Im Ernst, ich wäre sehr vorsichtig mit solchen Sachen. Suchen Sie auf jeden Fall einen sachkundigen Arzt (nicht nur Ihren örtlichen Hausarzt), vielleicht sogar einen Endokrinologen, bevor Sie etwas einnehmen. Eine Testosteron-Supplementierung kann dazu führen, dass Ihr Körper aufhört, Testosteron zu produzieren, was bedeutet, dass Sie lebenslang darauf bleiben müssen.
Dieser Typ ist sehr gut zum Thema Nahrungsergänzung anzuhören. Lassen Sie sich nicht von dem albernen Namen abschrecken, er ist der wahre Deal: http://www.st4all.net
- Men are attracted to youth, because that maximizes the number of possible kids before menopause, and to thin waists as proof she's not already pregnant.
I'm more mystified by the beauty of sunsets, flowers, open fields, wildlife, art, music...
We can spot predators in open fields. Maybe sunsets are similarly reassuring--we can see to the horizon. After we descended from the trees we needed savannas where we could see our predators and prey from a distance and exploit our ability to run. Art and music are variations of patterns and symmetry. Perhaps for reasons touched on by magic9 above, and maybe there's something deeper too--our bodies are symmetrical, to one degree or another, so are our brains. Perceiving patterns has high survival value, e.g., to keep track of when animals feed and approach the waterhole, to know when to hide and when to hunt, and to judge the likelihood of bad/good weather, and so on. Hence we create and play with patterns in art and music?
I would say why not try it. It seems to work for some people, not others. I tried it for aches after skiiing, and it had no effect whatever even after I doubled, tripled and quadrupled the dose.
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
Saying IQ is “pseudoscientific” is like saying “paper job applications are pseudoscientific”.
Are they perfect for their intended use? No.
Does that matter if they more or less work? No. Ditto say standardized tests.
Yes it might be better for each kid to have a 4 weeks multiphasic intellectual inventory instead an IQ test. But when you don’t have time/resources for that.
The way I understand things (very much not an expert):
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in both school and work at every level, from janitor to physicist. People with very high IQs tend to do very well in all kinds of intellectually demanding things.
IQ is a score which is correlated with intelligence--it's not intelligence itself. (To make an obvious point, if I let you copy down the answer key and then gave you an IQ test, this wouldn't make you any smarter.) So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case. There are also people who get high IQ scores and never do much impressive with their brains--that can happen for many reasons, but one is that they're really not as brilliant as their IQ score would normally suggest.
Also, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
>So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case.
This is kind of a pointless thing to say without data. Okay, "some people" are like this....how many? If we don't know what proportion of the population this applies to, then this point is not useful.
>so, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
Okay, and why does this matter? The problem that people, especially on the political left, have with IQ is most emphatically *not* that it is not useful for distinguishing geniuses from hyper-geniuses. The problem is precisely that it measures the intelligence and predicts the life outcomes of a majority of the population, and given the heritability of intelligence, this is potentially devasting for left-wing narratives around inequality and "privilege".
IIRC different kinds of IQ tests have a bit over 90% correlation with each other, which gives a rough measure of how well each correlates with the 'true intelligence' that they're trying to measure.
In short, it's not a perfect test of intelligence simply because perfect tests are impossible to devise - suppose you test 100 meter sprint speed by asking people to sprint 100 meters; you're literally testing the thing you want to measure, but some people will still have unusually bad days and get unrepresentative scores
I'm not trying to argue with NNT's flat-earth-level critique of IQ scores, nor with people whose whole knowledge of IQ is that it's somehow got intellectual cooties and must be avoided. What would be the point?
But the two points I made are places a lot of people who try to intelligently engage with IQ scores and related statistics get mixed up. They start thinking about IQ as what we care about, rather than as an imperfect measure of what we care about, and they don't realize that IQ scores at the high and low end of the range are probably less accurate representations of where the people who got them really fall in the distribution.
It is complete and unadulterated nonsense. It's embarassingly bad.
And this level of claim is warranted on my part given the fact that Taleb does not argue in good faith. He smears his opponents and blocks and curses out people on twitter who disagree with him. He invites much worse than what I've said by saying his post is "still unchallenged". He will say this no matter what happens, no matter what people say, no matter how much research contradicts his views. He's an arrogant ideologue interested only in pushing a narrative which he feels makes him look enlightened and virtuous (and sells more of his books).
Taleb is a dishonest debater. I remember reading a few good point-by-point refutations shortly after he published this rant about IQ being a swindle. It's just, if you disagree with him, he blocks you on Twitter and pretends that you do not exist. This is how he remains "unchallenged" in the eyes of his fans. Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights, but ultimately, he is in a book-selling business, not truth-finding business. It is better for book sales when his crackpot theories remain "unchallenged" no matter how wrong they are.
OK, I guess this sound too ad hominem. Sorry, I am not an expert and I do not want to spend my entire day fact-checking all citations and verifying all complex claims. I am only going to spend like 15 minutes writing this comment, please keep this limitation in mind if you are dissatisfied with the result. But other people have already written much better responses.
So, Taleb starts with repeating the popular myths: (1) IQ is just an ability to do IQ tests, or maybe tests in general, but definitely unrelated to anything that matters in actual life; (2) yes, low IQ is a thing, but high IQ is definitely not, a person with IQ 80 might be less smart than a person with IQ 100, but a person with IQ 180 is indistinguishable from a person with IQ 100... except for the ability to do IQ tests much better, I suppose. Also, don't forget the mandatory: (3) some racists talk about IQ, therefore everyone who talks about IQ is a racist.
My response to (1) is that this is an "all or nothing" fallacy. As an analogy, consider this argument: "There are people who are tall, but suck at basketball. Therefore, height is irrelevant for playing basketball. No, let me say it openly: the very concept of height is a pseudoscientific swindle!" Okay, slow down, dude. Yes, it is true that some tall people suck at basketball. But that only proves that height is not the only thing that matters at basketball. You also have to practice playing. Or maybe you are tall but also blind, so you are out of luck, even if you tried to practice. It can be simultaneously true that in general being taller is helpful at basketball, and that being tall is only a part (perhaps a very small part) of the entire package. Also, the accusation of pseudoscientific swindle is completely undeserved. Even in a hypothetical reality where height is 100% irrelevant to basketball (which is not the reality we are living in), height could still be useful for other things, for example easily reaching the objects on the top shelf.
The same is true for intelligence. It is just a part of a larger package necessary to succeed in life. Like, maybe you have a high IQ, but you also have ADHD so you actually can't focus on doing the smart things, or maybe you were born in a poor family so the idea of studying hard and getting a prestigious job simply never crossed your mind. Yes, you can point at some Mensa guys and laugh at them. The fact is that Mensa is mostly a selection of people with high IQ who failed to achieve anything spectacular, because those who did are typically too busy to attend Mensa meetings. Why is it so surprising that "the top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors"? Looking at the graph, it simply means that a person with IQ 110 could have an either job. Sounds plausible to me, considering that some colleges suck.
My response to (2) is that I have no time to check how cherry-picked / edited / taken out of context are the few graphs in the article (I vaguely remember reading that the graph was edited to make the point), but the very idea that above IQ 100 everyone is the same, is quite absurd. I think most people underestimate how diverse people are, because we typically live in "bubbles", surrounded by people similar to us. Thus e.g. a person with IQ 130 mostly keeps friends with IQ 130, and then concludes "yes, all humans are intellectually about the same". Then they step outside the bubble, and are shocked by the sheer incompetence of other people, who have e.g. IQ 100, i.e. not retarded, just... not smart either.
I have a repeated experience (a few years ago when I was a Mensa member) that when a person who seemed smart to me considered themselves intellectually average, I told them "nope, you are smart, and you should take a Mensa test to confirm this". About half of them actually accepted my challenge, and all of them passed the test. Some of them were quite shocked by that. If only 2% of population can pass the test, and they supposedly do not differ from the rest of the population at anything meaningful, how could my predictions be so accurate?
My response to (3) is that intelligence is an exciting topic many people have an opinion on, so of course the racists do, too. It would be suspicious if they did not. And by the way, many racists also take positions quite similar to Taleb's. There were probably historical Nazis who said things like: yeah, maybe the Jews have a high IQ, but who cares, that's just some academic nonsense, in real life they are still inferior to an Aryan Fat Tony who is street smart and has the will to power, or something like that.
I also notice that all graphs used in the article are cut at IQ 130. I find that suspicious. Perhaps there is a good reason for that: many IQ tests stop at some relatively low value, because people with higher IQ are rare, so calibrating the tests for them is more expensive. But I strongly suspect that adding e.g. the incomes of people with IQ 160 to the graph would make a visible difference. (I suspect than on a typical ACX meetup, IQ 130 would be the average, or even below the average. In Taleb's graphs, it is the highest intelligence considered.) Similarly, the categories of occupations are just too wide. Perhaps the lowest-quartile "college professor" is completely unimpressive, intellectually. What about a lowest-quartile quantum physics professor, though? Is he also indistinguishable from a smart janitor?
Oops, took me more than the originally planned 15 minutes. Still didn't check the article that Taleb was taking his graph from. Anyway, nothing I wrote here is new or particularly insightful. Remember that the next time Taleb calls himself "unchallenged". The counter arguments are obvious, he just doesn't listen.
Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side? It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians. I'm going to have to think about how that works.
Nazis and the woke would agree that the important thing about you is your ethnic background (although the woke would also add gender, sexual orientation, etc.), and that your individual traits or skills are irrelevant. IQ tests measure your individual trait, i.e. an unimportant thing.
IQ tests measure the individual; both Nazis and the woke are collectivists (although in different ways).
> Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side?
In the linked article he says that "Different populations have different variances, even different skewness and these comparisons require richer models."
(In other words, it's complicated, and Taleb is the only person smart enough to understand it. And no, he is not going to tell us.)
No, no, he's not smart and has no good "insights", mostly because "good insight" is an oxymoron. Think about what "insight" means. Does it mean scholarship? Knowledge? No, it means something consumers can easily easily consume. It's intellectual candy, intellectual crack. Real knowledge is hard, cheap and easy "insights" are never good, and insight merchants are a cancer.
I guess Taleb's response to the first table would be that all those correlations are produced by the lower half of the IQ distribution. (The rest of the article, I agree with.)
Here is my attempt to "steelman" Taleb:
There are various reasons to study IQ. We want to understand those below the average. We want to understand the average. And we want to understand those above the average. Different people care about different parts of the intelligence spectrum.
Specifically for the purpose of studying people with high IQ, the usual research is often not helpful. First, many IQ tests are capped at IQ 130, which for some people is actually where the interesting part *begins*.
Second, calculating the correlation between IQ and some measure X for the entire population conflates "people with low IQ suck at X" with "people with high IQ excel at X". Even if both are true, the correlation measured for the entire population does not *prove* it. To make a claim specifically about high IQ, we should calculate the correlation for the part of population with IQ greater than 100. And then maybe again for the part with IQ greater than 130, to check for the hypothesis "...but *too much* IQ is harmful".
Some people believe in significance of low IQ but insignificance of high IQ, for both good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are, of course, ideological. A good reason would be the law of diminishing returns.
For example, if you have an IQ 70 and can't get a good job, it is quite obvious what is your problem. If you have an IQ 130 and a relatively good job, but you would like to have a better one, it is not equally obvious that magically changing your IQ to 150 would solve the problem. Chances are, your greatest problem is something else (such as low conscientiousness, lack of social skills, etc.), which might still prevent you from getting the desired job even if your IQ magically changed to 150. Perhaps not... but that needs to be shown by a research that compares IQ 130 and IQ 150 directly, and not just says "comparing IQ 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, and 150, greater values correlate with greater success".
To be honest, I don't think the post even warrants a response from intelligence researchers - half of it is just crying about racism, the other half is "High school student who just finished AP stats"-level objections like the average not being the same as the entire population or that error bars somehow invalidate the mean difference between professions.
He also claims the IQ-income correlation is ~0.01, which is shockingly wrong. The Mind-Killer really can infect anyone, I guess.
When I first saw that article I had never heard of the guy. It's an incoherent article on Medium with myriad spelling mistakes, I literally assumed it was written by a mentally ill nutcase. I have continued to be profoundly shocked that anyone takes him seriously on anything.
"Forget everything you heard in college statistics or probability theory. If
you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.
THE GAUSSIAN AND THE MANDELBROTIAN
I was transiting through the Frankfurt airport in December 2001 , on my
way from Oslo to Zurich.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me
to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The cashier
handed me, among other things, a ten deutschmark bill, an (illegal) scan
of which can be seen on the next page. The deutschmark banknotes were
going to be put out of circulation in a matter of days, since Europe was..."
Where is the math? Who takes this seriously?
He then argues against Gaussians with ... wealth distributions. This guy is a fraudster btw, he claims to be a statistician but he only has business degrees. Something is really off about this guy. He basically argues for "fat tails" and talks about how Gaussians can't model stuff but Pareto et al were on this years ago. He seems to fail to understand that the Gaussian is the distribution with the most entropy of any distribution with finite mean and variance on the real line. The Pareto Distribution has finite mean and variance, models wealth, and has less entropy than the Gaussian. It would be stupid given this, additive genetics, and the CLT to "reject Gaussians" or whatever weird English-major thing he wants us to do. Gaussians are a specific thing, he has literally no point other than that some phenomena are not Gaussian.
