smallest states) of 3-5 members apiece seems both feasible and worthwhile to me. I haven't personally observed a love of "little fiefdoms" among voters: the main obstacle I foresee is that Representatives from safely Rebublican or Democratic districts with good relationships with local primary voters and party organizations probably like their current near-absolute job security.
If you do substantially expand the House, the main obstacle is the logistics of holding floor debates, which is easily solved by abolishing floor debates. These debates have served little practical purpose apart from posturing for the press at least back to the mid-1800s, which Representatives should be perfectly capable of doing on their own time. The real debates happen in committees, caucuses, working groups, and informal private discussions. Procedural votes and votes on bill passage in the House are already done via electronic devices (currently swiping a code card), which could just as easily be done from each Representative's DC office, or even from their district offices or state delegation offices located in their respective state capitals.
Committees could be populated by a proportional representation system from self-organizing caucuses. If there are 1500 total Reps and 150 of them organize themselves into the "Republicans with Silly Hats" caucus, then that caucus can choose amongst themselves members to fill about 10% of the seats on each committee.
Another way to approach this would be to have an "executive committee" of somewhere between a hundred or so Reps and the current size of the House, again chosen by proportional representation of self-organizing caucuses. Urgent business that needs to be debated and voted on in person for some reason would be handled by the executive committee, at least for a first pass, with the whole membership of the house getting a yes-or-no vote to ratify the EC decisions in addition to their voice in choosing and replacing committee members.
If we implemented the "Wyoming rule" (add representatives until each one has the same voter-to-legislator ratio as Wyoming, the least populous state), that would expand the House from 435 to 573. That doesn't sound like an unreasonable number.
But also, this just sounds like argument from incredulity? Like, what exactly is the issue with having 1500 representatives, beyond building a bigger building for them to meet in? It's a big number, but it doesn't seem like there's some obvious threshold at a thousand people or something where representative democracy stops working. It would be the world's biggest legislature, sure, but the US is the world's second-biggest democracy - proportionately it's not *that* huge.
I'd be concerned about moving too far from Dunbar's number-- as the House acquires too many people to be even moderately socially comprehensible, it might need another layer of hierarchy. This might matter.
The whole argument for increasing the number of representatives is to reduce the constituent:representative ratio in larger states. It seems entirely counterproductive if that is done while reducing the power (as a proportion of the total power of the house) of each representative.
Perhaps you would care to spend 5 minutes reading up how other countries have done this before posting. Check out Ireland for example, as far as I know, the only country that does pure multi-member districts at the national lower house level.
I'd like to hope my poly sci degree degree, and extensive comparative politics readings, haven't been a total waste! :)
Most democracies use multimember districts- that's actually the norm, SMDs are what's unusual. They make it work via having say 10-40 for the whole country- Ireland, to your example, has 39 districts. Finland has 13, Italy has 27, and so on. With the US having 435, my point is that current voters will be very unhappy about vastly reducing that number, and losing their current personal rep. Hence, an extremely large House seems like the only option
What makes you think voters would be unhappy about losing their "current personal rep"? I can't remember if I'm in the Texas 14th district or 17th or 34th (I think one of those might be the number for my US House district, and one might be my State House district, and the other might be my State Senate district, or just a random number that got into my memory). I know that Pete Sessions is my current representative, but I'd rather not have him - I'd rather be part of a five-member district in the interior of the Texas Triangle that sends one or two Democrats to Congress, who *would* represent me, even as my neighbors still get Pete Sessions because they like him.
Well, aside from status quo bias- if District 1 covers the metro area of Gotham, and District 2 covers the suburbs, exurbs and rural land of Mayberry- that means right now Gotham and Mayberry each have their own rep in the House. If you merge them, Gothan and Mayberry now have 50% less representation each, and the individual voices of both areas won't be heard as loudly. If you propose to do this to, like, the entire country, you're going to encounter an extreme amount of voter unhappiness. I don't think your personal example is how 98% of the country is going to think.
Not to mention that in practical terms, any electoral reform has to somehow pass the current political system that exists. Representatives are unlikely to vote themselves out of a job, and this issue would be bipartisan.
As a real-life example, I grew up in a rural state with 2 House reps- 1 covers the urban area (like 10% of the land), the other covers the rural area (the 90). These culturally & economically separate regions like having their own representatives. People would be extremely unhappy to see them merged
I guess I don't see this. Right now, no district precisely covers an urban area - either the rural or suburban district gets some of the urban area, or the urban district gets some of the suburban or rural area, or more likely (as in the five districts that divided Austin in the 2012-2022 cycle) every district has bits of each. I would think that the Austinites that were stuck in my largely rural and exurban district would be much happier with proportional representation, as would I, as would the rural and suburban people that find themselves stuck in a mostly urban district. I would guess that there is a significant fraction of people in your state that found themselves in exactly this situation. And everyone else gets to keep their representative, so merging seems like absolutely the way to go to make *everyone* happy.
If you merge the urban and suburban district, then everyone gets better representation - I don't see how you reduce representation for both, if you are preserving the same number of representatives total.
Alright I've had a deeper look into it and you're right about some things. I was assuming that party list-PR systems always used national balancing seats but it seems only about half of them do.
However I do find it odd that you'd specifically want defences of a strict US multi-member system when a mixed system, such as MMP or party list with levelling seats, is far more suitable for the US. My guess is that most people who advocate for strict multi-member districts just probably don't know of the existence of other systems.
An MMP system ideally has twice as many members as districts but you can push the envelope a bit. For example, increasing the House seats from 435 to 500 while reducing the number of districts from 435 to 300 would work fairly well. A 31% drop in the number of directly elected representatives does not seem like it would be a deal breaker to most US voters to me, especially considering the upsides of PR in general.
PS: I didn't realise Italy has just changed their electoral system, it seems like they now have 49 multi-member districts though? Plus 147 single member districts. This is a lot more than 27.
Any major structural change is going to be pretty much impossible in the US in the near future. So proponents of things like multimember districts are thinking longterm -- gradually changing public opinion, making changes on the local level and then working your way up, etc. By the time it ever became politically feasible, people's ideas about what they're okay with will have by definition changed from what they are now, so we can't make assumptions that people will still insist on things like having small districts.
I do think that, as far as giving the US a proportional legislature, MMP would be the way to do it that feels the least different from what we have now.
Yes, strong agree that MMP is the only likely option. I find it notable that out of the top 11 largest developed countries, 10 of them use single member districts- the UK, Germany, France, Japan and so on. So it's unlikely that we'll get rid of SMDs- hence MMP is the only viable option.
Per the New Zealand example, the only way to get there is to start with a multiparty system, and then have a few decades of people being unhappy when they learn how FPTP works with 3-6 parties. Once both the left and the right have been screwed out of fair representation over a long enough period of time, I think then we can start to get a national consensus for MMP. So, in the 2060s or 2070s, maybe....
Giving people in the ICU. something calming and sedating seems like a good idea to me — so long as the drug used doesn’t depress respiration or interfere in some other way with the patient’s already-malfunctioning body. Seems like without some sort of sedation there would be a substantial risk of people doing themselves harm because they are confused or frightened— trying to get out of bed and falling, yanking out IVs etc. If I am ever in the ICU I’d like to sleep thru as much of the experience as possible. Only exception that comes to mind would be if the patient is on the verge of dying, where being sedated might interfere with their having a last exchange with loved ones. I’m
guessing that under those circumstances hospital staff might lighten the dying person’s sedation
In prison, it is used to make inmates docile, sleepy and hungry. Being able to sleep 20 hrs per day is a way to escape, in a way, so "Vitamin Q" is hoarded, sold, and is ubiquitous.
If it has any actual medical or theraputic value I am not aware of it.
Many people who end up in jail have psychiatric issues, so I wouldn't be very surprised if a rather large percentage of those people could use an anti-psychotic to be somewhat closer to functioning normally.
Speaking from experience, it's nice not to have your relative, who's not well, wanting to run away from home in pajamas in a random direction because the TV, speaking to him personally, told him that a hundred million people <insert a random string>. Imagine having more than one such person on your hands, and imagine that some of them are violent, and I can absolutely see why people working with a crowd of inmates, many of whom are not well, would overuse Seroquel.
I don't disagree. I'm just noting that Seroquel's primary market (I cast about for another term besides the stark and cynical "market" here, but ...) AFAIK, is psychiatric hospitals and correctional facilities.
In my high school health class, I learned that drinking before your brain is fully developed is bad. I recently learned that the brain matures fully at around 25. Am I losing those sweet, sweet IQ points if I drink before turning 25 (I'm 18)? Or is the effect negligible at my age? A few searches brought me nothing but the usual "drinking bad" and many mentions of alcohol abuse disorder and drunk driving accidents, while I'm more interested in the concrete long-term effects.
Drinking is very overrated in my opinion. I've tried it many times, but never got much out of it, and the people who are all into it isn't really the people I'm interested in hanging out with anyway. This is as true for me now at 33 as it was at 18. Ymmv.
“Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016... Among the population aged 15–49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally.
… The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0·0–0·8) standard drinks per week.”
Some other places have mentioned that your HS might be lying to you re: observed effects on the brain of drinking before a certain age. But it's also worth thinking about it in terms of if there is an observed effect, and they've just interpreted it maximally badly.
Point is, with alcohol, you'd want to carefully and critically assess what official sources are actually saying the effects are. Both the CDC and FDA are strongly, strongly prohibitionist in terms of culture; if they are saying "Y might have effect X" you should read it as "we have an unbelievably weak link between Y and X that we are actually embarrassed about but we know you won't check" and so on.
Grain of salt: I'm incredibly biased on this topic.
What? The official advice for decades has been that moderate drinking is god for you, and this was based on *extremely* weak evidence that has largely been shown to have been highly confounded by unhealthy people/former alcoholics avoiding drinking. The bias has been heavily in favor of drinking being okay/good.
There's also the problem that young drinkers are excessive drinkers, ages 16-19 boys and girls don't go out for "I'll just have one pint of beer/a glass of cider", they go out to get blotto:
So school health education is trying to scare them straight, hence the stories about brain damage. And there *will* be worst-case kids who *are* drinking heavily from age 14 onwards and will do that kind of serious damage to their developing brains.
You should run a prediction market here on "what age will science 50 years from now conclude is the best age to start drinking?" with one of the options being "never" and stick stubbornly to the results. If the results skew European (small amounts of alcohol starting in childhood) you'll have to figure out a way to make up for lost time without becoming a drunk before you get to college.
That seems reasonable, but with the caveat that "best" will need to be spelled out in considerable detail (best life expectancy? best effect on socioeconomic status? best expected QALYs?) to get an unambiguous result, even if the science is completely settled at that point (and nothing else has happened to moot the question).
I highly doubt that drinking one glass of wine or one beer from time to time is going to have any significant effect. Binge drinking or drinking a couple of glass every day are probably bad but they are probably bad at any age.
I strongly suspect that the real risk you face from drinking at any level other than "get blackout drunk on a routine basis" is not loss of IQ points, but rather the risk that you will end up addicted to alcohol, which has wrecked a lot of peoples' lives over the years.
"Brain fully matures around 25" is pop psychology that got popular on social media a few years ago. You can find sources that say the brain isn't mature until your 40's, too.
I strongly recommend not drinking until it's legal, because you could get in a lot of trouble. Also it's not super healthy at any age.
Aside from that, high school health class doesn't want you to drink or have sex or do drugs, and they'll say anything to get you to not do it. They don't care whether it's true or not.
I’ll push back on that first bit and say that, if OP’s research tells him drinking is a net benefit (plausible, given the social benefits), the law shouldn’t enter into the calculus. It’s not hard to find ways to drink without getting in trouble and the state has absolutely zero business telling an adult he can’t drink a fucking beer.
I'm not saying it should. That was more of an afterthought. The real salient point was that it's extremely easy to drink while underage without getting caught. YMMV depending on where you live and how interested the cops are in being pricks.
I'd start by trying to confirm what you think you remember from your high school health class. There is nothing to explain if the claim has no basis. It sounds like you haven't been able to confirm, so ...
This is a case where I would have to admit that approval voting seems like the best solution (though "approval" should be phrased as "you would vote for this to win" rather than "you wouldn't object to people saying this one wins").
This also seems like cheating though. If everybody else votes only once and I vote a few times, haven't I committed some kind of fraud, even if I vote for different reviews?
Loved reading the reviews - great bang for the time invested. Lately I've started to suspect books are a bit... fat. Padded. Could be that they always were so, and long form blogging just spoiled me? Or I should just find better books.
Also loved the unofficial tradition of adding a personal insight to the reviews. Regardless of whether you agree or not with each particular idea, I just like the personal touch and the guts.
No, they definitely are, because its hard to justify the going price of a popular book if it were as optimally concise. The best bet is to read summaries of books before you read them (when available) and be comfortable not finishing every book you start. You may miss out on insights from rare books that finish strong, but overall you'll save a lot of time on unnecessarily finishing overly long books.
This has always been the case. You might look at long-running publications like the New York Review of Books, which has a long history of running articles that are officially reviews of a book or two or three, but where the books are used as the excuse for an essay by a renowned author on the subject of those books (which incidentally, gives you some sense of the central argument of those books, and whether those books might be worthwhile for you to read, or whether you're fine with just the summary).
Tyler Cowen has said "Most books should be articles, most articles should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets and most tweets shouldn't be written".
Strong agree, except for anything historical. If it's a good history of something, they usually fill the whole book with quality material.
I've forced myself to become more comfortable with skimming anything else that's nonfiction. Like I think every poly sci book I've ever read could be summarized in 1-2 of its chapters
Many years ago, I read about cultures where people routinely changed their names over the course of their lifespan, sometimes several times. Not the vestigial forms we had - nicknames, and, for women (at the time) married names, but something a lot more drastic. And in some cases, the names told a story about the person's life. This seemed utterly weird to me.
But now I realize that this pretty much describes my history on line. DinoNerd is relatively new, and would not have been suitable until I'd been in tech long enough to count as a "dinosaur". I've had at least 3 other nicks I've used all over the net; those seem to have lasted about a decade each. Then there are the single-use nicks, and the few sites - mostly long ago - where I used whatever email ID I happened to have, generally a variant on my legal name. And this feels natural to me, complete with a sense that I'm no longer the person who used the earlier nick, and it's weird to login somewhere I've been long enough to still have it.
I'm guessing many others have similar experiences, and wondering what thoughts people have about the cultural and psychological effects, based on their personal experiences.
I'm using my actual first name here as I consider my participation something that might somewhat plausibly reflect positively on my real life in the future and don't want to build capital in a screen name. I have used the same screen name/branding for video game stuff for the past decade, before that I was much more fluid.
I did change my real life name and it has been a very weird experience - I still go by my given name with family while I go by Jacob to anybody I've met in the last 5 or so years. At this point I don't really identify with Jacob very much, but I find my association with my given name drifting as well. When I think to myself 'what is my first name', I don't know. It's very disconcerting. At the same time I don't have any desire to have anybody in my life change what they personally call me.
I would strongly recommend anybody looking to change their first name to do it everywhere or not at all.
Interesting, I had the exact same thing. I started going by Jack in college, but my family still calls me by my first name. Which means that everyone who knows me through my family still does, too.
Everyone once in a while I look like an absolute imbecile when someone asks me my name and I go "uhhhh" as I try to remember which one I'm supposed to be going by.
Possibly with a very similar name too! Somebody should do a study.
I switched to Jacob so I was never a Jack, sometimes people assume that when we're friendly I'm Jack and I am not pleased. Not a bad name but it's a nickname for what is barely my name to begin with
Meanwhile I've been MarsDragon since I first got online *coughcough* years ago and identify with it strongly enough I can't think of changing. Sometimes I respond to "Mars" faster than my given name.
So, people do this now irl, in a variety of contexts. Callsigns, road names, honorifics, and the inverse, 'wallet name'.
Which comes back to why we have unchanging names to begin with - for legibility to the state. Can't get benefits, or pay taxes, or vote, with integrity, without fixture.
As for nicknames and handles...I think it's interesting to think about which identity one would miss the most.
Although intriguingly enough, by the middle of the 20th century, most large nations switched from using names to using some sort of unique identifying number for these purposes (because names aren't unique enough or unchanging enough).
The law varies from state to state, but as long as you're using your new name consistently and non-fraudulently it generally isn't a big deal (there's common law precedent.) You probably don't need to hire a lawyer: filling out some forms, a filing fee, showing up at the courthouse generally does the trick. Getting your Social Security info changed is a separate process, but mostly involves standing in line and filling out forms and waiting. The federal requirements for Real ID and how those affect the info on your driver's license is something I don't know about.
I've thought a bit about inversion of ownership in reachablity, and so also identity.
In the current paradigm everybody has access to you phone and email (for example) by default. They can spam you. You can block, but they can just use another id.
If you gave out a different number to each person, this wouldn't be a problem. You'd actual own access to you, if everything was "throwaway".
It's possible in principle to retain the usual convenience to you of having a single number (with the right interface design) while taking advantage of this.
More generally, in every space at least virtual, it makes sense to have an identity mangement software that ought to let you choose how much people get to "connect the dots" between your various ways of showing up. This is what you do with new nicks (create a break) but in a cruder fashion than my dream of it :)
I am especially worried about Italy chickening out because of this. (Germans seem to have integrated that it was their damn fault and are mentally preparing to face the consequences?)
Hm, this doesn't seem like a good source to me. There is exactly one semi-recent article from early July in this blog (the top article is from March, where I also was more pessimistic).
The article from July seems to be picking the bad news, and ignoring the good news. For example, it mentions that Germany does not have a LNG terminal, but does not mention that it will probably get one terminal operating in December, and a second one a bit later. (special ships serving as terminals). I think that was already known in July, though the timeline was less clear.
It also stressed that the storage capacities of Italy were only half-full in early July (though even then it looked suspiciously like an outlier, which it indeed was). In any case, Italy is now at 82%. https://graphics.reuters.com/UKRAINE-CRISIS/EUROPE-GAS/zdvxozxzopx/
Europe has reached its goal of filling its storage capacities for gas to 80%, and it's further increasing. Germany, aiming for 95%, is ahead of its schedule.
I am not saying that everything is fine. Europe is definitely heading to recession. And it will have impact if Russia decides to stop gas exports to Europe completely. Then Europe will have to reduce gas usage further. (At the moment it's roughly 10% below normal baselines. And a lot of measures have been decided upon, but not implemented yet, like closing swimming pools, reducing heating in public building etc). But this source looks both outdated and overly alarmistic.
Potentially, really bad, and worse than Euro + UK governments are admitting in public (the UK has done some surprisingly sensible worst-case forecasting, which is almost reassuring). At a trade fair a few months ago I had German gas traders telling me (a Brit) that 'you guys have done it right... you'll pay through the nose for gas but at least you'll have it. We won't be heating our houses'. In parallel with the gas issues power prices are now just... insane. In the same way that Scott says that '2100 isn't a real year', traders don't believe that €700+/MWh for German baseload or €400+/MWh for TTF is 'real', because there's a reasonable chance that all participants will be bankrupt or the state will have nationalized the market (or collapsed) before delivery. Remember this whenever you see people saying 'oh the problem is unique to our contry because of <insert local talking point here>'.
Right now, in the most West-Euro states, inc. UK, businesses would actually *make* money getting their power from diesel generators and selling surplus back to the grid. This has been true for a few weeks now and starting hitting industry news headlines at the end of this week; I imagine it will go 'mainstream' some time in the next fortnight and we'll see random MOPs getting involved.
I don't know how bad it is, but I am worried that it could get worse if someone on the Russian side realizes that they can bomb or otherwise sabotage the US natural gas ports to cut off the supply of US gas to Europe. One port blowing up on its own (Freeport: https://archive.ph/EwwuL) caused a noticeable increase in European natural gas prices - I think at one point it exceeded $300 a barrel of oil equivalent - so hammering them all would almost certainly be even worse.
(And looking at the latest prices, I see it's even worse than that now: natural gas is at 340 Euros per MWh, which is more like $580 per barrel of oil equivalent, since 1.7 MWh = 1 barrel of oil equivalent)
And it probably wouldn't be that hard either, at least for the first few. If the Russian government can't sneak some people in to do the job, it could always try to get some domestic crazies to do the job for them. There's definitely people angry enough at Biden and the "Globohomo Agenda" in Ukraine, or at the fossil fuel industry and "American Imperialism" in Ukraine, to do the job. There's some precedent as well, whether it be the Colonial natural gas pipeline hack or the blowing up of oil pipelines. I just hope that the FBI, or whoever is responsible for security against this sort of thing, is on top of this.
For the winter, I am now more optimistic that the worst-case scenarios will be avoided. To be fair, those were/are really bad. However, there is potential for things getting out of control in the next four weeks or so.
There are two rather distinct concerns:
- Short-term, electricity is an issue. Most people haven't realized how bad this is *right now*. The electricity prices are ten times higher than last year. Blackouts might come soon if things go bad. This is not so much due to Putin, but rather comes from the drought. Rivers are drying up, ships with coal have trouble reaching their plants. Power plants have to reduce/switch off production because there is not enough river water for cooling. Nuclear plants in France are at an all-time low anyway due to maintenance. In this situation, France has decided to cap prices, so electricity consumption in France is not going down. France sucks up electricity from all over Europe right now. On the positive side: rain and decreasing temperatures can improve the situation pretty quickly. Probably in a month the problem is mostly gone. In winter, electricity is probably not the bottleneck.
- Mid-term: Oil was never a real problem. For natural gas supply, things look much better than a few months ago. Germany has a master plan to fill all their gas caverns, and they are a whole month *ahead* of schedule, at 83% currently (the peak before last winter was only 70%). Replacing gas from Russia has worked better than expected. New temporary terminals for LNG will be ready by the end of year. The prices are going to be high, but it seems increasingly unlikely that Europe will run out of gas. That said, it is not trivial to distribute the gas (and possibly gasoline) within Europe, so there might be regional shortages.
Apart from that, prices will be insanely high, and countries will have rather mixed success in distributing the costs in such a way that it keeps social balance. So I agree with real dog that there will be substantial social unrest in some countries. Also, the energy and electricity mix is *very* different from country to country, so some countries will be hit much harder than others.
Other than real dog, I am not much concerned about food shortages. I think the effect of reduced fertilizer production will be dramatic in Africa and other developing regions, but not in Europe. The prices will be rather high, but that effect is not much stronger than in the US and elsewhere, and pretty moderate compared to the increased energy cost.
Hm, unfortunately my best sources are in German and behind paywalls (at least the in-depth analyses), spiegel.de and nzz.ch.
The electricity problems are not exactly hard to spot, they have been covered for weeks by all major European newspapers (increasingly alarmed). A lot of governments are already reacting. Here is an impressive graphic: https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1563385668906074112
I fount there will be much unrest over heat. Its a war situation. Provided everybody is seen to be in the same boat. Extravagant use of electricity might cause some issues.
Polish government has just realized that all sorts of technical gases (incl. CO2) are byproducts of fertilizer production, which is stalled because methane is too expensive, so half of the food processing sector is grinding to a halt. There's not gonna be much meat or beer this winter, it seems. There's the usual blame game and headless chicken running, barking desperate orders to somehow fix the economy with ministerial duct tape before it implodes.
For Poland my predictions are:
- 9% chance things go mostly as usual except some people will bitch at prices
- 60% chance of things going mostly as usual except the poor are priced out of heating and/or food, leading to widespread social unrest and possibly the current government dissolving in favor of emergency elections so the hot potato lands in someone else's hands
- 30% chance of intermittent blackouts regardless of how much you can pay, cutting power to non-critical industries, extreme subsidies / complete central planning of the energy economy
- 1% chance of gas and electricity literally running out in the middle of the winter, humanitarian crisis and a total clusterfuck complete with martial law
And I think our strategic fuel reserves are better than e.g. Germany's, so yeah, good luck out there.
> [...] research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups,
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs.
>In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication
Gender, wokeism, race, fashion, religion -- are all constructs. But millions have suffered and died over them. One could argue, for example, that Christian charity has built hospitals. True enough. Would there have been a need for hospitals if the religion hadn't wounded so many, and fomented so many wars and pogroms?
The most deadly wars in history (based on deaths as % of world population) were caused by the Chinese and the Mongols, neither of whom were Christian. The idea that Christianity "caused" any wars is ridiculous. Wars have always taken place over power, land and resources and would have continued to do in the absence of Christianity - it's just that Christian Europeans were the first technologically advanced peoples and so their wars were more obviously destructive. You could actually argue that the culture that descended from Christian morality is what has made the world so much more peaceful today.
If you actually believe that Christianity has fomented a single war, one that would not have happened if everyone involved had been a cheerful pagan, you've come as undone from reality as the woke.
(I think you could argue that Islam fomented maybe three wars? The great conquest was obviously extremely materially advantageous to its leaders and arguably the entire region long-term, but it's doubtful whether it would have happened without the unifying power of the banner of the Prophet.)
"Would there have been a need for hospitals if the religion hadn't wounded so many, and fomented so many wars and pogroms?"
I am fascinated to learn that Covid-19 spread worldwide due to a religious war. Can you inform me of which sects of Christianity are responsible for the current spread of monkeypox throughout Europe? Had it not been for these damnable Christians, we wouldn't need hospitals to treat illness and accidents!
Scene: a haymeadow in Europe sometime during the 'Dark Ages'
Peasant scything hay: Drat! I have just cut myself on the blade! This is because I'm a Catholic, were I a freethinker this would never ever happen! Well, I suppose I shall just have to die of blood-poisoning thanks to that abbey of friars in the town, whose fault this is, with their hospital because of wars and pogroms!
Unthinking internet atheist talking-points like these are what makes their disseminators sound more brainless than the "we believe in reason, logic, and science and using your brain to think!" personae they like to present.
I think the idea is that Christianity caused the Dark Ages and the Crusades and the Inquisition and all sorts of other nasty stuff that put human progress on pause for a thousand years, and if it wasn't for that, the peasant in your example would've had access to modern antibiotics back in 1450, and by 2020 we'd be able to cure diseases like COVID and monkeypox easily with minimal casualties.
It's a dubious narrative that makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions, but I remember it being quite popular among secularists back in the mid-2000s, when New Atheism was at its peak. They even made a Family Guy skit about it! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1anrSbdjM)
>I think the idea is that Christianity caused the Dark Ages
The "Dark ages" isn't a thing. It's a propaganda term. The Christian MIDDLE ages in Europe saw more scientific progress than a majority of the rest of the world *combined*.
You mean the response to hundreds of islamic invasion over centuries that saw a majority of christendom conquered? Why is Islamic conquest okay to you people, but fighting against it is some
The crusades aren't even in top ten most deadly conflicts in human history, and yet leftists desperately cling to them as an example of how "bad" Christians are, and they were at least in principle far more justifiable than most pre-modern wars.
>and the Inquisition
Again, a response to Islamic conquest in Spain, which again, you people bizarrely have no problem with.
>all sorts of other nasty stuff that put human progress on pause for a thousand years,
Thousands of years? The middle ages didn't even last for 1000 years! And there were profound scientific accomplishments in that time. Again, Europeans in the middle ages made more scientific and intellectual progress than most of the world combined. Why don't you blame the religions and cultures of the non-intellectual majority of the rest of the world for "putting progress on pause"?
It's so damn funny that the left will react furiously if you suggest that white people are more intellectually capable than other peoples, and yet somehow they also believe that the responsibility for scientific progress is almost exclusively on Europeans. By the time the middle ages had ended, sub-saharan Africans largely hadn't even invented the wheel, and certainly were thousands of years beyond the more advanced Europeans. Why aren't they guilty of not advancing human progress?
>and if it wasn't for that, the peasant in your example would've had access to modern antibiotics back in 1450, and by 2020 we'd be able to cure diseases like COVID and monkeypox easily with minimal casualties.
This is absurd nonsense. It's all just narrative with no justification. Stop basing your understanding of history on left wing memes.
>They even made a Family Guy skit about it!
What exactly do you mean "even" made a skit about it? This should count squarely against its validity.
Christianity caused the Dark Ages, eh? That's...very creative. One wonders how they explain that the only institution that preserved reading and writing throughout that period, and such science as Late Antiquity possessed, was the Church.
I think the empowering act for such a theory is less making unwarranted assumptions than the elision of vast swathes of known historical fact.
And here was me thinking Aesculapius was a pagan god. Well, plainly we must have done, else without Christianity, there would have been no wars and pogroms, and hence no need for hospitals, and if there were no need for hospitals, then there must not be any diseases or accidents, so yeah - Christians caused the Black Death and you busting your arm when you fell out of that tree when you were ten!
I wonder if now that we realized doctors were giving our opioids like candy, there will be a major movement to change the way people - especially kids - are medicated. I wonder what Scott thinks about whether this is a problem and if it’s gotten worse over time.
My guess is the main change is that more people in chronic pain can't get medicine for it, and so eventually commit suicide or start buying from the street (and become way more likely to die of an overdose).
Absolutely, yes. I know of at least two cases of people switching to buying pills illicitly because of this; I truly don't perceive that the "handing out like candy" narrative was *ever* the case, either — it was never easy to obtain opioids, *especially* for more than maybe a month of low-dose hydrocodone or codeine, unless perhaps you're elderly.
I they were expecting a ranked runoff system where we selected, not our favorite, but our predictions for what all of the other voters would prefer. :)
Taxpayers contribute to college education, and in the next California budget around 13% is earmarked for higher ed. I guess we assume that college grads contribute more to society, so it is worthwhile for all of us to pitch in. But the student loan crisis is a free market indicator that way to many people signed up for the college dream. What metrics should America use in deciding whom and how many should be sent to university? I have this vague idea that taxpayers should only fund excellent students. That seems more fair.
This is not one of the supply of goods and services questions that needs to be decided by politics over the market. Making student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy after N years would solve the "declare bankruptcy immediately after graduation" exploit, while providing enough feedback that mal-investment in education would be harder to finance.
> But the student loan crisis is a free market indicator that way to many people signed up for the college dream.
I think that doesn't necessarily follow. It could be true, or it could be false. I think you can gain certainty by hopping up the causal chain; it's definitely an indicator that the terms of the student loans were bad. (Maybe the terms are bad because the ROI is bad as you say, but maybe the loans were bad just because the APR is way too high.) Anecdotally, lots of people I spoke to didn't understand the terms of the loans.
> I have this vague idea that taxpayers should only fund excellent students.
This is regressive, because excellent students tend to make lots of money, and so need less financial assistance.
I think the approach of the UK (and I believe many EU countries) is more equitable; make student loan repayment contingent on income. If you earn lots of money, then you're probably in a job where your degree credential helped you, and you can certainly afford to pay back the loan. If you don't earn lots of money, then maybe you were not an "excellent student", but maybe other reasons contributed like you come from a working class background and had to take over the family business when your parent got sick.
I can see the argument for putting some kind of aptitude-test or expected-impact-test on top of the means-testing; we shouldn't just enroll every single citizen in a basket-weaving course at a distance learning "University" and expect the public to pay for it. So I'm open to blending the two approaches. But I think if you can balance the books with just means-testing, then you end up with a simpler and easier-to-administer system.
> Why would you take over the family business if that were *less* profitable than whatever job you could get with your degree?
Concisely: people value things other than money.
More verbosely:
I thought this was a clear placeholder for the general and well-understood category of "life intervenes" events, but if you prefer a specific example, substitute some other event like "parents die and first child needs to take over caring for young siblings".
The general point being, one thing that sometimes happens is that a person goes to university, and then due to life events, can't actually capitalize on that investment. Even disregarding serious events, one might model university as (making up numbers for discussion) having a 75% chance of getting someone a good job, and 25% chance of not doing so, resulting in substantial debt. This model could be EV positive, but still scary. This uncertainty disproportionately affects poor people, because rich people aren't ruined by the debt of student loans. Therefore by reducing the threat of ruin, you encourage more poor people to roll the dice. I put forth that society benefits from this.
Of course, if your view is that university is a net-negative on average, then you don't want to encourage people to go to university. That's a different proposition that I discussed briefly in my post. But the above is just focusing on explanations why poor people would be discouraged from participating in a clearly EV-positive transaction.
UK resident here. Our system provides no feedback because, as you point out, if your degree doesn't help you at all it's free.
This created a nightmare class of people (often middle class in origin) who have no useful skills but think they're too good for most jobs they can get.
Meanwhile the "meritocracy" worked fairly well for good working class students. My industry has a good number of working class students who did eg. Maths at eg. Warwick and are now making good money.
Overall I think the UK is handing out too many degrees by a factor of four, and the worst ones are all at the taxpayer's expense.
That's a wrong question. A better one is how to deal with credentialism and degree inflation. Does a physiotherapist really need at least a Masters degree? Does "pre-med" add anything to actual "med"? Does an admin assistant need a Bachelor degree?
"we assume that college grads contribute more to society" -- maybe, but only because the jobs they take require these credentials.
There are plenty of areas where a certain level of education is required, of course. But that need not be the norm.
Pre-med is mostly a selection process. I doubt it significantly adds to anyone's abilities, but in some form it may well serve a useful selection function.
Seems other countries do quite well without that "selection function". Besides, medschool and what follows weeds out the weak much more effectively, doesn't it?
This is an excellent question. In particular, what practical Masters level coursework could social workers be taking that couldn't be condensed or learned in an apprenticeship program?
How would you suggest we deal with this? It’s not clear to me which way the causality goes (more college graduates-->credential ian or credentialism-->more college graduates). If people are getting degrees anyway, why wouldn’t a rational employee use them as a filter?
It is not an easy question to answer. But at least it needs to be asked, since dealing with symptoms will not cure the disease. Wikipedia has a good overview:
I don’t think taxpayers should only subsidize excellent students, they should only subsidize actions that will have significant positive externalities that aren’t captured in private signals. Stylistic examples that might not be accurate: assume that society benefits from having lots of good nurses, but for whatever reasons the labor market isn’t able to provide enough compensation relative to the high cost of training nurses. Then society should subsidize someone who enrolls in a nursing school (but to your point, there should probably be some underwriting to ensure they are qualified enough to graduate and become a nurse). On the other (bad stereotype) hand, let’s say that MBA degrees generate almost no positive societal externalities, and the cost of training is well in line with what the labor market will supply after they graduate. Then there would be a much weaker reason to subsidize higher education for that individual, and we probably do it only so that we don’t have to make hard decisions about what educational processes have these net positive externalities that aren’t realized without subsidies.
This system would be more fair, but the track record has not been great for predicting which careers will be in demand. People would be able to hack the system for example by attending a good nursing program and then going into another field using their nursing degree to signal that they are a quality candidate.
Really? Science, engineering, business, and various other fields seem to actually teach relevant professional skills. In Scott's example, four years of medical study are apparently still useful. Even in the much-maligned social sciences and humanities, people do actually sometimes go on to relevant careers. Beyond that, I don't fully buy into the education as self-actualization model, but I do think it has value beyond the strictly career-related.
What would the purpose be of taxing education? It wouldn't raise all that much revenue. Is it just to have less of it?
It's not enough that they (ALLEGEDLY) teach useful skills - they need to teach useful skills more efficiently than the counterfactual world where people get work/cadetships straight out of highschool (factoring in the costs incurred and loss of income from going to college). If it was simply the norm that people got business cadetships (or even extended internships) out of highschool, they would still be learning things, and I would predict much more useful things, and they would also be earning income and avoiding debt (or costing taxpayers large sums of money).
>Even in the much-maligned social sciences and humanities, people do actually sometimes go on to relevant careers.
Yes, because they're smart, not because they learnt something at college they couldn't have picked up on the job. Education mostly acts as a filter, not as training.
I have a CS degree, a relatively practical major, and it was still the case that most of my schooling was a waste of time. I learned far more in a shorter amount of time when I started actually working as a programmer.
The point of taxing education is to have less of it, because people engaging in so much of it for signalling purposes is wasteful.
You should read Bryan's book to get down into the weeds, but I'll try.
Some fields (but far from all or even most) teach relevant skills for the majority of the time in a somewhat efficient way. This is probably still less efficient than apprenticeships. The market will figure out how to efficiently train people in professional skills once the subsidized competition is gone.
That people go on to relevant careers is exactly what's expected by the signaling theory.
Lots of things, including professional work, has value that is beyond strictly career-related.
Higher education is about 2-3 % of GDP so it could raise a lot of money. But the main point is to not subsidize a status signaling zero-sum game.
I’m not sure I agree with the premises, first that student debt means less people should go to college and second that there should be a central mechanism for deciding who should go. I’d rather give people better information on what the decision to take out loans means in practice and perhaps a cap on the amount of loans that can be used to finance a particular type of degree (e.g., higher for an MD than a bachelor’s).
My targeted solution to the student debt crisis is to make student loans dischargable under bankruptcy again. The reason they were made non- dischargable in the first place is that there was a bit of a scandal in the early 90s about recent professional degree graduates (doctors, lawyers, etc) with tons of debt and high earnings potential but little or no assets declaring bankruptcy strategically to get rid of their loans.
That should no longer be possible after the 2005 bankruptcy reform law, which has a bunch of provisions in place specifically to limit strategic bankruptcies by people who have negative net worth but enough income to reasonably be able pay their debts back, so repealing the 1994 student loan rules would allow people with unmanageable student debt to declare bankruptcy and get a clean slate.
If you want a broader loan forgiveness program, then maybe consider adding a new type of personal bankruptcy procedure specifically for student loans, allowing debtors an expedited and simplified way to modify or discharge loans for demonstrably worthless degrees.
Going forwards, I'd also add some kind of provision for new loans requiring universities to take on at least some of the responsibility for bad debt among their former students. Either by partially underwriting the loans themselves or by being liable to the government for excessive losses due to default and bankruptcy. Of course, this would be paired with universities in question having the option of declining to accept federal loans for students who are unlikely to be able to pay them back. The goal here is to make universities responsible for managing their own moral hazard of accepting federal subsidiaries for students who they should be able to foresee are likely to flunk out, wind up with a worthless degree, or otherwise not benefit from attending college and signing up to repay tuition loans.
Having the universities, rather than the federal government, entirely underwrite the loans makes the most sense. Right now there are extremely perverse incentives for universities to encourage the largest loans possible, knowing the government will just eat the cost:
I myself don't think that any of the alternative voting schemes are better than FPTP. In particular, the complexity of alternatives raises doubt about the integrity of the process that isn't there in a properly regulated simple polling system.
On edit: I am strongly biased against these alternative systems because every instance that I have seen them used/proposed (Hugo Awards, post-Trump voting) it has been to keep the "weirdos and wreckers" on my side out. (If there are other uses, I would appreciate hearing about them - for instance, did anyone propose using ranked alternative to keep AOC from being elected?)