Grey Enlightenment starts with noticing the same thing, Taleb's really creepy, skeezy nature:
"I’m guessing he chose 35 because that is when he became rich writing mediocre books, trading (he claims to have gotten rich with trading even though no records or second-hand anecdotal evidence exists of any actual trading prowess on his part), or kinda being a thin-skinned blowhard online."
Basically it seems like he wrote this stupid business book NYT best seller fluff and has been making up lies about himself ever since. He is probably a compulsive liar or something. Ironically it seems like he won the lottery with his book -- funny enough this can be modeled with Bernoullis, making the number of winners a quite small tailed distribution that looks like a bell curve. I wonder if he knows what it's called? Probably not.
2) It is amazing to read the reactions of Taleb's fans on Reddit.
"You cite your own blog?" -- yes, of course, because Taleb's fans will keep saying the same things over and over again across the entire internet, no matter how many times it was debunked, so it is much smarter to just write a response once and keep linking it.
"He's probably angry because he realized that Mensa is a club of idiots after paying for their expensive tests and memberships." -- uhm, in my country that is €10 for testing and €25 for yearly membership. I don't think it is a money well spent, but I wouldn't call it expensive either.
"Lmao wtf is this sir ??? what are your credentials??" -- haha, so Taleb keeps talking about how Fat Tony can outsmart all intellectuals-yet-idiots, and accuses scientists of fraud, but hey, if you point out on your blog a mistake he made, you suddenly need a PhD to be taken seriously.
(All these comments are upvoted. All comments critical of Taleb are downvoted.)
The point I find interesting is that IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence and that it might work well for that, but it's accuracy isn't particularly good in the direction of measuring above-par intelligence. The scatterplot on the post shows how much noise there is in correlating IQ with lifetime income results, something it has been purported to be meaningful for.
The original formula was literally "mental age ÷ physical age × 100", which meant like "if you are 5 years old, but your reasoning abilities are on the level of a typical 6 years old, your IQ is 120".
Only later, when the concept was generalized for all ages, the formula was refactored, because it doesn't make sense for older people to assume that intelligence is always increasing with age... and you also can't find such N that Einstein's reasoning abilities are "on the level of a typical N years old".
As you see, Taleb is wrong (yet "unchallenged") even about things that are quite simple to check.
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
I think this is a good post overall, but using HBD as your stats example is needlessly polarising - none of the rest of your post cares one whit about racial anything.
As to object level critique - I tend to think of intelligence as "potential", and while (assuming for argument that your numbers are correct) you convincingly paint a picture of how many Americans are *currently* functional independent thinkers, the data you've presented doesn't in any way rule distinguish between lack of natural aptitude and a horrific failure of the education system and societal norms - eg. there's definitely no ability barrier to all "3.75%" of your 'sufficiently literate and numerate' group having a "good reading habit", that's purely social.
If you want to flesh this out into a standalone post elsewhere, I suggest elaborating on why you've picked the AP stats exam as your test of mathematical numeracy (I believe I get it but it's worth spelling out), why you've picked the grade you've picked as your threshold (because a 5(/5?) is equivalent to only 70%? % marks don't necessarily translate well across systems, American undergrad courses are unusually easy to get high % marks in), and similarly it's worth elaborating on the literacy measure you've used - quoting a definition and/or example of a "dense" text would be nice.
Finally, I'd be fascinated by cross-country comparisons if you can get them - those would help shed light on if the primary problem is the education system and/or local culture. Eg. French people have a much greater social expectation of being politically informed and opinionated.
I'm trying to get into this "conventional morality" thing but the Defining Issues Test is pretty opaque. Are you sure it shows what you claim it shows? Can you go into more detail on the data you claim shows that much of the population have "conventional morality"?
Great post, if this forum had decent people on it they would be hailing you as better than Scott Alexander. He's never posted anything even half as intelligent. Goes to show that their attention and compliments are totally performative, political, and cynical. Sadly, your data proves why spectacle merchants receive so much attention and why this kind of thing is sneered at and ignored by people who probably don't have the reading skills or mathematical literacy to understand it.
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
Thank you for this. I hadn't heard of him but I find this philosophy/outlook to largely align with my own (though i am in the US so the slavic specific parts are bit foreign to me). “freedom moderated by a vision of eternity” really connects with me. I will seek out more of his writing/speaking.
In my view, Arestovych is a psychiatrist more than a philosopher. His nebulous and utopian "fifth project", in which he tries to combine all the good features of liberalism, socialism, progressivism and pan-Slavic nationalism, doesn't strike me as particularly thought-over or coherent (to the extent I can extract it from the occasional interview with Latynina), but I have seen him use it to bottle up some common sense sorely needed at certain moments, and deliver it to the right places at the right time, and I am immensely grateful to him for that. (Among other things, he spoke out against the cancelations of Russian culture in the West during the first months of the 2022 war; against Zelensky's push to stop giving Schengen visas to Russians; against an idiotic project by the UA military to restrict freedom of movement inside Ukraine for mobilization purposes. At least in the latter case, the project was quickly scuttled.) He is also fun to listen to to a certain point (and gets annoying beyond that point). All in all, he strikes me as a Jordan-Peterson-like "applied thinker" (some of the similarity is explained by both being Jungians) doing an important job. If you're looking for a political philosophy that stands on its own, however, you'll be disappointed.
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
One of George Stigler's humorous essays imagines product liability law being applied to universities. One line — by memory so not verbatim:
"The branch of economics that dealt with how to enrich poor nations, I think it was called 'economic development,' was enjoined by the courts on the grounds that no university could afford to pay for the amount of damage its professors did."
You might need a bit more specificity, because I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
So, as a factual matter, yes, a lot of countries have developed significantly, no, there has not been any replicable model to bring their per capita income to Western levels. There's a lot of countries where per capita income is between $1000-$3000/month. Which is not a "Western" lifestyle but is a significant and radical jump from being a "developing" economy.
So, hopefully without getting too technical, just take a look at a list of countries by gdp per capita (PPP) (1). There's plenty of countries like Chile or Thailand or Serbia or even Ukraine where people are making $12-$30k year which, ya know, isn't great but it's far from where they were 30-40 years ago or where still developing countries, like most of Africa, are. And it's not like their growth rates are bad; I certainly wouldn't say Chile is growing as fast as China but they don't compare too unfavorably. (2)
As for development economics, while I'm no expert, I thought the field was generally a mess and hasn't had a persistent message since the Washington Consensus, which has been dead for decades now. And Chile/Thailand/Serbia all certainly pursued different economic development plans.
Soooo... it feels like you're trying to argue against someone who's not really there, pointing to a lack of economic progress which....kind of exists, like "developing" economies haven't closed the gap with developed economies but they're certainly much better off than they were 30-40 years ago. What exactly are you getting at here?
There are some methods that have shown consistency in results like land reform/redistribution. From the "How Asia Works" book review:
"'Klaus Deininger, one of the world’s leading authorities on land policy and development, has spent decades assembling data that show how the nature of land distribution in poor countries predicts future economic performance. Using global land surveys done by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), he has worked out that only one significant developing country has managed a long-term growth rate of over 2.5 per cent with a very unequal distribution of land. That country is Brazil, the false prophet of fast growth which collapsed in a debt crisis in the 1980s in large part because of its failure to increase agricultural output. Deininger’s two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich. In short, if poor countries are to become rich, then the equitable division of land at the outset of development is a huge help. Japan, Korea and Taiwan put this in place.'
Unfortunately, it's not on the table anymore, which means we might not see many more East Asian - style economic miracles:
'Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based Landesa, is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring'"
In general though, I agree with your sentiment. This doesn't just apply to economics, it's everywhere; people start with their pre-concieved conclusions and work backwards to a model that makes it make sense. Just goes to show that the scientific method is not a natural way of human thinking.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
You'd be right. I can't say too much about what city planners learn in universities in Denmark because that's not what I studied, but I know from some city planner friends that Jan Gehl is a superstar in the field, and Jan Gehl does take notes not from theme parks, but from holiday resorts (especially the maze-like slow down and have a spa experience kinds of places), which I feel like is pretty much the same thing in this respect?
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
There are surely huge gains to be made outside of the western world. Especially around child birth where poor sanitation has a very large negative effect. But hard to say if there are easy solution in more developed countries. Some things that come close would be if everyone got a flu shot and/or wore n95 masks a lot more effect like in Asian countries (not something i do or really want to do). That would save lives by reducing disease transmission. Also resolving all the lead in water issues that have been popping up in the US recently. Might not save lives but should increase quality of life.
I seem to recall that on balance, a properly-used N95 reduces covid transmission by roughly...10%. Dunno how that compares to flu...probably unfavourably, given Omicron's pretty high infectiousness. The whole sick-pay thing matters here too, even if it's not a direct intervention...although there's definitely people on the margins who literally can't afford to miss a day out sick, many more opt to go to work anyway. Incentives matter, and theoretical diffuse harms are way less salient than immediate paycheck hits. The same plays out in school attendance...there just isn't always Slack in the syllabus to accommodate proper lengths of staying home. (I remember some classmates in highschool who were held back entire years due to catching mononucleosis...that was pretty scary. Like, yeah, obviously better not to attend...but that's an incredible humiliation, and disruption of social network + educational progress...being sick already sucks enough!)
Lead, asbestos, etc. removal: diminishing returns, although I'm still surprised how common lead paint is.
Hmm, it was my understanding that allergy prevalence is more tied to kids not getting outside often enough young enough, or otherwise exposed to a variety of potential triggers (such as pe dander)...with some degree of heritability as well. Although it might well be the case that safetyism attitudes towards not letting kids get """dirty""" contribute to keeping them confined indoors, safely glued to hypoallergenic screens.
Food allergies: I sure do miss peanuts in public. Amazing cooking oil, great snack. Other "nut butters" really don't compare, imo.
I wonder about that. Presumably baths and showers disrupt our skin microbiome. We know from experience that too much washing dries out the skin. Do or did stone age tribes suffer from chronic skin conditions? Analogizing from the gut microbiome, eradicating pathogens is not a feasible goal. It seems the healthiest guts have a diversity of bacteria, which presumably keeps the pathogens in check.
Food irradiation, maybe. A lot of reduction in food-borne illness, less waste, and reduced need for refrigeration and preservation is being left on the table because of consumer distaste for the word "radiation."
That was one of my favourite "alt-history" scenarios as a kid...atomic development going somewhat differently, certain nuclear failures not happening. Steaks that last for months? Wow, that sounds amazing. A world we could have had...still could, I guess. All it'd take is a norms shift. "Gentlemen, we have the capability"...
There's been some talk about installing UV lights all over the place to reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases. I'm not sure if that meets the criteria though.
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
Great resources, many thanks! I've read David Sinclair's book, and a recent book not on your list, Eat Like the Animal, by Raubenheimer and Simpson. The latter's thesis was a new one to me, that our bodies want a target amount of protein and we overeat if our food is low in protein. Do you have any thoughts on that thesis? Not a longevity theme per se, but an interesting explanation for the obesity epidemic.
Been interested in this field for awhile but so much of what comes out about it seems based on shoddy or overstated experiments.
Also it's quite hard to separate the wheat from the chaff if you don't know the field that well. Will look at your recommendations and hopefully they will clear some things up :)
The current hardcover edition of Methuselah's Zoo has a couple minor errata that I brought to Austad's attention from the advance proof, too late to be able to change before it printed. Maybe he'll edit them for the paperback. They mostly don't affect the scientific content, just a typo here, getting slightly wrong an old cultural reference there.*
The main scientifically-relevant one iirc was that the comparison of cancer resistance in naked mole-rats vs blind mole-rats wasn't clear. For a good review of comparative cancer resistance in mammals including those, see Seluanov et al. 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0004-9].
*Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" is about searching for life extension and finding it by eating carp guts. It also plays with the idea that humans are neotenous apes, similar to axolotls being neotenous salamanders [this juvenile chimp looks more human than does the adult chimp: https://images.wtmfiles.com/NeotonyChimpsProfile_Crp_TxtCa_WEB_1122x449.jpg]. Aldous Huxley was familiar with his brother Julian Huxley's experiments de-neotenizing axolotls so they finally anatomically "mature". In the book, life extension results in the long-lived humans also finally anatomically "maturing", to look more apeish! But the current version of Methuselah's Zoo got it backwards, and said that the carp guts made the humans look like "fetal apes."
I remember reading that book years ago, and its satirical ending. Spoilers ahead:
“What’s that?” he whispered.
“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.
…Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.
“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.
…Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.
…“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”
“But what’s happened to them?”
“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.
“Time?”
…. “But the Earl there — let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”
Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.
Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor.
…“No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
…Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock — well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.
Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again."
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
Donals Hoffman argues that the current scientific paradigm is at a dead end, citing leading physicists like Arkani-Hamed, who says "space-time is doomed". Hoffman uses the analogy of video-games. While we wear the headset it "looks like" e.g., a car (or whatever") is speeding past us on our left, but that (obviously) is an illusion in the virtual world. We can't understand the principles underlying the game by examining the world inside the game not matter how thoroughly we study the virtual world within the game. The reality has to too with transistors and diodes and software and whatnot in the computer generating the virtual world of the game. Physics has reached its limits, he argues, because we're analyzing the world inside the headsets, convinced that if we can enlarge the pixels sufficiently, we'll understand everything. In other words, w're at a dead-end not just because of limited intelligence but because we haven't figured out that we're studying the virtual reality within the game revealed to us by the headset. We have to figure out what's outside the headset.
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
To your girlfriend: she might have processing issues, where she's quite bright but unable to deal well with certain sorts of situations or tasks. There are evaluators for this sort of thing, but they tend to be spendy.
My middle kid is like this, with an IQ in the mid 130s but some trouble applying it. There are drug and non-drug interventions. We're currently working through the non-drug coping techniques. The assessment ran us 2000+, and wasn't covered by insurance.
What? No, of course not. IQ correlates with educational outcomes to some degree, but there's so many not-strictly-smarts things that go into Doing Well At School. For example, I'm not quite at the super-cynic level of Bryan Caplan where the entire edifice comes off as a costly signalling trap...but it's absolutely true that formal education rewards obedience, conformity, and putting up with *a lot* of dreadfully boring arbitrary crap. Temperament matters so much. This can be just as hard for those with +SDs on IQ, as for those with -SDs...just in different ways.
I was a Precocious Prodigal Child growing up, always able to ace schoolwork and do reading/writing/math way above my "grade level". (Like doing 10th-grade math in 4th grade, or setting historic school records for Most Library Books Read In A Year, that sort of thing.) But the actual process of school was lonely, tedious, and cruel, and so many times my grades suffered because I'd consider doing the work "beneath me". You can't do no work for an entire semester, then bust out every assignment perfectly on the last day for full credit - since Being On Time is more important than the actual quality of the work. (Okay, that's not true, I actually did manage to pull that stunt off several times. Boy, those professors hated me.) By college, I'd fallen pretty well behind my definitely-less-smart peers...not for lack of ability, but because the education system was Just Not For Me.
They graduated and went on to degree-premium jobs. I didn't, and now bag groceries in my 30s. Constantly catch myself making "intellectual class" mistakes, like trying to explain to my bosses how X process would be so much more efficient with a simple spreadsheet...then I remember they can barely wrangle Microsoft Word. (You do not want to see our internal memos and emails...my God, so painful to read.) Good folks, love them, fight in the trenches back-to-back every shift...and yet. There's a reason I don't ever mention places like ACX at work. Just Not For Them.
I'm pretty sure I responded to a previous thread you had posted, several OTs ago, but: on the old scoring system, 2230/2400 SAT (perfect reading/writing, worse on math), ~130 WAIS-IV (again >99th percentile reading/writing, worse on math/shape rotator stuff). [ETA: took these tests *after* flunking out of three colleges three times, was feeling really stupid then and wondering what happened to that whiz kid...more fool me, she never left.] But school was a hellish nightmare that almost broke my intellectual curiosity for good, even given those proclivities. Many Such Cases, including most of my friends (borked minds think alike!). Your girlfriend isn't an outlier. Says a lot more about the school system than her.
I kind of thought of you when posting and was wondering what you'd say.
But the big difference between you and her is that your cognitive surplus, even if it hasn't dramatically improved your income, it still manifests in ways that make it obvious that you are likely smart. For instance, you voluntarily read a blog by a pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes short fiction, comments on Effective Altruism, and posts long speculative essays on the implications of a Carthaginian demon mentioned in a poem.
You also frequently like to ask and answer questions on complex topics written on threads like this one.
It does, though, make me consider that almost all the smart people I know of are quintessentially male. Not in that they are all men, but all have male interests and reasoning styles (the kinds of people attracted to this blog). So I could imagine that a really smart person that has more feminine interests would be more difficult to notice. Can you speak to that at all?
It's nice to know I've made a memorable impression on someone!
Feels like a "Categories Made For Man, Not Man For Categories" thing to do (sex- ?) gender-essentialism with interests and reasoning. There are definitely __trends__ with some predictive power (wordcels vs. shape rotators[1] really hit some nerves, I found it hilarious how like 99% of commenters here always claim to be shape rotators), but a lot of it just seems really context-dependent. Is a female computer[2] quintessentially male, for example? Less feminine than Rosie the Riveter, or more? It's easy to delineate broad distributional trends, but the exercise quickly gets absurd in the particulars. And totally-external social conditions (e.g. labour market dynamics) can shift such Timeless Trends surprisingly quickly. Incentives, ah, find a way.
That being said, I'm not sure what proportion of my traits are quintessentially male (QM) vs. quintessentially female (QF). I like to joke that being a Gemini means it's easier to get away with being both male and female at the same time. (This was a lot more ironic after I came out as trans.)
QM: working with hands/physical labour, tomboyish behaviour, stereotypical nerd interests like D&D, metalhead, aggressive/direct, appreciation of fine tools (knives are cool!), empathy-deficient, economic-thinking
QF: total wordcel (awful at ~all math and spatials), feminine fashions, submissive/accommodating, small talk and gossip, homebody, Lots Of Feelings Always (lol, hormones), conscientious neuroticism, shoe collection[3]
Basically, I guess I don't feel like intellect pays no dividends in QF areas? I'd much rather read Jia Tolentino than Terry Grossman; or gab with my geeky female friends about pan-coronavirus vaccines, rather than my female coworkers about who's sleeping with who (okay, I lied, that can actually get really fascinating). Smart is smart, no matter how it's channeled. Not __better__ - life isn't a morality play - but it's easier and more comfortable to be around intellectually-similar people. As with so many other traits.
What you might be gesturing at is QM things being more *legible*...computer science, academia, research, Nobel Prizes, even stupid shit like Jeopardy! championships or chess mastery. Men Being Really Smart is, like, a whole industry of respect-generation and -redistribution that tries really hard to pretend it's not. School definitely falls under this category, although I'd expect some shifts as the sex ratio in education achievement continues to distort further. (Didn't Andrew Yang say earlier this year that women graduate college like 35% more, or something? Crazy...)
I really don't like fuzzy wokeisms like "the invisiblization of women" or whatever, but there is some kernel of truth in that direction. A really smart person with feminine interests will mostly be recognized *within* that niche, not outside of it; I'm thinking of how even highly-successful female politicians/CEOs/whatever tend to get treated with the same paparazzi-Gawker vibe as celebrities, instead of the focus being on actual achievements. Conversely, channeling that intellect into perhaps-less-authentically-felt QM interests is likely to be more noticeable. This really seems unfortunate, cause incredibly-important QF things like parenting[4] sure do benefit bigly from applied smarts. We ought to incentivize this more!
I guess I'm sorta just rambling on with no clear closing, though. So I'll end by saying that one can chase __being noticed__ or __being smart__, but doing both at once is like serving two masters. Not impossible, but better check real carefully about that moonlighting clause. Additional terms and conditions may apply.
[3] I think it's really precious how guys have tried to reclaim this QF interest under the "sneakerhead" rebranding. Makes for a great co-ed icebreaker, at least. Guys really ought to care more about teh fashuns, it's a strong comparative advantage...
[4] Who would you rather turn to for evidence-based parenting advice: Emily Oster, or Amy Chua? (Assume Scott is indisposed.)
Literally wrote a long, thoughtful, reply then my phone deleted it when I accidentally swiped away.
But to make long story short, I think your points about the "wordcel" thing and respect-generation get to the crux of my oversight.
Think our culture teaches us to instinctively value literary brilliance less than scientific smarts, hence why everyone wants to be a shape-rotator.
Also, appearing smart is a huge status game for men, who are more status-seeking by nature. For those reasons obviously the more conspicuous displays of what most people would deem smart are going to disproportionately come from men.
Was recently reading American Prometheus and was amused at how hard Oppenheimer tried to appear even more smart than he was.
Depends on the tests and what they are measuring. She may be spatially gifted/good at pattern matching, or she might be making up for poor/average maths scores with really good verbal abilities.
What course did she do at university? Maybe it didn't suit her talents, and insurance broker may be difficult because (to me) that's a sales job. High scoring on an IQ test doesn't mean you'll be good at sales, that's a whole other set of skills (including being able to manipulate people so that they happily sign up to buy the product you're selling).
1. The tests were the Cattell B and the Culture Fair. The latter is purely pattern matching, similar to Raven's. The former leans much more on verbal reasoning and working memory.
2. To answer your question from the other thread, she's never been assessed for dyslexia or dyscalculia, but her vision isn't great generally due to an eye condition. Also, anything beyond basic mental arithmetic is something she struggles with in particular (3x13 is fine but 14x24 isn't). Even something like differentiating a basic term she would need to write out in order to solve, but her working memory appears to be otherwise fine when it comes to other things.
3. She studied econ, and despite struggling a lot with the mathier parts of the course (game theory was not fun for her) she still got a first-class degree. Oh and we grade things differently in the UK so I think her percentage works out at around a 3.8 GPA. Also, a lot of variability in her marks by subject. Like she either completely crushed it or did really bad. Little in-between.
4. That's the funny thing, because she's not very senior at the moment most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel, preparing PowerPoints, and occasionally using Power BI to visualise some stuff. She's generally A LOT better at the client-facing stuff, despite having a fair bit of social anxiety.
"most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel"
That makes me laugh, because I am atrocious at maths, yet somehow the office jobs I ended up in have me handling accounting, payroll, and creating spreadsheets in Excel to keep tracks of money etc.
We are not being assessed on our strengths!
I have the same problems with mental arithmetic and needing to write things down to work them out. I don't understand the magic words, I just do it all by rote memorisation.
My cousin tested out 4 standard deviations above the mean. She always knew she was smarter than other people, and she had fun showing off. I don't think this helped her get along with people, though. My cousin never did anything with her genius, though. She went into the Army instead of college. Developed some post-Iraq health syndromes which VA couldn't really help her with. Now she's an alcoholic living on disability. I had my IQ tested four times, and I test out in the middle of the two standard deviations above the mean range—but my cousin, who is 20 years younger than I am, when she was just a kid would leave me in the dust with how quickly she could figure out a problem. And she had fun proving she was smarter than I was! But the thing I noticed about her was she was tremendously incurious. I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity? As for me, I'm a sub-genius, but I've always known I was smarter than most people, but I've always known that there were people who were smarter than I am. Kept me humble, but I'm always shocked how *focused* many geniuses seem to be.
Yeah definitely don't get that vibe from her that you got from your cousin. Like, I've taken Wechsler and scored pretty much the same as you, but my girlfriend generally struggles with things more than me despite trying harder. Her parents made her study like hell in high school, while I was coasting but she still scored worse than me in Math and English.
Definitely think the curiosity component has something to do with it. In many ways, it's hard to tell in every day life that she's smart simply because she's not really curious about stuff. In fact, she actively loathes me engaging her in theoretical about economics (what she majored in) or philosophy, and doesn't have many hobbies.
Think it's possible I was just under the illusion that smart people generally find life easier and maybe that isn't the case.
Here's a stupid question about the bleedin' obvious: is she dyslexic or has trouble with dyscalculia or something of that kind? If she tests as smart but has always struggled despite studying hard, something might be amiss in that department, and if nobody ever consisted testing for it, it can go undiagnosed for years.
"I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity?"
I can confirm that no, not so much. I was 115 IQ when I was young and 130 when I was older, and am currently doing seasonal cashier work with no idea what to do for the winter. IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
Not usually, I mostly hover at the same strength. Harder ones just make me think about the meaninglessness of spending time on puzzles. They've got to be solvable quickly enough to outrun ennui.
My older relative tells stories of getting D's in all his classes before getting a 97 Aptitude score in the military. He's both very smart and extremely hyperactive, so school was misery for him.
That is an interesting one. Sounds like a possibility of a learning disability to me. Dyslexia making reading difficult? ADHD making concentrating difficult?
I don't think you should automatically assume ADHD. Terman's study of geniuses showed that, although most did OK financially (most became professionals who earned better money than the average population), many geniuses didn't do anything with their "gifts". There were geniuses who became janitors and bus drivers. None of the Terman study geniuses earned any major prizes or made any significant advances to human knowledge. While one of the people's whose IQ wasn't high enough to qualify for the Terman study went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
She has an eye condition, but it doesn't effect her ability to read as far as I know. That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all! ADHD might be something to do with it, as she gets bored of everything apart from football (soccer) really quickly. Only other thing to note is that she's always had a lot of sensory troubles- textures, smells, tastes, and sounds REALLY bother her.
The fact that it turned out that way in two tests makes me think it's highly unlikely to be a fluke (and she's not lying, i've seen the results). Also her younger brother is at Oxford, so maybe something genetic there?
"That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all!"
Even if we don't assume dyslexia, an eye condition that makes it hard to focus on text would be a stumbling block when learning, and that would only reinforce itself - trying to read/study hurts her head, so she hates reading, so she doesn't read unless absolutely necessary, so it's harder for her to pick up information.
The sensory issues do sound like a problem with the wiring, as it were. Raw intelligence is all very well, but we have to process our environments through the equipment we have, and if she has the physiological equivalent of bright lights shining in her eyes while horns are blaring while sitting on tacks while smelling rotting fish, that is not going to make it easy to concentrate on learning and doing well.
Is she curious, though? Is she interested in learning new things? If not, I don't think you need look any further than her "curiosity quotient". If you're not curious about learning new things, you're not going to crack open a book nor want to spend your time school work. I've heard there are tests for CQ, but I've never seen one.