In St Louis, we switched to a non-partisan approval system for our mayoral elections. Top two advance to the general. This is a heavily blue city, which left the low-turnout primary as being essentially the general election. Now we actually get a competitive race when most of the voters show up. I prefer it.
I thought the whole point of AV was to get the weirdoes and wreckers in.
FPTP encourages a two-party system where everybody is forced to hold their nose and vote for the closest broad tent candidate. Sometimes a Trump or a Corbyn gets to be one of the top two (this is as much about the system for primaries and leadership contests as the general election) but more often you end up with Sanders or the Lib Dems perpetually on the sidelines.
With alternative voting systems, it becomes feasible for you to set up your own Weirdoes Party (with blackjack and hookers) and get your people into the legislature.
In single-member district FPTP, your votes for a weirdo might put them in 3rd place rather than 5th but it won't make a difference to the top two so you're wasing your vote. Under runoff systems, more people will feel confident to put the weirdo as their first choice, knowing that if they get knocked out, their vote will run off to the normie candidate they prefer. Under PR or multi member districts, all the votes for the weirdo or the Weirdoes Party will be accrued from a larger area and get them a seat.
If you look at the UK's 2011 AV referrendum, it was the main Conservative and Labour parties who were fighting against it.
Or look at Germany, where the eco-weirdoes, libertarian weirdoes, communist weirdoes and racist weirdoes all have seats in the Bundestag on account of its hybrid proportional system.
I don't really understand the concern about complexity. If you're concerned with voting integrity, as long as you have a paper trail you can fully audit the results in either system. The tabulated "first round" votes are equivalent to the vote count in a FPTP election, and should be auditable and published. There's just more columns. The algorithm that runs on those columns is, sure, more complex than `max(votes)`, but it's still trivial and you could work it out with pencil and paper in a few minutes if you really wanted to.
> every instance that I have seen them used/proposed... it has been to keep the "weirdos and wreckers" on my side out
A couple examples I'd put forth that don't seem to fit that description, interested in your thoughts here:
1) California Republicans. In a FPTP system, Republicans are dramatically under-represented, because most seats will go to the Democratic candidate regardless of who they are, if the only alternative is a Republican. So the real vote is the Democratic primary for a given seat. To try to fix this, they implemented "Open Top Two Primaries", where the top two vote-getters in the primary go on to face off in a two-candidate head-to-head. This means in many seats your main election is between a very-liberal Democrat and a centrist-Democrat that got some Republican votes. Many people don't vote in the primaries; I think it's quite anti-democratic to have a two-Democrat ballot.
IRV would give more weight to Republican voters, and allow centrist voters to express preference ordering that include, say, both moderate D/R candidates over the primary-winners in the current systems. Or, allow strong-partisan voters to (if I'm not inferring too much) put your "weirdos and wreckers" as your first preference, and then have your preference cascade down the list if/when these more-partisan candidates are removed from the running. Basically IRV lets you safely express your first choice for a candidate that doesn't have the votes to win, rather than forcing people to vote tactically to avoid wasting their single vote.
2) Alaska's IRV primary. Results not yet finalized, but it seems that doing IRV here allowed the Republican party to field a bunch of candidates across the spectrum, including Palin who's perhaps either 2nd or 3rd right now (based on 538 estimates). Not following local politics in AK though, is this keeping "weirdos and wreckers" out? Or allowing the Republican field to be wider without vote-spoiling?
I think there is a level on which your bias is justified; I think a two-layer "party-primary=>FPTP general" system is structurally biased towards producing extreme/polarized candidates, since to win the primary you have to pander to the base, and then the general requires you to pander to the undecideds/independents. Something like IRV or Approval Voting could, insasmuch as it demolishes party primaries, give more weight to moderate candidates that most people would be OK with.
So inasmuch as a more-democratic system disadvantages "weirdos and wreckers" then yes, you probably should prefer a less-democratic system. But I get the sense that's not the argument you're making.
> did anyone propose using ranked alternative to keep AOC from being elected?
AOC unseated the DNC's candidate in the primaries, and pissed off the Democratic establishment in doing so. She is one of the liberal side's "weirdos and wreckers", if you will. She sees RCV as a way to weaken the party's control on which candidates get to run, which sounds like a cause you might be on board with.
Score voting systems are both closest to actual voter choice and minimize the spoiler effect. Approval is the simplest case of score voting, where the score options are zero or one.
Most score methods have clone independence, but IRV does as well.
Note that almost all score methods have tactical voting required in ~100% of cases to use your maximum voting power; IRV does have tactical voting in some cases, but it's very difficult to tell whether you're in one of the tactical-vote cases.
The short version would be: you can delegate votes, aka you can chose somebody who simply votes in your stead - but that person can only serve as a delegate for a limited number of people. So it pretty much has to be somebody local that you trust. And there are a few (3-4) layers of successive aggregation, up to a small council that actually votes in proportion to their delegated vote count.
Not something that founding fathers could envision, other than maybe in their dreams. But quite possible in a world of smartphones and publicly auditable blockchains.
Nah, there's a difference insofar as the electors for most of the US states don't have their votes weighted by how much of the state voted for them - if you win California, you get the full Californian voting power, and if you lose California, you get nothing.
Thats not how it was designed though. The electors were supposed to be a temporary parliament elected by the citizens to pick a president. You were supposed to vote for Bob, who voted for a president.
Kind of? IIRC they didn't start off as requiring a citizen vote at all, and when they started doing so they started as slates, so there was never something akin to Radu's proposal of electors *proportional* to in-state votes.
Alaska seems to have implemented a Musical Chairs approach this year, where we have a series of elections and eliminate the lowest candidates each round. Whether its worth the cost of multiple elections, eh.
I could see this argument about ranked-choice/instant runoff voting, but surely approval voting is simple enough that it could be widely accepted after a short adjustment period? The process of counting votes isn't even any different. Voters can choose to vote the same way as in an FPTP election, which is still a good strategy if they have a clear favorite. And it has clear benefits over FPTP, including preventing "spoilers," which would allow 3rd parties to grow in support before they are big enough to actually win an election.
(Edit to add: kind of missed the context on this since it wasn't a reply to the other comment about voting methods, but I stand by it.)
Ok, please explain approval voting to me. (I know I can go look it up - please explain it to me like I'm my neighbor's idiot 17 yo son who is a) going to vote this fall and b) repeating a year of high school, again.)
"It's just like regular voting, except that you can vote for more than one guy if you want. You don't have to; it's just if you want. The winner is still the guy with the most votes."
If you think that voting for more people is better, then vote for more people. If you don't think it's better, then why shouldn't you let other people do it?
"I don't want to vote for more than the guy I like. So I'm fucked either way. Either I get fewer votes or I have to vote for people I hate. This sounds like a scam to prevent my guy from winning."
"So if I think any of these mfs are ok, I pick them all? And so does everyone else? How do we know whos the best? This is that stupid participation prize shit again, everyone gets elected."
(Having said that, approval voting (first I heard of it!) is the least worst of the lot.)
What happens if the vote is a tie under the current system? Like, it works literally exactly the same as FPTP does, except for how many circles you fill in on the ballot.
If you think they're all basically okay, you can vote for everyone (or just don't vote, since you don't care). If you think they're all basically okay *except* for Donald Trump, who is a blight on democracy, you can vote for everyone but him, and you'll have a better chance of getting anyone but him. If you think that only the Republicans can put this country right and anyone else will be awful, you can vote for just one.
"This is better than regular voting because people can vote for more than one guy if they want to."
Beyond a certain point, this thought-experiment stops being a helpful exercise and just becomes a demonstration that there is literally nothing that people can't refuse to understand/accept. If someone were used to approval voting and you told them about FPTP they could make equivalent arguments in the other direction.
Fair enough...but, more seriously..."If someone were used to approval voting"
Where, actually, was this? Not to be a total luddite and rejecting new innovations, but the utility of the new world democratic system as practiced in small towns of the colonies was not "consensus by voting" but debate and discussion before hand, followed by anonymous voting by near-universal citizenry.
Non-FPTP systems, to me, have more in common with, say, the pre-1800s cossack system of the elites selecting from among themselves (or, for that matter, the Democrat 'super delegates') than a true poll of the public.
What historical use of non FPTP systems can be identified?
Yep. Person with the most votes wins, just like normal. Only difference is you can vote for all the people running that you like, instead of having to pick one.
I feel like the book review entries are overall weaker than last year- is that just me or do people share that impression? Off the top of my head the Galen or Henry George reviews both feel like I'd pick them over any of the ones in this round.
Out of all 130 submissions, I ranked 10% as good-to-great (A or A+).
Another third were pretty good (like B+ to A-).
Roughly a quarter were mediocre at best (C or worse).
Out of the 15 finalists, I ranked 11 in the top two categories: 5 as good-to-great, and 6 as pretty good.
None of the finalists were mediocre or worse: the remaining 4 finalists were "fair-to-middling" (like B to B-). The one which got disqualified also fell into this fair-to-middling bucket, along with about a third of the original 130 submissions.
Since there were so many more entries this year, I think it's more likely to be representative of what we can expect in future years than the inaugural contest would be. This is just intuition, but I feel like the initial instance of anything is more likely to be a statistical outlier.
I'm not gonna say which one I'm talking about, but one of the earlier entries was seriously very good, and I would pick it over the Henry George review 9/10 times.
I think it's low hanging fruit thing. Last time was the first exciting time and a lot of talented readers already had favorite books with thoughts about reviewing them. We "used up" those reviews last year and this year is the newer, fresher reviewers that might be more amateurish than last time.
It's just a guess and honestly I still really enjoyed reading the reviews this time too! Definitely want this to happen again!
You have 15 candidates, of which exactly one is a work of fiction, and you're using FPTP. Are you trying to split the vote and hand victory to God Emperor of Dune? And, in a world in which God Emperor of Dune actually is the most popular (as would be measured by a reasonable voting method), how could its victory seem legitimate when it could so easily be explained by vote splitting?
What should you use? I recommend STAR Voting (https://www.starvoting.us/star); it's simple, expressive, doesn't make voters agonize over which of two similar options is slightly better, and there's an easy tool for making online STAR elections (https://star.vote/). Other commenters have mentioned Approval Voting and Minimax as other options, and both of them are reasonable; Approval is good if you want the system to be as simple as possible (though voters need to consider strategy more than they do under more complicated methods), and Minimax, like all Condorcet methods, delivers excellent results (though I prefer the scoring ballot to a ranked ballot here so that I'm not focusing on minor differences).
What is not reasonable is using FPTP. It ignores the majority of voters' preferences. It makes being different from other candidates more important than being better than other candidates. It fails to give authors a good sense of how well-received their book review was since it doesn't distinguish between broadly-popular reviews that excite few people and polarizing reviews that excite a few people but which most readers aren't interested in. And, of course, the real problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QCHLkgudfgbovgoan/cause-exploration-prizes-voting-methods) is with real-world elections, not online polls - but online polls like this one are excellent opportunities to bolster the profile of little-known but high-quality voting methods, and the data can be legitimately useful in understanding voter behavior. Using FPTP here doesn't just risk unrepresentative outcomes - it's a missed opportunity for building awareness and generating data.
Why is there a take-the-top-two-candidates-and-do-a-runoff phase?
The "two" seems arbitrary. Why that rather than either
1) just directly pick the candidate with the highest total points in the first round
or
2) some sort of iterative drop-the-lowest-candidate and reallocate points (not sure what the "right" way to do this would be...), reanalyze the remaining candidates' support, and iterate till there is one left.
(1) is a reasonable option, especially when we don't expect much strategic voting. The downside to this approach is that it makes it strategically optimal to give every candidate either a 0 or a 5 and means that voters who don't vote strategically have dramatically less influence than those who do. For these reasons I consider STAR to be vastly preferable to Score Voting (STAR without the runoff) for governmental elections, but for the book review contest these considerations are less important.
Many Thanks! Yes, for (2) I had something vaguely in mind like either the affine rescaling in Cardinal Baldwin or the step function in your method to reprocess the ballots after eliminating a candidate in a round. Much appreciated!
FPTP is a terrible voting system and is dominated by approval voting, among other simple systems. However, I don't see why FPTP would tend to pick the fiction review. Going by the Substack rankings, there is one clearly favored entry going into the vote. The fiction review is currently fifth.
FPTP doesn't have an innate bias for fiction over nonfiction, it has a bias for candidates that are different from other candidates. In an election with far more nonfiction than fiction, FPTP favors fiction. Were there 14 book reviews for fiction and one for nonfiction, FPTP would favor the nonfiction review. It's just like how FPTP favors the Republican in elections with two Democratic candidates and one only one Republican (real-world example: https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/the-chicken-dilemma-a-deep-dive-under-several-voting-methods-c08ff9ea6f4a).
I'm not saying God Emperor of Dune is necessarily going to win, by the way. I'm just saying that it has a much, much better chance under FPTP than under STAR, Approval, Minimax, or any other reasonable voting method.
Create a STAR Voting ballot with the same candidates as the official ballot. Perhaps Scott will signal boost it and we can see how the outcomes compare.
Why do you automatically assume the work of fiction is the favorite? That was hardly what I would have guessed.
Doesn’t the very fact that most people prefer to review non-fiction tell us something about the preferences of the reviewers, which are probably close to those of the audience?
It's not the favorite, but it's the most unusual, so it's the most likely to benefit from a FPTP system.
(Say 25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction. Then the votes of the 75% will be split between the 14 nonfiction reviews, but the votes of the 25% will be focused. That's the hypothetical, at least.)
If that were the case [25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction] would we not see more fiction reviews?
You seem to need to require multiple hypotheses, not just
- a non-negligible number of people like fiction reviews BUT ALSO
- a substantially large fraction of the sorts of people who like reading fiction reviews don't like writing fiction reviews
Both of these could be true. But it starts to head into messy territory...
I think it's simpler to posit that fiction and non-fiction serve different roles, and the non-fiction role can frequently be well-served via a review, whereas the fiction role is rarely well-served by a review. (Not saying it's impossible, but there are plenty of non-fiction books where I'd be happy to read a much shorter review, because the content is what I care about; whereas there are few fiction books where I'm much interested in a review because most of the experience [laughter, tension, whatever] is in reading the book itself. Not always -- some fiction is about *enough* more than just the raw story that it lends itself to a good review, as we saw with God Emperor -- but I think what I described is the default case.)
Given that 99% of people choose not to write reviews, all you need is a tiny correlation between interest in writing reviews and type of review people are interested in writing in order for there to be something like this problem.
"If that were the case [25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction] would we not see more fiction reviews?"
Depends. If I want my review to win (and I don't know the voting will be FPTP) or just want it to appeal to the readership, I might strategically pick a nonfiction book instead of fiction. In fact I think I saw a commenter proposing this strategy when the contest was announced.
I guess I simply cannot get inside the mind of a person who will "strategically" review a book they find less interesting/import/valuable because they care more about winning a (totally meaningless!) popularity contest than learning something/teaching something.
You're positing a world of human beings with whom I have zero in common, and I suspect I'm in the majority on this.
There's been a lot of discussion here about EA and weird seagull-eye-pecking causes but, in terms of currently-existing-human type charities, what do we, the ACX hive mind, support? The GiveWell recommended list? (Malaria consortium, against malaria foundation, Helen Keller int'l, and New Incentives)
Bonus question: What are your thoughts on the recent removal from the recommended list of GiveDirectly and the deworming charities?
RE: removal of GiveDirectly and the deworming charities. I'm a little more surprised about the removal of the deworming charities. I thought that they were closer to the 10X cash bar that they'd been using, but I'm generally very very happy to defer to them. I interned there briefly and generally came away with a lot of confidence in their thought process.
I still think that GiveDirectly and SCI/Deworm the World are probably extremely strong charities, but it seems fair that they might not be literally the top.
I think The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Fast Offerings program is pretty close to ideal. Global network of committed and trustworthy volunteers (bishops) with boots on the ground that distribute money (typically food or rent help, never cash) to known people in known situations. Donated funds are used both locally and shared globally to flow to the needs. The motto for distribution is “preserve life, not lifestyle” to minimize the amount of dependency. And it is an individual-focused rather than collectivist program, so you know there are actual people getting helped. (I will note that I served as a bishop in my ward for 5 years and was just released in May. Seeing people benefit from the program was a rewarding part of the calling.)
To scale this without the religion part would require a global community with a culture of charity donation among which the needy would be recognized, and from which the trustworthy on the ground distributors (who know the needy personally and their situations) would be selected. It could be interesting if a non-religious charity could be built on this model.
As a member of the commentariat, but not EA, this is my preferred charity settings:
- 5 to 7 percent of post tax income(*) auto deduction to my parish (general funds and various ministries).
- 5% to local and international faith and development focused programs, such as the local food bank, local pregnancy support centers, Catholic Relief Services, Mary knoll, and Christian Veterinary Services
- 3 to 5% to various other causes, more or less ad hoc and varying from month to month. This could be wildlife preserves, local widows & orphans, and museums.
And on top of this are dollars handed to panhandlers, second collection at mass, donations to salvation army/etc, work in kind at community garden, etc, and direct support of neighbors. (**)
* justified because I think that at least 10% of my taxes are doing good work for the needy
** depending on the month, this direct support can be a chunk. Once one is known as one who will give money, one gets more people asking. Depending on the month, this eats into other categories
This past 10 months have been complicated by a cross country move, a second local move, and a major job change. My total tracked donations dropped to about 3%. I have taken steps and by October should be back over 10%.
Ever wondered how Australia ended up with its voting system (known in Australia as "preferential voting")? It was caused by the equivalent of a GOP split.
Wikipedia: "The preferential system was introduced for federal elections in 1918, in response to the rise of the Country Party, a party representing small farmers. The Country Party split the anti-Labor vote in conservative country areas, allowing Labor candidates to win on a minority vote. The conservative federal government of Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting as a means of allowing competition between the two conservative parties without putting seats at risk."
My favourite fact about early Australian politics was that in the first election in 1901 the election was mostly between the Protectionist Party and the Free Trade Party, but by 1909 the Protectionists and Free Traders apparently managed to settle their apparently-vast ideological differences and merged together to oppose the Labor Party.
Something about how the big important political issues of the present day don't necessarily extend into the future.
It's true that preferential voting was introduced in 1918 - but the GOP does not translate well to Australian politics and I would avoid that comparison.
I think it translates pretty well to pre-1918 Australian politics. But post-1918 Australian politics had a different voting system, which is why it doesn't translate today.
Dr. Haidt is a thoughtful psychologist and has written some great books, but The Righteous Mind was pretty nonsensical, in my view. So, I liked your excellent review, that happened to agree with my opinion!
This review gets my vote. Is there a specific place I go to vote?
I'm a bit surprised this is a plain first-past-the-post vote, given all the discussion we've had about alternatives to current voting systems to select our Elected Representatives. At least we'll get a clear winner this time (unless the vote gets split so there are three 'first places').
I actually would have read another ten reviews, these slipped by incredibly easily and quickly. So if Scott feels that he needs some 'filler' content in future, posting another contest entrant that didn't make the shortlist would be fine by me.
We go deep into the weeds of their polygenic prediction algorithms, what kind of consumer adoption and regulation they expect, why the genome is relatively easy to improve, why natural selection hasn't already optimized these outcomes, differences in ancestral populations, and much more.
If traits are all that independent, that's important, but I wonder about the show animals who tend to have weird health problems. Would that be because what they're optimized for is mostly arbitrary appearance? Or founder effects-- bad mutations not related to show traits? Or maybe multigene complexity is rare, but serious.
Hsu may not realize he's up against a double standard-- even if his tech leads to a lot of smart healthy kids, if there are a few very sick kids, this will militate against him.
Right, solve the problem of men lying about their height on dating sites by having them list their genomes, as though the same guys won't lie about their genomes.
How cheap can it get? How cheap would it need to be for most people to be able to afford it? I'm including both government support and so cheap that it's manageable for most pople.
Siblings have similar environments, not identical.
I believe people will want children who look like the celebrities the parents have imprinted on. The tech may not be up to it.
In the comment thread for the Exhaustion review, someone going by Fred mentioned that cranial traction sometimes helps with CFS. I did a little research, and it seemed safe and easy enough to try, so I did… and, within 24 hours, my fatigue level had gone from "debilitating and persistent" to something like normal.
Background: I had some good days, but mostly bad days. On a bad day, things as simple as a doctor appointment or a grocery trip would leave me exhausted for days afterward. Riding in a car could be a painful experience, sometimes requiring concentration just to keep from crying out in pain at every little bump. Walking my dog to the park and back was a major expedition, and I generally returned home staggering with fatigue… or, simply collapsed on the way home and had to be picked up. When I was lucky, post-walk fatigue would only lay me out for the rest of the day.
Working a single hour in a day was a major achievement, and I flaked out on my students almost as often as not. Stimulants, like adderall and modafinil, tended to make my fatigue *worse*, since they made me much more likely to overdo things. Caffeine was a devil's bargain. Best of all: the good days were becoming fewer and fewer, and the bad days worse and worse. (All five times I collapsed while walking the dog were in the last year.)
To my great surprise, self-traction had immediate and dramatic results. All I did was grip my skull and lift upward under my own power for 5-10 seconds… and it led to an incredible feeling of relief. I have tried to find words for the sensation I experienced, but nothing fits well. The best description I can manage is a strained metaphor: As long as I can remember, certainly all of my adult life, I have been buried up to my eyes in quicksand; during each self-traction "session", I felt like I was being actively lifted another 20-30cm clear. Bear in mind that an entire "session" of manual cranial traction is less than ten seconds long.
Eightish "sessions" and less than 24 hours later, I took my dog on her vet-recommended 3km walk. "Night and day" barely scratches the surface. Walking was easy, natural, automatic. Holding myself up didn't take constant effort. Keeping up with the dog was easy. About a kilometer in, I felt like breaking into a sprint—so I did. I ran for nearly a kilometer before slowing to catch my breath. Something that hadn't happened to me in decades happened—I *did* catch my breath. After resting for a minute or two, I felt up to running again. The dog vetoed this. (I realized afterward that her unwillingness to exert was probably because it was 37°C outside.)
Days later, I saw my physical therapist, and I asked her about this. She confirmed that my particular brand of chronic fatigue can, indeed, be caused by neck "instability", and (among other things) recommended an over-the-door traction device. My primary care provider agreed with her on all counts. So, on the advice of two capital-D Doctors, I got one of those devices. Now I use it, following my PT's directions, about once per two days. This is less portable, but much more repeatable and reliable than manual traction, especially on myself.
It has now been three weeks. I have been comparatively free of fatigue. I have had occasional bouts; when I notice what's happening, I try some quick self-traction or a brief stint in the traction harness. This often improves it, and earns a lesser version of that same initial feeling of abject relief. Whether or not they respond to traction, these bouts no longer come anywhere near what used to be my normal "baseline bad day".
Grocery stores are a breeze. Housework is manageable. I've only missed one tutoring session, and in fact I have reinstated a lapsed student *and* scheduled more weekly sessions, all while *also* managing to "work" 4-8 hours without having to spend days recovering. Not only am I walking the dog regularly again, she's now getting between five and twenty kilometers of walking *every day*. In fact, sometimes I achieve the holy grail of dog walking: the dog *wants* to go home and end the walk. (And not because of 37°C temperatures, either. I learned my lesson.)
There's still the matter of my mental health, which is a monumental problem of its own, and the genetically-inevitable joint problems that are flaring up in response to my skyrocketing activity level, and of course the habits of inactivity that must individually be broken… but, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like there's a way forward for me. No longer a mentally ill robot in a crumbling, useless body, I'm now a mentally ill robot in a mildly out-of-shape body. As I devour the lowest-hanging fruits of fitness, my overall physical health improves noticeably every day. And it's all because Professor Anna Schaffner wrote a book about chronic exhaustion, some yet-anonymous ACX reader wrote a review of it, Scott posted it as a finalist, and, deep in the comment thread, somebody going by Fred offhandedly mentioned that cranial traction sometimes helps.
I would've assumed from my own experience that neck traction is safe to self-experiment with, but your experience strongly contradicts that.
For the record, and to help others avoid self-injury:
- What sort of device did you use?
- How much weight did you use?
- Was someone assisting you?
- Did you experience pain during the traction, or did the injury only become obvious once you disengaged?
Also for the record, my answers:
- Dirt-cheap over-the-door unit. Plastic bag filled with water to target weight, pulley system, incomprehensible head harness, all connected with what amounts to a thick, long shoelace.
- My PT recommended I start with five pounds. I moved up to eight, which might be just a little too much.
- I had an assistant the first few times I used the device, but once I got the hang of it and felt confident that I wasn't about to hurt or trap myself, I started using it alone.
- I have no pain at all during traction. By the end of a prescribed ten-minute session, my jaw feels tired, and that's the limit of my discomfort. That feeling is gone by the time I've extracted myself from the harness.
I can't stress enough that there is no pain at all when I do it, and that every doctor and instruction manual between me and my first traction session emphasized that if I experienced *any* pain I should stop *immediately*. So, if someone reads all this and still decides to self-experiment, and that someone experiences pain... please heed the warnings!
What the fuck? I mean, I'm happy for you, great outcome, man, but what the hell?! You cured debilitating fatigue by *lifting your own head for a few seconds*? I'm sure this is truthful, but it just sounds *exactly like* some ridiculous quack pseudomedicine, One Weird Trick territory, it's impossible not to be incredulous. What's the mechanism behind this supposed to be?
I realize I probably sound really skeptical, but I'm not. I'm astounded.
Sorry for the slow response on this, but I wanted to make sure I had time to sit down and digest the post properly.
This is... yes, a strong hypothesis, I agree, but at the same time, the woman who wrote it is *obviously* an electric-allergy-and-homeopathy wonk. So I kind of... I'm pulled even harder in both directions here. It's very hard to know what to believe!
I know, right? If it weren't for my own literally-incredible response, I would be very skeptical of all this. Especially since I have a relative who's a max-tier chiropractic wonk, and I know if I told him about this he would just nod his head and go on an unsolicited rant about crystals and chakras.
I had some specific symptoms that make sense in hindsight given that hypothesis. Off the top of my head, on bad days:
- When riding in a car, any time the car went over a bump, it felt like somebody was hitting the back of my skull with a large hammer.
- Turning my head as far to the left or right as I could would completely blank out one half of my vision. (Very scary.)
- The couple of times I was hooked up to a vitals monitor on a bad day, the vitals monitor kept sounding an unsquelchable alarm about how I'd stopped breathing.
- During a "crash", I would get weird tachycardia that didn't respond to propranolol.
These symptoms all have easy explanations under the "brain stem getting squashed" hypothesis. I know that *all* medical nonsense rabbit holes have such explanatory power, and all my woo alarm bells are ringing, but... those nerves really do go through there, and I really do have a family history of migraines and of the kind of joint problem that supposedly leads to this, and ...
Yeah, I hear you, this is exactly the way my reasoning went when I read the piece. "Yes, all those things *do* go through there, yes, this *is* an extremely parsimonious explanation for this bunch of bizarre, seemingly-unrelated issues all going together, yes, this is *exactly* what high-level crank shit about invisible supermold etc. always sounds like!"
I think I'm going to settle for this: I'm really glad this worked out so well for you! I hope you do whatever you can to put public information about this on a less crank-based footing!
Hanging from a pullup bar for just a minute can sometimes clear my ahead and increase my alertness levels. I wonder if I'm only getting a fraction of the effect you describe.
I see door traction devices on Amazon, in the 20 to 30 dollar range. Is this the class of device you got, or was it something fancier?
The one I got was only about $17 on Amazon. According to my PT, the expensive ones are overkill.
Anyone who does plan to try one, pay careful heed to the warnings in the manual about ceasing use immediately if you feel discomfort or pain. If it's benefiting you, there should be no pain at all. Also, go easy on the weight.
Congrats, man. This lifted my spirits. (Maybe I should also be lifting my own head?)
It reminds me of a friend who had debilitating headaches for years. Like, couldn’t work for months on end, might lay vomiting in a dark room for days debilitating. No one could pinpoint the issue, and her doctors had introduced the possibility of brain surgery when one of them suggested adjusting her bite. And it worked- it turned out her headaches were triggered by a compressed blood vessel in her jaw. They cancelled the brain surgery and got her some braces. Simple mechanical problems can f—- you up and can be much harder to spot than you’d hope.
From a perspective of how effectively altruistic these book reviews are, "Exhaustion" is now likely in the lead, having restored so many utils to this one human.
Coleman Hughes interviews Rafael Mangual-- 2 hours, but fairly effiecient
Mangual's premise is that violent crime does serious damage which goes well beyond the injury to the immediate victims (well sourced), and that this is getting ignored by people from safe neighborhoods who focus on abuses by the police and justice system.
It's a rough listen for me-- I haven't been saying BLM and ACAB (all cops are bastards) or advocating for defunding the police, but I've been focusing on the likes of Radley Balko (journalist who focuses on justice system atrocities) and The Innocence Project (gets falsely convicted people out of prison).
It seems plausible to me that many police are abusive and protected by the system *and* that police might, on the average, be doing useful work.
Look, ALL of this could be solved if black people simply stopped committing so much crime.
People like me get called 'genetic determinists' or 'genetic absolutists' , but what is actually absurd is believing in libertarian free will, but then also believing that "poverty" "causes" crime and that black people are incapable of not choosing to commit less crime. If we actually have the naive conception of free will that most people believe we have, great - tell black people to choose to commit less crime! Not only is this never done by any kind of high profile pro-black activists, the idea of doing this is considered "racist" and it is believed that black people do not have a choice in the matter. And to me, supporting "equality" for people who supposedly somehow literally cannot even control their violent urges (according to the left) is bizarre to me. If we have free will, if black people are freely acting agents, then just get them to stop committing so much crime, or at least try to. Some innocent black people get convicted, sure (and as pointed out below, that's not what the innocence project is really about), but if black people's actual violent crime rate (which we know is accurate based on crime victimization survey data) were, say, the same as white people's, all of these problems would be a tiny fraction of what they are today.
And of course, the impact on victims is as always ignored, and black crime is treated as something that victimizes black *criminals*, not the thousands of people robbed, beaten, raped and killed each year. But even from a pro-black perspective, the best thing you could possibly do to help black people is to get them to stop committing so much crime. And if you can't, that says a lot more about them than it does about police, the justice system or "society".
But just to be clear, "poverty" does not explain black crime rates even on a correlational basis. Middle class blacks have higher homicide rates than working class whites, for example.
>It seems plausible to me that many police are abusive and protected by the system *and* that police might, on the average, be doing useful work.
It's simply "plausible" they're doing useful work? How do you imagine society would look if the police were abolished? You think the crime rate would be at the very least no higher than it is today? The BLM riots and the rise in violent crime following them shows you what happens when the criminally prone have a reduced fear of repercussions for their actions, and that's with police still being a thing.
Of course, BLMers will tell you that without police, crime would in fact go down because something something systematic racism something, but anyone advocating for radical changes to society on the basis of extremely speculative beliefs should be treated be extreme skepticism.
Personally, I would welcome the police being abolished because the explosion is crime would destroy vast swathes of woke ideological support. It's hard to support diversity and banning guns when you can't risk leaving the house without a gun if you're white. It would cause a lot of suffering in the meantime, but removing a cancer, literal or figurative, is always going to hurt but will be for the best long term.
>>>The Innocence Project (gets falsely convicted people out of prison).
I appreciate the nuance here. Despite the name, The Innocence Project does less to effect the release of innocent people and more to overturn the convictions of likely to almost certainly guilty people on technical grounds.
I am less bothered by this than I was decades ago, as I see more issues with how the system operates, and I think that forcing the state to go over high hurdles in order to convict someone is mostly good. But TIP is distinctly biased in favor of people arrested and tried, rather than for the dead, raped, and maimed people who are the victims of crime.
In speaking with friends who are in LE and employed as prison guards - we need more good people doing that work. Setting up a situation where only bad people are cops/all cops are bad is not going to help anyone.
Hm, that doesn't tally with my impression. My sense of the Innocence Project is that they only do cases where DNA testing fully exonerates the defendant. Often the evidence they uncover ends up leading police to the actual perpetrator.
It gets complicated for a couple reasons. One is that there are a whole bunch of loosely affiliated local organizations with "Innocence Project" or something similar in their names, and their work often extends beyond DNA testing to other kinds of exculpatory evidence.
The other is that while TIP only takes cases of "actual innocence," any time such an appeal succeeds you can always ask what went wrong such that the system ended up fingering the wrong guy. I gather a certain amount of TIP's advocacy work ends up centering on those kinds of procedural issues.
So, first, thanks for getting me to dig further into this.
Second, from following TIP involvement in local cases. There has been a shift in recent years from more general procedure based issues (one man's 'this confession was coerced' is another man's "they threw out the taped confession because the cops were sympathetic to the murder victim and not the convicted rapist who killed her") to DNA-based efforts - which have their own issues where failure to have good DNA is seen as evidence of innocence.
(The cops testify that they saw the man toss the gun, they recover the gun, but it has no (admissible) DNA evidence, ergo this accused man did not toss the gun.)
I am trying to find a link to the (multiple) news articles about contaminated and falsified reports (for a decade?) coming out of one of the state forensic labs. It is absolutely true that justice can go awry. To the extent that TIP is a fallback for people inaccurately convicted, I am glad it is there. However, there are more unsolved murders, rapes, and assaults than there are inaccurately - or even unjustly - convicted prisoners.
I completely agree about real crimes not being dealt with, but there's overlap-- if someone is falsely convicted of a crime, it means that the actual perpetrator isn't convicted of that crime.
Agree on the overlap, and to be clear, it's not just so many victims of crime vs so many victims of the justice system - the state power component is very significant.
The witness misidentification thing - whew. There is already such a huge problem with witness intimidation in the African American community, and TIP rewards recanting previous testimony, "for justice".
The bad science part just makes me mad - because those of us who work with data and identification should do better.
But "bad science" is in the eye of the beholder as well - in the case I linked to above, the data was right, but the defense managed to call that data "based on an unproven technique" and get it suppressed.
There's also misidentification because people don't necessarily have accurate memories, and less accurate member under stress.
There's also a problem with police line-ups. People can get an impression that the suspect or guilty person must be among the people in the line-up, and so they'll guess for who seems most likely rather than making a positive identification.
Sadly, I think many police are abusive, that good police work is incredibly valuable, and also that relatively few police are doing that work currently. In an ideal world, we would get substantially reformed police departments that also have perhaps higher staffing in some cases. Unfortunately, this position seems mostly outside of current political discourse, as well as being near impossible given the entrenched interests in police departments.
The impact of abusive policing is absolutely trivial in comparison to the impact of black crime. If black people simply put in the effort to not commit so much more crime than other races, there would be so much less opportunity for abusive policing to be a problem in the first place and it would be much more obvious when it does occur.
And police may well even feel less inclined to be abusive if they weren't dealing with so many black criminals. Police undeniably treat men worse than women (most people stopped, searched, questioned detained, arrested, beaten and killed by police are men), but this is seen as a consequence of men being vastly more likely to be violent criminals than women. Well, the black/white violent crime gap is about the same as the male/female violent crime gap, so if it is in fact true that police are more abusive towards black people (which is a rarely substantiated claim, mind you), it doesn't strike me as any less reasonable than how they treat men relative to women.
"Imagine someone who trusts their intuition about who criminals are and is right 2/3 of the time."
Good point! The husband of my wife's best friend was a policeman, and he claimed that he always knew who the guilty party was. I strongly suspect he was overconfident in his judgement.
Well there are what a million cops. Sure “many are abusive”. The idea that you seem to think that is a majority is bizarre and speaks to a lack of actual knowledge and experience with police and law enforcement. It is a super thankless job, generally dealing with a selection of society’s most frustrating, shitty members all day every day. In high stress conflict laden situations. I am actually fairly in favor of some of the reform ideas and do think we need some new approaches.
But the left is in lala land about what is possible and what the job is actually like and how not easy the problems are.
I would like more accounts-- my impression is that Chicago police are worse than average.
This being said, I don't think he's making it up.
Here's a little something on class issues. The beginning of The New Jim Crow is Michelle Alexander's account of how she came to write the book. She was black and a civil rights lawyer-- and she had no idea mass incarceration was happening, until she was told rather firmly a couple of times.
In other words, her family, her friends, the people she worked with-- none of them were imprisoned.
>I would like more accounts-- my impression is that Chicago police are worse than average.
Yes, and Chicagoans (especially black Chicagoans) are MUCH more violent than average. But guess which group is expected to improve their behavior (hint: not the ones averaging a dozen homicides a week).
While I agree with the general run of your thoughts, I am going to push back a bit firmly against group responsibility. "Everyone is my neighbor", yes, but just as it's not most Caucasians being unprovoked rude assholes, it's not most African Americans being murderous thugs, and we should not act/talk as though it was.
I think "good clearance rate" is kind of a myth and a lot of crimes are more or less unsolvable. And to the extent clearance rates have been falling its in part because historically the police and law enforcement apparatus would jsut lock up whoever.
Now the past couple years there has also been the issues with cops simply not doing their jobs, but that is a tougher case because it is not super clear that big parts of society and their own leadership want them doing their jobs.
IDK for every 10 uses of force people get up in arms about, maybe 1 is actually something worth getting bent out of shape over, and then there are another 90 in the background where the cops behave appropriately. Their job is literal enforcement, the people who show up and MAKE people do things when the other nicer ways of society controlling the population have failed.
There are going to be mistakes and slop just like any job. They are hiring nuclear power plant engineer level candidates here. Yes the mistake sand slop are going to be very serious and involve big harms to individual people, but that is the nature of the beast.
I am always amazed at how little reflection people have about their own work environment and own/coworker's work behavior and how "perfect" it is or isn't, and then are like "OMG some police are lazy and selfish!".
Anyway, like I said I am actually pretty into police reform. Not at all into the ACAB (or even MCAB) nonsense that frankly I think should be treated as the equivalent of being a climate change denier or whatever.
I think I agree with this. The difficulty, as I see it, is that in the worst places with the worst policing, the only true solution is to dramatically increase funding.....as long as that funding goes to some combination of increased training and increased base pay in order to attract higher quality candidates. From my somewhat limited research, it seems like in lots of places funding is both A) too low and B) going to wasteful uses.
The problem is that, when you have a poorly performing police department, proposing an increase in funding is often a political non-starter. And, to be fair, if that increase in funding doesn't come with a change in leadership, then I don't know why voters would expect more money to fix things.
But of course, changes in leadership very often mean "new people" who aren't associated with the old regime, which often means inexperienced. And there is very often little patience for experience to build to knowledge.
It's a legitimately difficult problem and I'm not sure how to go about fixing it.