Also, there's the tall poppy syndrome. I'm not saying this applies to your GF, though.
I don't think you need to be curious to not struggle in school though, as in Shane Glean's example. Being a genius who works hard would be enough for most programs.
I'd agree, except if you don't give a shit about getting a degree, you're not going to make the effort. And maybe I'm old school, but I wouldn't want to take courses in anything I'm not interested in or curious about. Of course, the modern educational system is all about turning out cogs for the Machine.
Reading adhdmemes suggests that sensory issues seem to be pretty common. They can't force their brain to stop focussing on the texture/smell/taste and focus on something else instead.
As for the test question, I got high scores on standardized tests and also always felt like I processed information pretty quickly. That doesn’t always mean much for real world performance, though.
Neither, from what I can tell, though I haven't seen full episodes. If asked, I'd definitely be on the side nearer a 1 rating for casting decisions and what they've done to characters (CELEBRIMBOR SHOULD NOT BE THAT OLD, I WILL DIE ON THE COLD HILL OF HIMRING OVER THAT, ALSO WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THE 90S BOYBAND HAIR FOR THE MALE ELVES????) but visually people are finding it impressive.
I've seen online that Amazon owns IMDb and has put in place a moratorium on reviews in order to "filter out trolls" or something. That is the kind of action that will both artificially inflate ratings, and get people to give 1 or 2 star ratings just for spite.
I have seen reviews and criticisms that were unfair and very harsh and very critical on grounds of wokeness. But there are some problems with (the little I've seen of) the show, e.g. the ponderous dialogue that is meant to sound profound but is just awful: "stones sink because they look down to the darkness"? "It is said the wine of victory is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it has fermented"? "I've seen some shit, no really I've seen some shit" (paraphrasing there, but that dialogue exchange really was just "i know you are but what am i?" level).
Imagine, for a moment, somebody takes the most sublime story every written, and manages to turn it into a slightly bad movie, which, in any other context, would "deserve", say, a 4.
I think people rating that slightly bad movie as a 1 is fair. In fact, I'd say it deserves worse than a 1.
I think there are, conversely, going to be people who will rate it a 10, not because they like the movie, but because they hate the story, or the people who like the story. If there's a substantial audience who genuinely loves it, great - but I think the people who rate it a 1 are generally accurately conveying their disinterest in it, and the people who rate it a 10 are not, in fact, accurately conveying their interest in the show.
Mind, I don't think the Elf Bible is the most sublime story ever written. I'm not a particular fan of Tolkien's work; it's all too ... unnecessary, for my tastes, and I would say that Peter Jackson's original trilogy were quite good, and the Hobbit trilogy - well, I'm not sure, I never bothered finishing them.
However, I think it's perfectly fair that somebody attempting to trade on the reputation of somebody else's work gets held to a different kind of standard than somebody making something on their own, and I think in particular that it is fair to judge on a curve that will make it much harder to achieve a given number. Which is to say - if you're trying to make money on somebody else's work, you, in a significant sense, start in the negative numbers, and have to work your way up.
Diversity is "Whatever". Either you do a good job with your show or you don't; if you do a good job, your show will stand on its own merits. If you start complaining about how racists don't like your show - well, I know that your show is shit, and you're just pulling a Sony to try to get as much money out of your bullshit as you can before the house of cards comes tumbling down.
"If you start complaining about how racists don't like your show - well, I know that your show is shit"
Part of this is that there is (so far) one village where the inhabitants could legitimately be brown (or BIPOC, or whatever the non-offensive term is) - the village of Tirharad, which is invented for the show, and is inhabited by descendants of humans who fought in the armies of Morgoth. Well, two actually - the other village is Hordern.
So this could and should be a village full of brown-skinned people. But the shots I've seen show it as majority white. Bronwyn, played by an Iranian-British actress, and her son Theo, played by an Indonesian-Australian actor, are the only two who are not white-white. So when the show had a chance to show us genuinely diverse setting (these villages are most likely populated by descendants of Men from Khand and Near Harad), no, they didn't do that.
But they did give us a black (or rather, mixed-race) Elf and a black Dwarven princess, also in a sea of mostly white members of their respective societies. So those decisions do seem less like 'organic diverse cast' and more like 'make Big Point of having Diverse Inclusive Characters'. And of course, ask how come there's a black Elf (and a solitary one so far, there's no hint of other black Elves) and bingo, you're a bigot who hates this show because you're a racist!
Harfoots: "They were browner of skin than other hobbits, had no beards, and did not wear any footwear. They lived in holes they called smials, a habit which they long preserved, and were on friendly terms with the Dwarves, who traveled through the High Pass.[1]"
Just make them somewhat darker, and you're pretty consistent with canon. Even if they appeared later than the Rings of Power is set, Harfoots have to be descended from someone.
"Browner" is doing a lot of work here. The showrunners are using it as justification for having black British and Australian actors among the Harfoots.
But "browner" in the context of "based on English people" can mean more sallow in skin tone when compared to peaches-and-cream complexions, but not black/brown in the current US racial categorisation. And even there, the irony is that our two main Harfoot characters, Poppy and Nori, are fair-skinned and (in Nori's case) blue-eyed. Kavanagh (even if it is spelled 'Kavenagh') is an Irish name and she's got the colouring to go with it.
I do understand the need to collapse the timeline and have all your major characters in one place, and the Fall of Númenor is one of those Big Damn Epic Events (if it ever gets made) that they really do have to include in the course of the proposed five seasons.
But they've chucked in some "who that?" original new characters, and why should I *care* about some woman out in the back-end of nowhere making googly eyes at an elf serving his term in the outpost? You haven't given me any reason yet to know who they are or what they are going to do. We get Galadriel, we get Elrond, we get Gil-galad, we get Celebrimbor, we get Durin, but we get the new showrunner versions of all these ("oh no,they're not Hobbits, they're Harfoots wink wink") and I swear, if Meteor Guy does turn out to be Gandalf I will do damage (though I'm kind of thinking he might be Saruman?) Creepy Morgoth cultists? Raft Guy (again, ton of speculation that this is the show's version of Sauron as Annatar, which I hope not)? Galadriel deciding to swim all the way back to the shores of Eriador through the Sundering Seas after she noped out of going to Valinor? (That one was really special).
So Galadriel is young Warrior Princess who is *so* bad-ass she can dispatch an ice troll all by her ownsome with a couple twirls of her sword while her useless, stupid, men stand around doing nothing but being a distraction. The reviews I've seen said that the fight is over so fast, it's anticlimactic. So that's a mistake they made: they want to show that she is Just That Awesome, but they made the fight *too* easy for her so people don't care.
Ah well, it's early days yet and the rest of the season might turn out to be good. The general consensus so far seems to be "Don't go in expecting 'Lord of the Rings' and you won't be disappointed; if you think of it as a TV high fantasy show, then it's pretty good. If you're looking for Tolkien's lore, you won't enjoy it".
Fantasy as a genre is the kind of thing people tend to love or hate. Doubt tribal identity has anything to do with it. Maybe, maybe generational identity has something to do with it.
Neither 10 nor 1 is justified in my opinion. I was the disappointed by acting (especially among the elven actors), and the narrative involves too much in the way of explanation and flashbacks. After watching the first episode, I'd rate it 6. If it were less than 5, I probably wouldn't watch any future episodes. But I'll stay tuned for at least the next couple of episodes to see if it gets better.
No, not if it didn't hold my interest. I have no problem with them taking liberties with Tolkien. Just don't rely on special effects to get past poor acting, plotting, or pacing.
Right. I don't have an issue with changes to Tolkien, either.
But, if you are trading on Tolkien's name, then I do think it is fair to come in with a set of expectations such that what would, with a generic fantasy story, be a 5, might instead be rated as a 1 - because they're trading on, and making money off of, Tolkien's reputation.
I said taking liberties with Tolkien. Whether you think they took too many is a different kettle of elves. But just thank your stars that Disney didn't get ahold of the franchise. We'd have a Little Galadriel cartoon movie and Orcs on Ice skate shows.
"For the most part, we all scarcely noticed because neither the source material nor the adapations were very good. The Shannara books? Who cares. Wheel of Time? Eh, ok. Narnia? Nice start, but the 2nd and 3rd movies were failures, if of different sorts."
The Narnia movies are different, yes they were trying to leap off the success of the Tolkien movies, but so too were they (and the adaptations of His Dark Materials) trying to stand on their own as (ugh) properties. (That the Pullman adaptations sank after one movie just brings out my Schadenfreude).
TV adaptations of Shannara - agree there, those books had their time and that was the late 70s. Nobody was really expecting much there.
But Wheel of Time *was* expected to be The Big Fantasy Doorstopper Novel Adaptation. This was taking on not Tolkien, so much, as GRRM and *his* creation. Bezos allegedly wanted a GoT of his own, and while this is being talked up in relation to Rings of Power, Wheel of Time was the first attempt at this. It's been renewed for a third season, but the fact that the writer can dismiss it as "Eh, ok" is damning for the failure of WoT to become the new GoT.
A lot of the complaints by fans of the books for the WoT adaptation sound familiar when it comes to Rings of Power. Are Jordan's fans all racists and bigots, too?
The rest of the review is spot-on; the showrunners are woefully inexperienced and it shows in the writing. I'll pull out a chunk of quotes from Tolkien's letters about the language he uses, but let me finish here, first:
"There's only three ways to make this feel special--to essentially reclaim the Iron Throne of High Fantasy, as it were"
No. The pinnacle of High Fantasy is not the Iron Throne, which is but a debased imitation in deliberate contra-distinction to the real pinnacle.
That peak is the three Silmarils, and the attempts here at using Tolkien's name and characters for their own grandiosity is the creation of the crown bearing the three Silmarils, which burns its wearer, because they were never meant to be so used, and the wearer is unworthy.
No-one can claim the Silmarils for their own. Create your own work, in tribute or in defiance, as it may be, but do not stretch out your hand to take that beauty high above your imagination or capability to create yourself.
"(T)he pain that I always feel when anyone – in an age when almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or 'personal expression' – immediately dismisses out of court deliberate 'archaism'. The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like. But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom. Of course, not being specially well read in modern English, and far more familiar with works in the ancient and 'middle' idioms, my own ear is to some extent affected; so that though I could easily recollect how a modern would put this or that, what comes easiest to mind or pen is not quite that. But take an example from the chapter that you specially singled out (and called terrible): Book iii, "The King of the Golden Hall'. 'Nay, Gandalf!' said the King. 'You do not know your own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better.'
This is a fair sample — moderated or watered archaism. Using only words that still are used or known to the educated, the King would really have said: 'Nay, thou (n')wost not thine own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall . . .' etc. I know well enough what a modern would say. 'Not at all my dear G. You don't know your own skill as a doctor. Things aren't going to be like that. I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casualties' — and then what? Theoden would certainly think, and probably say 'thus shall I sleep better'! But people who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom. You can have 'I shall lie easier in my grave', or 'I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed at home' – if you like. But there would be an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual 'archaic' English that I have used. Like some non-Christian making a reference to some Christian belief which did not in fact move him at all.
Or p. 127, as an example of 'archaism' that cannot be defended as 'dramatic', since it is not in dialogue, but the author's description of the arming of the guests – which seemed specially to upset you. But such 'heroic' scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs. Why deliberately ignore, refuse to use the wealth of English which leaves us a choice of styles – without any possibility of unintelligibility.
I can see no more reason for not using the much terser and more vivid ancient style, than for changing the obsolete weapons, helms, shields, hauberks into modern uniforms.
'Helms too they chose' is archaic. Some (wrongly) class it as an 'inversion', since normal order is 'They also chose helmets' or 'they chose helmets too'. (Real mod. E. 'They also picked out some helmets and round shields'.) But this is not normal order, and if mod. E. has lost the trick of putting a word desired to emphasize (for pictorial, emotional or logical reasons) into prominent first place, without addition of a lot of little 'empty' words (as the Chinese say), so much the worse for it. And so much the better for it the sooner it learns the trick again. And some one must begin the teaching, by example.
I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as 'contemporary' – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one's friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!"
And this is where our showrunners/scriptwriters fall down. They try for archaism, or at least profundity, and they fall face-first into tushery instead (the difference between ships and stones) because they have the modern mind-set and can't think themselves into the cast of mind that can say such lofty sentiments and mean them and use them naturally.
What is more natural to them are the (terrible) attempts at banter ("you smell of rotting leaves" dear oh dear) and informality.
What do you think the relevant tribes are? I don't know if the show has gotten linked to political identity. One alternative split is between those who have read the _Silmarillion_, or fans of Tolkien's writing more generally, and those who haven't.
I watched the _Fellowship_ movie. It was better than I expected, but bad enough so I didn't watch the next two. The things that bothered me probably wouldn't have if I hadn't read the books.
But why are certain books so precious? People who like Dickens tend to like the musical Oliver! which changes a lot, people dance and sign along the streets for instance, something that just wasn’t in the book. And all of the multiple versions of A Christmas Carol are different - the sequence, the events, and ghosts are nearly always different from the books. Nobody cares. Hamlet is always curtailed, or it would run for 4 hours. In fact the point about seeing multiple hamlets is seeing different interpretations.
What’s the reason for the demand for total onscreen loyalty for Tolkien and other similar books? Something to do with genre fandom rather than normal readership.