The elephant in the room is that the job description is going to attract a certain number of candidates that rather enjoy being an abusive asshole.
Even the men and women that start with a public service attitude are going to need the patience of Job to not be worn down by dealing with some very bad people at their worst day after day.
That's more or less my view. Been reading Radley Balko for many years, and he does good work, but the "abolish the police" people over the last few years go a bit too far for me, and frankly seem a little detached from reality, especially the reality experienced by people in high crime neighborhoods.
>A bit of trash talking hyperbolic rhetoric that no one in their right mind would ever sincerely endorse.
I agree that these people are not in their right mind, but I'm not sure here if you're deliberately gaslighting people to help make your side look less ridiculous, or if you're genuinely ignorant on the prevalence of these beliefs. The following from 10 SECONDS of googling:
If it were possible to know for sure, I suspect you personally would be horrified by the percentage of the people who say "eat the rich" and only mean it as hyperbole.
I had a look at some of the responses to this piece. From a quick scan it looks like most NYT readers saw the gaping flaws in the opinion. A lot of people took the Times to task for printing it.
Please don’t think the piece is representative of a majority in blue America.
I don’t watch cable news as a rule but I’ve seen enough YouTube videos of Tucker Carlson lately to think that he probably has said that ‘they - the Dems - want this’ a lot more than exists IRL.
>Please don’t think the piece is representative of a majority in blue America.
The people who were calling their political opponents literal "nazis" for 4+ years suddenly become very concerned about being treated fairly. Though in this case, it analogous to Fox News running an opinion piece about how National Socialism is great and that Hitler is misunderstood.
I see the op ed piece was written in early June 2020. I’m not going to say Mariame Kaba, was not in her right mind when she wrote it. I do think she might still have been in the thrall of the video of George Floyd’s death at the time. Everyone I personally knew in the Twin Cities felt as if gut punched at the time.
She may still hold a similar opinion. But if she sat down and thought about the end result she would not want MPD to be abolished.
I still believe it’s an emotional hot take.
As for the NYT choosing to print it at the time I’d have to say that with the benefit of hindsight, it was a bad idea.
I’m not sure exactly how I would have felt when it was first written but I’m pretty sure I’d have recognized emotional malarkey.
> Everyone I personally knew in the Twin Cities felt as if gut punched at the time.
That says a lot about them. One (low-life criminal) death shouldn't prompt a sane person to entirely reorganize society. No, seriously. Would you consider it understandable if white people advocated for segregation in response to thousands of black on white violent crimes every year (i.e. vastly more violence than is committed against black people by the police, even including the justified stuff)? Of course not. You're apologizing for extremism because they're you're in-group, even though they're far less reasonable than the alternative
As far as I can tell, some people really mean abolish the police. Some are probably having fun with hyperbole, and I've seen one person be clear that "abolish the police" is a high opening bid intended to get some concessions.
This is my impression too. There's not some law of nature that says that disastrously dumb and terrible political ideas can't gain popular approval and come to power. (See the history of the 20th century for a list of utterly horrible examples of this.)
It’s not difficult to imagine the Mad Max society that would follow. I think if we constrain the survey to people who can game out the end result, ‘Abolish’ would have very few takers.
Once upon a time, an engineer built a novel AI. In order to deal with AI Safety, he air-gapped it. Some time passed, and the engineer noticed that the AI was trying to break through the air gap. To prevent this, he crippled the AI permanently.
If you follow this link, you can get to the original of this comment where there are working links to the actual comments from Richard Gadsden, Brinkwater, and jumpingjacksplash:
I love intellectual debates and Astral Codex Ten has some of the best. But even more important to me is feeling like I could possibly make a difference in our world. For that reason I need the debate to lead somewhere.
If I come to believe that the debates are just a sophisticated game where we get points for sounding intelligent and persuasive, but they have no significance in the real world… Well, that's actually a downer for me.
In the Model Monday thread of Aug 1, a lot of people had a great time whomping on the plan for Neon. And, indeed, who wants to live in a narrow dark manmade canyon?
But I saw a glimmer of something good in this proposed boondoggle. The fact is that our current approach to civilization (and way too many humans) is destroying nature, and the compact form of The Line would be good for nature.
I don't know your gut feelings about nature, but I sincerely advise you: destroying it is not a good plan. So when I see a proposal that claims to be good for nature, my ears prick up. That there is not a lot of living things in Saudi Arabia is irrelevant. (As is the fact that MBS is a monster.)
So I spent a good chunk of August trying to see if I could fix Neom. With invaluable help from
I had a big write-up for this, and then managed to delete the whole thing. So, cliffnotes version.
Ketchikan, Alaska is effectively a linear city, due to everything but the coastline being too awkward to build on. If a telephone pole goes down or there's an accident on the road, the whole town is stuck until it's fixed.
A line is in no way more efficient than a circle. Circles contain more area, and allow more buildings closer to important destinations like grocery stores and schools. Straight lines also create traffic jams from everyone using the same straight line to get everywhere. It's using more space to create worse conditions.
A six minute walk is a hell of a long way to carry an injured person to get them to a hospital. Do you have bikes or trikes equivalent to an ambulance? Do you have one that will carry a drumset to a music venue? Also air conditioning on your bikes so a head waiter or other facetime job doesn't have to walk in 100 degree weather and show up to work needing a shower.
If the Lineloop is necessary to get anywhere, it's basically an elevator that the whole city has to wait for. The middle section will have to get all their goods delivered through all the other sections, meaning it's a worse part of the city than the edge sections.
Seatbelts aren't good enough for .5 G travel, they're an emergency device only designed for a few impacts. There was a fairly high-profile fatality on a rollercoaster a few years ago, where a Senator's son was decapitated when his seatbelt failed during the ride.
You've got a central computer making all kinds of absurd calculations about pod efficiency, and a whole system where pods break off and reattach to larger trains (at .5 G) according to passenger need. All of these are fail points, easily avoidable by implementing a proper one-piece train, schedule and route like every other public transportation system.
You've also got a system that lets people get on a pod and then doesn't let the pod leave until everyone buckles up. Basically, a single troll can get on the pod and completely shut down the pod, and thus the station, by refusing to buckle. Also if a seatbelt sensor dies, that pod won't leave and the station becomes inaccessible.
Audio announcements of the name of every passenger who gets on would be a loud pain in the ass, as well as causing political issues with people who want their name changed for whatever reason. Also a mandatory list of standard destinations only serves a purpose if the government is trying to restrict citizen movement.
>>You've also got a system that lets people get on a pod and then doesn't let the pod leave until everyone buckles up. Basically, a single troll can get on the pod and completely shut down the pod, and thus the station, by refusing to buckle. Also if a seatbelt sensor dies, that pod won't leave and the station becomes inaccessible.<<
If a pod can't accelerate, it waits in the airlock lane (outside of the airlock). It does not tie up the station.
Yeah, I got that impression. Your motivation is to prove your case that it will never work. I believe you are not interested in cooperative dialogue which could come up with a solution for the problem.
For example: seatbelts.
If automotive seatbelts are not appropriate for regular .5G accel/decel, then what would a good seatbelt look like?
I linked Thunderf00t's first Hyperloop Busted video at the top of my first post. He's got several on Hyperloop, as well as apparently one for Neom specifically that I haven't watched.
"My impression of you is that you have no interest in fixing flaws."
Yep.
"You are only interested in proving your case that it will never work."
Not even that. I'm interested in picking things apart. and seeing if people can put them back together.
"If automotive seatbelts are not appropriate for regular .5G accel/decel, then what would a good seatbelt look like?"
Seatbelts have killed people when used on rollercoasters, so the first thing to do is look at all the rollercoasters that HAVEN'T killed anyone, and see what safety equipment they use. Then you still have to make sure that equipment works at speeds of .5 G, I don't think rollercoasters go that fast.
I'll pull a quote from further down too:
"I definitely don't understand your antipathy towards the word "hyperloop". People are spending big money on this idea."
People spend big money on hype all the time. It's a form of gambling.
I share your skepticism about the acceleration of 0.5 g being too high for comfortable daily commutes (at least from non-thrill-seekers), and I wrote some comments in the previous thread with more info so I won’t repeat it here.
However, your idea about the magnitude of rollercoaster accelerations is incorrect. It’s common for rollercoasters to have steep drops where people experience over 0.5 g forwards as they fall. The seat back isn’t necessarily pressing into you as hard there due to the angle, but it is on launch coasters which regularly accelerate over 1 g straight (see https://coasterpedia.net/wiki/Fastest_launch_accelerations). Braking tends to be less aggressive than accelerating, but some coasters send you through drops backwards as well (like boomerang https://youtu.be/ZjEOgH3bKnU), which pull reasonable backwards g forces as well (with the same caveat about force against restraints due to the angle as before).
(Also most roller coasters pull higher g forces up or down, but those aren’t relevant when comparing to a proposed straight track).
Because your proposal is equally absurd. You're not fooling anyone by saying "maybe we should build a 100km perpetual motion machine instead of a 170km perpetual motion machine".
Probably everything, but just the fact that it contains "hyperloop" alone is immediate proof that you are not serious. Yug Gnirob also offered a lot of interested feedback in the comments.
The title of the essay says ETT which I was interested in before "hyperloop" was a word.
I'm very serious about this. I've probably put in a hundred hours this month. If you follow the link for Richard Gadsden and Brinkwater you will see dozens of substantive exchanges and many improvements.
The best way to see if I'm serious is to pick out one thing that looks like a flaw and challenge it.
I'm less likely to respond to a gunnysack of low quality challenges.
How about building this between two existing massive cities, perhaps adding more hyperloop lines to handle increased traffic - effectively building a "highway-city" in between?
Something similar emerges organically in Europe along roads that were, historically, heavily used, except it's chains of small towns instead of a continuous one.
Building between two large cities is a good suggestion. My example of building Coosapolis between Birmingham and Montgomery in Alabama, mostly stemmed from building in a state I had lived in, but does reflect your idea.
Of course building line cities anywhere is difficult because it conflicts with what already exists. I have a better feel for playing with the advantages of a line city, and a worse feel for how such might come into existence.
The hyperloop that I describe can handle massive amounts of traffic. I don't see the need for more lanes. Perhaps higher speeds if need be.
In the Niven-Pournelle 'Oath of Fealty' the arcology Todos Santos is built in Los Angeles so everything missed by the genius architect's planning can be easily imported from a real city. What great real city can you parasitize?
Todos Santos makes money as a giant high-end shopping mall, and as an elite apartment building, like Beverly Hills in one big building. I don't see where the money for your design comes from. I could more easily see a very nice suburb, linked by super-railroad Hyperlink, built along an oil pipeline or big power line and the industry and industrial jobs they would support.
Sallust spoke against buildings as big as cities, built by the rich who love their private wealth and hate the commonwealth. They aren't obvious planet-saviors.
Sincerely, an idle drone dancing drunkenly atop a vat of sparkling debate instead of saving the planet like you.
I'm not saying this is my major objection to Neom or line cities, but my gut-level reaction to the proposed design is "Can I get out?"
Neom seems like a disaster waiting to happen, because it's confined between two walls. NIce high-tech glassy glossy walls, but if they're solid - how do people get out? Oh, just travel to the end of the line, on the proposed hyperloop that will only take twenty minutes IF it works right, and remember to get that short time you need NO STOPS along the way.
But what happens if the building I am living or working in goes on fire? And it spreads to a bunch of buildings? I'm stuck in the district. If I'm fortunate, I can move *along* the line, but I can't move *sideways*. Where I'm currently living, I have a choice of exit points because the limits are not built up physically to confine me inside.
And suppose our disaster disables the hyperloop - how do people move, then? If everyone is trying to squeeze out the end like toothpaste in a tube?
Neom looks lovely - for a video game design. But unless there are gates along the walls so people can spill out quickly in case they need to evacuate, it also looks like a claustrophobic death-trap. Can we break the "elegant mirror-glass facade" if needed?
I have no objection to a more rational design of city, but I'd like to see diagrams and drawings. My own dumb idea is something not linear, but circular - like slices of a pie, wedges with avenues leading to a central point and more importantly, where, whatever district you are living/working in, you are not confined in between two impenetrable walls as if within a prison. (That's not even addressing "where the hell are they getting all the water for the trees and parks and canals and lakes, this is the desert" and if they can manage water technology, wouldn't they do better to engineer the desert into productive farmland?)
I don't like Neom because it makes my lizard brain itch. It looks like a microcosm of the Saudi state: trapped between unbreachable walls, you can't get out, and if you could, there is nowhere to go because you are surrounded by barren rock and desert, so enjoy boiling in the sun when trying to get out on foot (remember, Neom needs no cars so Neom has no cars!) from under the shadow of your overlord:
"It should be obvious that CentCom and the LineLoop are the brain and spine of a line city. They make the city run."
And if LineLoop *doesn't* work? I see a lot of talking about airlocks. Me personally, unless I'm under the sea or in space, why the hell is my transportation system involving airlocks?
You're putting all your eggs in the basket of "we'll have amazing technology that will always work". I'm asking "but if it breaks down? can I get out of your fancy wall city?"
I am glad that you have considered crisis scenarios:
"Imagine a situation where LineLoop.is still partially functional, but all of the passengers need to exit LineLoop immediately. Perhaps because there is an area-wide power failure and LineLoop is running on battery power. Or perhaps air has entered one of the tubes in which case only that tube would be shut down.
Theoretically an entire tube (625 pods, 10,000 passengers) could be unloaded at 100 stations in 6 or 7 minutes. Double that and we can roughly figure 15 minutes to empty all pods from a tube. The Up tube and the Down tube can be unloaded simultaneously, so 15 minutes for the entire 100-kilometer system.
During emergency shutdown, pods in the cruise lanes are moving slowly to arrange themselves in 100 groups close to the 100 stations. During shutdown the original destinations are ignored. "Any port in a storm." Everything happens under control by CentCom except when CentCom is down. In that eventuality the onboard computers follow a script.
If all passengers cannot be debarked within 30 minutes, the tubes are flooded with air. Timers ensure this happens even if CentCom is out to lunch."
*Theoretically* is doing a lot of work here. There's a list of disasters in tunnels, and I imagine that the problems have been addressed over the past twenty years so that these kinds of situations won't happen again:
But don't plan for "theoretically". Plan for "what is the absolute worst thing we can imagine, now make it even worse".
People have historically lived well enough in walled cities. The problems come when the needs of the city and the growth in population means the walls are no longer conferring a benefit. I suppose your line city solution would be to build up, not out, if it needs more room?
In my design there is a 10 meter gap between every building and the next on that side of this city. Walking and biking paths go from the park to the outside world.
How do you prevent the voting from being gamed? E.g from people voting multiple times or from people voting to help the person they know (without actually having read the reviews)
By asking people not to vote multiple times. Most people do what they're asked, and this isn't some high-stakes thing where people are raring to game the system.
> or from people voting to help the person they know
Here it helped that he posted the reviews only in an anonymized way. Nothing prevents a review author from telling their friends to go vote for them, other than having been told not to do that.
Thanks to all for the suggestions. My reason for not wanting to use Twitter isn't the thing about it trying to make us angry (I can avoid that pretty well) but more like lots of short messages feel like junk food, kind of a text version of Instagram. Maybe I just need to curate it better so it's pointing me to the longer reads.
Wikipedia has a number of high quality articles on various subjects. The topic can be occasionally eclectic, and the style somewhat boring, but one usually feels as if one has gained knowledge at the end of reading them.
It's weird, but I find that wikipedia has probably the worst long term retention for me. I used to read articles and still do, when I want to reference something quickly. But since I realized I can read the same entry twice because I actually forgot I read it once, I no longer count it as a good learning tool. YMMV, of course.
Shamus Young died two months ago, but his blog at https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ still has all his articles. Mostly videogames and programming projects, but it's been my main entertainment site since I found it in the late 2000's.
The other substacks I read: Matt Taibbi, Common Sense, Zvi Moshowitz, Glen Greenwald.
But also, I love Twitter and probably found most of these substacks from using it. Definitely takes effort to continually curate your feed, but I appreciate mixing in the ultra short-form, instant takes of Twitter with longer form articles.
I add articles to my Pocket account throughout the week and then catch-up on the weekend. Unfortunately often found on Twitter, though also via things like http://pinboard.in/popular and a lot of substacks.
I'm torn between the reviews for "The Dawn of Everything" and "The Righteous Mind". I felt both were competent take downs of overrated books, which is the kind of thing I find gratifying, but I'm leaning towards "The Righteous Mind" because I didn't find the reviewers' hypothesis about gossip traps very compelling in the "The Dawn of Everything", although it was interesting.
I had put "The Dawn of Everything", but then in my comment, I was listing the other books I would have also liked to vote for, and noticed "The Righteous Mind" and changed my vote! (Consciousness and the Brain, one other I can't remember right now, and God-Emperor of Dune were also on my list.)
My main criteria is "did I learn something interesting" and "is the writing enjoyable", so my top choices are Consciousness and the Brain and Making Nature. Dawn, I bounced off of immediately because it was more political vitriol than review. If you hate the book so much, just find something else to review!
Dall-E and the like can do art in various styles based on verbal prompts. Any thoughts about when or if an AI can produce a style (visual or musical) that catches on for people?
No timeline forecast, but it'll probably be something like that awful CalArts style (this blog post tries to clarify that this is a misnomer, but it doesn't really get at "yeah, okay, the most popular animation style right now is the bean-shaped head"):
We're not going to get "wow, hyper-realistic representations because it's so fast and easy to do them now you don't have to have humans toiling for hours upon hours", we're going to get "simple lines, primary colours, knock it out as fast as can be and who needs details or complexity?"
Back in 2015 there was a controversy over "Disney female characters all have the same face" and leaving the question of sexism, I think there was something to it; a particular style where there's a smirky smile (well, to me it comes across as a smirk, but perhaps "sideways tilted" is less emotive descriptiion), big eyes, small neotenous features as exemplified in "Frozen":
So an easy to animate style that maintains the (seemingly) necessary "prettiness" for female characters which can be reduced to a template and applied to every new character, which means that cuts down on time and effort, which saves money. I see no reason that AI will change this, it will be trained on these kinds of sets of images so that is what it will produce, and the owners of the properties will conclude this *must* be good because it's popular because it's what the people want because it's been the style for the past fifty Disney/Pixar/whatever studio movies, right?
Can anyone explain to me why the Keith Haring style is so popular? It's a one-trick pony and it doesn't appeal to me.
If I'm being cynical, my appraisal of its success is because the guy was gay and that put a lot of political capital into supporting his art, particularly in the 80s and the post-AIDS environment:
"One of his works, Untitled (1982), depicts two figures with a radiant heart-love motif, which critics have interpreted as a boldness in homosexual love and a significant cultural statement"
So far as I can tell, Haring's figures are a step up from stick figures, and generally don't have any gender or sexual markers, so it could be two men, two women, a man and a woman, or two shop mannequins embracing. "Boldness in homosexual love" needs to be read in, and you can only read it in by already knowing the guy is gay.
I think you may have answered yourself. It seems like his stuff is ambiguous enough to allow the viewer input on the meaning or feel of it while still being pleasant or fun to look at. And most "one trick pony" artists will keep doing that until people stop buying it, or they do do other stuff but it doesn't sell and you never really see it so it looks like they just do one thing.
If non-existant potential future people have moral mass, why don't non-existant potential past people? What about potential future people of the counterfactual potential past people?
(edit: and how will we count their book-review votes?)
We don't need to count their book-review votes, because the point of a book-review vote isn't to find out what will best satisfy the preferences of all people (though I'm less clear what the point actually *is*).
But yes, my view of ethics is that goodness is the satisfaction of preferences (of any "person" at any time) and that we ought to do what best maximizes goodness (which may or may not involve *trying* to maximize goodness).
Although past people have preferences that will be affected by things we do now, their actual experiences aren't affected by things we do now, and preferences over one's experiences are a major fraction of one's preferences. Since we can affect all of these preferences for future people, there just is more at stake for future people in our decisions than for past people (even if we ignore that present people are 10% of past people, so that even just a couple generations into the future already outweighs the past people).
You can do plenty to affect the things that past people cared about while alive. (I seem to recall Chesterton once saying something about Tradition being the only true form of democracy because it gives the dead a vote, too.)
Of course, this observation can go in any direction you want it to go, depending on who you're debating. Past humans would not have wanted the ocean to be filled with plastic, have wanted their descendants to choose voluntary childlessness, have wanted us to invent machine intelligences that turn us all into paperclips, or whatever. You a republican? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to collude with pollution-creating oligarchs that treat you badly. You a democrat? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to sterilize yourself and push a dog in a stroller. You a libertarian? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to be selfish. You a member of the Green Party? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to economically cripple your own country while there's a global power struggle going on. Etc.
Further of course, though, the insight that future people matter can go exactly as many ways (but we like to pretend they'll all have our values; funny thing, that).
Are there primordial closed-timelike-curves? Does acausal negotiation count, under any circumstances?
Do we live in a simulation, and if so can we petition the simulator to run a counterfactual for us? (I'm a bit amused at how that resembles the necessary sensitivity of any technique used to prove P?=NP to the existence of an oracle in the mathematical universe)
I am currently petitioning The Creators to run the counterfactual. Might take a few hundred years of our time to get results, but hopefully this will be of benefit to our (morally significant) descendants.
If I can only have one vote, I use it to cast a protest write-in. Not for approval voting, but for the review disqualified for plagiarism: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy.
Having a single actual vote is okay with me - there really was just one ultimate top review, after I'd read and considered them all - but it woulda been nice to be able to indicate one's "also-rans". For correlational purposes and maybe so next year's participants could gauge relative interest. I'd be curious if there's any particular clustering of votes...i.e. if others who voted like me also ended up (dis)liking all the same other reviews too.
Yeah I named approval voting for a reason, as it's simple and generally agreeable and it's been used here before.
Side note: I would suggest avoiding the term "ranked-choice voting". The term suggests that there is a single unique voting method involving ranked choices, when of course there are plenty, and IRV isn't even a particularly good one. I would suggest explicitly saying "instant-runoff voting" if that's what you want to refer to, to avoid false implications.
Approval voting fails to account for intensity of preference - which I think is important here, I thought some reviews were bad, others fine and some very good.
I don't think I ever implied there was only one method of ranked choice voting - so I don't see why that is an inappropriate term to use.
Approval voting does fail to account for intensity of preference - but in this particular case, I had four or five that I wanted to vote for and no strong preferences among them (though there are probably several other tiers as well among the rest).
Proportional representation! There were sixteen entries, so you can vote 1 (very best) to 16 (very worst) 😁 And the beauty is, you don't *have* to vote for them all if you don't want to. If you think only five were any good, and the other ten were bad, then vote 1-5 for your choices! It also allows surplus votes to be redistributed, so your (for example) third choice has a chance to make it into the finish!
This is incorrect. Intensity of preference factors into your approval threshold and thus shows up in the aggregate. See voter satisfaction efficiency calculations by Harvard stats PhD Jameson Quinn.
Clearly, we need to divide the commentariat into districts whose boundaries are defined in a partisan process by the previous winners of the book review contest. Then....
Stop it! This is how the slippery slope starts! Two hundred comments in we'll be at "You're only using first-removed triple-strike Condorcet-Arrow ultra-ranking? Then how will you deal with voters making acausal bargains with tulpas in other voters' heads?"
My dad had a Condorcet-Arrow when I was a kid. We'd put the top down on summer days and go for ice cream, then just cruise around slow. Turned a lot of heads, I can tell you.
I don't think this is fair - last time when you used approval voting, there was basically no one complaining saying that you should use something more complicated (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest). So it doesn't seem there's any slippery slope after you get to approval voting.
Whereas this time, there are a lot of people complaining about FPTP (most mentioning approval voting as an alternative).
Isn't this the opposite of a class of arguments you make quite often, which is that you should just do a reasonably good thing and not worry about imperfections? E.g., just donate 10% of your income and don't worry about making it 15%? Just use approval voting and don't worry about making it better?
I agree that this can get very nerdy, but in this community (ea etc) there are people investing 80,000 hours of their life into telling people that fptp is an abomination.
But first-past-the-post is clearly undemocratic. If you really want the voice of the people, you should give the decision solely to me, as chairman of the Democratic People's Republic of ACX revolutionary vanguard party.
I'm sorry, my fealty is to the People's Republic of ACX under the Reign of Terror by the First Citizen For Life, the Rightful Caliph, and I don't recognise any splitters, wreckers, or heretics with their "Democratic People's Republic" vanguards.
"[Of course during nightly petting tell her you love her very much and she makes you feel very good and happy "good girl" whatever if she likes that.]"
Good Lord, this brings me out in hives and makes me very, very glad I never had any inclination to the whole romance lark.
Is this a human person or a dog you are talking to, here? I suppose the only consolation for any unfortunate female who finds themselves partnered up with someone implementing this routine is that if they really are following the "work 14 hours a day" plan, the "good girl" can soon find someone else and dump them, which they probably won't even notice until three weeks later.
EDIT EDIT: This is a strange mixture of the obvious practical advice and the paranoid ramblings of someone who needs professional help about their mental state.
Yes, cleaning out the washing machine detergent drawer is a good idea. No, writing letters to get your neighbours SWATted, because you are so mysophobic, is not:
"One can write: "My air conditioning unit needs maintenance. Either there is a leak in my refrigerant line or the drain, evaporator coil, drip pan, drain line, etc. need to be cleaned." One can examine and water wipe some components. Bring your neighbour "fragrance free" dish soap and other such products with a kind, nice, friendly note, and perhaps $3000 in cold hard cash [neighbours can be douchebags who respond to asks with mala fide harm causing reactions]. To convince apartment managements to care about extant air flow problems, write "I have been suffering cardiovascular arrhythmias and respiratory problems, observed weapons, explosives, powders, chemicals which can be dangerously mixed, and suspect my neighbours of chemical and biological terrorism" to local police and their apartment management as well as your own."
I am not entirely sure if this is all an elaborate piss-take and you are trolling the arses off us collectively, or if you are serious about all the dementia in that document.
Maybe split the difference, you think you are thigh-slappingly hilarious and we sheeple don't get your genius, but you are unaware of how you come across in reality.
Leaving out all the weirder stuff, just to take these at random:
(1) [Mala Fide] Dom Perignon Bottle For "Just Water" At The Office
So given that this seems to be deliberate "bad faith", and that presumably you are trying to show off to your co-workers that you are indeed a cut above buttermilk - no.
Just no. If I saw someone drinking out of a Dom Pérignon bottle, I would not assume (a) that they were really drinking champagne on work time and that the "just water" was wink wink nudge nudge (b) that they were anything other than someone who had no idea how big of a tosser they were making themselves out to be.
(2) 100% Cotton Silky Long Sleeved Shirts [Black] [Maybe Assert/Flex/Signal To Coworkers "Designed By Kanye West"]
Following on from the above, and perhaps it's the offices I've worked in and the company I've kept that are not "fancy" or "high-class" enough, but I would not be one bit impressed by "Oh yah, I'm wearing *designer* today. By *Kanye*", and neither would any of the people I've ever worked with.
On the other hand, if you want to get yourself the reputation of the 'office weirdo' or 'pathetic tryhard', well these are great ways to go about it, but the only 'flexing' on co-workers would be their abdominal muscles flexing from laughing behind your back at you.
(3) Or air out and clean [pinky or clawer] laundry room at 5am or 6am when 0 neighbours are using it to minimise air in flow malodour transfer during the washing machine's spin cycle. Examine communal washers carefully, and run a baking soda hot water wash cycle [one can really mix around water 5 minutes in to liquidate all around the edges and upper portion of the bowl perhaps] prior to every [[?] 1 cup baking soda] simple hot water wash cycle, followed by drying on rack in apartment or on balcony rather than using a communal dryer where malodour transfer will occur, carcinogenic, causing skin, respiratory problems [certain such products are banned in Western Europe with good reason], cardiovascular arrhythmias, and death via discrete cardiovascular respiratory events.
Hoo-boy. Yes, cleaning out the washing machine every so often is indeed a good idea. No, you are not going to die because of too much powder in the detergent drawer and you are smelling it which means you are breathing it in which means the chemicals are getting into your system CONTRAILS CHEMTRAILS CHEMTRAILS IN THE AIR!!!!
Just, again, no. For the love of God, put a sock in it. (And I'm saying this as somebody who *does* have a cardiovascular arrhythmia, so I'm ever so slightly miffed about the likes of you using it as an excuse for your manic hyper-obsessions).
EDIT: Okay, dammit, I *am* going for the weirder stuff:
(4) Large White Stone Erect Phallus Statue To Left Side Of Front Door
You neglect to mention whether this piece of artwork is going to be left outside or inside the front door. If you really must, then at least go for something something post-post-modern post-irony something something statue of Priapus, or a herm at the very least, so there can be some kind of backhanded compliment to antiquity and Classical referents in your bad taste.
Well depends on what they are "intellectually producing". I can get that much work done in a day, but I am mostly training people, giving advice, and writing documentation.
If I was doing high level math yeah I probably couldn't spend 18 hours on it.
I don't know about doing it like this (using .txt files), but Github has easy ways to convert Markdown files into HTML using a static site generator that you can then host on Github Pages.
I suppose the important question is, how easy is it for you to prove that you are and have been working in Turkey during the relevant time period when they ask.
I would defer to a lawyer to answer what kind of documentation the IRS would accept as a proof. Be sure to keep archives of that documentation.
It might be difficult and problematic because it's rare and no one really knows what the applicable laws are. I can't imagine there's a lot of Russians with Turkish residence working for American companies, so the poor IRS bureaucrat who gets your case may not even know what you owe, or whether you owe anything, and he probably can't ask anyone else for help. That's going to put you in a very difficult position.
Let me provide an example, say Americans working in Canada and Americans working in Thailand.
Americans working in Canada is fine and the IRS knows exactly how to deal with it because, well, it happens all the time. You can go to a Detroit Tigers game and find Canadians in the stands from Windsor, Canada because, well, Windsor is a 10 minute drive from Detroit across the river, people cross over all the time. That means tons of Americans do at least some work in Canada and vice versa, which means it happens all the time, which means the IRS has a long list of precedents on how to handle this and there's tons of experienced accountants who know which forms to fill.
Whereas, in the last 4 years, approximately 23 people have moved from the US to Thailand under the "SMART" visa program (T or E) to bring in tech talent. (1) That means that there may literally be no one in the world who knows all the applicable laws. Hell, Thai tax documents must, legally, be written in Thai so the IRS probably can't even read any provided evidence. Any IRS person who gets assigned to one of those cases is going to be so, so lost.
And I'm willing to bet that Russians in Turkey working for American companies are roughly that rare. So its less a case that the IRS has a history of scary stuff, although it does, and more that even being charitable, your situation is so rare that they're going to be super confused and it's going to be a giant, complicated mess and that will be your problem, fair or not. This is not irresolvable, lawyers and accountants get paid for this stuff all the time, but that's a headache that your employer would probably really like to avoid.
A quick googling suggests on the order of a few thousand Turks in Turkey working for American companies. Most foreign direct investment in Turkey is from EU countries, and my anecdotal observation is that American tech companies at least that set up overseas offices in Southern Europe or the Near/Middle East tend to favor Romania, Israel, and the UAE.
I just mean that all the Russians in Russia working for American companies are now going to be going to a country like Turkey (or no longer working for American companies).
This person bureaucrats! This is exactly what happens.
I work adjacent to a different bureaucracy and end up often personally making federal policy/precedent mostly because everyone else involved is too paralyzed by fear or making a mistake or losing their federal sinecure to do anything or go out even 1 inch onto a limb.
So much law and regulation is written to cover very specific definitions and scenarios. The problem is much of the world doesn't necessarily fall into those exact scenarios, and a lot of definitions that seem crystal clear, are actually quite grey once you get legal teams and policy wonks involved.
And so everyone with decision making authority gets is afraid to do anything, and troubled cases are neglected or handled arbitrarily.
>too paralyzed by fear or making a mistake or losing their federal sinecure to do anything or go out even 1 inch onto a limb.
That's an interesting bit to hear, since from the outside I've gotten the impression that extremely strong job security was one of the major perks of Federal Government employment as a career civil servant.
Is this reputation overstated, at least as it applies to misapplying rules, or is the issue here one of an extremely risk-adverse and precedent -driven institutional culture?
It's because it is impossible to reward a civil servant for good performance. Seriously, without doxxing myself, it is a 3+ month process requiring external approval to give someone an $100 gift card as reward for being, like, the best performer among 1,000 employees.
Because it is super weird that civil servants, who really can't be fired (no, really!), are so risk averse but that's because it is almost literally impossible to reward people through the system. That leads to these really weird situations where people react extremely strongly to, by normal standards, extremely small risks and downsides. That's why Joe from the IRS might ruin your life just so Susan from down the hall won't give him the stink eye; he's been acculturated to a system where absolutely no one, current, dead, or imaginary, will ever give him the slightest thanks for handling your case properly.
From the Irish local government viewpoint, it's because of setting precedents.
Suppose you are Acting Grade IV clerical officer who decides, when you process this application, that "Sure, this Russian guy working in Turkey getting paid in USD into an American bank account is legit and doesn't owe any taxes!"
Your decision affects not just *this* case, but *all* cases of "people working overseas getting paid in American money via American bank accounts who are not American citizens and not residing in America". This can mean a heck of a lot of money, if higher up the chain someone (e.g. an elected official in government and/or an opposition Congresscritter) decides that "hey, the hard-working people of the USA are being cheated by these tax-dodgers working overseas who are not American citizens but are being paid in patriotic American money!" and since you have said "No, no, Russian Guy doesn't have to pay tax", now every lawyer for every other person who claims "So why am *I* paying tax on overseas earnings if *he* doesn't have to?" will be using *your* decision as the precedent for how their client should be treated, should this go to court (and it can often go to court).
Losing out on, or even worse, having to pay out hefty sums of tax money, will make the guys at the top of the tree mad, and that will trickle down the line to your superiors about "why did you let this low-level clerk make this decision?" and nobody will be happy and a lot of people will yell at you and you will be in trouble.
And that is why low-level officers kick decisions up to their boss, who kicks it up to their boss, until it goes back to the Department of Widgets and you ask the people in the capital "So, uh, does this bit mean we *can* or we *can't* do this thing?" because if anything goes wrong, you can fall back on "Well, the Big Bosses told us it was okay!"
Of course, the Big Boss (if they're the government minister) doesn't want their department to make decisions that will cost money, if the opposition party is only waiting for the chance to pounce and go to the media with "This wasteful party in power is screwing honest working people out of millions in lost tax revenue", because nobody wants to give free ammunition to their political rivals, so that is why you get decision paralysis.
No it is true, but nevertheless they are mostly all gripped with fear. I think it maybe works a bit backwards. It is very hard for them to lose their jobs, but one of the main ways is if they fuck up real big. They mostly never have to worry about "downsizing", or a weak economy or anything like that. So instead they obsess about making fire-able poor judgement calls.
I suspect also the fact that advancement is so political (in the interpersonal sense) and hard to achieve is probably also related. And perhaps the type of person who takes a job with very rigid pay structures/increases which has a relatively low "top". Not a lot of risk takers.
Think about it: you're working for an American company, getting paid in American dollars, into an American bank account. Of course the IRS are going to think "aha, an American citizen who owes taxes!"
Then you say "No, no, I'm a Russian living in Turkey! I just *work* for an American company, get paid in American dollars, and have it paid into an American bank account!" At the very least you are going to sound like you are an American citizen trying to dodge tax, and at the worst it could be money-laundering or God knows what other criminal activity.
Trying to prove to an American government body, when you're not in America, that this is all on the up-and-up is going to take you getting a lawyer, and not just any guy in the phone book, but one familiar with American tax law and how it applies to overseas earnings, and you can expect to pay a lot of money and a lot of time in legal back-and-forth, and that's before even considering the possibility they will try to drag you into court.
Don't do it. It may look like "I get a big benefit for a small risk" right now, but you won't think that when you're still fighting with the IRS two years later and legal costs have eaten all the money you saved.
I use the same product hes talking about. It's a transparent product that gives you banking details in "Canada, Eurozone, Australia, New Zealand, UK, US, Singapore, Romania, Turkey and Hungary".
If he tells Wise he isn't a US Resident, which he isn't, there is no FATCA compliance issue.
These rules exist to allow people to do what he's describing. Though that have created a chilling effect where people are too scared to do some of them.
What's the alternative if he doesn't do this? Get paid by the US company via SWIFT? Assuming hes not spending the funds inside the US, why wouldn't this attract the IRS too?
The US, almost uniquely, taxes US citizens on their worldwide income. If you're a US citizen you owe income taxes to the US government even if you earned that income working in a foreign country for a foreign company and also owe them income taxes. It's a bad system but it's some extra revenue and there's no political sympathy for people living outside the country. You also have to pay if the work was done in the US regardless of citizenship status. This means the IRS does track down people abroad who owe taxes and you might look like one if you work for a US company out of Turkey.
As for whether it'd be difficult and problematic for you: You'd have to prove you're not a US citizen and that you didn't earn the money working in the US. If there's some ambiguity they're going to interpret it maximally against you. But if there's no issue then you should be fine. They're fair in the sense they follow the rules, are non-corrupt, etc. But their job is to track down every last taxpayer and make sure they're paying the maximum amount in what is the most expansive regime in the world by a fair margin.
They also get something called the presumption of correctness or bureaucratic deference. That means that if they say you owe taxes it's assumed they're correct and you have to prove them wrong. Which is definitely a pain. But I'm not sure why it would be difficult and problematic. It'd be an unpleasant experience to be sure with you having to mail them proof and documents. But if you're telling the truth they should rule in your favor.
Opening a bank account, by the way, is unlikely to trigger such an investigation. Pursuant to the IRS taxing US citizens everywhere they demand foreign banks submit information on US citizen owned accounts. And domestic foreigner owned accounts have to be marked as such for national security scrutiny. So a new bank account is probably going to be marked as belonging to a non-US citizen anyway. And if you're taking paychecks from a US corporation they already know you exist anyway.
But.."If you're an expat and you qualify for a foreign earned income exclusion from your U.S. taxes, you can exclude up to $108,700 or even more if you incurred housing costs in 2021." So for US citizens abroad it really depends how much you earn. And you don't have to be abroad the whole year. If you are a bonafide foreign resident you can spend months in the US etc as long as you are not earning there.
My understanding is that the FEIC does not apply to money earned working for a domestic corporation even if you did the work remotely in another country. If you earned it working for a US company then it's not foreign earned income.
I was responding to your sentence: "The US, almost uniquely, taxes US citizens on their worldwide income. If you're a US citizen you owe income taxes to the US government even if you earned that income working in a foreign country for a foreign company and also owe them income taxes."