Not *necessarily* total onscreen loyalty. I have my disagreements with some of Jackson's choices (e.g. making Gimli comic relief, the treatment of Denethor and so on) but to be fair, I never expected anything to ever come out of trying to make movies of the book(s). Animation seemed the nearest medium to come close to portraying them, and Ralph Bakshi's attempt was honest but a failure.
Then the movies were announced, and I was torn between "this will be a mess" and "who on earth will they get to direct it?" When Peter Jackson was chosen, I was astounded: a guy from New Zealand best known for some B-movies of gross horror (though enjoyable) and questionable taste (Meet The Feebles, ahem ahem) was going t be given this project?
I didn't know what to expect. That we got something as good as we did was amazing. Of course, greed kicked in and they stretched The Hobbit out into three movies when it should have been one, but even there, when he got it right, he got it right.
And for all the complaining I did about The Hobbit, boy did I not know when I had it good. Little did I know that Bezos was going to spend hundreds of millions for Warrior Galadriel, The Little Bullied Elf Girl That Could (outdo any of those stupid guys and who is right and they're all wrong).
Shakespeare adaptations, like opera productions, routinely get put through the latest wringer of artistic interpretation (mainly down to directors needing to do something novel this time round because there are centuries of productions of the play) but even the most excessive do generally stick to the main plot (I've often thought that a race-swapped version of Othello where everyone is black but Othello is white would be striking enough to make the point about race and discrimination and being an outsider fresh once more, I have no idea if anyone ever tried this).
But imagine a version of Oliver Twist which decides that really, Oliver is a young trans kid, Fagin is a Hispanic drag queen who takes in and shelters runaway queer kids, Nancy and Bill Sykes are a pair of gay lovers who are murdered by a homophobic mob on trumped-up charges of crime, and Mr Brownlow is really a white supremacist paedophile whom Oliver/Olivia kills in the end, while burning down the luxurious mansion (Brownlow made his fortune in the slave trade, naturally), and then we see Olivia and the Dodger emigrating to America to start over in the New World where nobody knows them and they can be who they really are.
"But that's not Dickens", people protest, to which the reply is "Oh, so you're all transphobic racists, that's why you're criticising this!"
>Warrior Galadriel, The Little Bullied Elf Girl That Could
I mean, she did follow Feanor (even when her father turned back) and then she refused the call to return and took a Ring, all because she wanted a realm of her own; she was certainly an ambitious warrior. But this is a negative thing in the source, something which she has to overcome when Frodo offers her the One.
An ambitious *ruler*, which is not necessarily the same thing as an ambitious *warrior*. If she'd taken a magic sword, the latter case would be much stronger.
This puts a finger on an issue of a lot of feminism-- the kickass heroine and such, where bad behavior gets valorized because it's a woman being aggressive.
I don't think that extreme inequivalent to what is going on with rings of power, which in any case isn't based on much, just footnotes.
And I wasn't just talking about the latest opposition to wokeness but people who hate any interpretation of a book on screen, there are people who hate any representation that isn't scene by scene, and word by word the same as the book.
The ruin of the story of Denethor took away at least half the value of the LoTR movies for me. It's one of the best character stories in the book, much more interesting than Theoden's remembering he's a king. I don't know whether Jackson didn't understand despair, despaired of conveying it with the tools at hand, or didn't think his fat rich American audience would have any truck with it. But...what a loss.
I've seen a theory that the first LOTR movie was good because it was at a never-to-be-repeated sweet spot when CGI was getting good, but it still also made sense to have practical special effects.
I still have some hope that good movies can be made that include strong practical effects and enough CGI to handle things that previously would have been terrible (like the brief claymation stuff in Terminator 1) or impossible.
What we seem to be getting is almost entirely CGI, even when practical effects would have been (by historical standards) easy and effective. That the Star Wars prequels were practically shot entirely in front of a green screen, something went wildly awry. Sometimes we get a good modern movie in which there is clearly some CGI, but appears to be there to touch up the edges instead of be the core of the movie. Dunkirk, which I watched recently for the first time, seemed to have a really good mix - mostly practical.
I have often heard complaints about movie adaptations of popular books.
Jackson's LOTR movies did change some, but were masterfully done. As far as movie adaptations go, they are some of the best ever done. I have heard very few complaints from anyone about them.
People just get upset when their favorite books get done poorly by someone who doesn't care about the stories. If Jackson had turned LOTR into some kind of self-insert fan-fiction, people would have hated that too.
The cast diversity sucks all the air out of the room in online discourse, alas. That is part of the story, but I doubt it's the whole story.
The creators are inserting a lot of their own material (that's not in Tolkien). I would be surprised if Tolkien Purists per se are *that* big a slice of the population, but I could be wrong (disclaimer: I have read all of LOTR, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, parts of the Unfinished Tales, and I've had a beer at the Eagle & Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met). I haven't seen much *subversion* of Tolkien yet, if we make a distinction between adding material and subverting existing material.
Galadriel, Warrior Princess is not in Tolkien, to be clear (she is a *powerful* character, but doesn't show that power by wielding a sword). Maybe some people see this as a dramatic subversion in itself.
This is Second Age Galadriel, she does a lot of travelling around Middle-earth to find where she can found a realm of her own. And she doesn't need to be the main lead in this adaptation; if you're going for The Rings of Power, that should be Celebrimbor.
Celebrimbor taking over in Eregion from Galadriel could be an interesting sub-plot because you have all the potential of family drama and trying to avoid starting yet more internecine Elvish conflict, now that Morgoth is defeated and his forces (including Sauron) scattered to the four airts of the world. That must have been a delicate political situation to handle.
Celebrimbor founding the Gwaith-i-Mirdain, setting up as Lord of Eregion, establishing friendly terms with the Dwarves and a friendship with Narvi, the desire for peace in a land exhausted by war, Númenor at its peak, and the rumours of something stirring once more, are they true or just people jumping at shadows, and then the arrival of Annatar. Elrond and Gil-galad distrust him, so why does Celebrimbor allow him in? The entire backstory of Celebrimbor and his heritage.
There is a lot you can focus on, if you don't try to shove in diddley-aye fake Irish accent Hobbits and Original Characters whose only function is to have an Elf-Human romance (just like Arwen and Aragorn!)
Give us Khazad-dum. Give us Gil-galad in Lindon. Give us Elrond as his herald, and Galadriel finally arriving in Lothlorien. Give us the forging of the Rings and the dreadful revelation of Annatar's true nature. Give us Númenor, at once at its greatest and its most decadent, falling into the same trap of pride and desire as the Elves did in their fashion, and bringing about its own downfall in a cataclysm that haunts human imagination to this day. Yes, and give us Near Harad and Khand too, if you want to tell tales of non-white people. Are there any of the people of Bor the Faithful left at all, after these many years?
I've avoided the show because I watched part of the Wheel of Time series that Amazon put out a little while ago, and it was actively different than the books. One of the main characters was inexplicably married in the first episode, and then his wife is killed in the first episode. That kind of change makes no sense to me at all, and *should* result in a different character, so he either is the same as before and they added a major plot change for no reason, or they made him a different character. There were also a lot of continuity issues, like meeting characters at different times and in different ways, resulting in some people never meeting that had relationships in the book. It also apparently got much worse than the episodes I watched, with significant amounts of gay sex (up from none in the book!) and a significantly different ending.
Even from the first scenes it was obviously pushing some "diversity" angles as well, with people from a tiny village and no outside contact (an important subplot related to the lack of outsiders and the fact that almost everybody looked similar) being various mixed races. On some level it's not a big deal, and doesn't change the story much. On another level it shows a willingness to change the story to tell a different story, and given the other changes it felt like you weren't really watching the story you already knew and liked, but a completely different story.
If someone wants to make a Tolkien-like show and make it super diverse and tell whatever story they want, that's fine with me. If it's well made I'll probably watch it. If someone wants to bank on a major name, but then change it to be super diverse and tell whatever story they want, then that frustrates me. They bought the rights to use Tolkien's stuff because of the fanbase that comes with it. You can't go against that same fanbase or pull a bait-and-switch on what the story is and expect people to just be cool with that. That's the whole point of making it Tolkien-based!
That was in later books (like book 10 and later, not a core part of book 1) and is not necessarily sexual. Some of the references (Moiraine and Siuan in New Spring for instance) seemed directly related to having a shoulder to cry on because their training was so hard.
"One of the main characters was inexplicably married in the first episode, and then his wife is killed in the first episode."
- That was it for me. I didn't continue past the first episode entirely on the basis of that. The only possible narrative reason you'd do that was to simplify his story (allowing you to skip the actual source of the character's angst) - but his entire narrative arc flows from the scene that you can now skip, and if you actually skip it, you've completely fucked his role in the first five books, at the very least. As you say, it's a completely different character.
(Also I didn't like how pathetic they made Moraine, or how useless they made the villagers, in the battle. Also we shouldn't have even seen that battle. Also that battle went on way too long, and it just got boring. Also why did they add a kidnapping?)
I've really been looking forward to a professionally done WoT series or movies for a long time, so I stuck it out for a few more episodes. At first I thought I was mis-remembering parts (like Thom being in Emond's Field when they met him), but quickly realized that they didn't care at all about accurately relating the story as written.
Unfortunately, there is almost no chance of anyone ever doing a different version that's more accurate to the books. Amazon isn't going to create a new series using the rights, and nobody else is going to touch a series already being done, even if they had the rights.
On the plus side I re-read all of the books and enjoyed that more than watching the series anyway.
"Unfortunately, there is almost no chance of anyone ever doing a different version that's more accurate to the books."
I dunno, man. Have you seen how many Three Musketeers and Zorro movies there are? Hell, there are like three film versions of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Basically, "it's bad to make movie versions of the same popular stories over and over" is a naturally arty opinion and only fairly recently got mainstreamed.
I don't mind changes, in and of themselves; you have to make changes to adapt the media to the format.
But you should, I don't know, do a good job?
The wife was introduced solely to be shoved in the fridge. That's astonishingly bad writing. Weren't they trying to do the "diverse" thing? And they rolled right out of the gate with one of the cardinal sins of anti-diverse-writing? And then they added a bit where another strong female protagonist gets kidnapped and now we have to go rescue her? These books are fucking long enough, work on condensing the material down, instead of adding pointless plot points that add nothing to the story, and are sexist to boot.
I know it sounds like petty nit-picking, but it really doesn't work when (a) trying to both evoke memories of the movies while being constrained by Warner Studios that 'you can't copy the visuals of our movies or we'll sue your asses off' and (b) even black reviewers are laughing about Arondir's hairstyle (here around 35:28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMXL4NiKJ0A).
Gil-galad is the only male Elf allowed to have long hair. Galadriel's long hair is treated stupidly in the one scene where she *should* have it tied up or tied back, when she's fighting the ice troll and looking like she's strolling onto a shoot for a shampoo advertisement with it falling loosely all around her shoulders.
As I said, Warner Studios are making sure that Amazon can't copy the movie look, but surely they could have done better for the Elves than 90s hairstyles?
I thought he was actually writing a mythology for England. Why do you think he wasn't.
I don't know where you're seeing people who insist that criticism of the show must be racism. I'm seeing people who dislike the show for being uninspired and they aren't being called racists.
yeh, that's it mostly. Although the Irish harfoots have other criticisms.
Of course these "races' who intermarry would in fact all have the same skin colour, but so what? We can hardly exclude all non white actors from a lot of historical fiction and fantasy for that reason. In the excellent The Personal History of David Copperfield, Dev Patel -- of British Indian descent - plays the titular character. However he is playing a white man, or else the reactions of everybody around him would have been different.
I was going to mention Dev Patel for a different movie; he stars in The Green Knight, playing a nephew of King Arthur. It was a little jarring at first, but race is a complete non-issue in the story so it's not a big deal.
Also, if King Arthur had actually existed, his nephew would have been in no way English. Arthur is famous for having fought to keep the English *out* of what would later become known as England, and the warrior aristocracy of the British Isles at that time would be a mixture of proto-Welsh and ex-Roman. Nobody knows for sure what that would have looked like, but it would have been on the dark and swarthy side of contemporary England.
The “romans” were romanised proto-Welsh for the most part. The romans weren’t that dark either, but if you were being accurate then the Britons would have had darker hair, but not skin. That’s visible even today in the U.K.
I'm assuming you don't mean "diverse" in the sense of, a fellowship of humans, elves, dwarves, wizards and hobbits unites in the face of evil and learns to get along despite ancient elf-dwarf grudges?
LOL. Good point. I was trying to be as neutral as possible. They cast actors of other than European ancestry, and people got very angry. I admit to not having watched the show, more because I'm too lazy to get Netflix than anything else, but I knew what the fuss was about.
If you were given the following brief, how would you even start?
We are looking for ideas for a system to objectively grade ability.
The goal is an alternative to existing institutions that grade on a bell curve - instead we want an absolute yardstick that allows us to compare any two individuals worldwide (provide they have both gone through the process/taken the test.)
Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire.
Ideally the test (if there is one) can be taken multiple times by the same individual. It can be taken at any time by any individual. Very ideally, it is a simple process to organise/distribute, such that rich and poor communities alike can participate. But most important is that it cannot be cheated or gamed and end up lying about an individual's abilities.
This process might be applied to the academic fields or practical ones, but really we're interested in any area where skill, competence or knowledge need to be guaranteed.