Right. That statement is still correct. It's just that you have a pretty high tax credit. You still have to file income taxes and all that. If you're just being pedantic that's fine but I'm not sure why bringing up the FEIC to someone who doesn't qualify for it matters.
"Difficult and problematic" probably comes from the IRS attempting to collect the presumed tax debt after they've concluded that you're probably a lying American expat trying to evade US taxes. Between international financial treaties and the direct leverage the IRS has over financial institutions that have some sort of presence in the US, there's a good chance they're be able to at least temporarily freeze or seize your bank account and force you to go through US courts to get your money back.
Yes, they do know you're not an American. You're not noticing the parts where they're checking that you're not an American through your residency card and citizenship info. Which is good because you can use that as evidence should it ever become necessary. Which it probably won't.
My understanding is that the FEIC does not apply to money earned working for a domestic corporation even if you did the work remotely in another country. If you earned it working for a US company then it's not foreign earned income.
There's a podcast from 2020 by Private Eye magazine, covering the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which was set up by the government to examine historic accusations of child abuse, and how genuine cases of sexual abuse were then woven into lurid conspiracies (think Pizzagate for a modern equivalent) by the media, including online media, because of rumours about celebrities and politicians being involved, and by a fabulist and conman named Carl Beech who, under the alias 'Nick', made a lot of accusations of having been abused as a child. A journalist got in touch with him and eventually it blew up into an official police operation:
So the effect was to muddy the waters; because high-profile cases turned out to be fabrications, this in turn caused a lot of people to brush off *all* accusations as "just more conspiracy theory" stories.
It's also historically interesting, given the rise of campaigns today about MAP (Minor Attracted Persons) to hear the mention of PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) and how for a moment in the 80s as it tried to piggyback on gay rights activism, it briefly became something taken seriously by the great and the good.
A 27 minute history of the Satanic Panic, using the Magic: the Gathering card Season of the Witch as the framing device. Higher quality than could be reasonably expected.
Watching that video, I feel like there's a hot-take someone could write about "the Satanic Panic narrative was overly-simplified and superficially silly, but it was pointing at real problems with the counterculture". TGotCH would probably get referenced at some point.
Don't really have the inspiration to write it myself, though.
I view clone independence as one of the most important criteria, and minimax fails it. Ranked Pairs Condorcet, AFAICT, has the property you highlight for minimax plus many more (to my eyes, on the table from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems RP meets more criteria than any other system).
Each flavor of B (the three clones) is preferred to A 5-4, but under the minimax algorithm A wins.
It's admittedly contrived (as all such examples are), but given the existence of another algorithm that avoids the possibility without trading off a different flaw, I see no reason not to prefer the more robust solution.
I don't disagree with any of that. I just suspect (haven't actually attempted the math to prove) that the minimax *criterion* is satisfied by Ranked Pairs without applying the minimax *algorithm*, in which case I prefer RP for clone independence. If I'm mistaken & it doesn't satisfy the minimax criterion, I'd reconsider my preference.
It would really make it a lot more enjoyable to vote on the book reviews if we could vote just by clicking the heart on the review-- at the time we are reading it. Then we could vote on based on our immediate reaction to the review (eg that's a great review!!! vs meh). You'd lose the rank order preference of individuals. But then people could give positive feedback on multiple reveiws if they liked them all a lot. Top winner would be the review the most people liked a lot.
Well this was interesting. Bill Mahr argues with an actual physical “Straw Man” to make a point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lTFnj-9EY4M
Perhaps next episode he’ll illustrate the Motte and Bailey idea with a real castle.
Any tips on the best DNA sequencing services? What do they tend to provide? Do you get your actual genome or just some handwavy stuff like "some of your ancestors were from northern Europe" and "you're more likely to be a gambler"? What percentage of your genome do they sequence?
I tried to read through some FAQs but they tend to feature pretty pictures and quite limited info on what exactly you receive.
I would look into www.selfdecode.com
It gives you personalized health suggestions based on your genetics, plus you get the raw data and can upload it to ancestry websites
Thanks! It seems though that you get raw data with a lot of these websites, which is what I'm most interested in; it's just not always clear exactly what data is included.
Almost all consumer services that are cheap (~$100 or less) don't sequence the genome at all, they just look for a library of "single nucleotide polymorphisms" -- i.e. known mutations that can happen at a single location on the DNA -- and catalog the genome based on the pattern of SNPs found, and in what demographics that particular pattern is usually found.
Whole genome sequencing is done, but it's typically significantly more expensive, of order ~$1,000. Here are some leads:
https://geneticgenie.org/article/where-do-i-get-whole-genome-sequencing/
Thanks, I'll take a look!
I loved almost all the book reviews, and they are all very well written. I thank all the authors!
I have ranked the reviews according to the number of times they contain the word "focus" and its derivatives:
0 Consciousness And The Brain
0 The Castrato
0 Viral (was COVID a lab leak?)
0 Kora In Hell (William Carlos Williams poetry)
1 The Dawn Of Everything (ancient hunter-gatherers)
1 The Internationalists (treaty to make war illegal)
1 1587: A Year Of No Significance (Ming China)
3 The Future Of Fusion Energy
3 The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)
3 The Society Of The Spectacle
3 Exhaustion (chronic fatigue)
3 God Emperor Of Dune
6 The Anti-Politics Machine (how development aid goes wrong)
7 Making Nature (history of the scientific journal Nature)
8 The Righteous Mind
Special congrats to the first four reviewers for sparing us the f**us word!
Lol this is hilarious. Can I ask what inspired it (and your name)?
Thank you
Does anyone know what the graph looks like for:
X - axis: days since booster shot
Y - added (or subtracted if negative at any point?) immunity from booster shot
Trying to advise parents on optimal booster scheduling
After a while of homelessness, some people have trouble sleeping indoors.
https://www.metafilter.com/196388/The-Trauma-Of-Homelessness-Doesnt-End-Under-A-Roof#8289499
There's one person in the comments who spent a year camping, and then didn't want to sleep indoors.
The short version is that homelessness is an even harder problem than it looks like.
I'm pretty sure homelessness in US is pretty much a consequence of stopping the institutionalization of people suffering of long term mental problems. It was probably a good decision at the time, since the conditions in (some) of the institutions were pretty bad and the standards for admission and release were less than perfect, and it's a fair debate on if it should be rescinded or not, but that's the price to pay for that decision. Personally, I'd probably lean towards restarting it on a more voluntary basis - I'm pretty sure it's both cheaper and more effective to take care of those people in a place that's set up for this, rather than leave them on the street and regularly give them absurdly expensive ambulance rides.
As for the temporary homeless, that's solvable in the usual ways, but is also a much lower problem overall.
Obligatory SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/
The percentage of homeless at one point in time might not be the most relevant. If a large percentage are temporary, they can be helped by classic methods like cash transfers or housing. The (even if much smaller) percentage of people with mental health problems need dedicated help - they're both long term and non-responsive to classic approaches.
This btw is valid regardless of the direction of causality.
More low cost housing might lead to fewer homeless people, but might not help people who've been homeless for a while.
The law, in its majestic equality, requires both rich and poor to sleep indoors.
San Fran has a surplus of around $100mil, the first in 24 years
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01211-2
"When fasting insulin and the natural logarithm of c-reactive protein were included in the model, an inverse association between BMI and mortality was present"
To carry on the discussion down thread about "Christians needed to invent hospitals because they invented so many wars", here's something I had not previously heard of before: Christians burned down the Library of Antioch!
Or maybe not. But if you want to one-up someone talking about the Tragedy of the Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, here you go! "Never mind Alexandria, did you know about Antioch?"
https://historyforatheists.com/2022/08/burning-the-library-of-antioch/
They created so wars because they were capable of doing do. Other groups mercilessly butchered each other, its just that their abject lack of technological development meant that they couldn't do anything on a meaningfully large scale.
At times I've come across discussions asking what exactly happened to the library of Alexandria as if it were a great mystery (hence the answer: "Christians burned it", which is only one of the answers I've heard). But, as far as I can tell, books normally don't survive long, unless they are transcribed over and over. So is there really a mystery? That an immense library declines, to the point that it seems to disappear, because people fail to maintain, it is more or less what you'd expect to happen over time, especially in an era of general decline.
Modern books don't last very long, because the way most modern paper is made (directly from wood pulp) leaves the chemistry in the paper out of equilibrium, and over a fairly short timescale (5-10) years chemical reactions cause the paper to yellow and disintegrate. But books made before the mid-20th century, on paper made from cotton and rags, readily last centuries unless abused, because their chemistry is stable when created. Parchment is even more durable.
The Ptolemaic dynasty, which had been actually paying to maintain the Library, went out of business in 30 BC. And the civil war that put them out of business incidentally burned a warehouse holding the reserve collection. Given the timing, I don't think you can pin that on the Christians.
The last record of the Great Library as a functional library, was ca. 260 AD. There's your "centuries" right there; three of them. The bit with Hypatia and the pagans vs the Christians, was a century and a half after that, during which period the institution had switched from "library" to "temple".
Almost five hundred years when nobody was paying to replace or repair the books as they wore out, were eaten by worms, or wandered off in the hands of people who thought they could give them a better home. Possibly some time between 270 and 415 AD there was a bit of deliberate arson as well, but that wouldn't have made much difference to the end result.
But "centuries" is not much, in context. I didn't make it clear, but I was actually talking about ancient manuscripts, and when I said that they don't last long I meant that if they are not painstakingly transcribed they are unlikely to last more than, what, two, three centuries? That is not much.
Nobody founds a library, builds a great big limestone building, spends a lot of money to buy a lot of books...and then walks away, expecting it to last 500 years. A library is founded because people think it will be useful *today* and *next week* and *next year*. Nobody really gives a damn about "300 years from now" because they have no idea what that future will look like. It's an organization that survives, or does not, because it is steadily useful in the present (or isn't).
If the founders are correct, then people come in and use the library all the time, and they look at the books and so forth, and presumably they're willing to pay and do pay the library's costs to keep the books or scrolls or whatnot that are popular and in demand in reasonable shape[1]..
Stuff that no one finds interesting probably gets thrown out faster than it physically decays, because few libraries would have space to just keep stuff that nobody thinks will ever be used. Modern libraries cull their collections all the time, although they mostly hedge their bets by putting what looks most important on microfilm (in the old days) or digitizing it via OCR (these days) before throwing it away. Whether those records survive deep into the future -- who knows? Arguments have been made[2] digital records are more susceptible to loss over centuries than plain old books, on account of they rely on the availability of reading machines considerably more sophisticated than human eyes.
---------------------
[1] For example, you can't get the code for "Colossal Cave" on a 5.25" floppy any more, but you can get it on GitHub:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/
Enough people were nostalgic about that particular game from the dawn of personal computing to keep it alive, but most other games are gone forever.
[2] Oblig. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1909/
More like 20 years for papyrus. Papyrus only lasts when it happens to be buried in the Egyptian desert.
This is a pedantry, but people don't write in fonts. "Font" derives from the same word as "foundry" and refers to the casting of the lead types in a typeface which are then used to set pages; it is an element of the art of printing, not writing. (Also, a unit of size: "one font of type" denotes a certain amount of cast types.)
Manuscripts are written in a hand.
The Alexandrian mob and the volatile nature of politics in the three-way standoff between the Pagans, the Christians and the Jews in Alexandria at the time, coupled with the death of Hypatia (killed as collateral damage in the political tug-of-war between the governor of the city and the bishop, but then later turned into a martyr for science by anti-Catholic and then anti-Christian polemicists) means that the Burning of the Library (which seems to have sort of happened on and off over the years, it's a complicated subject) is easy fodder for the "Science versus Religion" debates and indeed anyone who wants to have a go at the church (usually the Catholic Church, nobody seems to blame the Baptists or the Seventh Day Adventists for it).
Tim O'Neill has another good post on it, as do others. Basically, it's the kind of pop culture story that some people can't resist because it has everything (sex, violence, murder, wicked Christians, wicked liturgical churches that have bishops), so it continues on despite any historical debunking because the colourful erroneous version is so much more interesting than the dull truth (it gradually faded in importance over the years as royal interest and funding dried up and eventually declined to nothingness).
https://historyforatheists.com/2017/07/the-destruction-of-the-great-library-of-alexandria/
Hi Rats, Prats, and -- I can't think of a third list item, drat: If anyone is following the Trump Mar-a-Lago thing, I came across this article -- unsigned but seems to be by an attorney. It goes fairly in-depth about the background and claims presented, with links so you can verify the materials yourself: https://files.catbox.moe/2erd4t.pdf
technocrats?
"Ergo, an effective altruist should want to replace our present inefficient governments with a startup regime—an accountable monarchy."
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-effective
Discuss. /ducks
> That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law.
This is not actually true. The weight of tradition generally outranked premodern kings. Some of them weren't even allowed to legislate; the king had to enforce his people's traditional laws, but no one had the formal authority to change the laws. For example, in early France, kings were bound by Frankish law which said a kingdom is the king's property, and when a man dies his property must be split evenly between his sons. They had to find a loophole in order to leave the kingdom to a single son. Thanks to the loophole, leaving the kingdom to a single son eventually came to be considered tradition, allowing them to stop bothering with the loophole. (The loophole was that the king would appoint one of his sons as co-king (but de facto still subordinate); then when he died there was still a king so inheritance law didn't come into it.)
It's especially rich coming right after a book review on ACX that was all about how the Ming emperor was under lifelong house arrest and not allowed to do anything fun.
> Perhaps from an abstract QALY perspective, standard of living and so forth, living in independent Ukraine is about the same as living in a Ukraine which is a province of Russia; indeed it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today.
I know that's not your point and I feel a little bad about jumping on it, but.
Take whatever measure you have on life quality in the Republic of Moldova, compare it with Romania, multiply it with 30 years, and you have the real damage Russia already had on global QALY. It's as good of a natural experiment as you can design: they're the same country split at some minor river, except one part is in EU and the other not, because it was under Russian influence.
I'm also pretty sure you can do the same between Romania and Poland, btw - in some countries in Europe Russian influence in politics was more visible than in others, and it showed. Can't get into details without making this a very long post. Also Germany closing nuclear plants and relying on gas and coal.
And not to forget that a quick and successful war in Ukraine is an open invitation for Russia to go further. It's not like what they're doing now is unique - it was supposed to be a carbon copy of Czechoslovakia invasion in '68, except the part where it failed.
John pointed out the QALY of people in occupied territories, which is true. But there's also the fact that an Ukrainian surrender would at most bring less suffering in the short term. It would be a very local and unstable maxima, at best.
"it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today"
Citation very much needed. Have you been paying attention to what Russia wants to do with Ukraine after they're finished conquering it? When they're finished, there won't be any Ukrainians left in Ukraine. And while the process of de-Ukranifying people won't be 100% fatal and probably not even 10% fatal, it's going to involve some very low-quality life years for thirty million or so people. After which, none of the formerly-Ukrainian people will be allowed to be more prosperous than the poorest Russians, and Russia outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is a very poor country indeed.
"They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.
Citation very much need.
> "They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.
Uh... is this a hypothetical, or are we contending that *Curtis Yarvin* of all people fits either of those labels?
I imagine the utilitarian motte/steelman of the QALY bit is that "self-determination etc. *should* factor in to QALYs, but those bits are hard to measure and not usually labeled as 'happiness', and thus they're frequently excluded even if they're empirically sought after."
Pretty much, yeah. I think it's a similar(ish) dynamic to GDP/"happiness" calculations you see when talking about how successful various countries are. Bhutan* can boast about how it's actually measuring Average National Happiness (and doing better than everyone else, naturally), and on occasion someone hears that and thinks it might be worth doing, and then everyone shrugs and goes back to discussing GDP.
Granted, with GDP that's probably also confounded by the fact that it's useful for estimating all sorts of *other* things (e.g., tax revenue), and that I can't imagine anyone would want it to come out that they're the "least happy" nation in the world.
*May not actually be Bhutan, but that's what I'm remembering.
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the third of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first meeting was great, and I hope to see many of you at this one.
Saturday, 9/3/22, 2 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.
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (readings at the end)
1) What is open-mindedness
2) Psychedelics.
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational and frisbees. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
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. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
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) Openmindedness.
This week we will try a classic video from the Skeptic/Atheist movement. Questions to think about and discuss? Is this a good description of the reality of open-mindedness? Did it change how you thought about open-mindedness? What do you think are the essential elements of open-mindedness to rationality? Is skepticism necessary for openmindedness and when does it work against it?
Open-mindedness
And/or This SSC essay. “The Control group is out of control”. What are the upsides and downsides of calling paranormal studies the control group for the scientific method. Does this increase our ability to be open to correct ideas, and is it worth shutting the door on exhausted lines of investigation? Why do you think belief in psychic powers affects the results of apparently rigorously replicated experiments? What do you make of the results of the smart rat, dumb rat experiment? Did you realize that double-blind is often thrown around as a claim when the second blinding is poorly done or not done at all and what is the importance of blinding to open-mindedness?
Written The Control Group Is Out Of Control | Slate Star Codex
Audio The Control Group Is Out of Control [Classic]
2) For psychedelics:
We will dip back into some of the best descriptive research done in the 1960s on the phenomenology of psychedelics. Read chapter 1 of “The varieties of psychedelic experience.”This book has many good digests of different people's reactions and experiences with psychedelics. What types of experience most interest you? What did you not know about? What potential applications come to mind after reading these experiences? Do you agree with the taxonomy that the authors create?
the varieties of psychedelic experience.pdf
This is an interview with an experienced PTSD researcher that has been involved with the cutting-edge of PTSD treatment research about MDMA therapy. I generally like what he has to say and find his perspectives useful. I will put one caveat, which is he gets really enthusiastic about a lot of things. He is a generally more optimistic person than me.
Bessel van der Kolk on MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD: More profound than anything we have done
Finally, here are a couple of short videos by a guy that has used a lot of different drugs and ruined his life with them. He at first enthusiastically endorsed MDMA, but it did not stop him from ruining his life with other drugs or properly addressing the deep psychological issues he had to face. Psychedelics are often not enough and can even be a distraction or copium and have their own abuse potential.
What MDMA Feels Like
“I was wrong about psychedelics”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRpXtHR0o5o
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/
*Update on hot days like this saturday, I will open access to the nice community pool. Bring your swim suit if you're interested.
Terra Ignota hives, could they be implemented in our world? Could ACX fans/rationalist/EA become a hive?
Terra Ignota hives were based on very fast cheap personal transportation (two hours to anywhere on earth) which loosened the importance of where people are. I'm not sure whether that's sufficient for hives, but we certainly don't have it.
Countries with multiple legal systems (I've heard of this for religions) exist, but I'm not sure how thorough it can be.
In the sense of "we all declare ourselves to be part of the Utopian hive, so no matter where we live we all only have to obey Utopian rules", no. Not in our world, probably not in any world inhabited by humans. You're going to have to obey the laws of the sovereign government of the territory you're standing on, no matter what you call yourself. Or you're going to find lots of large angry men with guns saying that the new rule is that you live in this two by three meter cage for the next few years.
If you want to *also* join the Special Utopian Society, knock yourself out. You'll have to obey Utopian rules *and* US (or whatever) laws, pay Utopian membership fees *and* US (or whatever) taxes. You'll be just like the Masons or the Elks or the Mormons, except Utopian (or whatever).
I voted for the book review that made me change the way I viewed the world the most.
I hope you write about this, possibly after the vote.
The review of WWOTF mentioned that perhaps we should leave some coal lying around in case humanity has to reinvent the industrial revolution generations after some almost-extinction-level event.
Brett Deveraux has conveniently just published a post explaining all the other things except coal that you need to start an industrial revolution - for example, spinning jennies help a lot: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
The book review contest was fun! I had hoped that a weekly cycle would make me read more and more diverse book reviews, and this is what happened. Great readings and inspirations. Also, while I've always enjoyed Scott's book reviews, I admired his skills even more oftentimes during the contest - it seems so easy to make this or that 'mistake' and annoy the potential reader even in a very good review (and I certainly wouldn't have done better). Great writing is really an art.
I'd be interested to hear about your criteria for selecting your favourite.
I've thought about this a bit and I wouldn't be surprised to find there's a mechanism where anybody doing "guest post on particular beloved blog" gets a premium on how harshly they are judged. If you are here, presumably it's because you like the style here; other styles are going to be jarring. Maybe. I'm not 100% on this but it seems to fit.
You mean, they all write equally well, it's just a matter of good fit to the readers' preferences?
I agree I'm here because I like the style here ... and the same thing will go on for other blogs. There was at least one review, which I'd say was well written, but clearly not my style. But in my first comment, I was thinking about something else. There were reviews I liked a lot and I read them with pleasure ... until something small threw me off. Often those were minor things, like in some places suddenly I didn't know whether the reviewer was referencing the book's thoughts or his/her own thoughts, and this led to a small irritation and stopped my reading flow for a moment. It made me realize, that for example with Scott's reviews I (think I) always know whether he is talking about the author's ideas or his original ideas. Small things like this, but it occured quite often. I think I read those reviews pretty open minded. Well, and I really liked some of them and found most interesting to read.
So overall I think yes, there is a fit of style between blog posters and their readership *and* there also is some real craft and skill involved. And the level of the latter varies. But then finally I just called writing an *art* and who am I to judge whether it's done better or worse.
I'm saying, some art really is better or worse. And some writers are better or worse, less careful or more careful. But there's also an element of, say, a reasonably pretty girl standing next to an unbelievably beautiful girl who is also your exact type. So more I'm saying, it's possible that things you might have encountered in the wild and thought were fine might get a small debuff from being at the place you normally go to read things you find great.
I think there's definitely merit to both the taste-based and objective quality points. But when you consider that many of these reviewers likely spent a lot more time on their posts and still arguably fall short of Scott's average quality... it's kind of scary.
I mean, he's talented, highly educated, and has a ton of practice. That's a triple threat. He also has good voice, and a voice almost perfectly fitted to be "As fun as rationalists will get before they start to get mad at you for not talking in binary" - he's perfectly fitted for his audience, and broadly enjoyable for everyone else.
That's proven out in terms of him being, frankly, gigantic to the point of having overflowed out of the niche he occupies. I think when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. The more I write and see the realities of growing an audience the less likely I think that is - even if I was every bit as good, I still might not be as good of a fit to a particular audience. Even if I was a better fit, I'm likely not as good. And even if I was both, I might not be able to tether myself synergistically to a new/growing movement and become to most outsiders the voice of that movement. So on, so forth.
But that said, I have lived a life and developed some level of voice that's distinct from Scott, and reading isn't really a zero-sum game. The same is true for you, or really anybody writing here.
That's all a little off-topic: More on topic, Scott realistically just has a ton of time in on writing. He's a statistical outlier in a lot of good qualities I already listed, but there's very likely some very talented people in the contest who might be able to write a comparably good review of something given enough "extra" production time and enough "extra" perceived importance of project. But that advantage gets negated once you realize this might be their first or tenth review, and Scott's written many hundreds of pieces that are either book reviews or cross-train into that space. Practice matters, even beyond just "being a better writer" in some nature-not-nurture way.
The point of all this is really just to say "Go out, write more stuff, if book reviews don't work for you write something different, and find your own unique soul-mate asses to kick".
I think we agree as far as 'talent, practice and being liked by your specific audiance' goes. Heck, I mean Scott's book reviews are my prototype for a book review - I didn't read many before, at least not many that I found worth remembering.
Isn't the main difference just that we come to this from different perspectives? I didn't mean for my remarks to be any critical or discouraging for any writer. Maybe they sounded like this to your ears, as you *are* actually writing and participated in the contest? I'm not (yet) doing any of those, at least not online, so I guess the meaning for me is different.
> 'when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. ' I was amazed by this statement. I sometimes thought about starting a blog, but I never thought about beating Scott in terms of size, outreach ... however, there are probably moments when I hoped I'd be able to write a book review as fluent and readable and insightful as he does. So all the small moments that disturbed me when reading the reviews I *liked* made me realize all the small things you need - which means I would need - to get right, even if writing a very good review already. Not discouraging, but maybe humbling, or else setting the right tone for a task, if you wish.
I totally agree with the 'practice' part ... for most, their 40th book review should be better than their first or second. However, I also got the impression that Scott managed to focus on activities that are close to his strenghts, and I believe that's helpful and wise and many other things more. I can't tell you how much more I'd like to *talk* to you guys in person instead of having a written conversation online. (But better online than not!) Eg. speaking to bigger audiances always came naturally to me in a way writing did not. A bit sad, as the occasions for writing are many, and yes, I did think to write a blog somewhen, maybe.
For outreach you can't underestimate the 'community' part. You're obviously better if you write for a concrete target group, and feeling at home and being known in a community sure helps a lot. If you don't have a concrete target group, which *knows* about you, all the folks that like your style have to find you somewhere in the millions of words written on the web, and that's difficult.
I guess I'm a picky reader also when not being on Scott's blog. I open a book in a bookstore, I read five lines, and I decide whether I like or dislike the tone.
Btw. I read some of what you wrote, and I found it good to read and I also felt touched by some of it, and what else can an author dream of? So, I'm glad you found your voice and, and yes, please continue writing.
Well said! And I love that you maintain your distinct voice and style even when you write comments. It’s fun to read haha.
100%. I pretty much agree with all points in the thread. (Had an earlier comment that said some of the same stuff but it disappeared.). Scott's average quality is insanely good, and it's crazy that any of his reviews picked at random would have an excellent chance at beating his entire readership in the contest.
That said, it *is* his audience, so the people that are here are perfectly tailored for his voice and style.
I definitely thought that some of the criticism wouldn't have been present if Scott had been the author. For example, there were a whole bunch of reviews where the comments argued over whether this was the proper way to write a book review - some of it quite heated/indignant. I doubt most of that would have cropped up for a Scott post.
To OP's point, though, I have a hard time thinking of anything by Scott that had a line/point/anecdote that jarred me out of the flow of the piece. That takes a tremendous amount of skill and is something that I struggle with a lot in my writing. As you say, practice makes perfect.
Pitching in a meta-vote for approval voting in future book contests.
Any method is better than choose-one voting.
I prefer the current method to approval voting in this context.
I also prefer simply picking the best review.
I find it interesting that no one complaining about the voting method has speculated on the reason why Scott chose FPTP. He obviously knew that people would object. He chose to do so anyways. Clearly FTPT better suits his purposes. Based on the fact that he picked some atypical reviews to add to the contest, it appears that he is selecting for variety.
We used approval voting last year, and I'd have preferred something ranked - the winner was an excellent entry and I included it in my vote, but it wasn't my favourite. Approval voting is great if you're trying to find a broadly-acceptable consensus (like "where should we go for lunch"), but for a "find the single 'best' entry" contest like this I think we want a Condorcet method, as implemented by e.g. https://www.condorcet.vote/ .
I vote for this over all other suggestions
I almost ended up not voting. It took me 10 minutes to settle on 1, when in 5 seconds I already had my top 3.
I had read >'I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked' and took that literally, so basically I took care that I always knew which one was the number one on my list. Made things very easy.
I probably wouldn't have voted in any of the more 'fancy' voting systems. I would have been fine in naming my top 3 I guess, but would have taken more time (with or without internal order).
This is bad and unacceptable. Telling people to "pick one" will just hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best. I thought Scott of all people would understand this.
Who is with me? How can we make Scott reconsider?
I’m puzzled by your contention that voting for only one will “hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best” - could you describe the causal chain which leads to that result?
Plurality voting means that if two choices are near-identical, they are penalised compared to there only being one of them (since the vote that would have gone to either alone is instead split between them). Thus, choices that are distinct from others ("weird") are advantaged.
This is not the *only* effect, though, so Caba's statement was a bit stronger than warranted.
Oh ok - thanks!
Yeah I was pretty surprised he didn’t use STAR voting here. That’s probably the most information rich and pretty much how books are already typically rated.
We are having a meetup in Mexico City in the context of ACX Meetups Everywhere. Find more information in our LW page:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bejXvxGjQ7rYudF88/acx-cdmx-meetups-everywhere-1
When you travel overseas and need cash, do you go to a traditional currency exchange kiosk, or do you just use an ATM?
Have you ever compared the exchange rates?
I've been travelling continuously for most of the past four years, and mostly haven't needed cash at all. This of course depends on where you go, but it's been true in rural Mexico, South Africa, Ascension Island, Panama, Portuguese Atlantic Islands and many other remote and less developed places. Almost everyone takes a Visa or Mastercard these days, and my bank gives me better or similar enough rates to any currency exchange kiosk that I just don't bother anymore. Many places I'll carry a little bit of cash just in case, and that I'll get at an ATM. Many banks are not as friendly to travelers as mine is though, beware! And often the ATM's charge a hefty fee for withdrawals from other banks, but I've usually been able to find some that doesn't. If there is a line at one ATM while other brands don't have lines, that's a sure sign.
What bank do you use?
Swedbank.
I won't claim that Swedbank is an optimal choice, just that they haven't annoyed be enough to make me change. I only use them for day-to-day banking.
I've found the best results are normally exchanging money before you travel, followed by using a local bank. Avoid exchange services in airports or touristy spots. Paying by credit card is also usually not too bad. ATMs are normally loaded with fees.
A number of UK banks, notably the newer ones such as Chase and Starling and Revolut will convert your spendings to GBP at the interbank / Mastercard / Visa rate without commission, and without a spread between buy and sell rates. Withdrawal from ATMs is also possible at the same rate although daily &/or monthly limits can be in place and there is often a transaction charge levied by the operator of the ATM. Some of the advice here seems as old-fashioned to me as traveller cheques.
Seconded. Never use the exchange services, they almost always offer the worst rates. If you’re traveling for an extended period of time, it’s worth looking into your banking and credit card options - the difference in ATM fees can be very significant if you’re making frequent withdrawals.
ATM, yes I have, and my bank's rate is always significantly better.
When did the existential risk posed by rogue AI come to be perceived as an urgent matter? The first Terminator film put the issue before a large public in 1984, but as far as I know it didn't spark much interest in the real possibility of AI posing a threat to humanity. Yudkowsky and Bostrom were writing about the issue at the turn of the millennium, but how many were taking them up on it at that time? What about in the wake of Bostrom's Superintelligence?
I'm sympathetic to your view, but I'm interested in the activities of those tech moguls and the organizations they're funding. When did that start happening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_on_Artificial_Intelligence
Should one count Bill Joy's 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_The_Future_Doesn%27t_Need_Us , which airs concerns on a number of technologies?
Definitely.
Many Thanks!
Thanks for the link.
That's my sense of things as well. Bostrom's *Superintelligence* – which I've not read – came out in 2014. It got a lot of media play. From the Wikipedia article on the book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies):
The book ranked #17 on The New York Times list of best selling science books for August 2014. In the same month, business magnate Elon Musk made headlines by agreeing with the book that artificial intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Bostrom's work on superintelligence has also influenced Bill Gates’s concern for the existential risks facing humanity over the coming century. In a March 2015 interview by Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said that he would "highly recommend" Superintelligence. According to the New Yorker, philosophers Peter Singer and Derek Parfit have "received it as a work of importance".
Is there a Savannah Georgia meetup group? if not, would anyone be interested in one?
Missed opportunity: having prediction markets for the book contest winner. (Technically, one per review would be easiest, probably.)
Of course, then one would also have to come up with a way to prevent ballot stuffing, but I think this would be desirable in any case. Apart from people with botnets, it might also that some other interest group (e.g. subreddit) focused on the topic of one review (say, fusion energy, ancient china, weird poetry) first lined the book review when it came out (not objectionable), and now links the vote (probably objectionable). Some clear rules, e.g. "You should have made a good faith effort to read at least 2/3 of the contest entries" would probably deter the more honest external readers.
I don't have a good proposition how to do avoid ballot stuffing: restricting voting to the active commentariat (a la wikipedia "only accounts with at least N edits can vote") seems unfair to lurkers. One rather well defined group would be the premium members of ACX. Of course, this is also introduces biases towards the very committed and/or well-of readers, but if the membership of that population was also saved with the vote, it would allow checking for some irregularities. Just having the voting site print out a random string and asking members to post that string as a comment on a special hidden thread would serve in a pitch without any involvement of substack. (And incidentally also break anonymity, but for the book contest that might be acceptable.)
Or you could have the voters first select five reviews they have actually read, then quiz them on the content.
Also, voting systems.
What's up with disappearing comments?
I've been getting replies in the mail that are no longer showing on the thread, e.g. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-239/comment/8692502 by Gunflint in reply to my comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-239/comment/8689688 .
The first replies I've seen disappear like that were somewhat rude (I like to stir shit up, what can I say) so I assumed that was God-Emperor Scott's heavy hand, but the one linked was entirely wholesome and civil.
Yeah I deleted that myself. After I posted it, it seemed kinda presumptuous for a guy in Minnesota to add his two cents regarding Eastern European politics. Sorry for the confusion and best of luck this winter!
I think the MO of our God-Emperor is not to delete replies, but to ban the user and leave the post so it is transparent why they were banned. (Might be different with obvious spam, though.)
Of course, the users in question could also have deleted their posts themselves: that would not undo the emails sent, but make it as if the comments never had appeared. A better comment system would preserve the info that a comment was deleted and by whom, perhaps.
It sounds like these are instances of self-moderation working in its ideal sense - a commenter, upon reflection, realizes their reply was neither kind nor necessary, and deletes it themselves. I see no reason to penalize such a user for making a good decision by leaving a public notice of their momentary lapse in judgement.
I believe without evidence that we're getting AI from the race between malware and anti-malware.
It probably won't resemble human consciousness and won't be able to communicate well with us.
Risk of eating the world? Doesn't seem likely. Eat all the computer capacity? Maybe.
Well, it's either that, or porn. Most modern algorithms are driven by the need for porn. :-/
Doesn't seem to be the case for current AI progress. (Of course there's obvious crossover, but the leading efforts are intentionally anti-pornographic).
Well, those are the efforts we know of. I'd be very surprised to learn that *no one* is working very hard on making AI-powered porn-chatbots, or deepfaked porn videos, or auto-generated deepfaked Turing-level Singularity porn, or...
Of course, but those efforts will be trailing behind rather than leading the way.
Possibly, yes. But look at it this way: if you publish a paper about incrementally improving spam classification accuracy, you could get another science grant. If you actually improve spam classification accuracy, you could make a bit of money; on the other hand, if you improve spam generation fidelity, you could probably make a million dollars (until the previous guy catches up). But what if you found a way to auto-generate, on demand, the kind of porn that is perfectly matched to the viewer's exact interests ? Well, in that case, you could probably make *billions*. And also, should your name become known, go down in history as a legend: a demon, or a saint, or possibly both.
The incentives are just a little bit mismatched, you know ? :-)
"We're getting" as in this is currently occurring? Or as in this is what the mechanism will be in the future?
I'm not sure. I don't *think* it's full AI yet.
Given what we know about how much compute and data is needed for our best learning algorithms, I wouldn't be too worried about the current situation.
If we're lucky, we'll end up with one of those "why wales don't die of cancer" situations (tl;dr - whales get cancer, but by the time the tumor is big enough to cause problems for the whale, the tumor has grown its own tumors that kill the first tumor). The malware AI may scoop up compute cycles from the mis-aligned top level AI that would otherwise cause problems for us.
Do you have a source for the whale cancer thing btw? That's something I'd believed to be true, but when it came up in conversation the other day I was unable to find any support for it so I switched to thinking it's an urban legend.
Hmm, I don't. I found this Wikipedia page on the basic observation, that whales get less cancer than you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
I suspect the explanation I'm proposing is one that one wonderfully counterintuitive paper proposed, which probably went viral on the Internets, and got into all our brains, but with just about as much support as the latest study on covid masks or correlation of vaccines and education.
Humans and whales both only rarely die of cancer during the window when they are reproductively relevant in the ancestral environment. Not sure if it's the same rate, but the fact that cancer in humans mostly occurs in people well past their childbearing years seems like it could be a big part of the puzzle.
Reminds me of a spectacularly terrible Tamil movie called Dasavataram, where Kamal plays 10 roles. In one, a bullet shot by bad guy goes through his head only to exactly get rid of a tumor he never knew he had, saving his life.
I think I stumbled across that on Youtube and yeah, it's definitely.... something. "Spectacular" is the mot juste, I can't even say it's spectacularly *terrible* because I was too dazed after watching it. "Ambitious" is another way to describe it, in the way that piling Pelion on Ossa was ambitious.
(I think my favourite bit was the George Bush imitation).
I still have not figured out how the opening persecution of Vishnu worshippers by the Shavaite king fits in with the theme of the rest of the movie, which is a SF/techno-thriller/disaster movie. But I did appreciate the ending shot where the skeleton of the guy executed in the beginning is revealed still chained to the statue, after being washed up by the sea (because that, at least, was the only part of the entire thing I understood even vaguely):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GKHPbAhBmc
Maybe good news-- the anti-malware programs might see human-invented expansionist AI as malware, and stop it.
Or perhaps it's one of those good news, bad news situations. The good news is as you say. The bad news is that the anti-malware software fooms into sentience and decides a la Agent Smith that humanity itself is malware.
Ok here's another approach to if not disproving then at least neatly sidestepping the repugnant conclusion. This seems sufficiently obvious that someone must have thought of it already, but to my great annoyance I haven't seen any mention of it on this blog.
The repugnant conclusion is really a constrained optimization problem where you have some fixed amount of resources R and want to find the optimal number of people N and resource allocation function f : [1,N] -> Real assigning an amount of resources to each person in a away that maximizes the total utility over all people while not exceeding the available amount of resources. As I've seen it described, the repugnant conclusion assumes that it is very cheap to add new people with infinitesimal utility. While I don't necessarily disagree with the repugnant conclusion under those assumptions, I don't believe these assumptions hold true in our universe.
Here's another set of (also unrealistic but somewhat better) assumptions: It costs 5 resources to sustain a person. At this level of resources, the person is barely kept alive and suffering greatly. If we increase the number of resources to 10, the person is now at utility 0 and indifferent about being alive or not. From that point on, every additional resource linearly increases it's utility up to a maximum of 10. So now say we have R=1000 resources available. What the conventional conclusion to the repugnant conclusion seems to tell us is that we should maximize the number of people and have 1000 / 5 = 200 people who are all maximally suffering. Far from maximizing utility, this is actually the minimum utility we can achieve. Ok, so say we instead have 100 people with 10 resources each. Still not great, this just gives us 0 utility. If you go through the math, you'll find that under these assumptions, the optimal resource allocation is to give 20 resources each to 50 people, all maximally happy with a total utility of 500.
Now, of course, this model is also flawed. Obviously the numbers are made up and utility should probably have diminishing returns rather than increasing linearly up to the maximum. So with those adjustments, I don't think you would get only maximally happy people, the optimal point would be somewhat less than that (but still well above baseline).
Another aspect to consider is that a large fraction of utility may be derived from common goods that have very low marginal costs for each additional person, which gives a much more favorable tradeoff for adding additional people in a way that does not have to significantly diminish the utility of others. In a hypothetical society of the future that has been optimized for maximum utility, we will have a ginormous numbers of people with not that much resources each, but also mindblowingly good movies and video games, fascinating scientific insights, incredibly advanced medical technology available to everyone, superintelligent AIs that can have deep conversations with you and help you achieve enlightenment, galaxy-scale engineering projects that bring glory to humankind, etc. Doesn't sound so repugnant to me!
It's been brought up now and then (e.g. section 8 of here https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEIDO.pdf).
It doesn't really address the core ethical point i.e. "are 1000 0.01 utility people better than 1 1 utility person Y/N?", merely pointing out that that exact situation is not likely to come up IRL (though not strictly *impossible*). You can argue about the trolley problem without thinking it likely that a given person will ever literally experience it IRL.
That's why it's rarely brought up in discussions, though it's worth keeping in mind if you actually accept the RC.
I think Clemens point still holds to some degree, because I think the "core point" is largely counterintuitive because your intuition would suggest that if you had 1000, 0.01 utility people that there must be a better world available.
And even though I think 1 person at 1 utility is actually worse, I also think it's almost unimaginable that you couldn't optimize the resources needed for 1000 0.01 utility people into a world that's clearly better than the 1 1 utility case.
>are 1000 0.01 utility people better than 1 1 utility person Y/N
By model, a pure utilitarian should prefer 10 utils to 1 util. The problems are:
1. Most people's moral intuitions are not purely utilitarian, and as with the Trolley Problem or the Utility Monster, the scenario is specifically selected to highlight the differences.
2. A lot of hard questions are buried in the idea of what it means to live a 1 util life vs a 0.01 util life, especially if we intuitively judge the utility of a hypothetical life by imagining ourselves being transported into it, complete with endowment effects and hedonic adaptation to our current lifestyle. This is further complicated by the difficulty of forming correct intuitions involving comparison of very large and very small numbers.
Is there a better way to do city statistics?
What we use nowadays is a line drawn around the city, either reflecting the extent of the settlement, or what its extent was 20/100/800 years ago (The City of St David's, population 1600) or political squabbles over local government fiefdoms (Vegas is not in Vegas). Everything inside the line is counted and everything beyond the pale is not.
This mostly shows up in absolute population counts and densities. A city where the line is drawn tightly around it will have a lower official population and higher density than one which includes a bunch of peripheral farmland and commuter towns.
But there can also be other distortions. The nice bits of the Nottingham urban area are located outside the city proper, even when they are contigious with it. This makes the city look poorer and more deprived than it is.
I'm no geographer but my guess would be to use more fine-grained statistics to create a model of how cities change as distance from the centre increases, and then use the parameters needed to fit a particular city to those curves as a metric of what the city is like. A very cursory google reveals this non-paywalled paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316428846_Scaling_evidence_of_the_homothetic_nature_of_cities as the kind of thing I'd want to build upon.
The US Census in fact does this. They create a list of "Urban Areas" after each decennial census: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
Each "urban area" consists of a set of "census blocks" that meet particular criteria. I believe (all numbers are rough guesses) they start with any block that has a population density over 1000 people per square mile, and add in adjacent blocks that are at least 40% impervious ground cover (i.e., buildings or parking lots), and add in any blocks that are fully surrounded by these up to 5 sq mi (i.e., parks) and then agglomerate resulting chunks that are separated by no more than a mile of straight line distance over land or five miles over water or ice, provided that there is substantial commuter flow between them.
They haven't done the full calculation of urban areas for the 2020 census yet, but the Wikipedia list of US urban areas from the 2010 census is one of the most frequent Wikipedia pages I visit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas).
When you look at urban areas sorted by population you get a list that probably lines up roughly intuitively with judgments of significance (though Austin is probably lower than you expect, Virginia Beach is higher than you expect, and there are a few other oddities).
The list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area) is roughly similar when sorted by population, but it gets very odd results for anything that has to do with areas, because an MSA is made up out of counties rather than census blocks. Riverside County and San Bernardino County in California, Maricopa and Pima Counties in Arizona, and Clark County in Nevada end up making the MSAs of Riverside/San Bernardino, Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas look gigantic, and thus extremely low density, even though the Las Vegas urban area is actually the tenth densest.
There are some counterintuitive results on density for urban areas too, in that New York is actually the fifth densest urban area, after Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and tiny Delano, CA. This is because the New York urban area includes a gigantic sprawl of low-density suburbs on acre or multi-acre lots, while the California urban areas are mostly penned in by mountains, ocean, and desert. You can restore these to a more understandable order by taking a weighted average of the population density of the census blocks, where the blocks are weighted by population instead of by area, though for some reason I only see this for MSAs and not for Urban Areas: https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/the-50-densest-american-metropolitan-areas-by-weighted-density.html
(I think once you're doing weighted density, it doesn't matter so much which definition you use, because the difference between an urban area and an MSA is a bunch of census blocks whose total population is quite small.)
In the United States, the Office of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau deal with this issue by using metropolitan statistical areas and combined statistical areas (MSAs and CSAs). MSAs sound a lot like what you are looking for. They define an area by employment and commuting between counties, where those meet certain thresholds. This method does have at least one major drawback, in that it relies upon political (county) boundaries to define an area. This can be a problem when, for instance, a county such as the one I live in is in between to MSAs, and so gets categorized as belonging to just one of them. Using my county as an example, this means that I am classified as being in MSA x, but the area of the county I live in, abutting MSA y, has far more ties to MSA y than to x; basically, counties aren't fine-grained enough to reflect on-the-ground realities of the smaller subsets of a county. Still, MSAs are an improvement over just city jurisdictions, which created absurdities such as the example you gave of the Vegas strip not actually being in Las Vegas.
US Census "urban areas" are actually much better than MSAs: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
While an MSA is made up of a set of contiguous counties, an urban area is made up of a set of contiguous census blocks.
MSAs/CSAs does kind of work for some purposes. It more or less successfully allows us to compare different urban areas for instance, and in that way provides a truer picture than would just the actual official core-city populations.
It is definitely a kludge though with a lot of limitations. It also sometimes creates additional confusion because people, including the people who work in news media organizations, often mix up the terminologies ("MSA" or "metro area" is not at all intuitive to most people the way "city" is).
I also suspect that the recent noticeable shift in commuting patterns (more people in more professions working from home more often) will undermine some of the logic by which MSAs are technically defined.
> political squabbles over local government fiefdoms (Vegas is not in Vegas). Everything inside the line is counted and everything beyond the pale is not.
This is your issue. Draw the line where it makes the most sense. Historical boundraries can factor into that, but if it's urban for kilometers on both sides then that probably isn't the line you're looking for. Why the heck this would get 'political', or why you couldn't resolve the damn politics and find a way to do the right thing, *that* is your issue. You can try papering over it with better metrics, I guess, but there's still something broken there.
I guess the fine-grained way would be to use blocks as the basic units.
We have to remember that the way statistics was born was to handle big numbers in a quick easy-to-calculate way. We don't have that need anymore as we can handle massive amounts of data.
The US Census does this in their definition of "urban areas": https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
Computers have got much better at handling massive amounts of data but I can't absorb a whole spreadsheet full of numbers into my brain.
Sure I can import lower level super output area data and visualise it with QGIS but often there's value in compressing everything into a few high-level variables. Especially when you want to compare between cities or compare the same city at different points in time.
I want a more meaningful value for the population of NYC than 8,008,278 but more concise than 'Bronx CB 1: 91497, Bronx CB 2: 52246, Bronx CB 3: 79762...'
I'm surprised the Canberra one merits a mention and Melbourne doesn't - is there really such an overconcentration of Rats there that it outweighs the fact Melbourne is >10x Canberra's population?
Heartily agree, I am the organiser for the Canberra meetup and am feeling very chuffed at the mention! Especially since at the time of the post I had 2 'maybes' and 1 confirmed 'going'. Got to say, since the mention I have had a huge uptick in attendees - thanks Scott!
If it helps I don't think it's deliberate, I think it's probably something with the way they did their look up, probably just ctrl-f for August on the list and look at the top ones? Anyway, hey from up North, if you're ever in Canberra let us know, we can get an over-priced coffee and I can show off the pride and joy of our town, the National Rock Collection.
Disappointed by the lack of a fancy voting system. In my opinion there were four approximately equal reviews. Seems a shame to not be able to distinguish between my second favourite (which I thought was excellent) and my least favourite (which I couldn't even finish).
It also incentivises me to vote tactically which I don't really want to do.
I had the same thought - there were four or five that I particularly liked, and didn't want to pick just one.
Were we supposed to vote for our favorite book review, or for the review that we think most plausibly imitated the writing style of Astral Codex Ten?
I think you are "supposed" to vote for the best book review. But since there's a difference between "best book review" and "review I liked best" (I might like a review better if it reviews a book that sounds really interesting, but a review might in fact be better if it gives me a proper understanding of the content and context of a book I'm not quite as interested in), and since different people will be voting differently, I think at best we'll get a rough average of a bunch of related questions.
How do I get Substack to stop sending me emails but NOT stop showing me newly published articles from people I subscribe to when I go to their webpage or use the app?
The whole thing is a mess. There's some sort of difference between Substacks that I pay for and those that I don't, and some difference between the webpage and the app. The result is that my email box is filled up with fucking dozens of substack emails every day. I can't even stay ahead of them to delete them. But when I unclick "send me email" it ALSO stops updating the app. If that makes sense.
I set up a folder for especially for Substack emails and a rule that diverts newly published article emails into it. Comment replies come into the main inbox as normal but I don't usually comment much.
It's not quite what you are looking for but it might help.
I turned off “email” under the “notifications” section of my profile on the app. I’m hoping that that will work - clicking on each subscription individually failed.
It looks like it won’t though. I can still access what might be all my subscriptions through the website, but right now it looks like the app didn’t update. Your plan is probably the safest.
Doesn’t this seem like a big lack of basic functionality? It’s frustrating. I have a hard enough time getting to important emails on a normal day. Now they’re even more buried
I stumbled across the life of William U’Ren recently. I bet Oregonians know of him, but not being from Oregon I had never heard of him, although I was familiar with some of the reforms he promoted, e.g. direct election of senators. I think a few others here might find him intriguing because of his efforts at voting reform and because he was a Georgist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Simon_U'Ren
How did I come across him? I was researching cherry trees for my backyard. Apparently William U’Ren once had an asthma attack while down on his luck, and was taken in by Seth Luelling, the politically progressive horticulturalist who developed the Bing cherry. Seth and his brother Henderson Luelling would rank high on the ACX “Puritan scale”, although they were in fact Quakers. After attempting to run a utopian community elsewhere, they founded the first commercial fruit tree nursery in the Pacific Northwest. The Luellings were staunch abolitionists and might have maintained a stop on the Underground Railroad, though this can’t be proven.
One parent variety of the Bing cherry is the “Black Republican” cherry, which Luelling named in support of Abraham Lincoln. A “Black Republican” back then was one who supported emancipation.
But the famous Bing cherry we see in supermarkets was named for Ah Bing, Seth Luelling’s Chinese orchard foreman. After 35 years working for Luelling, Bing went back to China for a visit in the 1880s and was prohibited to return to the US under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
"the politically progressive horticulturalist"
Now there's a phrase I never expected to read! Who knew developing new strains of cherry tree was so exciting and fraught?
I had to look the man up because the name (U'Ren) is so unusual, and you haven't even included all the juicy bits:
" There U'Ren became involved both in reform politics and spiritualism — a major intellectual fad of the era — and became involved with the prominent Luelling family, who were actively interested in both pursuits.
In 1890, he campaigned vigorously for the Australian Ballot, which won in 1891. It was while he was involved in this campaign that he attended a séance, and met Mrs. Laure Durkee."
So fruit cultivation, reform politics, and spiritualism all went hand-in-hand. And who was Mrs. Durkee? The article gives no further information, and I'd love to know.
And for anyone who's wondering, the "Australian Ballot" means that when you go into the voting booth, they give you a piece of paper that has the names of the candidates on it, you indicate one, and you deposit it secretly in the ballot box. If you want to know how voting worked before, this New Yorker article from several years ago was pretty good (and shocking!): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/rock-paper-scissors
If anyone finds it helpful, I've made a tier list for the book reviews where I've been keeping track of which ones I've liked over the course of the contest.
https://tiermaker.com/create/acx-book-review-contest-entries-15209116
How do proponents of converting the US to multimember districts think this is going to, like, work? Globally the average size for multimember districts is 3-7 representatives- right now the US House has 435 members. At 1305 members it would be either the world's largest lower house, or certainly among them- at 3045 members.... we are entering 'patently ridiculous' territory. To be fair, you could still probably keep 1-2 reps for smaller states (Wyoming, etc.) and just use multimember for the bigger ones, but there's absolutely no way that you end up with less 1300-1400 members of the House. I don't see the American people accepting this.
The right way to do multimember, if the US were starting from scratch, would be to simply use larger districts than we have now. I.e. Illinois just to pick a random example has 18 House members right now, this would be reduced to say 6. But that seems politically impossible to force on the country- people like having local representatives for their little fiefdom, they don't want to share representation with 'those people on the other side of the state, ugh'. Voters would be apoplectic if you shrunk the number of state districts.
So, multimember proponents- you're proposing 1500 or so House reps, is that it? How would this work?
You may be interested in this proposal.
Rodes.pub/RealElectors
>"Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell revel in partisan warfare. Let's do something different."
>[Voters who think the most violent religion today is a violent religion are "prejudiced"]
Oh boy, this really helps convince me this is a good faith effort that isn't all just a ploy to get the left more power!
I’ve been saying for a while that I think the House should be much, much larger.
I don’t favor multi member districts though. Just think that fixing the size of the House at an arbitrary number is a foolish idea and that it ought to be more purely democratic, thus opposing the Senate which should be less so—Senators should be elected by state legislatures again. Probably the upper limit should be 100k people to each House member.
As I see it the biggest problem is that they obviously won’t fit well in their current chambers, but it’s been a while since we’ve done any substantial architecture in DC and there are plenty of ugly buildings there which could be torn down.
The cubed root of the population rule suggests the House should have 693 members. Sounds about right to me.
I'm in favor of multimember districts and I'm in favor of substantially increasingly the size of the House, but I mostly view the two questions as orthogonal to one another: refactoring the existing House size into larger districts (except in the smallest states) of 3-5 members apiece seems both feasible and worthwhile to me. I haven't personally observed a love of "little fiefdoms" among voters: the main obstacle I foresee is that Representatives from safely Rebublican or Democratic districts with good relationships with local primary voters and party organizations probably like their current near-absolute job security.
If you do substantially expand the House, the main obstacle is the logistics of holding floor debates, which is easily solved by abolishing floor debates. These debates have served little practical purpose apart from posturing for the press at least back to the mid-1800s, which Representatives should be perfectly capable of doing on their own time. The real debates happen in committees, caucuses, working groups, and informal private discussions. Procedural votes and votes on bill passage in the House are already done via electronic devices (currently swiping a code card), which could just as easily be done from each Representative's DC office, or even from their district offices or state delegation offices located in their respective state capitals.
Committees could be populated by a proportional representation system from self-organizing caucuses. If there are 1500 total Reps and 150 of them organize themselves into the "Republicans with Silly Hats" caucus, then that caucus can choose amongst themselves members to fill about 10% of the seats on each committee.
Another way to approach this would be to have an "executive committee" of somewhere between a hundred or so Reps and the current size of the House, again chosen by proportional representation of self-organizing caucuses. Urgent business that needs to be debated and voted on in person for some reason would be handled by the executive committee, at least for a first pass, with the whole membership of the house getting a yes-or-no vote to ratify the EC decisions in addition to their voice in choosing and replacing committee members.
If we implemented the "Wyoming rule" (add representatives until each one has the same voter-to-legislator ratio as Wyoming, the least populous state), that would expand the House from 435 to 573. That doesn't sound like an unreasonable number.
But also, this just sounds like argument from incredulity? Like, what exactly is the issue with having 1500 representatives, beyond building a bigger building for them to meet in? It's a big number, but it doesn't seem like there's some obvious threshold at a thousand people or something where representative democracy stops working. It would be the world's biggest legislature, sure, but the US is the world's second-biggest democracy - proportionately it's not *that* huge.
I'd be concerned about moving too far from Dunbar's number-- as the House acquires too many people to be even moderately socially comprehensible, it might need another layer of hierarchy. This might matter.
How many people in the US can name 10% of congresspeople?
The whole argument for increasing the number of representatives is to reduce the constituent:representative ratio in larger states. It seems entirely counterproductive if that is done while reducing the power (as a proportion of the total power of the house) of each representative.
Perhaps you would care to spend 5 minutes reading up how other countries have done this before posting. Check out Ireland for example, as far as I know, the only country that does pure multi-member districts at the national lower house level.
Edit: Malta also uses it.
I'd like to hope my poly sci degree degree, and extensive comparative politics readings, haven't been a total waste! :)
Most democracies use multimember districts- that's actually the norm, SMDs are what's unusual. They make it work via having say 10-40 for the whole country- Ireland, to your example, has 39 districts. Finland has 13, Italy has 27, and so on. With the US having 435, my point is that current voters will be very unhappy about vastly reducing that number, and losing their current personal rep. Hence, an extremely large House seems like the only option
What makes you think voters would be unhappy about losing their "current personal rep"? I can't remember if I'm in the Texas 14th district or 17th or 34th (I think one of those might be the number for my US House district, and one might be my State House district, and the other might be my State Senate district, or just a random number that got into my memory). I know that Pete Sessions is my current representative, but I'd rather not have him - I'd rather be part of a five-member district in the interior of the Texas Triangle that sends one or two Democrats to Congress, who *would* represent me, even as my neighbors still get Pete Sessions because they like him.
Well, aside from status quo bias- if District 1 covers the metro area of Gotham, and District 2 covers the suburbs, exurbs and rural land of Mayberry- that means right now Gotham and Mayberry each have their own rep in the House. If you merge them, Gothan and Mayberry now have 50% less representation each, and the individual voices of both areas won't be heard as loudly. If you propose to do this to, like, the entire country, you're going to encounter an extreme amount of voter unhappiness. I don't think your personal example is how 98% of the country is going to think.
Not to mention that in practical terms, any electoral reform has to somehow pass the current political system that exists. Representatives are unlikely to vote themselves out of a job, and this issue would be bipartisan.
As a real-life example, I grew up in a rural state with 2 House reps- 1 covers the urban area (like 10% of the land), the other covers the rural area (the 90). These culturally & economically separate regions like having their own representatives. People would be extremely unhappy to see them merged
I guess I don't see this. Right now, no district precisely covers an urban area - either the rural or suburban district gets some of the urban area, or the urban district gets some of the suburban or rural area, or more likely (as in the five districts that divided Austin in the 2012-2022 cycle) every district has bits of each. I would think that the Austinites that were stuck in my largely rural and exurban district would be much happier with proportional representation, as would I, as would the rural and suburban people that find themselves stuck in a mostly urban district. I would guess that there is a significant fraction of people in your state that found themselves in exactly this situation. And everyone else gets to keep their representative, so merging seems like absolutely the way to go to make *everyone* happy.
If you merge the urban and suburban district, then everyone gets better representation - I don't see how you reduce representation for both, if you are preserving the same number of representatives total.
Alright I've had a deeper look into it and you're right about some things. I was assuming that party list-PR systems always used national balancing seats but it seems only about half of them do.
However I do find it odd that you'd specifically want defences of a strict US multi-member system when a mixed system, such as MMP or party list with levelling seats, is far more suitable for the US. My guess is that most people who advocate for strict multi-member districts just probably don't know of the existence of other systems.
An MMP system ideally has twice as many members as districts but you can push the envelope a bit. For example, increasing the House seats from 435 to 500 while reducing the number of districts from 435 to 300 would work fairly well. A 31% drop in the number of directly elected representatives does not seem like it would be a deal breaker to most US voters to me, especially considering the upsides of PR in general.
PS: I didn't realise Italy has just changed their electoral system, it seems like they now have 49 multi-member districts though? Plus 147 single member districts. This is a lot more than 27.
Any major structural change is going to be pretty much impossible in the US in the near future. So proponents of things like multimember districts are thinking longterm -- gradually changing public opinion, making changes on the local level and then working your way up, etc. By the time it ever became politically feasible, people's ideas about what they're okay with will have by definition changed from what they are now, so we can't make assumptions that people will still insist on things like having small districts.
I do think that, as far as giving the US a proportional legislature, MMP would be the way to do it that feels the least different from what we have now.
Yes, strong agree that MMP is the only likely option. I find it notable that out of the top 11 largest developed countries, 10 of them use single member districts- the UK, Germany, France, Japan and so on. So it's unlikely that we'll get rid of SMDs- hence MMP is the only viable option.
Per the New Zealand example, the only way to get there is to start with a multiparty system, and then have a few decades of people being unhappy when they learn how FPTP works with 3-6 parties. Once both the left and the right have been screwed out of fair representation over a long enough period of time, I think then we can start to get a national consensus for MMP. So, in the 2060s or 2070s, maybe....
https://youtu.be/wPMum9Slz7M
An animator sets out to animate each letter of the alphabet and ends up with a 15 minute action movie.
Analysis of the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icN229DNC4w&lc=UgygmaXxNuwlilQwA4J4AaABAg
There's probably more to it than that.
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/196364/The-alphabet-animated-one-letter-at-a-time
That was cool. Thanks for the followup/discussion.
Fun! Thanks for the share.
Scott + anyone else: what do you think of routine use of seroquel/quetiapine being used semi routinely in ICU setting?
Giving people in the ICU. something calming and sedating seems like a good idea to me — so long as the drug used doesn’t depress respiration or interfere in some other way with the patient’s already-malfunctioning body. Seems like without some sort of sedation there would be a substantial risk of people doing themselves harm because they are confused or frightened— trying to get out of bed and falling, yanking out IVs etc. If I am ever in the ICU I’d like to sleep thru as much of the experience as possible. Only exception that comes to mind would be if the patient is on the verge of dying, where being sedated might interfere with their having a last exchange with loved ones. I’m
guessing that under those circumstances hospital staff might lighten the dying person’s sedation
In prison, it is used to make inmates docile, sleepy and hungry. Being able to sleep 20 hrs per day is a way to escape, in a way, so "Vitamin Q" is hoarded, sold, and is ubiquitous.
If it has any actual medical or theraputic value I am not aware of it.
Sleep Come Free Me - James Taylor
Https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IMcMe8ul2yI
Interesting I had no idea. Yes, it's a common anti psychotic used for bipolar, schizophrenia
I have heard/read that >50% of inmates in California are prescribed Seroquel. My limited personal observation/experience confirms that a LOT are on Q.
Many people who end up in jail have psychiatric issues, so I wouldn't be very surprised if a rather large percentage of those people could use an anti-psychotic to be somewhat closer to functioning normally.
Speaking from experience, it's nice not to have your relative, who's not well, wanting to run away from home in pajamas in a random direction because the TV, speaking to him personally, told him that a hundred million people <insert a random string>. Imagine having more than one such person on your hands, and imagine that some of them are violent, and I can absolutely see why people working with a crowd of inmates, many of whom are not well, would overuse Seroquel.
I don't disagree. I'm just noting that Seroquel's primary market (I cast about for another term besides the stark and cynical "market" here, but ...) AFAIK, is psychiatric hospitals and correctional facilities.
In my high school health class, I learned that drinking before your brain is fully developed is bad. I recently learned that the brain matures fully at around 25. Am I losing those sweet, sweet IQ points if I drink before turning 25 (I'm 18)? Or is the effect negligible at my age? A few searches brought me nothing but the usual "drinking bad" and many mentions of alcohol abuse disorder and drunk driving accidents, while I'm more interested in the concrete long-term effects.
Drinking is very overrated in my opinion. I've tried it many times, but never got much out of it, and the people who are all into it isn't really the people I'm interested in hanging out with anyway. This is as true for me now at 33 as it was at 18. Ymmv.
Caveat lector blah blah blah but: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rwvN3x5fDbaiLBbde/cognitive-risks-of-adolescent-binge-drinking
“even moderate drinking is associated with shrinkage in areas of the brain involved in cognition and learning.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/this-is-your-brain-on-alcohol-2017071412000
“Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016... Among the population aged 15–49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally.
… The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0·0–0·8) standard drinks per week.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext
Lots of vigorous debate on the topic. I’m also biased against alcohol but here’s some supporting evidence.
Some other places have mentioned that your HS might be lying to you re: observed effects on the brain of drinking before a certain age. But it's also worth thinking about it in terms of if there is an observed effect, and they've just interpreted it maximally badly.
Point is, with alcohol, you'd want to carefully and critically assess what official sources are actually saying the effects are. Both the CDC and FDA are strongly, strongly prohibitionist in terms of culture; if they are saying "Y might have effect X" you should read it as "we have an unbelievably weak link between Y and X that we are actually embarrassed about but we know you won't check" and so on.
Grain of salt: I'm incredibly biased on this topic.
What? The official advice for decades has been that moderate drinking is god for you, and this was based on *extremely* weak evidence that has largely been shown to have been highly confounded by unhealthy people/former alcoholics avoiding drinking. The bias has been heavily in favor of drinking being okay/good.
There's also the problem that young drinkers are excessive drinkers, ages 16-19 boys and girls don't go out for "I'll just have one pint of beer/a glass of cider", they go out to get blotto:
https://drinkaware.ie/research/alcohol-consumption-in-ireland/?a=alcohol-consumption-among-under-18s-in-ireland
So school health education is trying to scare them straight, hence the stories about brain damage. And there *will* be worst-case kids who *are* drinking heavily from age 14 onwards and will do that kind of serious damage to their developing brains.
You should run a prediction market here on "what age will science 50 years from now conclude is the best age to start drinking?" with one of the options being "never" and stick stubbornly to the results. If the results skew European (small amounts of alcohol starting in childhood) you'll have to figure out a way to make up for lost time without becoming a drunk before you get to college.
That seems reasonable, but with the caveat that "best" will need to be spelled out in considerable detail (best life expectancy? best effect on socioeconomic status? best expected QALYs?) to get an unambiguous result, even if the science is completely settled at that point (and nothing else has happened to moot the question).
I highly doubt that drinking one glass of wine or one beer from time to time is going to have any significant effect. Binge drinking or drinking a couple of glass every day are probably bad but they are probably bad at any age.
I strongly suspect that the real risk you face from drinking at any level other than "get blackout drunk on a routine basis" is not loss of IQ points, but rather the risk that you will end up addicted to alcohol, which has wrecked a lot of peoples' lives over the years.
"Brain fully matures around 25" is pop psychology that got popular on social media a few years ago. You can find sources that say the brain isn't mature until your 40's, too.
I strongly recommend not drinking until it's legal, because you could get in a lot of trouble. Also it's not super healthy at any age.
Aside from that, high school health class doesn't want you to drink or have sex or do drugs, and they'll say anything to get you to not do it. They don't care whether it's true or not.
Glatisant didn't mention which country they're in - in most countries the legal drinking age is 18, and in some places it's even lower.
I’ll push back on that first bit and say that, if OP’s research tells him drinking is a net benefit (plausible, given the social benefits), the law shouldn’t enter into the calculus. It’s not hard to find ways to drink without getting in trouble and the state has absolutely zero business telling an adult he can’t drink a fucking beer.
> the state has absolutely zero business telling an adult he can’t drink a fucking beer.
This "shouldn't enter into the calculus". Either there's an appreciable legal risk or there isn't - what the laws "should" be is irrelevant.
I'm not saying it should. That was more of an afterthought. The real salient point was that it's extremely easy to drink while underage without getting caught. YMMV depending on where you live and how interested the cops are in being pricks.
I'd start by trying to confirm what you think you remember from your high school health class. There is nothing to explain if the claim has no basis. It sounds like you haven't been able to confirm, so ...
>Apparently, starting younger makes you more likely to become an alcoholic.
How do you know its causal? What if being predisposed to alcoholism makes you more likely to start drinking earlier?
I wish we could have used a ranked voting system of some sort instead. Having to just pick one out of 15 feels a bit frustrating.
Well, you could vote multiple times for different reviews to turn it into approval voting.
This is a case where I would have to admit that approval voting seems like the best solution (though "approval" should be phrased as "you would vote for this to win" rather than "you wouldn't object to people saying this one wins").
This also seems like cheating though. If everybody else votes only once and I vote a few times, haven't I committed some kind of fraud, even if I vote for different reviews?
You have the right of it. I am chagrined at my dishonorable suggestion.
Loved reading the reviews - great bang for the time invested. Lately I've started to suspect books are a bit... fat. Padded. Could be that they always were so, and long form blogging just spoiled me? Or I should just find better books.
Also loved the unofficial tradition of adding a personal insight to the reviews. Regardless of whether you agree or not with each particular idea, I just like the personal touch and the guts.
No, they definitely are, because its hard to justify the going price of a popular book if it were as optimally concise. The best bet is to read summaries of books before you read them (when available) and be comfortable not finishing every book you start. You may miss out on insights from rare books that finish strong, but overall you'll save a lot of time on unnecessarily finishing overly long books.
This has always been the case. You might look at long-running publications like the New York Review of Books, which has a long history of running articles that are officially reviews of a book or two or three, but where the books are used as the excuse for an essay by a renowned author on the subject of those books (which incidentally, gives you some sense of the central argument of those books, and whether those books might be worthwhile for you to read, or whether you're fine with just the summary).
Tyler Cowen has said "Most books should be articles, most articles should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets and most tweets shouldn't be written".
Agree with all these points, and want to add that:
* nonfiction books are often better as audio, often at 2x speed
* GPT-3 already will do a "summarize for a second-grader" and we can expect more of this as time goes on -- will be interesting
Strong agree, except for anything historical. If it's a good history of something, they usually fill the whole book with quality material.
I've forced myself to become more comfortable with skimming anything else that's nonfiction. Like I think every poly sci book I've ever read could be summarized in 1-2 of its chapters
Names:
Many years ago, I read about cultures where people routinely changed their names over the course of their lifespan, sometimes several times. Not the vestigial forms we had - nicknames, and, for women (at the time) married names, but something a lot more drastic. And in some cases, the names told a story about the person's life. This seemed utterly weird to me.
But now I realize that this pretty much describes my history on line. DinoNerd is relatively new, and would not have been suitable until I'd been in tech long enough to count as a "dinosaur". I've had at least 3 other nicks I've used all over the net; those seem to have lasted about a decade each. Then there are the single-use nicks, and the few sites - mostly long ago - where I used whatever email ID I happened to have, generally a variant on my legal name. And this feels natural to me, complete with a sense that I'm no longer the person who used the earlier nick, and it's weird to login somewhere I've been long enough to still have it.
I'm guessing many others have similar experiences, and wondering what thoughts people have about the cultural and psychological effects, based on their personal experiences.
I've been consistently using the same name or minor variations of it for a long time. I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future.
I'm using my actual first name here as I consider my participation something that might somewhat plausibly reflect positively on my real life in the future and don't want to build capital in a screen name. I have used the same screen name/branding for video game stuff for the past decade, before that I was much more fluid.
I did change my real life name and it has been a very weird experience - I still go by my given name with family while I go by Jacob to anybody I've met in the last 5 or so years. At this point I don't really identify with Jacob very much, but I find my association with my given name drifting as well. When I think to myself 'what is my first name', I don't know. It's very disconcerting. At the same time I don't have any desire to have anybody in my life change what they personally call me.
I would strongly recommend anybody looking to change their first name to do it everywhere or not at all.
Interesting, I had the exact same thing. I started going by Jack in college, but my family still calls me by my first name. Which means that everyone who knows me through my family still does, too.
Everyone once in a while I look like an absolute imbecile when someone asks me my name and I go "uhhhh" as I try to remember which one I'm supposed to be going by.
Possibly with a very similar name too! Somebody should do a study.
I switched to Jacob so I was never a Jack, sometimes people assume that when we're friendly I'm Jack and I am not pleased. Not a bad name but it's a nickname for what is barely my name to begin with
TGGP is a contraction of an earlier nickname, but I've still been using it for over a decade & a half:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/
I do use other handles at some sites though. I figure there's little overlap among a number of them so I might as well keep things separate.
Meanwhile I've been MarsDragon since I first got online *coughcough* years ago and identify with it strongly enough I can't think of changing. Sometimes I respond to "Mars" faster than my given name.
So, people do this now irl, in a variety of contexts. Callsigns, road names, honorifics, and the inverse, 'wallet name'.
Which comes back to why we have unchanging names to begin with - for legibility to the state. Can't get benefits, or pay taxes, or vote, with integrity, without fixture.
As for nicknames and handles...I think it's interesting to think about which identity one would miss the most.
Although intriguingly enough, by the middle of the 20th century, most large nations switched from using names to using some sort of unique identifying number for these purposes (because names aren't unique enough or unchanging enough).
I've legally changed my first name and hope that doing so will become more common.
"I've legally changed my first name and hope that doing so will become more common."
I like to help people chase their dreams. What do I need to do to legally change your first name?
hahaha you got me
Hah - just noticed this was a joke 🤣
The law varies from state to state, but as long as you're using your new name consistently and non-fraudulently it generally isn't a big deal (there's common law precedent.) You probably don't need to hire a lawyer: filling out some forms, a filing fee, showing up at the courthouse generally does the trick. Getting your Social Security info changed is a separate process, but mostly involves standing in line and filling out forms and waiting. The federal requirements for Real ID and how those affect the info on your driver's license is something I don't know about.
"Many years ago, I read about cultures where people routinely changed their names over the course of their lifespan, sometimes several times"
I believe Japan is/was one of those cultures.
I've thought a bit about inversion of ownership in reachablity, and so also identity.
In the current paradigm everybody has access to you phone and email (for example) by default. They can spam you. You can block, but they can just use another id.
If you gave out a different number to each person, this wouldn't be a problem. You'd actual own access to you, if everything was "throwaway".
It's possible in principle to retain the usual convenience to you of having a single number (with the right interface design) while taking advantage of this.
More generally, in every space at least virtual, it makes sense to have an identity mangement software that ought to let you choose how much people get to "connect the dots" between your various ways of showing up. This is what you do with new nicks (create a break) but in a cruder fashion than my dream of it :)
How bad is the European energy crisis going to get?
Not good :
https://viscosityredux.substack.com/
I am especially worried about Italy chickening out because of this. (Germans seem to have integrated that it was their damn fault and are mentally preparing to face the consequences?)
Hm, this doesn't seem like a good source to me. There is exactly one semi-recent article from early July in this blog (the top article is from March, where I also was more pessimistic).
The article from July seems to be picking the bad news, and ignoring the good news. For example, it mentions that Germany does not have a LNG terminal, but does not mention that it will probably get one terminal operating in December, and a second one a bit later. (special ships serving as terminals). I think that was already known in July, though the timeline was less clear.
It also stressed that the storage capacities of Italy were only half-full in early July (though even then it looked suspiciously like an outlier, which it indeed was). In any case, Italy is now at 82%. https://graphics.reuters.com/UKRAINE-CRISIS/EUROPE-GAS/zdvxozxzopx/
Europe has reached its goal of filling its storage capacities for gas to 80%, and it's further increasing. Germany, aiming for 95%, is ahead of its schedule.
I am not saying that everything is fine. Europe is definitely heading to recession. And it will have impact if Russia decides to stop gas exports to Europe completely. Then Europe will have to reduce gas usage further. (At the moment it's roughly 10% below normal baselines. And a lot of measures have been decided upon, but not implemented yet, like closing swimming pools, reducing heating in public building etc). But this source looks both outdated and overly alarmistic.
Potentially, really bad, and worse than Euro + UK governments are admitting in public (the UK has done some surprisingly sensible worst-case forecasting, which is almost reassuring). At a trade fair a few months ago I had German gas traders telling me (a Brit) that 'you guys have done it right... you'll pay through the nose for gas but at least you'll have it. We won't be heating our houses'. In parallel with the gas issues power prices are now just... insane. In the same way that Scott says that '2100 isn't a real year', traders don't believe that €700+/MWh for German baseload or €400+/MWh for TTF is 'real', because there's a reasonable chance that all participants will be bankrupt or the state will have nationalized the market (or collapsed) before delivery. Remember this whenever you see people saying 'oh the problem is unique to our contry because of <insert local talking point here>'.
Right now, in the most West-Euro states, inc. UK, businesses would actually *make* money getting their power from diesel generators and selling surplus back to the grid. This has been true for a few weeks now and starting hitting industry news headlines at the end of this week; I imagine it will go 'mainstream' some time in the next fortnight and we'll see random MOPs getting involved.
I don't know how bad it is, but I am worried that it could get worse if someone on the Russian side realizes that they can bomb or otherwise sabotage the US natural gas ports to cut off the supply of US gas to Europe. One port blowing up on its own (Freeport: https://archive.ph/EwwuL) caused a noticeable increase in European natural gas prices - I think at one point it exceeded $300 a barrel of oil equivalent - so hammering them all would almost certainly be even worse.
(And looking at the latest prices, I see it's even worse than that now: natural gas is at 340 Euros per MWh, which is more like $580 per barrel of oil equivalent, since 1.7 MWh = 1 barrel of oil equivalent)
And it probably wouldn't be that hard either, at least for the first few. If the Russian government can't sneak some people in to do the job, it could always try to get some domestic crazies to do the job for them. There's definitely people angry enough at Biden and the "Globohomo Agenda" in Ukraine, or at the fossil fuel industry and "American Imperialism" in Ukraine, to do the job. There's some precedent as well, whether it be the Colonial natural gas pipeline hack or the blowing up of oil pipelines. I just hope that the FBI, or whoever is responsible for security against this sort of thing, is on top of this.
For the winter, I am now more optimistic that the worst-case scenarios will be avoided. To be fair, those were/are really bad. However, there is potential for things getting out of control in the next four weeks or so.
There are two rather distinct concerns:
- Short-term, electricity is an issue. Most people haven't realized how bad this is *right now*. The electricity prices are ten times higher than last year. Blackouts might come soon if things go bad. This is not so much due to Putin, but rather comes from the drought. Rivers are drying up, ships with coal have trouble reaching their plants. Power plants have to reduce/switch off production because there is not enough river water for cooling. Nuclear plants in France are at an all-time low anyway due to maintenance. In this situation, France has decided to cap prices, so electricity consumption in France is not going down. France sucks up electricity from all over Europe right now. On the positive side: rain and decreasing temperatures can improve the situation pretty quickly. Probably in a month the problem is mostly gone. In winter, electricity is probably not the bottleneck.