Right now I'm thinking about procedurally generated challenges, and grading somehow (by time taken or quality of result) the way they get solved. But right away that limits the system to only those fields that can have challenges procedurally generated and algorithmically graded (like, for eg. GCSE-level Maths but not higher level Maths, and certainly not English.) It also probably allows a determined-but-stupid individual to simply take the test enough times to learn the shape of all possible problems by heart*.
*this isn't necessarily a problem if the space of generated problems maps perfectly onto the entire domain the subject was supposed to be learning - but that itself is a pretty big ask.
I feel like I'm probably missing other promising avenues though.
"Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire."
Are you going to check if your modern-day applicant can plough a field with a horse-plough, write copper-plate as a professional copyist, or knows how to make an axle-tree?
Because if you're testing for "what can people of today do that people five generations ago could have done?" you are selecting for a limited range. Someone a hundred and fifty years ago could probably have driven a horse and cart, but not a modern car; someone who can drive a car probably can't harness a horse to a cart and drive it. So basically clerical work, though cooking might work (can they both cook an edible stew?)
If you're asking about "who would have been the better hire?" then you are definitely asking about clerical work, and even then office work in 1872 would not be very comparable to office work today.
Several people have taken this line and I just don't see where it's coming from. Geometry for example hasn't fundamentally changed in a thousand years. New skills may appear, that did not exist before, and that will simply lead to new tests being added to the stack.
With Carl below we ended up breaking subjects down into many atomic parts. It may be that some atoms fall out of favour over time as employers stop needing them and people stop wanting them. So, eg "Use of an Abacus" or "Coding in FORTRAN".
But anyone who does decide to learn those things could still be compared directly to their forefathers. The point is to move away from grade inflation.
A couple of people have answered as if we're looking for a single test event that grades ability in every subject at once. Maybe thinking I was after a replacement IQ test?
So I'm just clarifying that what I'm thinking about is a general approach to testing, which will still end up having lots of different implementations for different areas/domains.
If the general testing process is, as it is right now, "sit silently in a room and answer questions written on paper, which a trusted authority then marks using a rubric" - that doesn't necessitate that we all sit one huge test that covers everything. The general approach is used to make tests for English, Maths, Science, etc. and the results are good(ish) at letting us know if a given person has any understanding of those things.
The main issue is your desire to avoid having to renorm the test. It's straightforward to construct a test for a given ability: if you want to who's the best at running 100m, have people run 100m. Norm against your desired time, done. But a test like that would need to be renormed because the applicability of the quality measured to the goal will drift. It'll turn out that in 10 years we want to hire people who can run 110 yards, over hurdles, or swim 100 yards, et cetera -- and of course our 100m run test will start to produce inaccurate predictions -- or we'll have to renorm it. Same thing happens even for stuff as quantitative as mathematical aptitude: at one point we test for constructive geometry proofs, because logic and geometry are the desired abilities, and later we test use of logarithms, and still later quaternions or God knows what, whatever is useful for the current jobs.
The only way I can see to avoid that, for a test of intellectual abilities, is if you believe in general intelligence g, and construct a test that measures that. But then you run up against all the conventional criticisms of IQ and standardized tests, which is that the "language" in which the test is expressed (possibly literally its vocabulary and grammar, possibly its notation, context of problems, et cetera, even in something as clear-cut as math) may change in its penetrability over time, and between demographics, so your test may be irrelevantly extra hard or extra easy for different groups, and change over time -- again, necessitating renorming.
The only thing I've ever heard gets sort of close to what you want are those parts of the standard IQ test which consist of mental spatial manipulation ("Consider this drawing of a 3D object, and draw what the object would look like if you rotated it 90 degree about a vertical axis.") Those I've heard are well correlated with IQ and have almost no "language" issue because they're very easy to explain how to do (but difficult to actually do, particularly when under time pressure).
You can probably find some IQ tests with those kinds of tasks on them, and maybe try to find other abstract manipulation tasks which are very easy to state, but which someone has found correlated with g (assuming you believe in g).
Going to read this through again in the morning. I think the re-norming thing might be a good lead - because your example of sprinting 100m is a case of something that's naturally objective (the definition of metres or seconds won't change) but then gets "normed" into something that drifts.
Presumably this conversion is happening for the convenience of the employer, so they don't have to understand metres and seconds themselves even while making decisions to hire people who do.
No, I get that, but you're asking for a test that doesn't need to be redesigned or renormed over a long period of time -- let's say at least a decade. What are the odds that the exact detailed job requirements desired by the employer don't change at all? What would an employer looking for a programmer put in his job ad in 2022, and how would it differ from 2012, or 2002? That's a problem. The only way to avoid that is to measure some "timeless" ability that *underlies* these more detailed job requirements.
The equivalent for athletic vents would be measuring something broad like VO2 max, which should give you a broad "aerobic endurance" ability that will rank first-rate marathoners and 1500m freestyle swimmers and championship cross-country skiiers all high, and people who aren't good at those things low. That way if the Olympics gets rid of the marathon and substitutes some weird obstacle course instead, your test will still be useful to predict who will do well.
The only quality in the human mind that seems like this is g, the famous "general intelligence" ability, the very existence of which is debated popularly, although I think the pros are pretty united in believing it does. So basically only an IQ test will sort people well however the detailed job requirements change over time.
What I'm thinking of now is that there's a bright line separating the individual's tested abilities on one hand and the employer's requirements on the other.
An individual's "objective" skill level could be written as a long list of atomic "achievements": this guy has geometric, logic and logarithms but quaternions are as yet missing from his list.
This presentation wouldn't even need to have "Maths" as a subject, except as a categorisation to filter the atoms with - so you're not wading through the guy's equally verbose Dancing repertiore.
Presumably the only reason this seems ungainly is that the employer doesn't want to wade through it all. So we use this higher-level concept of Maths-the-subject which arguably introduces subjectivity and uncertainty.
But actually, if you look at eg, coding jobs, it's very much granular. They want Angular, React, DevOps, whatever, because they know the exact skills they need and they need them now.
If someone tried to hire a coder and all they said was, "you need to be good at Coding", most coders might conclude that this employer doesn't really know what he's talking about.
And of course the employer wouldn't be wading through individual atoms, they'd be being matched automatically against a list of requirements he'd assembled previously.
EDIT: and of course if job requirements are going to change over time, that just means new little atoms are going to keep appearing for people to collect.
I'm very much now thinking about lots of small, quick, "tightly scoped" tests rather than very broad, profound ones like IQ.
Probably depends on the employer. I happen to be hiring right now, for a job that requires some pretty strong technical skills, but my #1 criterion is actually a certain way of thinking, which can be proven by skills in a number of areas. I know some of them, so I can pick out certain aspects of candidate life histories as signals, but I'm concerned I might miss something because I may not realize a certain line item in a person's CV indicates competence in this broad area of thinking that I need. So if there were a test that I could give that would measure this stuff well, I would definitely pay money for it.
What you've described cannot be done, though I'm not sure exactly what problem you have with the general intelligence factor? It does most of what is important here, and indeed is probably the best we're likely to be able to do for the forseeable future.
If anyone here "knew where to start" on this problem (in terms of creating something more than tests of general intelligence), then it would be a problem that would have been solved by intelligence researchers/psychometricians/corporations/the military long ago.
It's also likely that even if you were to somehow come up with some amazing test of "general ability", it wouldn't receieve any kind of purchase in terms of driving hiring and promotion decisions in the real world (at least in western countries), because it's likely to be a highly heritable trait and one for which enormous racial differences would almost certainly exist, and that by today's definition of the word would make any such test "biased".
Again, most of what you're talking about it already covered by the general intelligence factor. And even that has limited use in society today because it leads to "not enough" non-asian minorities from being hired, meaning its either illegal to use it or it otherwise makes an institution "look bad".
Unlesss you have some profound insight that allows you to know that some accurate test of "general ability" would reveal no racial differences in said ability exists (in spite of all evidence to the contrary today), there's absolutely no reason to expect that such a test would be any more acceptable than IQ tests today.
And no, IQ tests today are not "culturally biased" or whatever other flippant dismissal anybody wants to given for them here.
Ability at what? There is no generalized "ability at everything". Skills (especially) are context sensitive. This is a major wrinkle in the "just teach them how to learn/just teach critical thinking skills and let them figure stuff out" fad in education--it's self-defeating. Critical thinking only happens in context of a topic. And is massively sensitive to *having stuff to reason from*. Without core content knowledge, all the "higher order skills" are useless and, in fact, detrimental. Because it's really easy to reason yourself into believing all the things you want to believe without the real world there to tell you that no, balancing a pyramid on its tip isn't going to work well without massive support structures.
So a test that detects ability in one area will be necessarily very different than one that works for another area. And it's fractal--the more sensitive you want to get, the more that even *similar* areas will differ.
My first impression is you can't make a test that can't be gamed for the same reason you can't make a lock that can't be opened; a test is a game, to make it ungameable is to make it purposeless.
There's the problem of the scope of what you're testing; if you're testing total ability including social skills, they'll have to work with other people, and once they start working with other people there's the difficulty in figuring out which people did what.
My attempt would be something like a three-step trial period. The first step they work with the test taker who walks them through simple tasks, the second they work with the test taker who starts giving them wrong instructions and sees how long it takes them to realize, the third you throw them at something monstrously difficult with no instructions. Although that one's probably going to be a bit holistic.
> My first impression is you can't make a test that can't be gamed for the same reason you can't make a lock that can't be opened; a test is a game, to make it ungameable is to make it purposeless.
My first thought reading that was something where, like capitalism, to game the system is the same thing as using the system as intended. As long as the outcome is, "we now know how good you are at X."
Interesting thoughts on your three-step process. It brings to mind the steps-to-mastery idea where the apprentice learns the rules, the journeyman follows them, and the master breaks them.
I went and answered your social skills point under Spruce's reply instead. That's what I get for reading too quickly.
"My first thought reading that was something where, like capitalism, to game the system is the same thing as using the system as intended."
I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true for capitalism, as is evident from the abundance of financial crimes being committed all the time. If it was true, there'd be no need for agencies like the SEC to enforce the rules of the game.
I think one of the problems you'll run into is that hireability in many fields requires people who can come up with reasonable solutions to problems that don't have a right answer. There probably will be objectively better and worse answers, but there will also be trade-offs involved where how you argue for your chosen approach is as important as which approach you pick. This of course becomes even more important when humans are involved. Objective grading can take you further than one might think, and it's a great first-stage filter if you have a large stack of applications, but I don't think any company who knows what's good for them will stop using job interviews in a later stage of the hiring process.
And then of course there's the bit where if you're in the US, being able defend a potential lawsuit is as important a measure for your grading system than what it actually measures - even if you're tring to measure empathy (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/08/seeming-and-being-empathetic/) but definitely if you're desinging SAT reading questions (http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13956.html) - which are so formulaic they might as well be procedurally generated, I'm sure AIs will be good enough for that very soon.
I'm walking a strange line here where, to help promote a direction for thinking about it, I'm coming down with some concrete statements like "this is to help employers select people".
Yet then when we follow that thought to areas like, employers also need social skills or, employers need to cover their arses legally, my instinct is that's a direction that's leading away from the goal - which is, can we come up with a system that makes skill/competence legible.
On your first point, having no right answer is a well understood property of lots of subjects already, (ie, English essays) so there was no way to avoid grappling with it.
I would say that there's no reason to categorise subjects in the same way we do now. I could easily imagine Social Skills or Teamwork being just another axis you get scored on alongside Maths, English, Strength and Agility.
This a massive ask if the test cannot be taken under controlled conditions, but the good news is I don't think the content of the test matters as much as it's (lack of) hackability. Being that the brief states that this is the 'most important' part, I can think of a few ways of minimising that risk.
(Note: these suggestions are mostly only relevant to online tests)
1. Requiring some formal identification to be provided before taking the test. This makes it a lot harder for someone to take the test multiple times in quick succession without being caught out.
2. Making sure the participants have their cameras and microphones on while taking the test (even if it isn't live). This allows you to make sure that the person taking the test matches the identification given, and makes it harder for the participant to receive help from others during the test.
3. Have a range of different but similarly difficult problems that may appear on the test. One possible failure mode of everything I just said are many people taking the test, screenshotting the questions, and then someone giving everyone the answers on StackExchange or something. If there's a wider range of different questions, the participants are less likely to be prepared for it.
4. Have different stages of the test, where the next stage can only be reached provided the participant gets some minimum score on the previous test. This is to somewhat nullify the try-hards who take the test multiple times, figure out all the permutations of the first question, and then answer it easily. Introducing stages means anyone who wants to hack the test is gonna need a hell of a long time to do it.
5. Make some minimum 'cool-off' period for each attempt. Something like 6 months or a year. This is the kind of requirement organisations like Mensa put in to limit 'testing effects' where people's performance improves on the test due to having taken it multiple times.
6. Realise the risk of the test being hacked can never be 0% because over time, if the test gains widespread adoption, you end up with people being better prepared for it by virtue of having specialised study guides. That being said, the SAT is probably a good example of something where specialised study has probably improved grades, but the best scores tend to be people with the highest levels of ability. Slightly hackable isn't bad provided it's not mostly hackable.