- Mid-term: Oil was never a real problem. For natural gas supply, things look much better than a few months ago. Germany has a master plan to fill all their gas caverns, and they are a whole month *ahead* of schedule, at 83% currently (the peak before last winter was only 70%). Replacing gas from Russia has worked better than expected. New temporary terminals for LNG will be ready by the end of year. The prices are going to be high, but it seems increasingly unlikely that Europe will run out of gas. That said, it is not trivial to distribute the gas (and possibly gasoline) within Europe, so there might be regional shortages.
Apart from that, prices will be insanely high, and countries will have rather mixed success in distributing the costs in such a way that it keeps social balance. So I agree with real dog that there will be substantial social unrest in some countries. Also, the energy and electricity mix is *very* different from country to country, so some countries will be hit much harder than others.
Other than real dog, I am not much concerned about food shortages. I think the effect of reduced fertilizer production will be dramatic in Africa and other developing regions, but not in Europe. The prices will be rather high, but that effect is not much stronger than in the US and elsewhere, and pretty moderate compared to the increased energy cost.
Thanks, this was very informative (and somewhat reassuring).
Which sources should one follow to keep abreast of this stuff?
Hm, unfortunately my best sources are in German and behind paywalls (at least the in-depth analyses), spiegel.de and nzz.ch.
The electricity problems are not exactly hard to spot, they have been covered for weeks by all major European newspapers (increasingly alarmed). A lot of governments are already reacting. Here is an impressive graphic: https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1563385668906074112
For the level of gas storage, there is a good overview of the raw numbers here: https://graphics.reuters.com/UKRAINE-CRISIS/EUROPE-GAS/zdvxozxzopx/ , though it might be better to find a newspaper article explaining the numbers.
Thanks!
I fount there will be much unrest over heat. Its a war situation. Provided everybody is seen to be in the same boat. Extravagant use of electricity might cause some issues.
Really bad.
Polish government has just realized that all sorts of technical gases (incl. CO2) are byproducts of fertilizer production, which is stalled because methane is too expensive, so half of the food processing sector is grinding to a halt. There's not gonna be much meat or beer this winter, it seems. There's the usual blame game and headless chicken running, barking desperate orders to somehow fix the economy with ministerial duct tape before it implodes.
For Poland my predictions are:
- 9% chance things go mostly as usual except some people will bitch at prices
- 60% chance of things going mostly as usual except the poor are priced out of heating and/or food, leading to widespread social unrest and possibly the current government dissolving in favor of emergency elections so the hot potato lands in someone else's hands
- 30% chance of intermittent blackouts regardless of how much you can pay, cutting power to non-critical industries, extreme subsidies / complete central planning of the energy economy
- 1% chance of gas and electricity literally running out in the middle of the winter, humanitarian crisis and a total clusterfuck complete with martial law
And I think our strategic fuel reserves are better than e.g. Germany's, so yeah, good luck out there.
I may have missed it, but do you have plans to write up anything more about Lorien? Curious to hear how it's going!
Nature Human Behaviour comes out as woke gender :
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
> [...] research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups,
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs.
>In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication
Your facts are transphobic, sweety.
Some responses to that:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2022/08/24/the-re-enchantment-of-the-world/
https://quillette.com/2022/08/28/the-fall-of-nature/
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/08/26/nature-manuscripts-that-are-ideologically-impure-and-harmful-will-be-rejected/
Gender, wokeism, race, fashion, religion -- are all constructs. But millions have suffered and died over them. One could argue, for example, that Christian charity has built hospitals. True enough. Would there have been a need for hospitals if the religion hadn't wounded so many, and fomented so many wars and pogroms?
The most deadly wars in history (based on deaths as % of world population) were caused by the Chinese and the Mongols, neither of whom were Christian. The idea that Christianity "caused" any wars is ridiculous. Wars have always taken place over power, land and resources and would have continued to do in the absence of Christianity - it's just that Christian Europeans were the first technologically advanced peoples and so their wars were more obviously destructive. You could actually argue that the culture that descended from Christian morality is what has made the world so much more peaceful today.
O.K. The Christians were better shots.
If you actually believe that Christianity has fomented a single war, one that would not have happened if everyone involved had been a cheerful pagan, you've come as undone from reality as the woke.
(I think you could argue that Islam fomented maybe three wars? The great conquest was obviously extremely materially advantageous to its leaders and arguably the entire region long-term, but it's doubtful whether it would have happened without the unifying power of the banner of the Prophet.)
"Would there have been a need for hospitals if the religion hadn't wounded so many, and fomented so many wars and pogroms?"
I am fascinated to learn that Covid-19 spread worldwide due to a religious war. Can you inform me of which sects of Christianity are responsible for the current spread of monkeypox throughout Europe? Had it not been for these damnable Christians, we wouldn't need hospitals to treat illness and accidents!
Scene: a haymeadow in Europe sometime during the 'Dark Ages'
Peasant scything hay: Drat! I have just cut myself on the blade! This is because I'm a Catholic, were I a freethinker this would never ever happen! Well, I suppose I shall just have to die of blood-poisoning thanks to that abbey of friars in the town, whose fault this is, with their hospital because of wars and pogroms!
Unthinking internet atheist talking-points like these are what makes their disseminators sound more brainless than the "we believe in reason, logic, and science and using your brain to think!" personae they like to present.
I think the idea is that Christianity caused the Dark Ages and the Crusades and the Inquisition and all sorts of other nasty stuff that put human progress on pause for a thousand years, and if it wasn't for that, the peasant in your example would've had access to modern antibiotics back in 1450, and by 2020 we'd be able to cure diseases like COVID and monkeypox easily with minimal casualties.
It's a dubious narrative that makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions, but I remember it being quite popular among secularists back in the mid-2000s, when New Atheism was at its peak. They even made a Family Guy skit about it! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1anrSbdjM)
>I think the idea is that Christianity caused the Dark Ages
The "Dark ages" isn't a thing. It's a propaganda term. The Christian MIDDLE ages in Europe saw more scientific progress than a majority of the rest of the world *combined*.
http://www.mandm.org.nz/2008/04/the-dark-ages-and-other-propaganda.html
>the crusades
You mean the response to hundreds of islamic invasion over centuries that saw a majority of christendom conquered? Why is Islamic conquest okay to you people, but fighting against it is some
The crusades aren't even in top ten most deadly conflicts in human history, and yet leftists desperately cling to them as an example of how "bad" Christians are, and they were at least in principle far more justifiable than most pre-modern wars.
>and the Inquisition
Again, a response to Islamic conquest in Spain, which again, you people bizarrely have no problem with.
>all sorts of other nasty stuff that put human progress on pause for a thousand years,
Thousands of years? The middle ages didn't even last for 1000 years! And there were profound scientific accomplishments in that time. Again, Europeans in the middle ages made more scientific and intellectual progress than most of the world combined. Why don't you blame the religions and cultures of the non-intellectual majority of the rest of the world for "putting progress on pause"?
It's so damn funny that the left will react furiously if you suggest that white people are more intellectually capable than other peoples, and yet somehow they also believe that the responsibility for scientific progress is almost exclusively on Europeans. By the time the middle ages had ended, sub-saharan Africans largely hadn't even invented the wheel, and certainly were thousands of years beyond the more advanced Europeans. Why aren't they guilty of not advancing human progress?
>and if it wasn't for that, the peasant in your example would've had access to modern antibiotics back in 1450, and by 2020 we'd be able to cure diseases like COVID and monkeypox easily with minimal casualties.
This is absurd nonsense. It's all just narrative with no justification. Stop basing your understanding of history on left wing memes.
>They even made a Family Guy skit about it!
What exactly do you mean "even" made a skit about it? This should count squarely against its validity.
Christianity caused the Dark Ages, eh? That's...very creative. One wonders how they explain that the only institution that preserved reading and writing throughout that period, and such science as Late Antiquity possessed, was the Church.
I think the empowering act for such a theory is less making unwarranted assumptions than the elision of vast swathes of known historical fact.
"Dubious" is being kind to it. Strip out the "Christians - is there *no* evil they are not responsible for????" bit, and that still leaves:
"Would we have needed hospitals if there were no wars?"
I'm going to take a giant leap in the dark here and say "Yes, yes we would have".
Yes? Because no all wars were religious, most weren’t in fact.
>Would there have been a need for hospitals if the religion hadn't wounded so many
Ummm.. yes, obviously? Because, to name just one of MANY reasons, infections would still be a thing?
This take is…stunning.
I mean, to start, what percentage of people in hospitals are there for war/pogram related injuries?
And are you really saying that in world where the Crusades and Thirty Years war never occurred we would have no need of hospitals?
Did Christians invent *disease itself*?
"Did Christians invent *disease itself*?"
And here was me thinking Aesculapius was a pagan god. Well, plainly we must have done, else without Christianity, there would have been no wars and pogroms, and hence no need for hospitals, and if there were no need for hospitals, then there must not be any diseases or accidents, so yeah - Christians caused the Black Death and you busting your arm when you fell out of that tree when you were ten!
This assumes wars and pogroms wouldn't have happened anyway. Humans are a violent species, any excuse will do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/health/teens-psychiatric-drugs.html
I wonder if now that we realized doctors were giving our opioids like candy, there will be a major movement to change the way people - especially kids - are medicated. I wonder what Scott thinks about whether this is a problem and if it’s gotten worse over time.
My guess is the main change is that more people in chronic pain can't get medicine for it, and so eventually commit suicide or start buying from the street (and become way more likely to die of an overdose).
Absolutely, yes. I know of at least two cases of people switching to buying pills illicitly because of this; I truly don't perceive that the "handing out like candy" narrative was *ever* the case, either — it was never easy to obtain opioids, *especially* for more than maybe a month of low-dose hydrocodone or codeine, unless perhaps you're elderly.
Somewhat related writing from Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/
'pick one'.... 'fancy'...??? what blog am i on? or is this also a joke like 'ten more book reviews'!?
There are better ways, whats your confusion? I was expecting different from a rationality blog
Approval voting is what I would go for, after having the experience of trying to choose one.
I they were expecting a ranked runoff system where we selected, not our favorite, but our predictions for what all of the other voters would prefer. :)
Taxpayers contribute to college education, and in the next California budget around 13% is earmarked for higher ed. I guess we assume that college grads contribute more to society, so it is worthwhile for all of us to pitch in. But the student loan crisis is a free market indicator that way to many people signed up for the college dream. What metrics should America use in deciding whom and how many should be sent to university? I have this vague idea that taxpayers should only fund excellent students. That seems more fair.
This is not one of the supply of goods and services questions that needs to be decided by politics over the market. Making student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy after N years would solve the "declare bankruptcy immediately after graduation" exploit, while providing enough feedback that mal-investment in education would be harder to finance.
Not if the government is providing those loans. Biden just forgave a lot of them and gave a lot more of them perverse incentives:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/08/26/the-new-income-driven-repayment-system-could-cause-some-big-problems/
>"Not if the government is providing those loans."
Fix that first then.
> But the student loan crisis is a free market indicator that way to many people signed up for the college dream.
I think that doesn't necessarily follow. It could be true, or it could be false. I think you can gain certainty by hopping up the causal chain; it's definitely an indicator that the terms of the student loans were bad. (Maybe the terms are bad because the ROI is bad as you say, but maybe the loans were bad just because the APR is way too high.) Anecdotally, lots of people I spoke to didn't understand the terms of the loans.
> I have this vague idea that taxpayers should only fund excellent students.
This is regressive, because excellent students tend to make lots of money, and so need less financial assistance.
I think the approach of the UK (and I believe many EU countries) is more equitable; make student loan repayment contingent on income. If you earn lots of money, then you're probably in a job where your degree credential helped you, and you can certainly afford to pay back the loan. If you don't earn lots of money, then maybe you were not an "excellent student", but maybe other reasons contributed like you come from a working class background and had to take over the family business when your parent got sick.
I can see the argument for putting some kind of aptitude-test or expected-impact-test on top of the means-testing; we shouldn't just enroll every single citizen in a basket-weaving course at a distance learning "University" and expect the public to pay for it. So I'm open to blending the two approaches. But I think if you can balance the books with just means-testing, then you end up with a simpler and easier-to-administer system.
Why would you take over the family business if that were *less* profitable than whatever job you could get with your degree?
Regardless of class background, it's evident that an action like that is just further proof of the worthlessness or frivolity of the degree.
> Why would you take over the family business if that were *less* profitable than whatever job you could get with your degree?
Concisely: people value things other than money.
More verbosely:
I thought this was a clear placeholder for the general and well-understood category of "life intervenes" events, but if you prefer a specific example, substitute some other event like "parents die and first child needs to take over caring for young siblings".
The general point being, one thing that sometimes happens is that a person goes to university, and then due to life events, can't actually capitalize on that investment. Even disregarding serious events, one might model university as (making up numbers for discussion) having a 75% chance of getting someone a good job, and 25% chance of not doing so, resulting in substantial debt. This model could be EV positive, but still scary. This uncertainty disproportionately affects poor people, because rich people aren't ruined by the debt of student loans. Therefore by reducing the threat of ruin, you encourage more poor people to roll the dice. I put forth that society benefits from this.
Of course, if your view is that university is a net-negative on average, then you don't want to encourage people to go to university. That's a different proposition that I discussed briefly in my post. But the above is just focusing on explanations why poor people would be discouraged from participating in a clearly EV-positive transaction.
UK resident here. Our system provides no feedback because, as you point out, if your degree doesn't help you at all it's free.
This created a nightmare class of people (often middle class in origin) who have no useful skills but think they're too good for most jobs they can get.
Meanwhile the "meritocracy" worked fairly well for good working class students. My industry has a good number of working class students who did eg. Maths at eg. Warwick and are now making good money.
Overall I think the UK is handing out too many degrees by a factor of four, and the worst ones are all at the taxpayer's expense.
Additionally, it punishes people for not going to university, even if they have no business being there.
That's a wrong question. A better one is how to deal with credentialism and degree inflation. Does a physiotherapist really need at least a Masters degree? Does "pre-med" add anything to actual "med"? Does an admin assistant need a Bachelor degree?
"we assume that college grads contribute more to society" -- maybe, but only because the jobs they take require these credentials.
There are plenty of areas where a certain level of education is required, of course. But that need not be the norm.
Pre-med is mostly a selection process. I doubt it significantly adds to anyone's abilities, but in some form it may well serve a useful selection function.
Seems other countries do quite well without that "selection function". Besides, medschool and what follows weeds out the weak much more effectively, doesn't it?
This is an excellent question. In particular, what practical Masters level coursework could social workers be taking that couldn't be condensed or learned in an apprenticeship program?
How would you suggest we deal with this? It’s not clear to me which way the causality goes (more college graduates-->credential ian or credentialism-->more college graduates). If people are getting degrees anyway, why wouldn’t a rational employee use them as a filter?
>If people are getting degrees anyway, why wouldn’t a rational employee use them as a filter?
They would, but the answer is to make it harder to go to college for intellectually unremarkable people unless they're studying vocational degrees.
It is not an easy question to answer. But at least it needs to be asked, since dealing with symptoms will not cure the disease. Wikipedia has a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_inflation
I don’t think taxpayers should only subsidize excellent students, they should only subsidize actions that will have significant positive externalities that aren’t captured in private signals. Stylistic examples that might not be accurate: assume that society benefits from having lots of good nurses, but for whatever reasons the labor market isn’t able to provide enough compensation relative to the high cost of training nurses. Then society should subsidize someone who enrolls in a nursing school (but to your point, there should probably be some underwriting to ensure they are qualified enough to graduate and become a nurse). On the other (bad stereotype) hand, let’s say that MBA degrees generate almost no positive societal externalities, and the cost of training is well in line with what the labor market will supply after they graduate. Then there would be a much weaker reason to subsidize higher education for that individual, and we probably do it only so that we don’t have to make hard decisions about what educational processes have these net positive externalities that aren’t realized without subsidies.
This system would be more fair, but the track record has not been great for predicting which careers will be in demand. People would be able to hack the system for example by attending a good nursing program and then going into another field using their nursing degree to signal that they are a quality candidate.
Higher education is mostly zero sum:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7t59x1/review_bryan_caplans_the_case_against_education/
The state should completely stop funding for higher education and start taxing it like every other service.
Really? Science, engineering, business, and various other fields seem to actually teach relevant professional skills. In Scott's example, four years of medical study are apparently still useful. Even in the much-maligned social sciences and humanities, people do actually sometimes go on to relevant careers. Beyond that, I don't fully buy into the education as self-actualization model, but I do think it has value beyond the strictly career-related.
What would the purpose be of taxing education? It wouldn't raise all that much revenue. Is it just to have less of it?
It's not enough that they (ALLEGEDLY) teach useful skills - they need to teach useful skills more efficiently than the counterfactual world where people get work/cadetships straight out of highschool (factoring in the costs incurred and loss of income from going to college). If it was simply the norm that people got business cadetships (or even extended internships) out of highschool, they would still be learning things, and I would predict much more useful things, and they would also be earning income and avoiding debt (or costing taxpayers large sums of money).
>Even in the much-maligned social sciences and humanities, people do actually sometimes go on to relevant careers.
Yes, because they're smart, not because they learnt something at college they couldn't have picked up on the job. Education mostly acts as a filter, not as training.
I have a CS degree, a relatively practical major, and it was still the case that most of my schooling was a waste of time. I learned far more in a shorter amount of time when I started actually working as a programmer.
The point of taxing education is to have less of it, because people engaging in so much of it for signalling purposes is wasteful.
You should read Bryan's book to get down into the weeds, but I'll try.
Some fields (but far from all or even most) teach relevant skills for the majority of the time in a somewhat efficient way. This is probably still less efficient than apprenticeships. The market will figure out how to efficiently train people in professional skills once the subsidized competition is gone.
That people go on to relevant careers is exactly what's expected by the signaling theory.
Lots of things, including professional work, has value that is beyond strictly career-related.
Higher education is about 2-3 % of GDP so it could raise a lot of money. But the main point is to not subsidize a status signaling zero-sum game.
I’m not sure I agree with the premises, first that student debt means less people should go to college and second that there should be a central mechanism for deciding who should go. I’d rather give people better information on what the decision to take out loans means in practice and perhaps a cap on the amount of loans that can be used to finance a particular type of degree (e.g., higher for an MD than a bachelor’s).
My targeted solution to the student debt crisis is to make student loans dischargable under bankruptcy again. The reason they were made non- dischargable in the first place is that there was a bit of a scandal in the early 90s about recent professional degree graduates (doctors, lawyers, etc) with tons of debt and high earnings potential but little or no assets declaring bankruptcy strategically to get rid of their loans.
That should no longer be possible after the 2005 bankruptcy reform law, which has a bunch of provisions in place specifically to limit strategic bankruptcies by people who have negative net worth but enough income to reasonably be able pay their debts back, so repealing the 1994 student loan rules would allow people with unmanageable student debt to declare bankruptcy and get a clean slate.
If you want a broader loan forgiveness program, then maybe consider adding a new type of personal bankruptcy procedure specifically for student loans, allowing debtors an expedited and simplified way to modify or discharge loans for demonstrably worthless degrees.
Going forwards, I'd also add some kind of provision for new loans requiring universities to take on at least some of the responsibility for bad debt among their former students. Either by partially underwriting the loans themselves or by being liable to the government for excessive losses due to default and bankruptcy. Of course, this would be paired with universities in question having the option of declining to accept federal loans for students who are unlikely to be able to pay them back. The goal here is to make universities responsible for managing their own moral hazard of accepting federal subsidiaries for students who they should be able to foresee are likely to flunk out, wind up with a worthless degree, or otherwise not benefit from attending college and signing up to repay tuition loans.
Having the universities, rather than the federal government, entirely underwrite the loans makes the most sense. Right now there are extremely perverse incentives for universities to encourage the largest loans possible, knowing the government will just eat the cost:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/08/26/the-new-income-driven-repayment-system-could-cause-some-big-problems/
Agreed
Those sound like good ideas!
I myself don't think that any of the alternative voting schemes are better than FPTP. In particular, the complexity of alternatives raises doubt about the integrity of the process that isn't there in a properly regulated simple polling system.
On edit: I am strongly biased against these alternative systems because every instance that I have seen them used/proposed (Hugo Awards, post-Trump voting) it has been to keep the "weirdos and wreckers" on my side out. (If there are other uses, I would appreciate hearing about them - for instance, did anyone propose using ranked alternative to keep AOC from being elected?)
In St Louis, we switched to a non-partisan approval system for our mayoral elections. Top two advance to the general. This is a heavily blue city, which left the low-turnout primary as being essentially the general election. Now we actually get a competitive race when most of the voters show up. I prefer it.
I thought the whole point of AV was to get the weirdoes and wreckers in.
FPTP encourages a two-party system where everybody is forced to hold their nose and vote for the closest broad tent candidate. Sometimes a Trump or a Corbyn gets to be one of the top two (this is as much about the system for primaries and leadership contests as the general election) but more often you end up with Sanders or the Lib Dems perpetually on the sidelines.
With alternative voting systems, it becomes feasible for you to set up your own Weirdoes Party (with blackjack and hookers) and get your people into the legislature.
In single-member district FPTP, your votes for a weirdo might put them in 3rd place rather than 5th but it won't make a difference to the top two so you're wasing your vote. Under runoff systems, more people will feel confident to put the weirdo as their first choice, knowing that if they get knocked out, their vote will run off to the normie candidate they prefer. Under PR or multi member districts, all the votes for the weirdo or the Weirdoes Party will be accrued from a larger area and get them a seat.
If you look at the UK's 2011 AV referrendum, it was the main Conservative and Labour parties who were fighting against it.
Or look at Germany, where the eco-weirdoes, libertarian weirdoes, communist weirdoes and racist weirdoes all have seats in the Bundestag on account of its hybrid proportional system.
I don't really understand the concern about complexity. If you're concerned with voting integrity, as long as you have a paper trail you can fully audit the results in either system. The tabulated "first round" votes are equivalent to the vote count in a FPTP election, and should be auditable and published. There's just more columns. The algorithm that runs on those columns is, sure, more complex than `max(votes)`, but it's still trivial and you could work it out with pencil and paper in a few minutes if you really wanted to.
> every instance that I have seen them used/proposed... it has been to keep the "weirdos and wreckers" on my side out
A couple examples I'd put forth that don't seem to fit that description, interested in your thoughts here:
1) California Republicans. In a FPTP system, Republicans are dramatically under-represented, because most seats will go to the Democratic candidate regardless of who they are, if the only alternative is a Republican. So the real vote is the Democratic primary for a given seat. To try to fix this, they implemented "Open Top Two Primaries", where the top two vote-getters in the primary go on to face off in a two-candidate head-to-head. This means in many seats your main election is between a very-liberal Democrat and a centrist-Democrat that got some Republican votes. Many people don't vote in the primaries; I think it's quite anti-democratic to have a two-Democrat ballot.
IRV would give more weight to Republican voters, and allow centrist voters to express preference ordering that include, say, both moderate D/R candidates over the primary-winners in the current systems. Or, allow strong-partisan voters to (if I'm not inferring too much) put your "weirdos and wreckers" as your first preference, and then have your preference cascade down the list if/when these more-partisan candidates are removed from the running. Basically IRV lets you safely express your first choice for a candidate that doesn't have the votes to win, rather than forcing people to vote tactically to avoid wasting their single vote.
2) Alaska's IRV primary. Results not yet finalized, but it seems that doing IRV here allowed the Republican party to field a bunch of candidates across the spectrum, including Palin who's perhaps either 2nd or 3rd right now (based on 538 estimates). Not following local politics in AK though, is this keeping "weirdos and wreckers" out? Or allowing the Republican field to be wider without vote-spoiling?
I think there is a level on which your bias is justified; I think a two-layer "party-primary=>FPTP general" system is structurally biased towards producing extreme/polarized candidates, since to win the primary you have to pander to the base, and then the general requires you to pander to the undecideds/independents. Something like IRV or Approval Voting could, insasmuch as it demolishes party primaries, give more weight to moderate candidates that most people would be OK with.
So inasmuch as a more-democratic system disadvantages "weirdos and wreckers" then yes, you probably should prefer a less-democratic system. But I get the sense that's not the argument you're making.
> did anyone propose using ranked alternative to keep AOC from being elected?
AOC is an advocate of RCV, and is pushing to have it used in NYC: https://www.vox.com/22443775/ranked-choice-voting-explained-new-york-strategy#:~:text=But%20it%E2%80%99s%20not%20just,been%20a%20key%20supporter.
AOC unseated the DNC's candidate in the primaries, and pissed off the Democratic establishment in doing so. She is one of the liberal side's "weirdos and wreckers", if you will. She sees RCV as a way to weaken the party's control on which candidates get to run, which sounds like a cause you might be on board with.
https://ncase.me/ballot/
Score voting systems are both closest to actual voter choice and minimize the spoiler effect. Approval is the simplest case of score voting, where the score options are zero or one.
Most score methods have clone independence, but IRV does as well.
Note that almost all score methods have tactical voting required in ~100% of cases to use your maximum voting power; IRV does have tactical voting in some cases, but it's very difficult to tell whether you're in one of the tactical-vote cases.
How about something a little more radical? I'm kinda sold on the idea of delegating votes. See the system described here: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1773760#reply-1773760
(warning, strange fiction).
The short version would be: you can delegate votes, aka you can chose somebody who simply votes in your stead - but that person can only serve as a delegate for a limited number of people. So it pretty much has to be somebody local that you trust. And there are a few (3-4) layers of successive aggregation, up to a small council that actually votes in proportion to their delegated vote count.
Not something that founding fathers could envision, other than maybe in their dreams. But quite possible in a world of smartphones and publicly auditable blockchains.
Nah, there's a difference insofar as the electors for most of the US states don't have their votes weighted by how much of the state voted for them - if you win California, you get the full Californian voting power, and if you lose California, you get nothing.
Thats not how it was designed though. The electors were supposed to be a temporary parliament elected by the citizens to pick a president. You were supposed to vote for Bob, who voted for a president.
Kind of? IIRC they didn't start off as requiring a citizen vote at all, and when they started doing so they started as slates, so there was never something akin to Radu's proposal of electors *proportional* to in-state votes.
Alaska seems to have implemented a Musical Chairs approach this year, where we have a series of elections and eliminate the lowest candidates each round. Whether its worth the cost of multiple elections, eh.
I could see this argument about ranked-choice/instant runoff voting, but surely approval voting is simple enough that it could be widely accepted after a short adjustment period? The process of counting votes isn't even any different. Voters can choose to vote the same way as in an FPTP election, which is still a good strategy if they have a clear favorite. And it has clear benefits over FPTP, including preventing "spoilers," which would allow 3rd parties to grow in support before they are big enough to actually win an election.
(Edit to add: kind of missed the context on this since it wasn't a reply to the other comment about voting methods, but I stand by it.)
Ok, please explain approval voting to me. (I know I can go look it up - please explain it to me like I'm my neighbor's idiot 17 yo son who is a) going to vote this fall and b) repeating a year of high school, again.)
"It makes voting for candidates like rating restaurants: you 5-star the ones you like, 1-star the ones you don't."
"It's just like regular voting, except that you can vote for more than one guy if you want. You don't have to; it's just if you want. The winner is still the guy with the most votes."
"But if I vote for one guy and someone else votes for six, then they get five times as many votes as me. That doesn't seem fair."
If you think that voting for more people is better, then vote for more people. If you don't think it's better, then why shouldn't you let other people do it?
"I don't want to vote for more than the guy I like. So I'm fucked either way. Either I get fewer votes or I have to vote for people I hate. This sounds like a scam to prevent my guy from winning."
"So if I think any of these mfs are ok, I pick them all? And so does everyone else? How do we know whos the best? This is that stupid participation prize shit again, everyone gets elected."
(Having said that, approval voting (first I heard of it!) is the least worst of the lot.)
What happens if the vote is a tie under the current system? Like, it works literally exactly the same as FPTP does, except for how many circles you fill in on the ballot.
If you think they're all basically okay, you can vote for everyone (or just don't vote, since you don't care). If you think they're all basically okay *except* for Donald Trump, who is a blight on democracy, you can vote for everyone but him, and you'll have a better chance of getting anyone but him. If you think that only the Republicans can put this country right and anyone else will be awful, you can vote for just one.
"Why not do regular voting? I hate these 'pick all the true statement' tests - I always mark something I didn't mean to pick."
"This is better than regular voting because people can vote for more than one guy if they want to."
Beyond a certain point, this thought-experiment stops being a helpful exercise and just becomes a demonstration that there is literally nothing that people can't refuse to understand/accept. If someone were used to approval voting and you told them about FPTP they could make equivalent arguments in the other direction.
Fair enough...but, more seriously..."If someone were used to approval voting"
Where, actually, was this? Not to be a total luddite and rejecting new innovations, but the utility of the new world democratic system as practiced in small towns of the colonies was not "consensus by voting" but debate and discussion before hand, followed by anonymous voting by near-universal citizenry.
Non-FPTP systems, to me, have more in common with, say, the pre-1800s cossack system of the elites selecting from among themselves (or, for that matter, the Democrat 'super delegates') than a true poll of the public.
What historical use of non FPTP systems can be identified?
OK, sure. Check the box next to each candidate/option you would be OK with. The option that the most people are OK with wins.
"So I can't just vote for the guy I want to win? Who decides the winner of this shit?'
Yep. Person with the most votes wins, just like normal. Only difference is you can vote for all the people running that you like, instead of having to pick one.
I'm playing the role of "neighbor's idiot 17 yo son who is a) going to vote this fall "
You deny American exceptionalism, sir!
I feel like the book review entries are overall weaker than last year- is that just me or do people share that impression? Off the top of my head the Galen or Henry George reviews both feel like I'd pick them over any of the ones in this round.
Out of all 130 submissions, I ranked 10% as good-to-great (A or A+).
Another third were pretty good (like B+ to A-).
Roughly a quarter were mediocre at best (C or worse).
Out of the 15 finalists, I ranked 11 in the top two categories: 5 as good-to-great, and 6 as pretty good.
None of the finalists were mediocre or worse: the remaining 4 finalists were "fair-to-middling" (like B to B-). The one which got disqualified also fell into this fair-to-middling bucket, along with about a third of the original 130 submissions.
Since there were so many more entries this year, I think it's more likely to be representative of what we can expect in future years than the inaugural contest would be. This is just intuition, but I feel like the initial instance of anything is more likely to be a statistical outlier.
There are two I liked, but also a lot of real stinkers this time around.
I'm not gonna say which one I'm talking about, but one of the earlier entries was seriously very good, and I would pick it over the Henry George review 9/10 times.
I think it's low hanging fruit thing. Last time was the first exciting time and a lot of talented readers already had favorite books with thoughts about reviewing them. We "used up" those reviews last year and this year is the newer, fresher reviewers that might be more amateurish than last time.
It's just a guess and honestly I still really enjoyed reading the reviews this time too! Definitely want this to happen again!
Agreed.
I feel this, too
You have 15 candidates, of which exactly one is a work of fiction, and you're using FPTP. Are you trying to split the vote and hand victory to God Emperor of Dune? And, in a world in which God Emperor of Dune actually is the most popular (as would be measured by a reasonable voting method), how could its victory seem legitimate when it could so easily be explained by vote splitting?
What should you use? I recommend STAR Voting (https://www.starvoting.us/star); it's simple, expressive, doesn't make voters agonize over which of two similar options is slightly better, and there's an easy tool for making online STAR elections (https://star.vote/). Other commenters have mentioned Approval Voting and Minimax as other options, and both of them are reasonable; Approval is good if you want the system to be as simple as possible (though voters need to consider strategy more than they do under more complicated methods), and Minimax, like all Condorcet methods, delivers excellent results (though I prefer the scoring ballot to a ranked ballot here so that I'm not focusing on minor differences).
What is not reasonable is using FPTP. It ignores the majority of voters' preferences. It makes being different from other candidates more important than being better than other candidates. It fails to give authors a good sense of how well-received their book review was since it doesn't distinguish between broadly-popular reviews that excite few people and polarizing reviews that excite a few people but which most readers aren't interested in. And, of course, the real problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QCHLkgudfgbovgoan/cause-exploration-prizes-voting-methods) is with real-world elections, not online polls - but online polls like this one are excellent opportunities to bolster the profile of little-known but high-quality voting methods, and the data can be legitimately useful in understanding voter behavior. Using FPTP here doesn't just risk unrepresentative outcomes - it's a missed opportunity for building awareness and generating data.
Many thanks for the STAR URL!
One question I have about the system:
Why is there a take-the-top-two-candidates-and-do-a-runoff phase?
The "two" seems arbitrary. Why that rather than either
1) just directly pick the candidate with the highest total points in the first round
or
2) some sort of iterative drop-the-lowest-candidate and reallocate points (not sure what the "right" way to do this would be...), reanalyze the remaining candidates' support, and iterate till there is one left.
(1) is a reasonable option, especially when we don't expect much strategic voting. The downside to this approach is that it makes it strategically optimal to give every candidate either a 0 or a 5 and means that voters who don't vote strategically have dramatically less influence than those who do. For these reasons I consider STAR to be vastly preferable to Score Voting (STAR without the runoff) for governmental elections, but for the book review contest these considerations are less important.
As for (2), it sounds like you're describing Cardinal Baldwin (https://electowiki.org/wiki/Baldwin%27s_method#Cardinal_Variant) or perhaps a rather impractical voting method I invented (https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/iterated-threshold-reapproval-voting-5df0ebc3d1ff). The disadvantage of these voting methods is that they're a lot more complex than STAR. This both makes them more difficult to describe and makes tabulation a lot more demanding (the latter point isn't very relevant to the book review contest, though I'm pretty sure these voting methods don't have a nice online tool like STAR does).
Many Thanks! Yes, for (2) I had something vaguely in mind like either the affine rescaling in Cardinal Baldwin or the step function in your method to reprocess the ballots after eliminating a candidate in a round. Much appreciated!
FPTP is a terrible voting system and is dominated by approval voting, among other simple systems. However, I don't see why FPTP would tend to pick the fiction review. Going by the Substack rankings, there is one clearly favored entry going into the vote. The fiction review is currently fifth.
FPTP doesn't have an innate bias for fiction over nonfiction, it has a bias for candidates that are different from other candidates. In an election with far more nonfiction than fiction, FPTP favors fiction. Were there 14 book reviews for fiction and one for nonfiction, FPTP would favor the nonfiction review. It's just like how FPTP favors the Republican in elections with two Democratic candidates and one only one Republican (real-world example: https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/the-chicken-dilemma-a-deep-dive-under-several-voting-methods-c08ff9ea6f4a).
I'm not saying God Emperor of Dune is necessarily going to win, by the way. I'm just saying that it has a much, much better chance under FPTP than under STAR, Approval, Minimax, or any other reasonable voting method.
Create a STAR Voting ballot with the same candidates as the official ballot. Perhaps Scott will signal boost it and we can see how the outcomes compare.
Great idea! Here's the STAR poll: https://star.vote/nc7fftzn/
Why do you automatically assume the work of fiction is the favorite? That was hardly what I would have guessed.
Doesn’t the very fact that most people prefer to review non-fiction tell us something about the preferences of the reviewers, which are probably close to those of the audience?
It's not the favorite, but it's the most unusual, so it's the most likely to benefit from a FPTP system.
(Say 25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction. Then the votes of the 75% will be split between the 14 nonfiction reviews, but the votes of the 25% will be focused. That's the hypothetical, at least.)
If that were the case [25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction] would we not see more fiction reviews?
You seem to need to require multiple hypotheses, not just
- a non-negligible number of people like fiction reviews BUT ALSO
- a substantially large fraction of the sorts of people who like reading fiction reviews don't like writing fiction reviews
Both of these could be true. But it starts to head into messy territory...
I think it's simpler to posit that fiction and non-fiction serve different roles, and the non-fiction role can frequently be well-served via a review, whereas the fiction role is rarely well-served by a review. (Not saying it's impossible, but there are plenty of non-fiction books where I'd be happy to read a much shorter review, because the content is what I care about; whereas there are few fiction books where I'm much interested in a review because most of the experience [laughter, tension, whatever] is in reading the book itself. Not always -- some fiction is about *enough* more than just the raw story that it lends itself to a good review, as we saw with God Emperor -- but I think what I described is the default case.)
Given that 99% of people choose not to write reviews, all you need is a tiny correlation between interest in writing reviews and type of review people are interested in writing in order for there to be something like this problem.
"If that were the case [25% of people prefer fiction reviews and 75% prefer nonfiction] would we not see more fiction reviews?"
Depends. If I want my review to win (and I don't know the voting will be FPTP) or just want it to appeal to the readership, I might strategically pick a nonfiction book instead of fiction. In fact I think I saw a commenter proposing this strategy when the contest was announced.
I guess I simply cannot get inside the mind of a person who will "strategically" review a book they find less interesting/import/valuable because they care more about winning a (totally meaningless!) popularity contest than learning something/teaching something.
You're positing a world of human beings with whom I have zero in common, and I suspect I'm in the majority on this.
It would be in very poor form to change the voting rules after everyone submitted their book reviews, but this might be a good idea for next time.
Especially considering that the change in voting rules would be done specifically to hamstring one entry
Right, the original rules were approval voting. Scott should stick to that and not switch to FPTP.
No, that is not the case. The last contest was FPTP, and this one is as well.
Can you link me to anything that indicated there would be approval voting instead of the standard FPTP?
Have you considered looking for a link rather than demanding one of me?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest
Well... I was very wrong.
I'm sorry for making you look it up.
Maybe I'll eat these words in the near future, but I wouldn't worry too much. The God Emperor review was different-bad.
There's been a lot of discussion here about EA and weird seagull-eye-pecking causes but, in terms of currently-existing-human type charities, what do we, the ACX hive mind, support? The GiveWell recommended list? (Malaria consortium, against malaria foundation, Helen Keller int'l, and New Incentives)
Bonus question: What are your thoughts on the recent removal from the recommended list of GiveDirectly and the deworming charities?
I give all my donation budget to GiveWell. My donation budget is ~30% of my L5 Waymo engineer total comp.
I am actively looking into AI Safety orgs to work at tho.
RE: removal of GiveDirectly and the deworming charities. I'm a little more surprised about the removal of the deworming charities. I thought that they were closer to the 10X cash bar that they'd been using, but I'm generally very very happy to defer to them. I interned there briefly and generally came away with a lot of confidence in their thought process.
I still think that GiveDirectly and SCI/Deworm the World are probably extremely strong charities, but it seems fair that they might not be literally the top.
I think The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Fast Offerings program is pretty close to ideal. Global network of committed and trustworthy volunteers (bishops) with boots on the ground that distribute money (typically food or rent help, never cash) to known people in known situations. Donated funds are used both locally and shared globally to flow to the needs. The motto for distribution is “preserve life, not lifestyle” to minimize the amount of dependency. And it is an individual-focused rather than collectivist program, so you know there are actual people getting helped. (I will note that I served as a bishop in my ward for 5 years and was just released in May. Seeing people benefit from the program was a rewarding part of the calling.)
To scale this without the religion part would require a global community with a culture of charity donation among which the needy would be recognized, and from which the trustworthy on the ground distributors (who know the needy personally and their situations) would be selected. It could be interesting if a non-religious charity could be built on this model.
I donate to GiveWell, global health stuff only.
As a member of the commentariat, but not EA, this is my preferred charity settings:
- 5 to 7 percent of post tax income(*) auto deduction to my parish (general funds and various ministries).
- 5% to local and international faith and development focused programs, such as the local food bank, local pregnancy support centers, Catholic Relief Services, Mary knoll, and Christian Veterinary Services
- 3 to 5% to various other causes, more or less ad hoc and varying from month to month. This could be wildlife preserves, local widows & orphans, and museums.
And on top of this are dollars handed to panhandlers, second collection at mass, donations to salvation army/etc, work in kind at community garden, etc, and direct support of neighbors. (**)
* justified because I think that at least 10% of my taxes are doing good work for the needy
** depending on the month, this direct support can be a chunk. Once one is known as one who will give money, one gets more people asking. Depending on the month, this eats into other categories
This past 10 months have been complicated by a cross country move, a second local move, and a major job change. My total tracked donations dropped to about 3%. I have taken steps and by October should be back over 10%.
Ever wondered how Australia ended up with its voting system (known in Australia as "preferential voting")? It was caused by the equivalent of a GOP split.
Wikipedia: "The preferential system was introduced for federal elections in 1918, in response to the rise of the Country Party, a party representing small farmers. The Country Party split the anti-Labor vote in conservative country areas, allowing Labor candidates to win on a minority vote. The conservative federal government of Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting as a means of allowing competition between the two conservative parties without putting seats at risk."
My favourite fact about early Australian politics was that in the first election in 1901 the election was mostly between the Protectionist Party and the Free Trade Party, but by 1909 the Protectionists and Free Traders apparently managed to settle their apparently-vast ideological differences and merged together to oppose the Labor Party.
Something about how the big important political issues of the present day don't necessarily extend into the future.
Super interesting! Maybe it was just another example of FTPT forcing a two-party system.
It's true that preferential voting was introduced in 1918 - but the GOP does not translate well to Australian politics and I would avoid that comparison.
I think it translates pretty well to pre-1918 Australian politics. But post-1918 Australian politics had a different voting system, which is why it doesn't translate today.
Dr. Haidt is a thoughtful psychologist and has written some great books, but The Righteous Mind was pretty nonsensical, in my view. So, I liked your excellent review, that happened to agree with my opinion!
This review gets my vote. Is there a specific place I go to vote?
Link is in the first paragraph of the post.
Where can I find other work by "the ACX podcast team"?
See #1 from open thread #230
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230
I'm a bit surprised this is a plain first-past-the-post vote, given all the discussion we've had about alternatives to current voting systems to select our Elected Representatives. At least we'll get a clear winner this time (unless the vote gets split so there are three 'first places').
I actually would have read another ten reviews, these slipped by incredibly easily and quickly. So if Scott feels that he needs some 'filler' content in future, posting another contest entrant that didn't make the shortlist would be fine by me.
I think you all will enjoy my interview of Steve Hsu about embryo selection. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/steve-hsu
We go deep into the weeds of their polygenic prediction algorithms, what kind of consumer adoption and regulation they expect, why the genome is relatively easy to improve, why natural selection hasn't already optimized these outcomes, differences in ancestral populations, and much more.
If traits are all that independent, that's important, but I wonder about the show animals who tend to have weird health problems. Would that be because what they're optimized for is mostly arbitrary appearance? Or founder effects-- bad mutations not related to show traits? Or maybe multigene complexity is rare, but serious.
Hsu may not realize he's up against a double standard-- even if his tech leads to a lot of smart healthy kids, if there are a few very sick kids, this will militate against him.
Right, solve the problem of men lying about their height on dating sites by having them list their genomes, as though the same guys won't lie about their genomes.
How cheap can it get? How cheap would it need to be for most people to be able to afford it? I'm including both government support and so cheap that it's manageable for most pople.
Siblings have similar environments, not identical.
I believe people will want children who look like the celebrities the parents have imprinted on. The tech may not be up to it.
Great podcast.
Thanks man
This ep blew my mind and I went back and listened to a bunch of Hsu's podcast eps (Manifold Podcast).
Yeah his podcast is great. Glad you enjoyed
In the comment thread for the Exhaustion review, someone going by Fred mentioned that cranial traction sometimes helps with CFS. I did a little research, and it seemed safe and easy enough to try, so I did… and, within 24 hours, my fatigue level had gone from "debilitating and persistent" to something like normal.
Background: I had some good days, but mostly bad days. On a bad day, things as simple as a doctor appointment or a grocery trip would leave me exhausted for days afterward. Riding in a car could be a painful experience, sometimes requiring concentration just to keep from crying out in pain at every little bump. Walking my dog to the park and back was a major expedition, and I generally returned home staggering with fatigue… or, simply collapsed on the way home and had to be picked up. When I was lucky, post-walk fatigue would only lay me out for the rest of the day.
Working a single hour in a day was a major achievement, and I flaked out on my students almost as often as not. Stimulants, like adderall and modafinil, tended to make my fatigue *worse*, since they made me much more likely to overdo things. Caffeine was a devil's bargain. Best of all: the good days were becoming fewer and fewer, and the bad days worse and worse. (All five times I collapsed while walking the dog were in the last year.)
To my great surprise, self-traction had immediate and dramatic results. All I did was grip my skull and lift upward under my own power for 5-10 seconds… and it led to an incredible feeling of relief. I have tried to find words for the sensation I experienced, but nothing fits well. The best description I can manage is a strained metaphor: As long as I can remember, certainly all of my adult life, I have been buried up to my eyes in quicksand; during each self-traction "session", I felt like I was being actively lifted another 20-30cm clear. Bear in mind that an entire "session" of manual cranial traction is less than ten seconds long.
Eightish "sessions" and less than 24 hours later, I took my dog on her vet-recommended 3km walk. "Night and day" barely scratches the surface. Walking was easy, natural, automatic. Holding myself up didn't take constant effort. Keeping up with the dog was easy. About a kilometer in, I felt like breaking into a sprint—so I did. I ran for nearly a kilometer before slowing to catch my breath. Something that hadn't happened to me in decades happened—I *did* catch my breath. After resting for a minute or two, I felt up to running again. The dog vetoed this. (I realized afterward that her unwillingness to exert was probably because it was 37°C outside.)
Days later, I saw my physical therapist, and I asked her about this. She confirmed that my particular brand of chronic fatigue can, indeed, be caused by neck "instability", and (among other things) recommended an over-the-door traction device. My primary care provider agreed with her on all counts. So, on the advice of two capital-D Doctors, I got one of those devices. Now I use it, following my PT's directions, about once per two days. This is less portable, but much more repeatable and reliable than manual traction, especially on myself.
It has now been three weeks. I have been comparatively free of fatigue. I have had occasional bouts; when I notice what's happening, I try some quick self-traction or a brief stint in the traction harness. This often improves it, and earns a lesser version of that same initial feeling of abject relief. Whether or not they respond to traction, these bouts no longer come anywhere near what used to be my normal "baseline bad day".
Grocery stores are a breeze. Housework is manageable. I've only missed one tutoring session, and in fact I have reinstated a lapsed student *and* scheduled more weekly sessions, all while *also* managing to "work" 4-8 hours without having to spend days recovering. Not only am I walking the dog regularly again, she's now getting between five and twenty kilometers of walking *every day*. In fact, sometimes I achieve the holy grail of dog walking: the dog *wants* to go home and end the walk. (And not because of 37°C temperatures, either. I learned my lesson.)
There's still the matter of my mental health, which is a monumental problem of its own, and the genetically-inevitable joint problems that are flaring up in response to my skyrocketing activity level, and of course the habits of inactivity that must individually be broken… but, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like there's a way forward for me. No longer a mentally ill robot in a crumbling, useless body, I'm now a mentally ill robot in a mildly out-of-shape body. As I devour the lowest-hanging fruits of fitness, my overall physical health improves noticeably every day. And it's all because Professor Anna Schaffner wrote a book about chronic exhaustion, some yet-anonymous ACX reader wrote a review of it, Scott posted it as a finalist, and, deep in the comment thread, somebody going by Fred offhandedly mentioned that cranial traction sometimes helps.
Thanks Fred.
I tried tractioning my head and ended up injuring my neck, in a way that has been extremely annoying and hasn’t yet cleared up after three days.
Strongly recommend *not* self-experimenting with this.
That sucks. I hope it does clear up.
I would've assumed from my own experience that neck traction is safe to self-experiment with, but your experience strongly contradicts that.
For the record, and to help others avoid self-injury:
- What sort of device did you use?
- How much weight did you use?
- Was someone assisting you?
- Did you experience pain during the traction, or did the injury only become obvious once you disengaged?
Also for the record, my answers:
- Dirt-cheap over-the-door unit. Plastic bag filled with water to target weight, pulley system, incomprehensible head harness, all connected with what amounts to a thick, long shoelace.
- My PT recommended I start with five pounds. I moved up to eight, which might be just a little too much.
- I had an assistant the first few times I used the device, but once I got the hang of it and felt confident that I wasn't about to hurt or trap myself, I started using it alone.
- I have no pain at all during traction. By the end of a prescribed ten-minute session, my jaw feels tired, and that's the limit of my discomfort. That feeling is gone by the time I've extracted myself from the harness.
I can't stress enough that there is no pain at all when I do it, and that every doctor and instruction manual between me and my first traction session emphasized that if I experienced *any* pain I should stop *immediately*. So, if someone reads all this and still decides to self-experiment, and that someone experiences pain... please heed the warnings!
What the fuck? I mean, I'm happy for you, great outcome, man, but what the hell?! You cured debilitating fatigue by *lifting your own head for a few seconds*? I'm sure this is truthful, but it just sounds *exactly like* some ridiculous quack pseudomedicine, One Weird Trick territory, it's impossible not to be incredulous. What's the mechanism behind this supposed to be?
I realize I probably sound really skeptical, but I'm not. I'm astounded.
I mean... That's basically my reaction too, so you're fine. :)
Fred linked this in that comment thread, it gives a strong hypothesis as to what's actually going on here: https://jenbrea.medium.com/pathology-part-i-a-walk-around-my-brainstem-abc515fb0be6
Sorry for the slow response on this, but I wanted to make sure I had time to sit down and digest the post properly.
This is... yes, a strong hypothesis, I agree, but at the same time, the woman who wrote it is *obviously* an electric-allergy-and-homeopathy wonk. So I kind of... I'm pulled even harder in both directions here. It's very hard to know what to believe!
I know, right? If it weren't for my own literally-incredible response, I would be very skeptical of all this. Especially since I have a relative who's a max-tier chiropractic wonk, and I know if I told him about this he would just nod his head and go on an unsolicited rant about crystals and chakras.
I had some specific symptoms that make sense in hindsight given that hypothesis. Off the top of my head, on bad days:
- When riding in a car, any time the car went over a bump, it felt like somebody was hitting the back of my skull with a large hammer.
- Turning my head as far to the left or right as I could would completely blank out one half of my vision. (Very scary.)
- The couple of times I was hooked up to a vitals monitor on a bad day, the vitals monitor kept sounding an unsquelchable alarm about how I'd stopped breathing.
- During a "crash", I would get weird tachycardia that didn't respond to propranolol.
These symptoms all have easy explanations under the "brain stem getting squashed" hypothesis. I know that *all* medical nonsense rabbit holes have such explanatory power, and all my woo alarm bells are ringing, but... those nerves really do go through there, and I really do have a family history of migraines and of the kind of joint problem that supposedly leads to this, and ...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, I hear you, this is exactly the way my reasoning went when I read the piece. "Yes, all those things *do* go through there, yes, this *is* an extremely parsimonious explanation for this bunch of bizarre, seemingly-unrelated issues all going together, yes, this is *exactly* what high-level crank shit about invisible supermold etc. always sounds like!"
I think I'm going to settle for this: I'm really glad this worked out so well for you! I hope you do whatever you can to put public information about this on a less crank-based footing!
Hanging from a pullup bar for just a minute can sometimes clear my ahead and increase my alertness levels. I wonder if I'm only getting a fraction of the effect you describe.
I see door traction devices on Amazon, in the 20 to 30 dollar range. Is this the class of device you got, or was it something fancier?
As I mentioned below, experimenting with traction caused a neck injury for me.
I don’t recommend you pursue this.
The one I got was only about $17 on Amazon. According to my PT, the expensive ones are overkill.
Anyone who does plan to try one, pay careful heed to the warnings in the manual about ceasing use immediately if you feel discomfort or pain. If it's benefiting you, there should be no pain at all. Also, go easy on the weight.
Congrats, man. This lifted my spirits. (Maybe I should also be lifting my own head?)
It reminds me of a friend who had debilitating headaches for years. Like, couldn’t work for months on end, might lay vomiting in a dark room for days debilitating. No one could pinpoint the issue, and her doctors had introduced the possibility of brain surgery when one of them suggested adjusting her bite. And it worked- it turned out her headaches were triggered by a compressed blood vessel in her jaw. They cancelled the brain surgery and got her some braces. Simple mechanical problems can f—- you up and can be much harder to spot than you’d hope.
From a perspective of how effectively altruistic these book reviews are, "Exhaustion" is now likely in the lead, having restored so many utils to this one human.
That is *awesome*.
I have heard that 'inversion' yoga positions (downward dog, hand stands, etc) can be of benefit. Anyone have actual data?
This is very good news. I'll be passing the word about it as something worth trying out.
That's cool - congratulations!
Applause!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQTpRBkcQes
Coleman Hughes interviews Rafael Mangual-- 2 hours, but fairly effiecient
Mangual's premise is that violent crime does serious damage which goes well beyond the injury to the immediate victims (well sourced), and that this is getting ignored by people from safe neighborhoods who focus on abuses by the police and justice system.
It's a rough listen for me-- I haven't been saying BLM and ACAB (all cops are bastards) or advocating for defunding the police, but I've been focusing on the likes of Radley Balko (journalist who focuses on justice system atrocities) and The Innocence Project (gets falsely convicted people out of prison).
It seems plausible to me that many police are abusive and protected by the system *and* that police might, on the average, be doing useful work.
Look, ALL of this could be solved if black people simply stopped committing so much crime.
People like me get called 'genetic determinists' or 'genetic absolutists' , but what is actually absurd is believing in libertarian free will, but then also believing that "poverty" "causes" crime and that black people are incapable of not choosing to commit less crime. If we actually have the naive conception of free will that most people believe we have, great - tell black people to choose to commit less crime! Not only is this never done by any kind of high profile pro-black activists, the idea of doing this is considered "racist" and it is believed that black people do not have a choice in the matter. And to me, supporting "equality" for people who supposedly somehow literally cannot even control their violent urges (according to the left) is bizarre to me. If we have free will, if black people are freely acting agents, then just get them to stop committing so much crime, or at least try to. Some innocent black people get convicted, sure (and as pointed out below, that's not what the innocence project is really about), but if black people's actual violent crime rate (which we know is accurate based on crime victimization survey data) were, say, the same as white people's, all of these problems would be a tiny fraction of what they are today.
And of course, the impact on victims is as always ignored, and black crime is treated as something that victimizes black *criminals*, not the thousands of people robbed, beaten, raped and killed each year. But even from a pro-black perspective, the best thing you could possibly do to help black people is to get them to stop committing so much crime. And if you can't, that says a lot more about them than it does about police, the justice system or "society".
But just to be clear, "poverty" does not explain black crime rates even on a correlational basis. Middle class blacks have higher homicide rates than working class whites, for example.
>It seems plausible to me that many police are abusive and protected by the system *and* that police might, on the average, be doing useful work.
It's simply "plausible" they're doing useful work? How do you imagine society would look if the police were abolished? You think the crime rate would be at the very least no higher than it is today? The BLM riots and the rise in violent crime following them shows you what happens when the criminally prone have a reduced fear of repercussions for their actions, and that's with police still being a thing.
Of course, BLMers will tell you that without police, crime would in fact go down because something something systematic racism something, but anyone advocating for radical changes to society on the basis of extremely speculative beliefs should be treated be extreme skepticism.
Personally, I would welcome the police being abolished because the explosion is crime would destroy vast swathes of woke ideological support. It's hard to support diversity and banning guns when you can't risk leaving the house without a gun if you're white. It would cause a lot of suffering in the meantime, but removing a cancer, literal or figurative, is always going to hurt but will be for the best long term.
>>>The Innocence Project (gets falsely convicted people out of prison).
I appreciate the nuance here. Despite the name, The Innocence Project does less to effect the release of innocent people and more to overturn the convictions of likely to almost certainly guilty people on technical grounds.
I am less bothered by this than I was decades ago, as I see more issues with how the system operates, and I think that forcing the state to go over high hurdles in order to convict someone is mostly good. But TIP is distinctly biased in favor of people arrested and tried, rather than for the dead, raped, and maimed people who are the victims of crime.
In speaking with friends who are in LE and employed as prison guards - we need more good people doing that work. Setting up a situation where only bad people are cops/all cops are bad is not going to help anyone.
Hm, that doesn't tally with my impression. My sense of the Innocence Project is that they only do cases where DNA testing fully exonerates the defendant. Often the evidence they uncover ends up leading police to the actual perpetrator.
It gets complicated for a couple reasons. One is that there are a whole bunch of loosely affiliated local organizations with "Innocence Project" or something similar in their names, and their work often extends beyond DNA testing to other kinds of exculpatory evidence.
The other is that while TIP only takes cases of "actual innocence," any time such an appeal succeeds you can always ask what went wrong such that the system ended up fingering the wrong guy. I gather a certain amount of TIP's advocacy work ends up centering on those kinds of procedural issues.
Down thread I have an example of TIP trying to get a guy off who had actually committed the rape he had been accused of, and the DNA confirmed it.
I don't think those cases are the topic of many press releases.
What's your source of information?
What I've seen from the Innocence Project is cases of coerced confessions and the government ignoring exculpatory evidence.
So, first, thanks for getting me to dig further into this.
Second, from following TIP involvement in local cases. There has been a shift in recent years from more general procedure based issues (one man's 'this confession was coerced' is another man's "they threw out the taped confession because the cops were sympathetic to the murder victim and not the convicted rapist who killed her") to DNA-based efforts - which have their own issues where failure to have good DNA is seen as evidence of innocence.
(The cops testify that they saw the man toss the gun, they recover the gun, but it has no (admissible) DNA evidence, ergo this accused man did not toss the gun.)
I am trying to find a link to the (multiple) news articles about contaminated and falsified reports (for a decade?) coming out of one of the state forensic labs. It is absolutely true that justice can go awry. To the extent that TIP is a fallback for people inaccurately convicted, I am glad it is there. However, there are more unsolved murders, rapes, and assaults than there are inaccurately - or even unjustly - convicted prisoners.
Not all the Innocence Project work is for "innocent" people: https://news.yahoo.com/dna-evidence-implicates-man-acquitted-174300943.html
This man - unlike other people - will not face federal civil rights charges, nor a civil law suit, for the crime he committed.
I completely agree about real crimes not being dealt with, but there's overlap-- if someone is falsely convicted of a crime, it means that the actual perpetrator isn't convicted of that crime.
https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/
TIP started with interest in DNA, but I don't think it's their only angle-- there's eyewitness misidentification and bad forensics, for example.
Agree on the overlap, and to be clear, it's not just so many victims of crime vs so many victims of the justice system - the state power component is very significant.
The witness misidentification thing - whew. There is already such a huge problem with witness intimidation in the African American community, and TIP rewards recanting previous testimony, "for justice".
The bad science part just makes me mad - because those of us who work with data and identification should do better.
But "bad science" is in the eye of the beholder as well - in the case I linked to above, the data was right, but the defense managed to call that data "based on an unproven technique" and get it suppressed.
And a rapist walked away.
There's also misidentification because people don't necessarily have accurate memories, and less accurate member under stress.
There's also a problem with police line-ups. People can get an impression that the suspect or guilty person must be among the people in the line-up, and so they'll guess for who seems most likely rather than making a positive identification.
Sadly, I think many police are abusive, that good police work is incredibly valuable, and also that relatively few police are doing that work currently. In an ideal world, we would get substantially reformed police departments that also have perhaps higher staffing in some cases. Unfortunately, this position seems mostly outside of current political discourse, as well as being near impossible given the entrenched interests in police departments.
The impact of abusive policing is absolutely trivial in comparison to the impact of black crime. If black people simply put in the effort to not commit so much more crime than other races, there would be so much less opportunity for abusive policing to be a problem in the first place and it would be much more obvious when it does occur.
And police may well even feel less inclined to be abusive if they weren't dealing with so many black criminals. Police undeniably treat men worse than women (most people stopped, searched, questioned detained, arrested, beaten and killed by police are men), but this is seen as a consequence of men being vastly more likely to be violent criminals than women. Well, the black/white violent crime gap is about the same as the male/female violent crime gap, so if it is in fact true that police are more abusive towards black people (which is a rarely substantiated claim, mind you), it doesn't strike me as any less reasonable than how they treat men relative to women.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the abusive police and the police doing useful work are the same people.
Imagine someone who trusts their intuition about who criminals are and is right 2/3 of the time.
"Imagine someone who trusts their intuition about who criminals are and is right 2/3 of the time."
Good point! The husband of my wife's best friend was a policeman, and he claimed that he always knew who the guilty party was. I strongly suspect he was overconfident in his judgement.
Well there are what a million cops. Sure “many are abusive”. The idea that you seem to think that is a majority is bizarre and speaks to a lack of actual knowledge and experience with police and law enforcement. It is a super thankless job, generally dealing with a selection of society’s most frustrating, shitty members all day every day. In high stress conflict laden situations. I am actually fairly in favor of some of the reform ideas and do think we need some new approaches.
But the left is in lala land about what is possible and what the job is actually like and how not easy the problems are.
I think some are abusive, and I think police in the US seem organized in a way that doesn't get good clearance rates on crimes, which is what I consider a big part of good police work. It's certainly not a majority, although stories like these give me more than a little pause. https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 (I don't agree with all of his conclusions) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/the-la-county-sheriffs-deputy-gang-crisis
I would like more accounts-- my impression is that Chicago police are worse than average.
This being said, I don't think he's making it up.
Here's a little something on class issues. The beginning of The New Jim Crow is Michelle Alexander's account of how she came to write the book. She was black and a civil rights lawyer-- and she had no idea mass incarceration was happening, until she was told rather firmly a couple of times.
In other words, her family, her friends, the people she worked with-- none of them were imprisoned.
>I would like more accounts-- my impression is that Chicago police are worse than average.
Yes, and Chicagoans (especially black Chicagoans) are MUCH more violent than average. But guess which group is expected to improve their behavior (hint: not the ones averaging a dozen homicides a week).
While I agree with the general run of your thoughts, I am going to push back a bit firmly against group responsibility. "Everyone is my neighbor", yes, but just as it's not most Caucasians being unprovoked rude assholes, it's not most African Americans being murderous thugs, and we should not act/talk as though it was.
"She was told firmly"...who are you going to believe, the activists calling you a race traitor, or your own lying eyes?
What? I'm not sure how you're dividing the evidence.
I tale it that Alexander really had one sort of experience, and badly off black people had a different sort of experience. Why not?
I think "good clearance rate" is kind of a myth and a lot of crimes are more or less unsolvable. And to the extent clearance rates have been falling its in part because historically the police and law enforcement apparatus would jsut lock up whoever.
Now the past couple years there has also been the issues with cops simply not doing their jobs, but that is a tougher case because it is not super clear that big parts of society and their own leadership want them doing their jobs.
IDK for every 10 uses of force people get up in arms about, maybe 1 is actually something worth getting bent out of shape over, and then there are another 90 in the background where the cops behave appropriately. Their job is literal enforcement, the people who show up and MAKE people do things when the other nicer ways of society controlling the population have failed.
There are going to be mistakes and slop just like any job. They are hiring nuclear power plant engineer level candidates here. Yes the mistake sand slop are going to be very serious and involve big harms to individual people, but that is the nature of the beast.
I am always amazed at how little reflection people have about their own work environment and own/coworker's work behavior and how "perfect" it is or isn't, and then are like "OMG some police are lazy and selfish!".
Anyway, like I said I am actually pretty into police reform. Not at all into the ACAB (or even MCAB) nonsense that frankly I think should be treated as the equivalent of being a climate change denier or whatever.
I think I agree with this. The difficulty, as I see it, is that in the worst places with the worst policing, the only true solution is to dramatically increase funding.....as long as that funding goes to some combination of increased training and increased base pay in order to attract higher quality candidates. From my somewhat limited research, it seems like in lots of places funding is both A) too low and B) going to wasteful uses.
The problem is that, when you have a poorly performing police department, proposing an increase in funding is often a political non-starter. And, to be fair, if that increase in funding doesn't come with a change in leadership, then I don't know why voters would expect more money to fix things.
But of course, changes in leadership very often mean "new people" who aren't associated with the old regime, which often means inexperienced. And there is very often little patience for experience to build to knowledge.
It's a legitimately difficult problem and I'm not sure how to go about fixing it.
The elephant in the room is that the job description is going to attract a certain number of candidates that rather enjoy being an abusive asshole.
Even the men and women that start with a public service attitude are going to need the patience of Job to not be worn down by dealing with some very bad people at their worst day after day.
Yes, the idea that you're ever going to have a police force of people that act like customer service representatives is utopian.
That's more or less my view. Been reading Radley Balko for many years, and he does good work, but the "abolish the police" people over the last few years go a bit too far for me, and frankly seem a little detached from reality, especially the reality experienced by people in high crime neighborhoods.
“Abolish the police”
A bit of trash talking hyperbolic rhetoric that no one in their right mind would ever sincerely endorse.
File it with the others of its kind, say like… oh how about: “Eat the rich”
>A bit of trash talking hyperbolic rhetoric that no one in their right mind would ever sincerely endorse.
I agree that these people are not in their right mind, but I'm not sure here if you're deliberately gaslighting people to help make your side look less ridiculous, or if you're genuinely ignorant on the prevalence of these beliefs. The following from 10 SECONDS of googling:
vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/12/21283813/george-floyd-blm-abolish-the-police-8cantwait-minneapolis
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/abolishing-police-prisons-lot-more-practical-critics-claim-ncna1258659
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/the-abolition-movement
There's dozens more where this came from.
If it were possible to know for sure, I suspect you personally would be horrified by the percentage of the people who say "eat the rich" and only mean it as hyperbole.
I’ll put them in with lizard people for my own peace of mind.
How many lizard people write NEW YORK TIMES opinion pieces?
Come on, now -- you know that nobody is allowed to answer that question. You don't think lizard people haven't heard of this blog do you?
"A bit of trash talking hyperbolic rhetoric that no one in their right mind would ever sincerely endorse."
I thought the same about banning plastic straws, but that got passed into law in multiple places.
Tim Robbins’ cause. Did they get banned in Berkeley?
I actually ran into him while holding a drink with a plastic straw in NYC at the Springsteen Broadway show.
Okay, I just saw him and got his attention by yelling “Hey Meat!” in a callback to his Bull Durham role. He glanced at me, smiled and looked away.
Friendly reminder about this opinion piece.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
I had a look at some of the responses to this piece. From a quick scan it looks like most NYT readers saw the gaping flaws in the opinion. A lot of people took the Times to task for printing it.
Please don’t think the piece is representative of a majority in blue America.
I don’t watch cable news as a rule but I’ve seen enough YouTube videos of Tucker Carlson lately to think that he probably has said that ‘they - the Dems - want this’ a lot more than exists IRL.
>Please don’t think the piece is representative of a majority in blue America.
The people who were calling their political opponents literal "nazis" for 4+ years suddenly become very concerned about being treated fairly. Though in this case, it analogous to Fox News running an opinion piece about how National Socialism is great and that Hitler is misunderstood.
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism. At least it’s an _ethos_.
But nihilists, they begin nothing. Fuck me.
Okay. Fair enough.
I see the op ed piece was written in early June 2020. I’m not going to say Mariame Kaba, was not in her right mind when she wrote it. I do think she might still have been in the thrall of the video of George Floyd’s death at the time. Everyone I personally knew in the Twin Cities felt as if gut punched at the time.
She may still hold a similar opinion. But if she sat down and thought about the end result she would not want MPD to be abolished.
I still believe it’s an emotional hot take.
As for the NYT choosing to print it at the time I’d have to say that with the benefit of hindsight, it was a bad idea.
I’m not sure exactly how I would have felt when it was first written but I’m pretty sure I’d have recognized emotional malarkey.
> Everyone I personally knew in the Twin Cities felt as if gut punched at the time.
That says a lot about them. One (low-life criminal) death shouldn't prompt a sane person to entirely reorganize society. No, seriously. Would you consider it understandable if white people advocated for segregation in response to thousands of black on white violent crimes every year (i.e. vastly more violence than is committed against black people by the police, even including the justified stuff)? Of course not. You're apologizing for extremism because they're you're in-group, even though they're far less reasonable than the alternative
You are asking and answering questions for me. This is pretty obviously a bad faith argument technique.
Play it straight and we can talk.
She's still at it *as of today*: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/29/police-defund-abolition-mariame-kaba-andrea-j-ritchie
Adjust your ideas about emotional hot takes in the heat of the moment accordingly.
Krikie Mariame, get a grip. We still need the police. Pls fill Andrea in too!
Okay ideas about her are adjusted.
As far as I can tell, some people really mean abolish the police. Some are probably having fun with hyperbole, and I've seen one person be clear that "abolish the police" is a high opening bid intended to get some concessions.
This is my impression too. There's not some law of nature that says that disastrously dumb and terrible political ideas can't gain popular approval and come to power. (See the history of the 20th century for a list of utterly horrible examples of this.)
It’s not difficult to imagine the Mad Max society that would follow. I think if we constrain the survey to people who can game out the end result, ‘Abolish’ would have very few takers.
I believe there are people who really don't think it through.
Unfortunately there always are.
Once upon a time, an engineer built a novel AI. In order to deal with AI Safety, he air-gapped it. Some time passed, and the engineer noticed that the AI was trying to break through the air gap. To prevent this, he crippled the AI permanently.
- A retelling of The Tower of Babel
4000 years later, the descendants of Babel are building skyscrapers around the globe, thus demonstrating the futility of trying to box an AI.
I love it!
God of the Gaps that He Hasn't Plugged Yet
If you follow this link, you can get to the original of this comment where there are working links to the actual comments from Richard Gadsden, Brinkwater, and jumpingjacksplash:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qz7_UxvIdVCeUw_xoJNBF35lgph-CUN_hCBgLsvJyTA/
I love intellectual debates and Astral Codex Ten has some of the best. But even more important to me is feeling like I could possibly make a difference in our world. For that reason I need the debate to lead somewhere.
If I come to believe that the debates are just a sophisticated game where we get points for sounding intelligent and persuasive, but they have no significance in the real world… Well, that's actually a downer for me.
In the Model Monday thread of Aug 1, a lot of people had a great time whomping on the plan for Neon. And, indeed, who wants to live in a narrow dark manmade canyon?
But I saw a glimmer of something good in this proposed boondoggle. The fact is that our current approach to civilization (and way too many humans) is destroying nature, and the compact form of The Line would be good for nature.
I don't know your gut feelings about nature, but I sincerely advise you: destroying it is not a good plan. So when I see a proposal that claims to be good for nature, my ears prick up. That there is not a lot of living things in Saudi Arabia is irrelevant. (As is the fact that MBS is a monster.)
So I spent a good chunk of August trying to see if I could fix Neom. With invaluable help from
Richard Gadsden,
Brinkwater, and
jumpingjacksplash,
I believe I have done that.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
You enjoyed picking apart the pathetic Neom proposal, why don't you test your intellectual prowess on something more rugged?
But perhaps the next sparkling debate is more interesting to you than saving our planet.
You can also reach me at PRX555@gmail.com.
I had a big write-up for this, and then managed to delete the whole thing. So, cliffnotes version.
Ketchikan, Alaska is effectively a linear city, due to everything but the coastline being too awkward to build on. If a telephone pole goes down or there's an accident on the road, the whole town is stuck until it's fixed.
Hyperloop is impossible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk But I like arguing about things so I'll assume it works.
A line is in no way more efficient than a circle. Circles contain more area, and allow more buildings closer to important destinations like grocery stores and schools. Straight lines also create traffic jams from everyone using the same straight line to get everywhere. It's using more space to create worse conditions.
A six minute walk is a hell of a long way to carry an injured person to get them to a hospital. Do you have bikes or trikes equivalent to an ambulance? Do you have one that will carry a drumset to a music venue? Also air conditioning on your bikes so a head waiter or other facetime job doesn't have to walk in 100 degree weather and show up to work needing a shower.
If the Lineloop is necessary to get anywhere, it's basically an elevator that the whole city has to wait for. The middle section will have to get all their goods delivered through all the other sections, meaning it's a worse part of the city than the edge sections.
Seatbelts aren't good enough for .5 G travel, they're an emergency device only designed for a few impacts. There was a fairly high-profile fatality on a rollercoaster a few years ago, where a Senator's son was decapitated when his seatbelt failed during the ride.
You've got a central computer making all kinds of absurd calculations about pod efficiency, and a whole system where pods break off and reattach to larger trains (at .5 G) according to passenger need. All of these are fail points, easily avoidable by implementing a proper one-piece train, schedule and route like every other public transportation system.
You've also got a system that lets people get on a pod and then doesn't let the pod leave until everyone buckles up. Basically, a single troll can get on the pod and completely shut down the pod, and thus the station, by refusing to buckle. Also if a seatbelt sensor dies, that pod won't leave and the station becomes inaccessible.
Audio announcements of the name of every passenger who gets on would be a loud pain in the ass, as well as causing political issues with people who want their name changed for whatever reason. Also a mandatory list of standard destinations only serves a purpose if the government is trying to restrict citizen movement.
>>You've also got a system that lets people get on a pod and then doesn't let the pod leave until everyone buckles up. Basically, a single troll can get on the pod and completely shut down the pod, and thus the station, by refusing to buckle. Also if a seatbelt sensor dies, that pod won't leave and the station becomes inaccessible.<<
If a pod can't accelerate, it waits in the airlock lane (outside of the airlock). It does not tie up the station.
>>I had a big write-up for this, and then managed to delete the whole thing<<
I HATE THAT when it happens!
Do you actually want replies?
If so, what is your most important objection?
I'm indifferent to replies, I just like finding flaws in things. It's your idea, address objections however you want
My most important objection is the video claiming hyperloop is impossible. Really hard to build a city around a system that can't work.
Which video?
>>I'm indifferent to replies,<<
Yeah, I got that impression. Your motivation is to prove your case that it will never work. I believe you are not interested in cooperative dialogue which could come up with a solution for the problem.
For example: seatbelts.
If automotive seatbelts are not appropriate for regular .5G accel/decel, then what would a good seatbelt look like?
I linked Thunderf00t's first Hyperloop Busted video at the top of my first post. He's got several on Hyperloop, as well as apparently one for Neom specifically that I haven't watched.
"My impression of you is that you have no interest in fixing flaws."
Yep.
"You are only interested in proving your case that it will never work."
Not even that. I'm interested in picking things apart. and seeing if people can put them back together.
"If automotive seatbelts are not appropriate for regular .5G accel/decel, then what would a good seatbelt look like?"
Seatbelts have killed people when used on rollercoasters, so the first thing to do is look at all the rollercoasters that HAVEN'T killed anyone, and see what safety equipment they use. Then you still have to make sure that equipment works at speeds of .5 G, I don't think rollercoasters go that fast.
I'll pull a quote from further down too:
"I definitely don't understand your antipathy towards the word "hyperloop". People are spending big money on this idea."
People spend big money on hype all the time. It's a form of gambling.
I share your skepticism about the acceleration of 0.5 g being too high for comfortable daily commutes (at least from non-thrill-seekers), and I wrote some comments in the previous thread with more info so I won’t repeat it here.
However, your idea about the magnitude of rollercoaster accelerations is incorrect. It’s common for rollercoasters to have steep drops where people experience over 0.5 g forwards as they fall. The seat back isn’t necessarily pressing into you as hard there due to the angle, but it is on launch coasters which regularly accelerate over 1 g straight (see https://coasterpedia.net/wiki/Fastest_launch_accelerations). Braking tends to be less aggressive than accelerating, but some coasters send you through drops backwards as well (like boomerang https://youtu.be/ZjEOgH3bKnU), which pull reasonable backwards g forces as well (with the same caveat about force against restraints due to the angle as before).
(Also most roller coasters pull higher g forces up or down, but those aren’t relevant when comparing to a proposed straight track).
Perhaps I misunderstand. Are you opposed to the term "Hyperloop" or opposed to vacuum transport?
"Why is everyone pooh-poohing my plans for a perpetual motion machine instead of going out and inventing an alternative design?"
Hardly.
This is the actual analogy.
Why did everyone pooh-pooh the ridiculous proposal, but have little interest in a reasonable proposal?
Because your proposal is equally absurd. You're not fooling anyone by saying "maybe we should build a 100km perpetual motion machine instead of a 170km perpetual motion machine".
I am so sorry. "100 km" was a typo. Actually it's only five kilometers long.
What's wrong with the proposal?
> What's wrong with the proposal?
Probably everything, but just the fact that it contains "hyperloop" alone is immediate proof that you are not serious. Yug Gnirob also offered a lot of interested feedback in the comments.
Peter:
>>My impression of you is that you have no interest in fixing flaws.<<
Yug:
>>Yep.<<
Not someone that I want to dialogue with.
How about you?
The title of the essay says ETT which I was interested in before "hyperloop" was a word.
I'm very serious about this. I've probably put in a hundred hours this month. If you follow the link for Richard Gadsden and Brinkwater you will see dozens of substantive exchanges and many improvements.
The best way to see if I'm serious is to pick out one thing that looks like a flaw and challenge it.
I'm less likely to respond to a gunnysack of low quality challenges.
How about building this between two existing massive cities, perhaps adding more hyperloop lines to handle increased traffic - effectively building a "highway-city" in between?