If there is some way for you to design such a system that can work online, at scale, and across cultures don't think it's an exaggeration to say it may well be one of the most important things ever done. Not just for school admissions but a lot of companies are currently really awful at psychometric testing generally.
> If there is some way for you to design such a system that can work online, at scale, and across cultures don't think it's an exaggeration to say it may well be one of the most important things ever done.
That's why I'm asking you lot!
Rather than guarding who can take the test and how often, I was thinking more along the lines of idempotency: if we have some magical test that shows you how good you are at X with perfect accuracy, you can take the test once or a hundred times and always get the same result.
Then the only reason you need verification is to make sure one person isn't taking the test for someone else. If you had something else (eg biometrics) to achieve that, you could freely distribute the tests without even worrying where they end up.
>Rather than guarding who can take the test and how often, I was thinking more along the lines of idempotency: if we have some magical test that shows you how good you are at X with perfect accuracy, you can take the test once or a hundred times and always get the same result.
This is facially impossible because you will never be able to replicate the test conditions exactly. Any minor change in physical health, hours slept the previous night, emotional worries, etc. is going to produce some change in the outcome.
It assumes there's such a thing as a general consistent skill level at something which can be measured, though what we really can measure is merely a result of one's effort in this particular task. If we are speaking about time indifference, the tools and techniques, and even the language have changed over four generations as well as our general attitude towards tests. And this is just from the top of my mind.
Is it actually a real practical problem or a sort of mental experiment? Are you really supposed to find the best solution or to point at incosistencies in the task?
I mean, I'm not expecting to come up with a production ready solution by next month. But I am taking the problem seriously and interested in good ideas or directions.
From an employer's perspective (they being the main consumers of existing grading systems) something like consistent skill and effort is exactly what we're trying to make legible.
If those things aren't real (and they might not be) then what is? A good "model" of how skills/skilled people "work" might be a smart starting point to go from.
> But I am taking the problem seriously and interested in good ideas or directions.
If a century of intelligence research and psychometrics couldn't come up with what you're asking for, why do you expect anybody here to have any clue what to do?
Some of Scott's older posts such as "Radicalizing the Romanceless", "Untitled", and his Nine Meditations, were primary inspirations for this piece. I imagine that many ACX readers may value reading it.
Impressions from others include:
* "This project by Elodes is emotional, masterfully-written, vulnerable, inspiring, necessary, and deeply, deeply important to me and potentially millions of other men and women."
* "[this] is the work that everyone should have a go at - I just started it and it's fire"
* "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating that 300 ways post. I'm bawling my eyes out reading it because it resonates so hardcore"
* "In stereotypical male fashion, I am going to decline to talk about the many emotions this raised in me, and content myself with giving praise. The conclusion in particular was masterful writing. Synthetic, rigorous and tender. You should probably read this."
* "it's fucking amazing work. [...] You've done something incredibly valuable with this write-up."
* "holy freaking crap. this list should be required reading for every human on the face of the planet"
* "your writing is very lucid and your frame is refreshingly expansive. Kinda daunting in its length, but from what I’ve sampled it’s well worth investing the time to read in its entirety."
* "I've been crying for an hour at the feeling of being seen . Thanks for sharing all of this"
* "Words are not enough to describe how this resonated with me. [...] Reading this, as a proof that my suffering was and is real, not just an imagination in my head, means more than almost anything else someone has done for me. I can't even believe that a book can mean do much to me, and would not have believed anyone if they told me earlier it will mean so much."
I hope ACX readers will find it similarly valuable.
Oh, did you update that series of posts? I read through the whole original thing some months ago, and even linked it here and there occasionally...it was certainly Interesting, especially as a trans reader. Way better quality than the usual standard of Men Talking About Men's Issues discourse. Not sure I'd want to devote another couple days' downtime to reread it though, unless there were significant revisions.
(I genuinely think it coulda been condensed down to 150, or 200 at most. Certain patterns and similarities emerge if one binge-reads. You do make note of this inefficient-for-authenticity's-sake, to your credit; but it adds extra onus on the reader for, imo, not so much marginal benefit.)
I made only marginal improvements, nothing that would warrant a reread. Thanks for reading it, I'm happy you liked it.
(I mostly agree with your comment; a fully revised version would likely be shorter. Though given that the actual amount of items nears 400, I doubt 150 would be doable without losing detail. I'd sooner write a 20-item "80-20" post for people who prefer efficiency.)
> It is common for women en masse to ask men to express their feelings (“Men should be more vulnerable and open about their emotions!”), only to go “wait, I don’t like this after all” when men follow their advice. [...] It is moreover hurtful when women say they want men to be open about their emotions, only to then respond not just with “actually, I don’t want this,” but rather with, “Not like that.” “Not those feelings.” Open up — but not that much! Open up — but not about that! Open up — but not here, not now, not in this space, not at this time, not to me. Men are told to open up about their feelings, but when that’s sadness, people get uncomfortable; when that’s anger, people get fearful; when that’s lust, people get disgusted; when that’s feeling weak or incapable, people get impatient; and even when that’s love or enjoyment, people routinely mock men for who or what or in what way they love or enjoy.
100% this.
I will strategically *not* say how that makes me feel.
Lordy, that PDF goes on for >100 pages. I don't think I could easily write 100+ pages on the entire last 50 years of my life, let alone the suffering, which is only a modest fraction of the whole. You must have thought about this a great deal.
I did nevertheless get through the first 15 pages or so, and the thing it seems to me is you're asking for men to acquire similar habits of complaint and redress, and similar expectations of sensitivity and compassion from their surroundings, as women hold up as their own ideal expectations.
Which...I dunno, doesn't honestly appeal to me at all. I like girls plenty, but I have no desire to be one. I like the company of women, in modest numbers, for various lengths of time, but I would never want to live in a group, organization, or nation entirely designed by and around women. Even among women I respect and admire, if I'm the only cock in a clutch of hens, after I while I get...restless. Experience an urge to make a short penis joke, leave some complicated feeling unexplored and unexpressed, ignore nuance, exaggerate, bullshit, belch, fart.
As I see it for many, perhaps most of us, there's an inherent tension between how men want their surroundings to treat them, and how women do, but by me that's a good thing, the continual negotiation of how we resolve that tension in a way that gives each sex half a loaf is part of what gives our social world complexity, nuance, depth, and variation, such that each individual can probably find the particular mixture of the two currents that suits him best. I don't think it would work as well if either current dominated.
Well darn. Do I really have to go through it all, then? I guess I can take it in chunks, pace myself. But maybe you want to write a precis or something? I don't suggest you go all the way to This One Weird Trick clickbaity lures, but a good way to be persuasive is to offer the central conclusion right up front in a summary way, and let people read further to discover the nuance, supporting evidence, response to objections and so forth.
Feel free to read the conclusion! It does indeed summarize a number of my points, but can be read on its own without the context of the preceding items.
Definitely possible, though I imagine the current (American) context has little space for it. There seems to be some manner of subgenre in Japanese porn that centers androphilic affection, though.
>A bad thing about being male: short penis jokes are socially acceptable, even on the left. I'm not sure how many men are affected by this.
And height jokes, and baldness jokes, and being sexually undesirable in general. But the good thing about this is how is plainly deomstrates the disingenuousness of the "body positivity" movement.
I would say that the body positivity movement is mostly left, but not dominant on the left.
When I point out that short penis jokes and fat jokes are unfair, people on the left take it pretty well, though I don't know if they stop making them.
I find it amusing the the left seems to be the last refuge of simple-minded Freudianism-- guns described as penis substitutes.-
In my experience, woke leftists are genuinely pretty good about not mocking people--including men--for their appearance.
I distinctly remember coming upon multiple online conversations about how it was problematic to fat-shame Trump.
The new, woke millennial left also seems quite good at not being opportunistically racist toward non-white conservatives (compare the Bush-era racist mockery of Condoleeza Rice et al.), opportunistically sexist toward female conservatives, opportunistically homophobic toward gay conservatives, etc.
Even class-based mockery of "toothless hicks from flyover country" is, at least in my experience, generally rare on the woke millennial left. It's *much* more of a centrist liberal thing.
They truly can't be accused of hypocrisy (at least in my experience--yours may differ) when it comes to respecting 'marginalized' characteristics even in their political enemies. They'll just call them terrible people in exactly the same way they do straight white men who disagree with them.
My impression is that big name comedians like Colbert used to insult people's faces more and have switched to insulting expressions. Does this seem correct?
What's absurd? If you click on the link, the first thing it says is true, capitalized, with a nice green check. It then gives her full quote and adds some context. TBH, I think there is at the least a colorable argument there, if you're talking about anything short of the modern era.
That's why the rest of the quote matters. She was at a domestic violence forum, and she went into domestic violence.
She could have easily gone into the high level of casual sexual assault that accompanies most armies moving through territory (especially in the pre and early modern), and had a long discussion about how much of the fallout of war (as opposed to the dying) falls on women, and reflected on whether it might not be that women suffer the consequences more widely than men. I'm not really making that argument here, and I'm not saying it would be convincing if someone did make it, but I don't think it's absurd on its face.
Of course, in the event, she was just pausing here before she pivoted to talk about domestic violence. It's not a good quote, or a good transition. But Hillary never was all that good at this stuff. I'm just saying that if you read the full context it's not nearly *as* ridiculous. It's another one of those cases where you can make someone look extra silly by cutting them off in a maximally disadvantageous place.
Your first point is included in item 10 of category 7.3. The second I don't think I mention myself, but I recall it being mentioned in an article on the (great) blog 'Because It's 2015', which I recommend in my conclusion as further reading.
I'm not sure what you mean with your last question. If you're asking if I keep a version history of sorts: I haven't, primarily because I haven't edited the piece since publishing it, and likely won't; there are a few things I'd change still, but a piece like this is never finished, so at some point as the author you just have to make peace with it.
I was thinking about material in _The Frailty Myth_, a book about women and athleticism-- athleticism is much more accepted for women than it was fifty years ago.
The bitter version is that men are being pushed to be as vain as women, and women are being pushed to be as competitive as men.
One of the things I am thinking is that a lot of the people who care about men's issues have a sort of bimodal distribution where there's a small number of leftists thinking about these issues, and a larger number of right-leaning to strongly far-right 'manosphere' types, many of whom have their own divisions (MRAs, PUAs, MGTOW, alt-right, trads). I feel like getting all these people to cooperate on anything would be very, very difficult.
With respect, I think you've chosen the wrong way to "market" this post. When I read these blurbs of effusive praise I just find myself asking "if this work is so great, why is it that I'm hearing about it from Elodes himself? If it's that great, surely *one of those people*, or someone equally effusive downstream from them, would be the one to sell me on it". For a relevant example, I didn't hear about SSC because Scott himself showed up to sell me on it; a friend linked a post (I think it was Meditations on Moloch).
So this presentation just looks to me like you're astroturfing yourself, even though you probably aren't really. I think it would work better if you had stopped before the impressions from others (and left your Twitter out, which again just looks like unrelated self-promotion).
It's sort of an old-school book jacket idea, I think.
I like the actual document a lot. I will share it when asked for an example of 'men's issues' and am debating what the best place to recirculate would be.
I particularly like your inclusion of the categories of feminine men and masculine women; there's a lot of people on the left pretending none of this exists in nature, and a lot of people on the right who think everyone should just be the modal example of their sex. Not everyone is at the median of their sex on the gender spectrum, and that's OK.
Maybe not if take into account the effect of restaurant food on your health, since most restaurant food is loaded with salt, sugar, and trans fats. All that medical care is hugely energy intensive.
I remember Eliezer Yudkowsky made this claim[1], at least of the Ideal Rational Society, dath ilan. No evidence was cited, unfortunately. Almost as if Arguments from Fictional Evidence are tricky at best.
Transport costs shouldn't be a major factor either way[2]: any reasonably-logistically-sound grocery run ought not contribute that much, compared to the carbon-lifecycle-analysis expenditure total. Matters more what exactly is bought, and from where...the consumer's own travel footprint is probably a rounding error. (Hitting up multiple stores for specialty ingredients, or getting such delivered direct to consumer...that might be different.)
I also notice that lots, lots, *lots* of people still cook using combustion[3]: gas, charcoal, woodfire, etc. Sure, to some extent electric stoves and ovens are still "powered by" coal/LNG...but that's still probably more efficient carbon-wise than directly and inefficiently burning shit. The fact that restaurant-grade equipment can reach much higher temperatures, faster, at larger scale, seems to imply another carbon win. (And that's just for the actual cooking parts: can't beat wholesale ingredient prices, or automated equipment with no smaller consumer versions, such as multiple-chicken rotisserie ovens.)
One possible point in favour of home cooking: __maybe__ less food waste? Restaurants have to care about presentation, and uneaten/unsold portions typically legally have to be tossed. Plus it's entirely possible to misjudge supply/demand and end up with a ton of X ingredient that no one ends up eating. (It makes me sad whenever I see dead seafood in fishtanks at seafood restaurants.) No cook perfectly upholds the Law of Conservation of Calories, but I'd imagine that home cooking allows for more flexibility of making exactly the food one wants, including portion sizes. For example, I was raised to cook for a whole family, and it took several years of living on my own to scale that down for just-myself...but now I'm pretty comfortable keeping a lean pantry. Just enough laying around for a few days' meals, a week tops. No longer do I stuff the crisper with all sorts of vegetables, racing against entropy to get everything cooked before spoilage, finally admitting defeat when Yes The Spinach Is Literally Liquid, You Can't Eat That. (No link for this paragraph, because the whole "anti-food-waste" movement got woke-captured and the evidence is shitty...)