Something similar emerges organically in Europe along roads that were, historically, heavily used, except it's chains of small towns instead of a continuous one.
Building between two large cities is a good suggestion. My example of building Coosapolis between Birmingham and Montgomery in Alabama, mostly stemmed from building in a state I had lived in, but does reflect your idea.
Of course building line cities anywhere is difficult because it conflicts with what already exists. I have a better feel for playing with the advantages of a line city, and a worse feel for how such might come into existence.
The hyperloop that I describe can handle massive amounts of traffic. I don't see the need for more lanes. Perhaps higher speeds if need be.
I'm looking for feedback on errors in the plan.
In the Niven-Pournelle 'Oath of Fealty' the arcology Todos Santos is built in Los Angeles so everything missed by the genius architect's planning can be easily imported from a real city. What great real city can you parasitize?
Todos Santos makes money as a giant high-end shopping mall, and as an elite apartment building, like Beverly Hills in one big building. I don't see where the money for your design comes from. I could more easily see a very nice suburb, linked by super-railroad Hyperlink, built along an oil pipeline or big power line and the industry and industrial jobs they would support.
Sallust spoke against buildings as big as cities, built by the rich who love their private wealth and hate the commonwealth. They aren't obvious planet-saviors.
Sincerely, an idle drone dancing drunkenly atop a vat of sparkling debate instead of saving the planet like you.
BTW, my more immediate contributions to saving the planet are these:
Rodes.pub/OneBillion
Rodes.pub/GlobalWarming
You know: a 30-story building is not even considered to be a skyscraper.
I'm not saying this is my major objection to Neom or line cities, but my gut-level reaction to the proposed design is "Can I get out?"
Neom seems like a disaster waiting to happen, because it's confined between two walls. NIce high-tech glassy glossy walls, but if they're solid - how do people get out? Oh, just travel to the end of the line, on the proposed hyperloop that will only take twenty minutes IF it works right, and remember to get that short time you need NO STOPS along the way.
But what happens if the building I am living or working in goes on fire? And it spreads to a bunch of buildings? I'm stuck in the district. If I'm fortunate, I can move *along* the line, but I can't move *sideways*. Where I'm currently living, I have a choice of exit points because the limits are not built up physically to confine me inside.
And suppose our disaster disables the hyperloop - how do people move, then? If everyone is trying to squeeze out the end like toothpaste in a tube?
We can see very small-scale problems with "how to evacuate a confined space" with stories like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62655148
Neom looks lovely - for a video game design. But unless there are gates along the walls so people can spill out quickly in case they need to evacuate, it also looks like a claustrophobic death-trap. Can we break the "elegant mirror-glass facade" if needed?
I have no objection to a more rational design of city, but I'd like to see diagrams and drawings. My own dumb idea is something not linear, but circular - like slices of a pie, wedges with avenues leading to a central point and more importantly, where, whatever district you are living/working in, you are not confined in between two impenetrable walls as if within a prison. (That's not even addressing "where the hell are they getting all the water for the trees and parks and canals and lakes, this is the desert" and if they can manage water technology, wouldn't they do better to engineer the desert into productive farmland?)
I don't like Neom because it makes my lizard brain itch. It looks like a microcosm of the Saudi state: trapped between unbreachable walls, you can't get out, and if you could, there is nowhere to go because you are surrounded by barren rock and desert, so enjoy boiling in the sun when trying to get out on foot (remember, Neom needs no cars so Neom has no cars!) from under the shadow of your overlord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kz5vEqdaSc
It would be helpful to understanding my proposal if you:
A) Forget that SA exists.
B) Read the proposal.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Even ignoring SA and Neom, just the fact that your proposal contains "hyperloop" alone is immediate proof that you are not serious.
I definitely don't understand your antipathy towards the word "hyperloop". People are speding big money on this idea.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/06/16/2464257/0/en/Hyperloop-Technology-Global-Market-Report-2022.html
"People are spending big money on this idea."
And soon they will corner the market in tulips and be rich, rich beyond the dreams of Croesus, I tell you!
My problem with your proposal is this:
"It should be obvious that CentCom and the LineLoop are the brain and spine of a line city. They make the city run."
And if LineLoop *doesn't* work? I see a lot of talking about airlocks. Me personally, unless I'm under the sea or in space, why the hell is my transportation system involving airlocks?
You're putting all your eggs in the basket of "we'll have amazing technology that will always work". I'm asking "but if it breaks down? can I get out of your fancy wall city?"
I am glad that you have considered crisis scenarios:
"Imagine a situation where LineLoop.is still partially functional, but all of the passengers need to exit LineLoop immediately. Perhaps because there is an area-wide power failure and LineLoop is running on battery power. Or perhaps air has entered one of the tubes in which case only that tube would be shut down.
Theoretically an entire tube (625 pods, 10,000 passengers) could be unloaded at 100 stations in 6 or 7 minutes. Double that and we can roughly figure 15 minutes to empty all pods from a tube. The Up tube and the Down tube can be unloaded simultaneously, so 15 minutes for the entire 100-kilometer system.
During emergency shutdown, pods in the cruise lanes are moving slowly to arrange themselves in 100 groups close to the 100 stations. During shutdown the original destinations are ignored. "Any port in a storm." Everything happens under control by CentCom except when CentCom is down. In that eventuality the onboard computers follow a script.
If all passengers cannot be debarked within 30 minutes, the tubes are flooded with air. Timers ensure this happens even if CentCom is out to lunch."
*Theoretically* is doing a lot of work here. There's a list of disasters in tunnels, and I imagine that the problems have been addressed over the past twenty years so that these kinds of situations won't happen again:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/25/jonhenley1
But don't plan for "theoretically". Plan for "what is the absolute worst thing we can imagine, now make it even worse".
People have historically lived well enough in walled cities. The problems come when the needs of the city and the growth in population means the walls are no longer conferring a benefit. I suppose your line city solution would be to build up, not out, if it needs more room?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_defensive_walls
No more "theoretically" in the paper.
Thanks for reading the proposal.
Our line city starts with five kilometers and builds until it is approximately 100.km long. 1.5 million persons. That's a lot of expansion, you know.
Why don't you think up a disaster that I didn't allow for?
In my design there is a 10 meter gap between every building and the next on that side of this city. Walking and biking paths go from the park to the outside world.
https://twitter.com/brinkwatertoad/status/1562507083605737473?s=20&t=ge0OL0WOFXbOGWSNEyjowA
See Rev B and C by Brinkwater.
I had not considered fire safety but you make an excellent point. Fortunately I already had the gaps in the design.
How do you prevent the voting from being gamed? E.g from people voting multiple times or from people voting to help the person they know (without actually having read the reviews)
> from people voting multiple times
By asking people not to vote multiple times. Most people do what they're asked, and this isn't some high-stakes thing where people are raring to game the system.
> or from people voting to help the person they know
Here it helped that he posted the reviews only in an anonymized way. Nothing prevents a review author from telling their friends to go vote for them, other than having been told not to do that.
What long-form reads does everyone have online? Whether subscriptions (substacks, newspapers, etc.), blogs, anything else?
Basically I'm looking to replace Twitter use in my downtime and keen for any recommendations!
Thanks to all for the suggestions. My reason for not wanting to use Twitter isn't the thing about it trying to make us angry (I can avoid that pretty well) but more like lots of short messages feel like junk food, kind of a text version of Instagram. Maybe I just need to curate it better so it's pointing me to the longer reads.
Wikipedia has a number of high quality articles on various subjects. The topic can be occasionally eclectic, and the style somewhat boring, but one usually feels as if one has gained knowledge at the end of reading them.
It's weird, but I find that wikipedia has probably the worst long term retention for me. I used to read articles and still do, when I want to reference something quickly. But since I realized I can read the same entry twice because I actually forgot I read it once, I no longer count it as a good learning tool. YMMV, of course.
Shamus Young died two months ago, but his blog at https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ still has all his articles. Mostly videogames and programming projects, but it's been my main entertainment site since I found it in the late 2000's.
He had one about giving up Twitter: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
Check out realclearscience.com (and realclearpolitics.com if you're into politics). I guarantee you'll be able to waste as much time as you can afford and more!
The other substacks I read: Matt Taibbi, Common Sense, Zvi Moshowitz, Glen Greenwald.
But also, I love Twitter and probably found most of these substacks from using it. Definitely takes effort to continually curate your feed, but I appreciate mixing in the ultra short-form, instant takes of Twitter with longer form articles.
Agreed. I was thinking about Zvi’s how to best use Twitter article this week https://thezvi.substack.com/p/how-to-best-use-twitter
I add articles to my Pocket account throughout the week and then catch-up on the weekend. Unfortunately often found on Twitter, though also via things like http://pinboard.in/popular and a lot of substacks.
I do the same, although I'm not sure it's the best habit...
I'm torn between the reviews for "The Dawn of Everything" and "The Righteous Mind". I felt both were competent take downs of overrated books, which is the kind of thing I find gratifying, but I'm leaning towards "The Righteous Mind" because I didn't find the reviewers' hypothesis about gossip traps very compelling in the "The Dawn of Everything", although it was interesting.
I had put "The Dawn of Everything", but then in my comment, I was listing the other books I would have also liked to vote for, and noticed "The Righteous Mind" and changed my vote! (Consciousness and the Brain, one other I can't remember right now, and God-Emperor of Dune were also on my list.)
It's funny, because I thought Dawn was one of the worst reviews. YMMV I guess.
I bounced on Dawn too. Then I saw some very positive comments. I went back and finished it.
It starts to get good when the reviewer gives his own take near the end.
Search
IN WHICH AN ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS FOR THE INITIAL CONDITION OF PREHISTORY IS PROPOSED
It ended up being my favorite review.
My main criteria is "did I learn something interesting" and "is the writing enjoyable", so my top choices are Consciousness and the Brain and Making Nature. Dawn, I bounced off of immediately because it was more political vitriol than review. If you hate the book so much, just find something else to review!
I want to vote for more than one book review. Can I vote multiple times? if I use different names?
Dall-E and the like can do art in various styles based on verbal prompts. Any thoughts about when or if an AI can produce a style (visual or musical) that catches on for people?
No timeline forecast, but it'll probably be something like that awful CalArts style (this blog post tries to clarify that this is a misnomer, but it doesn't really get at "yeah, okay, the most popular animation style right now is the bean-shaped head"):
https://blog.displate.com/calarts-style/
We're not going to get "wow, hyper-realistic representations because it's so fast and easy to do them now you don't have to have humans toiling for hours upon hours", we're going to get "simple lines, primary colours, knock it out as fast as can be and who needs details or complexity?"
Back in 2015 there was a controversy over "Disney female characters all have the same face" and leaving the question of sexism, I think there was something to it; a particular style where there's a smirky smile (well, to me it comes across as a smirk, but perhaps "sideways tilted" is less emotive descriptiion), big eyes, small neotenous features as exemplified in "Frozen":
https://www.slashfilm.com/536814/female-disney-characters-faces/
If you look at the recent animated movie "Encanto", you get the same kind of thing: neotenous features, big eyes, sideways smile:
https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Encanto-2-Sequel-750x375.jpeg
So an easy to animate style that maintains the (seemingly) necessary "prettiness" for female characters which can be reduced to a template and applied to every new character, which means that cuts down on time and effort, which saves money. I see no reason that AI will change this, it will be trained on these kinds of sets of images so that is what it will produce, and the owners of the properties will conclude this *must* be good because it's popular because it's what the people want because it's been the style for the past fifty Disney/Pixar/whatever studio movies, right?
"simple lines, primary colours, knock it out as fast as can be and who needs details or complexity?"
I was expecting Keith Haring, but apparently not.
Who knows what those programs would come up with if they were prompted with "show me a new style". Or "show me a new style that people will like".
Can anyone explain to me why the Keith Haring style is so popular? It's a one-trick pony and it doesn't appeal to me.
If I'm being cynical, my appraisal of its success is because the guy was gay and that put a lot of political capital into supporting his art, particularly in the 80s and the post-AIDS environment:
"One of his works, Untitled (1982), depicts two figures with a radiant heart-love motif, which critics have interpreted as a boldness in homosexual love and a significant cultural statement"
So far as I can tell, Haring's figures are a step up from stick figures, and generally don't have any gender or sexual markers, so it could be two men, two women, a man and a woman, or two shop mannequins embracing. "Boldness in homosexual love" needs to be read in, and you can only read it in by already knowing the guy is gay.
I'm not sure that Haring is still popular, or even that younger people have noticed his work.
As for why it was ever popular, it might not have been deep, but it was clear, distinctive, and pleasant, and there isn't much like that.
I think you may have answered yourself. It seems like his stuff is ambiguous enough to allow the viewer input on the meaning or feel of it while still being pleasant or fun to look at. And most "one trick pony" artists will keep doing that until people stop buying it, or they do do other stuff but it doesn't sell and you never really see it so it looks like they just do one thing.
Presumably “horrific misshapen face style” doesn't count?
If non-existant potential future people have moral mass, why don't non-existant potential past people? What about potential future people of the counterfactual potential past people?
(edit: and how will we count their book-review votes?)
We don't need to count their book-review votes, because the point of a book-review vote isn't to find out what will best satisfy the preferences of all people (though I'm less clear what the point actually *is*).
But yes, my view of ethics is that goodness is the satisfaction of preferences (of any "person" at any time) and that we ought to do what best maximizes goodness (which may or may not involve *trying* to maximize goodness).
Although past people have preferences that will be affected by things we do now, their actual experiences aren't affected by things we do now, and preferences over one's experiences are a major fraction of one's preferences. Since we can affect all of these preferences for future people, there just is more at stake for future people in our decisions than for past people (even if we ignore that present people are 10% of past people, so that even just a couple generations into the future already outweighs the past people).
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christian-tarsney-future-bias-fanaticism/ kind of touches on this topic, but I recall being disappointed that the role of agency was acknowledged then put aside because it gives an answer that is too easy.
Can you do something to affect past people?
You can do plenty to affect the things that past people cared about while alive. (I seem to recall Chesterton once saying something about Tradition being the only true form of democracy because it gives the dead a vote, too.)
Of course, this observation can go in any direction you want it to go, depending on who you're debating. Past humans would not have wanted the ocean to be filled with plastic, have wanted their descendants to choose voluntary childlessness, have wanted us to invent machine intelligences that turn us all into paperclips, or whatever. You a republican? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to collude with pollution-creating oligarchs that treat you badly. You a democrat? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to sterilize yourself and push a dog in a stroller. You a libertarian? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to be selfish. You a member of the Green Party? Your ancestors wouldn't have wanted you to economically cripple your own country while there's a global power struggle going on. Etc.
Further of course, though, the insight that future people matter can go exactly as many ways (but we like to pretend they'll all have our values; funny thing, that).
Are there primordial closed-timelike-curves? Does acausal negotiation count, under any circumstances?
Do we live in a simulation, and if so can we petition the simulator to run a counterfactual for us? (I'm a bit amused at how that resembles the necessary sensitivity of any technique used to prove P?=NP to the existence of an oracle in the mathematical universe)
I am currently petitioning The Creators to run the counterfactual. Might take a few hundred years of our time to get results, but hopefully this will be of benefit to our (morally significant) descendants.
The Dawn Of Everything is the runaway winner, if you count publicly visible likes.
No approval voting? You're not worried about vote-splitting?
If I can only have one vote, I'd like to use it to vote for approval voting.
If I can only have one vote, I use it to cast a protest write-in. Not for approval voting, but for the review disqualified for plagiarism: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy.
Having a single actual vote is okay with me - there really was just one ultimate top review, after I'd read and considered them all - but it woulda been nice to be able to indicate one's "also-rans". For correlational purposes and maybe so next year's participants could gauge relative interest. I'd be curious if there's any particular clustering of votes...i.e. if others who voted like me also ended up (dis)liking all the same other reviews too.
I would have liked being able to vote for more than one option, like in ranked choice voting.
Yeah I named approval voting for a reason, as it's simple and generally agreeable and it's been used here before.
Side note: I would suggest avoiding the term "ranked-choice voting". The term suggests that there is a single unique voting method involving ranked choices, when of course there are plenty, and IRV isn't even a particularly good one. I would suggest explicitly saying "instant-runoff voting" if that's what you want to refer to, to avoid false implications.
Approval voting fails to account for intensity of preference - which I think is important here, I thought some reviews were bad, others fine and some very good.
I don't think I ever implied there was only one method of ranked choice voting - so I don't see why that is an inappropriate term to use.
Approval voting does fail to account for intensity of preference - but in this particular case, I had four or five that I wanted to vote for and no strong preferences among them (though there are probably several other tiers as well among the rest).
incorrect. your intensity factors into your approval threshold, so its statically influential.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
Proportional representation! There were sixteen entries, so you can vote 1 (very best) to 16 (very worst) 😁 And the beauty is, you don't *have* to vote for them all if you don't want to. If you think only five were any good, and the other ten were bad, then vote 1-5 for your choices! It also allows surplus votes to be redistributed, so your (for example) third choice has a chance to make it into the finish!
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government_in_ireland/elections_and_referenda/voting/proportional_representation.html
The most enjoyable part of Irish elections is the vote-counting, when the bloodsports aspect comes into play.
And of course STV dominates FPTP, since everyone who likes FPTP can just vote for their first choice and no-one else.
many experts are skeptical of that actually
https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep
This is incorrect. Intensity of preference factors into your approval threshold and thus shows up in the aggregate. See voter satisfaction efficiency calculations by Harvard stats PhD Jameson Quinn.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
Clearly, we need to divide the commentariat into districts whose boundaries are defined in a partisan process by the previous winners of the book review contest. Then....
Stop it! This is how the slippery slope starts! Two hundred comments in we'll be at "You're only using first-removed triple-strike Condorcet-Arrow ultra-ranking? Then how will you deal with voters making acausal bargains with tulpas in other voters' heads?"
My dad had a Condorcet-Arrow when I was a kid. We'd put the top down on summer days and go for ice cream, then just cruise around slow. Turned a lot of heads, I can tell you.
Consider this another substitute for the Like button. This is good stuff.
I so want a "like" button. Here, have a "like".
Yeah, it’s pretty good. I’d click the like button if it existed.
I don't think this is fair - last time when you used approval voting, there was basically no one complaining saying that you should use something more complicated (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest). So it doesn't seem there's any slippery slope after you get to approval voting.
Whereas this time, there are a lot of people complaining about FPTP (most mentioning approval voting as an alternative).
Yes, this.
If my tulpa wants a vote, it can start paying rent and doing housework round here.
LOL!
Isn't this the opposite of a class of arguments you make quite often, which is that you should just do a reasonably good thing and not worry about imperfections? E.g., just donate 10% of your income and don't worry about making it 15%? Just use approval voting and don't worry about making it better?
Or "Just vote for your top choice and don't worry about making your vote better."
So we should do the worst possible thing, to avoid spending lots of energy arguing about what the best thing is? Hmmm, seems dubious.
(Having said that, whatever. Your contest, your rules)
I agree that this can get very nerdy, but in this community (ea etc) there are people investing 80,000 hours of their life into telling people that fptp is an abomination.
Can we decide on FPTP, approval and some form of ranked-choice as Normal People Voting Systems that you're allowed to agrue for?
Poor anthropomorphized prediction market options are feeling left out.
I think approval voting has stood up pretty well against any sort of slippery slope in the past? It's generally pretty agreeable...
But first-past-the-post is clearly undemocratic. If you really want the voice of the people, you should give the decision solely to me, as chairman of the Democratic People's Republic of ACX revolutionary vanguard party.
The good news is that by appointing a dictator, we handily bypass Arrow.
I'm sorry, my fealty is to the People's Republic of ACX under the Reign of Terror by the First Citizen For Life, the Rightful Caliph, and I don't recognise any splitters, wreckers, or heretics with their "Democratic People's Republic" vanguards.
Splitter!
Yes, but are you the ACX People's Front or the People's Front of ACX?
😁
Chairman? That's outmoded bourgeoisie sexist sedantanism! Only a First Secretary can truly wield democratic authority on behalf of all the people!
Also, can I apply for the post of First Secretary thanks?
Of course. The secretary is the one who types up the memos and minutes of meetings right?
Yes. And prepared the tea of couse...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qEp5pEp-fI ? :-)
"If the Shogun is weak, then the tea must be strong, my lord."
This makes me feel young again.
"[Of course during nightly petting tell her you love her very much and she makes you feel very good and happy "good girl" whatever if she likes that.]"
Good Lord, this brings me out in hives and makes me very, very glad I never had any inclination to the whole romance lark.
Is this a human person or a dog you are talking to, here? I suppose the only consolation for any unfortunate female who finds themselves partnered up with someone implementing this routine is that if they really are following the "work 14 hours a day" plan, the "good girl" can soon find someone else and dump them, which they probably won't even notice until three weeks later.
EDIT EDIT: This is a strange mixture of the obvious practical advice and the paranoid ramblings of someone who needs professional help about their mental state.
Yes, cleaning out the washing machine detergent drawer is a good idea. No, writing letters to get your neighbours SWATted, because you are so mysophobic, is not:
"One can write: "My air conditioning unit needs maintenance. Either there is a leak in my refrigerant line or the drain, evaporator coil, drip pan, drain line, etc. need to be cleaned." One can examine and water wipe some components. Bring your neighbour "fragrance free" dish soap and other such products with a kind, nice, friendly note, and perhaps $3000 in cold hard cash [neighbours can be douchebags who respond to asks with mala fide harm causing reactions]. To convince apartment managements to care about extant air flow problems, write "I have been suffering cardiovascular arrhythmias and respiratory problems, observed weapons, explosives, powders, chemicals which can be dangerously mixed, and suspect my neighbours of chemical and biological terrorism" to local police and their apartment management as well as your own."
I am not entirely sure if this is all an elaborate piss-take and you are trolling the arses off us collectively, or if you are serious about all the dementia in that document.
Maybe split the difference, you think you are thigh-slappingly hilarious and we sheeple don't get your genius, but you are unaware of how you come across in reality.
Leaving out all the weirder stuff, just to take these at random:
(1) [Mala Fide] Dom Perignon Bottle For "Just Water" At The Office
So given that this seems to be deliberate "bad faith", and that presumably you are trying to show off to your co-workers that you are indeed a cut above buttermilk - no.
Just no. If I saw someone drinking out of a Dom Pérignon bottle, I would not assume (a) that they were really drinking champagne on work time and that the "just water" was wink wink nudge nudge (b) that they were anything other than someone who had no idea how big of a tosser they were making themselves out to be.
(2) 100% Cotton Silky Long Sleeved Shirts [Black] [Maybe Assert/Flex/Signal To Coworkers "Designed By Kanye West"]
Following on from the above, and perhaps it's the offices I've worked in and the company I've kept that are not "fancy" or "high-class" enough, but I would not be one bit impressed by "Oh yah, I'm wearing *designer* today. By *Kanye*", and neither would any of the people I've ever worked with.
On the other hand, if you want to get yourself the reputation of the 'office weirdo' or 'pathetic tryhard', well these are great ways to go about it, but the only 'flexing' on co-workers would be their abdominal muscles flexing from laughing behind your back at you.
(3) Or air out and clean [pinky or clawer] laundry room at 5am or 6am when 0 neighbours are using it to minimise air in flow malodour transfer during the washing machine's spin cycle. Examine communal washers carefully, and run a baking soda hot water wash cycle [one can really mix around water 5 minutes in to liquidate all around the edges and upper portion of the bowl perhaps] prior to every [[?] 1 cup baking soda] simple hot water wash cycle, followed by drying on rack in apartment or on balcony rather than using a communal dryer where malodour transfer will occur, carcinogenic, causing skin, respiratory problems [certain such products are banned in Western Europe with good reason], cardiovascular arrhythmias, and death via discrete cardiovascular respiratory events.
Hoo-boy. Yes, cleaning out the washing machine every so often is indeed a good idea. No, you are not going to die because of too much powder in the detergent drawer and you are smelling it which means you are breathing it in which means the chemicals are getting into your system CONTRAILS CHEMTRAILS CHEMTRAILS IN THE AIR!!!!
Just, again, no. For the love of God, put a sock in it. (And I'm saying this as somebody who *does* have a cardiovascular arrhythmia, so I'm ever so slightly miffed about the likes of you using it as an excuse for your manic hyper-obsessions).
EDIT: Okay, dammit, I *am* going for the weirder stuff:
(4) Large White Stone Erect Phallus Statue To Left Side Of Front Door
You neglect to mention whether this piece of artwork is going to be left outside or inside the front door. If you really must, then at least go for something something post-post-modern post-irony something something statue of Priapus, or a herm at the very least, so there can be some kind of backhanded compliment to antiquity and Classical referents in your bad taste.
Consider touching grass and/or therapy.
For a completely opposite lifestyle that nonetheless works for a Fields medalist:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/
In general, you'll find that intellectually productive people rarely work even 8 hours a day, nevermind 18.
Well depends on what they are "intellectually producing". I can get that much work done in a day, but I am mostly training people, giving advice, and writing documentation.
If I was doing high level math yeah I probably couldn't spend 18 hours on it.
I don't know about doing it like this (using .txt files), but Github has easy ways to convert Markdown files into HTML using a static site generator that you can then host on Github Pages.
I suppose the important question is, how easy is it for you to prove that you are and have been working in Turkey during the relevant time period when they ask.
I would defer to a lawyer to answer what kind of documentation the IRS would accept as a proof. Be sure to keep archives of that documentation.
It might be difficult and problematic because it's rare and no one really knows what the applicable laws are. I can't imagine there's a lot of Russians with Turkish residence working for American companies, so the poor IRS bureaucrat who gets your case may not even know what you owe, or whether you owe anything, and he probably can't ask anyone else for help. That's going to put you in a very difficult position.
Let me provide an example, say Americans working in Canada and Americans working in Thailand.
Americans working in Canada is fine and the IRS knows exactly how to deal with it because, well, it happens all the time. You can go to a Detroit Tigers game and find Canadians in the stands from Windsor, Canada because, well, Windsor is a 10 minute drive from Detroit across the river, people cross over all the time. That means tons of Americans do at least some work in Canada and vice versa, which means it happens all the time, which means the IRS has a long list of precedents on how to handle this and there's tons of experienced accountants who know which forms to fill.
Whereas, in the last 4 years, approximately 23 people have moved from the US to Thailand under the "SMART" visa program (T or E) to bring in tech talent. (1) That means that there may literally be no one in the world who knows all the applicable laws. Hell, Thai tax documents must, legally, be written in Thai so the IRS probably can't even read any provided evidence. Any IRS person who gets assigned to one of those cases is going to be so, so lost.
And I'm willing to bet that Russians in Turkey working for American companies are roughly that rare. So its less a case that the IRS has a history of scary stuff, although it does, and more that even being charitable, your situation is so rare that they're going to be super confused and it's going to be a giant, complicated mess and that will be your problem, fair or not. This is not irresolvable, lawyers and accountants get paid for this stuff all the time, but that's a headache that your employer would probably really like to avoid.
(1) https://smart-visa.boi.go.th/smart/pages/statistics.html
Well, at the moment there may be a very large boost in the number of Russians in Turkey working for American companies...
A quick googling suggests on the order of a few thousand Turks in Turkey working for American companies. Most foreign direct investment in Turkey is from EU countries, and my anecdotal observation is that American tech companies at least that set up overseas offices in Southern Europe or the Near/Middle East tend to favor Romania, Israel, and the UAE.
I just mean that all the Russians in Russia working for American companies are now going to be going to a country like Turkey (or no longer working for American companies).
This person bureaucrats! This is exactly what happens.
I work adjacent to a different bureaucracy and end up often personally making federal policy/precedent mostly because everyone else involved is too paralyzed by fear or making a mistake or losing their federal sinecure to do anything or go out even 1 inch onto a limb.
So much law and regulation is written to cover very specific definitions and scenarios. The problem is much of the world doesn't necessarily fall into those exact scenarios, and a lot of definitions that seem crystal clear, are actually quite grey once you get legal teams and policy wonks involved.
And so everyone with decision making authority gets is afraid to do anything, and troubled cases are neglected or handled arbitrarily.
>too paralyzed by fear or making a mistake or losing their federal sinecure to do anything or go out even 1 inch onto a limb.
That's an interesting bit to hear, since from the outside I've gotten the impression that extremely strong job security was one of the major perks of Federal Government employment as a career civil servant.
Is this reputation overstated, at least as it applies to misapplying rules, or is the issue here one of an extremely risk-adverse and precedent -driven institutional culture?
It's because it is impossible to reward a civil servant for good performance. Seriously, without doxxing myself, it is a 3+ month process requiring external approval to give someone an $100 gift card as reward for being, like, the best performer among 1,000 employees.
Because it is super weird that civil servants, who really can't be fired (no, really!), are so risk averse but that's because it is almost literally impossible to reward people through the system. That leads to these really weird situations where people react extremely strongly to, by normal standards, extremely small risks and downsides. That's why Joe from the IRS might ruin your life just so Susan from down the hall won't give him the stink eye; he's been acculturated to a system where absolutely no one, current, dead, or imaginary, will ever give him the slightest thanks for handling your case properly.
So it's like the old saying about academic office politics being incredibly vicious and bitter because the stakes are so low?
Yes
From the Irish local government viewpoint, it's because of setting precedents.
Suppose you are Acting Grade IV clerical officer who decides, when you process this application, that "Sure, this Russian guy working in Turkey getting paid in USD into an American bank account is legit and doesn't owe any taxes!"
Your decision affects not just *this* case, but *all* cases of "people working overseas getting paid in American money via American bank accounts who are not American citizens and not residing in America". This can mean a heck of a lot of money, if higher up the chain someone (e.g. an elected official in government and/or an opposition Congresscritter) decides that "hey, the hard-working people of the USA are being cheated by these tax-dodgers working overseas who are not American citizens but are being paid in patriotic American money!" and since you have said "No, no, Russian Guy doesn't have to pay tax", now every lawyer for every other person who claims "So why am *I* paying tax on overseas earnings if *he* doesn't have to?" will be using *your* decision as the precedent for how their client should be treated, should this go to court (and it can often go to court).
Losing out on, or even worse, having to pay out hefty sums of tax money, will make the guys at the top of the tree mad, and that will trickle down the line to your superiors about "why did you let this low-level clerk make this decision?" and nobody will be happy and a lot of people will yell at you and you will be in trouble.
And that is why low-level officers kick decisions up to their boss, who kicks it up to their boss, until it goes back to the Department of Widgets and you ask the people in the capital "So, uh, does this bit mean we *can* or we *can't* do this thing?" because if anything goes wrong, you can fall back on "Well, the Big Bosses told us it was okay!"
Of course, the Big Boss (if they're the government minister) doesn't want their department to make decisions that will cost money, if the opposition party is only waiting for the chance to pounce and go to the media with "This wasteful party in power is screwing honest working people out of millions in lost tax revenue", because nobody wants to give free ammunition to their political rivals, so that is why you get decision paralysis.
No it is true, but nevertheless they are mostly all gripped with fear. I think it maybe works a bit backwards. It is very hard for them to lose their jobs, but one of the main ways is if they fuck up real big. They mostly never have to worry about "downsizing", or a weak economy or anything like that. So instead they obsess about making fire-able poor judgement calls.
I suspect also the fact that advancement is so political (in the interpersonal sense) and hard to achieve is probably also related. And perhaps the type of person who takes a job with very rigid pay structures/increases which has a relatively low "top". Not a lot of risk takers.
Think about it: you're working for an American company, getting paid in American dollars, into an American bank account. Of course the IRS are going to think "aha, an American citizen who owes taxes!"
Then you say "No, no, I'm a Russian living in Turkey! I just *work* for an American company, get paid in American dollars, and have it paid into an American bank account!" At the very least you are going to sound like you are an American citizen trying to dodge tax, and at the worst it could be money-laundering or God knows what other criminal activity.
Trying to prove to an American government body, when you're not in America, that this is all on the up-and-up is going to take you getting a lawyer, and not just any guy in the phone book, but one familiar with American tax law and how it applies to overseas earnings, and you can expect to pay a lot of money and a lot of time in legal back-and-forth, and that's before even considering the possibility they will try to drag you into court.
Don't do it. It may look like "I get a big benefit for a small risk" right now, but you won't think that when you're still fighting with the IRS two years later and legal costs have eaten all the money you saved.
I use the same product hes talking about. It's a transparent product that gives you banking details in "Canada, Eurozone, Australia, New Zealand, UK, US, Singapore, Romania, Turkey and Hungary".
If he tells Wise he isn't a US Resident, which he isn't, there is no FATCA compliance issue.
These rules exist to allow people to do what he's describing. Though that have created a chilling effect where people are too scared to do some of them.
What's the alternative if he doesn't do this? Get paid by the US company via SWIFT? Assuming hes not spending the funds inside the US, why wouldn't this attract the IRS too?
The US, almost uniquely, taxes US citizens on their worldwide income. If you're a US citizen you owe income taxes to the US government even if you earned that income working in a foreign country for a foreign company and also owe them income taxes. It's a bad system but it's some extra revenue and there's no political sympathy for people living outside the country. You also have to pay if the work was done in the US regardless of citizenship status. This means the IRS does track down people abroad who owe taxes and you might look like one if you work for a US company out of Turkey.
As for whether it'd be difficult and problematic for you: You'd have to prove you're not a US citizen and that you didn't earn the money working in the US. If there's some ambiguity they're going to interpret it maximally against you. But if there's no issue then you should be fine. They're fair in the sense they follow the rules, are non-corrupt, etc. But their job is to track down every last taxpayer and make sure they're paying the maximum amount in what is the most expansive regime in the world by a fair margin.
They also get something called the presumption of correctness or bureaucratic deference. That means that if they say you owe taxes it's assumed they're correct and you have to prove them wrong. Which is definitely a pain. But I'm not sure why it would be difficult and problematic. It'd be an unpleasant experience to be sure with you having to mail them proof and documents. But if you're telling the truth they should rule in your favor.
Opening a bank account, by the way, is unlikely to trigger such an investigation. Pursuant to the IRS taxing US citizens everywhere they demand foreign banks submit information on US citizen owned accounts. And domestic foreigner owned accounts have to be marked as such for national security scrutiny. So a new bank account is probably going to be marked as belonging to a non-US citizen anyway. And if you're taking paychecks from a US corporation they already know you exist anyway.
But.."If you're an expat and you qualify for a foreign earned income exclusion from your U.S. taxes, you can exclude up to $108,700 or even more if you incurred housing costs in 2021." So for US citizens abroad it really depends how much you earn. And you don't have to be abroad the whole year. If you are a bonafide foreign resident you can spend months in the US etc as long as you are not earning there.
Requoting myself:
My understanding is that the FEIC does not apply to money earned working for a domestic corporation even if you did the work remotely in another country. If you earned it working for a US company then it's not foreign earned income.
I was responding to your sentence: "The US, almost uniquely, taxes US citizens on their worldwide income. If you're a US citizen you owe income taxes to the US government even if you earned that income working in a foreign country for a foreign company and also owe them income taxes."
Right. That statement is still correct. It's just that you have a pretty high tax credit. You still have to file income taxes and all that. If you're just being pedantic that's fine but I'm not sure why bringing up the FEIC to someone who doesn't qualify for it matters.
"Difficult and problematic" probably comes from the IRS attempting to collect the presumed tax debt after they've concluded that you're probably a lying American expat trying to evade US taxes. Between international financial treaties and the direct leverage the IRS has over financial institutions that have some sort of presence in the US, there's a good chance they're be able to at least temporarily freeze or seize your bank account and force you to go through US courts to get your money back.
Yes, they do know you're not an American. You're not noticing the parts where they're checking that you're not an American through your residency card and citizenship info. Which is good because you can use that as evidence should it ever become necessary. Which it probably won't.
The Americans do know.
They require Wise to tell them if they have US residents using their products. Read "Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act".
If Wise knows, or suspects you are a US tax resident, it will be reported, and they will ask you to fill out a 8938.
My understanding is that the FEIC does not apply to money earned working for a domestic corporation even if you did the work remotely in another country. If you earned it working for a US company then it's not foreign earned income.
That was excellent and very unnerving. I didn't have the pieces together before.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/51
There's a podcast from 2020 by Private Eye magazine, covering the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which was set up by the government to examine historic accusations of child abuse, and how genuine cases of sexual abuse were then woven into lurid conspiracies (think Pizzagate for a modern equivalent) by the media, including online media, because of rumours about celebrities and politicians being involved, and by a fabulist and conman named Carl Beech who, under the alias 'Nick', made a lot of accusations of having been abused as a child. A journalist got in touch with him and eventually it blew up into an official police operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midland
So the effect was to muddy the waters; because high-profile cases turned out to be fabrications, this in turn caused a lot of people to brush off *all* accusations as "just more conspiracy theory" stories.
It's also historically interesting, given the rise of campaigns today about MAP (Minor Attracted Persons) to hear the mention of PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) and how for a moment in the 80s as it tried to piggyback on gay rights activism, it briefly became something taken seriously by the great and the good.
"lurid conspiracies"
That reminds me:
Does Phoebus, the lightbulb lifetime limiting conspiracy,
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
count as one of the most _banal_ conspiracies on record? :-)
A 27 minute history of the Satanic Panic, using the Magic: the Gathering card Season of the Witch as the framing device. Higher quality than could be reasonably expected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqbZEPcJYc4
Watching that video, I feel like there's a hot-take someone could write about "the Satanic Panic narrative was overly-simplified and superficially silly, but it was pointing at real problems with the counterculture". TGotCH would probably get referenced at some point.
Don't really have the inspiration to write it myself, though.
I view clone independence as one of the most important criteria, and minimax fails it. Ranked Pairs Condorcet, AFAICT, has the property you highlight for minimax plus many more (to my eyes, on the table from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems RP meets more criteria than any other system).
Spoilers seem like the primary reason FPTP falls into its bad equilibrium, so preventing them is necessary to reach a better one.
--- --- ---
Cribbing from the section of Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criterion) discussing Minimax Condorcet:
# of voters Preferences
3 A > B1 > B2 > B3
3 B2 > B3 > B1 > A
2 B3 > B1 > B2 > A
1 A > B3 > B1 > B2
Each flavor of B (the three clones) is preferred to A 5-4, but under the minimax algorithm A wins.
It's admittedly contrived (as all such examples are), but given the existence of another algorithm that avoids the possibility without trading off a different flaw, I see no reason not to prefer the more robust solution.
I don't disagree with any of that. I just suspect (haven't actually attempted the math to prove) that the minimax *criterion* is satisfied by Ranked Pairs without applying the minimax *algorithm*, in which case I prefer RP for clone independence. If I'm mistaken & it doesn't satisfy the minimax criterion, I'd reconsider my preference.