Thanks. Great answer despite the preamble about the evidence being sketchy. I wasn’t expecting anybody to fully answer this but that’s a good effort. On balance I’m beginning to think the restaurants are winning.
Working this out myself I think it’s clear that a mess hall feeding a large group of people a simple meal of meat, vegs and potatoes is going to be more carbon efficient than every person in the hall using their own cooker and stove. Individual cookers waste a lot of energy because there is a lot of empty space.
What about high end restaurants? It’s less clear. There’s going to be a lot of cook to order, and a larger number of ingredients even in what is nominally the same meal. Nevertheless there will be energy savings in more efficient equipment cooking multiple meals at once, even there. I’ll call it even.
You sure it wouldn't be faster and easier to just use a little operant conditioning? Id est, ply her with first-rate merlot and dazzlingly witty banter while in the restaurant, then give her a most excellent backrub when you get home, maybe make the bed the next morning.
My intuition is, money approximates carbon costs: when money switches hands, it is a payment for the recipient making or creating or doing something (which usually consumes energy and produces carbon emissions). Then the recipient too will buy something with it (which usually uses energy and produces carbon emissions). As long as money is not exchanged but stays in your wallet, it doesn't entail production of anything or any services rendered and thus contributes to practically zero amount of carbon produced. (However, if you -- or restaurant owner -- invest it, it will probably contribute to carbon creation.) So that probably should be considered in addition to direct carbon costs.
As long as economic activity produces carbon emissions, less economic activity results in less carbon emissions (if one can't differentiate between kinds of activity, and one usually can't judge what restaurant workers and managers will with their income). Only "good" thing carbon-wise one can do is engage in carbon negative or neutral economic activity (so, pay for someone to plant trees and ensure the trees won't be burned as fuel later.)
BUT If a restaurant is more efficient per unit carbon costs and all restaurant workers are vegans who have committed to zero-carbon lifestyle and the owners donate majority of the restaurant profit to carbon negative charities ... and you instead would buy a new SUV, then it calculation is much better for the restaurant. It is different if it is you who are committed to zero-carbon lifestyle but the restaurant staff will buy SUVs with their income, despite any efficiencies in restaurant production?
(I can now totally see where the people who wish for large-scale systemic changes to reduce carbon emissions come from.)
Your intuition that you can approximate carbon impact by amount of economic activity is correct, and is the basis of the US Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (USEEIO) models that allow you to estimate the impact (warming, but also others) of a given amount of economic activity of a given type:
And your concern that the only way to reduce the impact predicted from such models is to do less economic activity is also correct, and is a fundamental limitation of using them compared to e.g. detailed models of specific material flows.
I think there's a pretty clear case where this isn't true: organic farming. It takes up more land per unit of food, and is more labor intensive. Since one of the biggest climate impacts of food is land use, it seems like in this case cost and carbon cost are inversely related.
In purely carbon terms? And keeping the menu the same? It's probably a safe bet that the more mass-produced the food, the more efficiency leads to lower carbon footprint. This effect reduces somewhat as you move up the scale, though, and might flip once you get to Michelin-star food.
But there are so many other variables involved that it's hard to make a generalization.
I think it depends on the kind of a restaurant. But assuming the restaurant cooks the same dish from the same ingredients as you would at home (maybe just buying them in bulk, though), I'd assume it's more carbon friendly in terms of cooking with professional equipment and trained staff.
Though we should consider that a restaurant itself takes quite a lot of space as well. They also tend to be finely decorated, spending quite a lot of furniture, drapings, crockery and cutlery, etc.
Moreover, it's only viable if your savings on time, psychological comfort and healthier eating are greater than what you overpay in the said restaurant. Otherwise, it's better to cook at home and donate the extra money to charity.
There's also economic incentive. Our economics consists of services and for many people working in a restaurant is a way to supply for their family or save for their future education.
> assuming the restaurant cooks the same dish from the same ingredients as you would at home
I doubt that assumption holds. The nominal same dish at a restaurant likely contains more and higher-quality (more resource intensive) meat and animal fat than a home-cooked meal.
Why would the higher quality food be harder to cook, or more carbon intensive. I did say ignoring transport costs - in reality anything except cooking really.
I'm starting as a new professor of Ethics, Law, AI in a research institution in Europe.
Since I don't have to worry about tenure, I am looking for broad suggestions for cool/impactful things to or advice you wish you had known at the start of your academic career.
I don't have a huge budget, but I am fairly free to do as I please.
I felt like I didn't "get" the Prophet and Caesar's Wife post. I usually really like Scott's fiction so it seemed like I was missing something. Anyone got any takes/elaboration on the point/joke?
I confess I started speed reading and skimming somewhat after about the tenth scenario, but it seemed to me the main recurring moral emerging from the stories was that at base any action or intent, however altruistic and benevolent, has an element of "n-th order" selfishness.
After all, even doing the right thing when "the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth" (e.g. anonymous charity donations) has an element of making one feel better about oneself or perhaps assuaging guilt.
I think it's not just about altruism, it's about people's demands for the appearance of altruism. And possibly about claims to know how people will be affected.
I wouldn't mind some examination of the prophet's motives and concept of knowledge. And maybe something about how people come to believe a claim.
The other interpretation that stood out to me was that a people are bad at being explicitly utilitarian, and would do better if they stuck to their standard way of thinking about things in most scenarios. Perhaps especially so when it comes to social cost considerations, given our reasoning abilities were optimized for navigating social situations.
What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge? Wouldn't the best forum in the world restrict its membership to just those people, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded). It wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for grievance studies, English lit, etc would qualify on the basis of their thesis. This would help to ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, something which is very hard to come by, as most forums are just people signalling at one another.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics remain stupid/irrational. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to rational knowledge.
Further down this thread (and not before some altercation and mockery), the OP gave a response to Nobody Special which I think tells us the motivation behind this post: basically, you can't post original ideas for discussion on Internet fora without getting frustrated by the responses.
In his words:
> I don't bother to share any of my intellectual contributions to places with a lot of people who don't have any (any public forum) because I have learned from sufficient repeat sampling that the expected response from a person on such a forum is in fact ...[worthless]
This is 100% true and my experience has been exactly the same. You can't further some generally original line of thought without dealing with negative bullshit.
I have found in places like this that if I'm reading someone else's discussion without any agenda of my own, it's fertile ground for having all sorts of new ideas.
But if I have a concept for something already, and I'm seeking to flesh it out and develop it a little, it's an absolute uphill struggle.
And actually, that holds true not just in other online places but in real life as well. There is definitely a pain barrier to overcome when conveying potentially new ideas to uninitiated people.
I think OP's answer is "make a place where people are more like me, because then they'll see where I'm coming from and we can skip all the frustration."
I think this won't work because if you fill a room with more people like OP (or me, for that matter) you'll find it harder, not easier, to get them to grapple with new ideas. They're more likely than the common man to be pursuing their own odd mental journeys already, which makes it harder not easier for them to jump over to yours.
I don't know what a better answer would be. My current approach is, ignore responses which add negativity or steer the convo off in the wrong direction; and, be ready to keep repeating myself alot because other people are going to need time to get to where I am before they can go any further.
Does anyone else find themselves in this situation, and do any of you have useful advice for it?
This sounds like precisely what academia is. There’s still issues with disciplinary norms, and the general sort of gatekeeping that goes with creating a safe space for novel ideas, but it’s precisely a space where a bunch of people with idiosyncratic and interesting new ideas try to sometimes listen to and provide feedback on each other’s ideas in ways that are often helpful.
I don’t understand why so many people are taking this comment as a good faith argument. You seem to be unhappy. Sorry you don’t feel well.
When you are in a better mood I’m sure you’ll be able to see that some wisdom comes from folks that aren’t Nobel Laureates. Your Uber driver may just pass on a life changing insight tomorrow. Be respectful. Be humble. Be kind. Internalize the importance of those virtues and you are on your way to true enlightenment.
This is a massive cope. The "insight" part is particularly souring to the stomach. A major purpose of restricting forum membership to people with serious intellectual lives is filtering those who believe in "insights." "Insights" are cheap knockoffs of scholarship and knowledge, mind candy for consumers with child-like IQs (my adult IQ was 110 at the age of 11, for instance, so people at that IQ level are mentally 11 to me and should be treated as such). Something is wrong with you if you think a mental child can knowledge. Calling cheap, child copes "insights" is core to this malady.
The rest of your post is you simply asserting that people with low IQs have something to offer the world except physical labor, which is untrue. The minimum IQ for contribution to the knowledge of man is about 125 based on research, that's about 95th percentile. People under that level quite literally exist just to do labor for people above that level, who exist to progress and lead humanity.
I would like such a forum as OP describes because I would like to have adult conversations free of natural laborers who feel empowered under liberalism to talk down to their natural superiors and who have forgotten their place in the intellectual hierarchy. The proliferation of incredibly low-information posts based solely on emotion is a large part of the cancer of liberal serf ego-narcissism.
@Ratsoy69 if by any chance you’re still keeping an eye on your thread, this is a great example of someone else doing that “leading with vinegar” thing I was cautioning you about.
If it’s hard to see it in your own posts, reading this might help you see what it looks like from the outside.
I tend to diagnose the behavior as an insecurity-driven superiority complex when I see it, but part of that is my colored view based on my own history. Highschool-age me really latched onto “smarter than others” as a core block to craft an identity around. That one thing to be proud of can be a real lifesaver when you’re in that floating in that teenage awkward space, still figuring out how to like yourself and be socially successful with your peers.
But if you go too far down that road that can really stunt you - a superiority complex makes you insufferable to others makes them reject you socially makes you cling harder to your belief they are beneath you makes you more insufferable and so on.
I was lucky enough to break out of it, which I largely credit to a band of merry loser friends helping me trying a few other things outside of my “smartness” tower. Maybe I overdiagnose it in others since I lived it myself, but I see specters of it whenever I see people flash their IQ, imply that “most people” are stupid and thus somehow lesser than them, etc.
You were obviously wrong about your intrinsic station in high school and updated towards the real value as you accumulated experience. On the other hand, others may start off more modest early on, and update towards a leader mindset as experience accumulates. Just because you wrongly thought you were a superior does not mean that there are none.
> wants adult conversations free of natural labourers
You realise there already is a club for high-IQ people who've never done a hard day's work in their lives, right? It's called academia and you don't enjoy it - because it's full of other people like you!
> appeals to the idea of a natural hierarchy based on IQ
There certainly is a natural order of things, but it's not based on IQ. It involves the strongest men, and the men most able to command the respect and loyalty of their fellows, using you and your high-IQ ilk as furniture.
I would, ah, hesitate to bring it back if I were you.
> It's called academia and you don't enjoy it - because it's full of other people like you!
I don't enjoy academia because it's totally compromised by bioleninist mental children and associated status seekers merely pretending to be like people like me for gain.
>There certainly is a natural order of things, but it's not based on IQ. It involves the strongest men, and the men most able to command the respect and loyalty of their fellows, using you and your high-IQ ilk as furniture. I would, ah, hesitate to bring it back if I were you.
This is juvenile, Christ did not come as a steroid abusing body builder, yet He is infinitely intelligent. Man's perception of the Logos is what separates him from animals. The relation between the intelligent and unintelligent is exactly like that between child and adult ... it is self-evident and failure to see this is a willful state of defiance against God's natural law.
Who let the bioleninists in? The common man finds woke bullshit ridiculous. You need to take high IQ people and completely insulate them from the real world before you have a pack of people self-important, intellectually gifted yet pragmatically stupid enough to allow these ideas to take hold.
And I await with glee your Bible quote showing Christ saying how all us intelligent people should look down on those sheep-like natural labourers. Something about heaven through the eye of a needle, wasn't it?
Liberalism is a serious heresy and is incompatible with Christianity. As you are a liberal (and I mean this not in a restricted way, eg "Democrat." Both Republicans and Democrats are liberals. Anybody who rejects the natural hierarchy and Christian monarchy is a liberal. Liberalism is fundamentally anti-Christian), you have no right to lecture me on Scripture.
Still, the eye of the needle line had nothing to do with intelligence; rather, Christ was speaking to someone much like Lex Fridman. Lex Fridman does three things: he seeks status, money, and prestige. Though he is intelligent, has never produced any intellectual achievements outside of the official academy under his real name. He does his official, allowed research on computers, he does a podcast so he can make money and get popular, and he is also created a "start-up" (vomit inducing word) so he can get more money. A rich Jew quite like this came to Christ and asked him how to get to heaven. Christ told him if he were to be perfect he would give away all of his money and status and follow God himself to His very low status crucifixion and death. What Christian would not do this if they were in this rich man's position, in front of the Lord in the flesh? Instead, the rich Jew soy-sneered at the Lord and ignored him, going away, back to his mammon worship.
Oh god. Are you serious? I test somewhere in the final percentile but enjoy conversations with people from all parts the bell curve. Unless of course they are assholes. I avoid smart assholes as well as stupid ones.
Why not just join Mensa and only hang with them if you can’t tolerate ordinary people?
Edit
Afterthought. Is your user name meant entirely ironically?
If you're serious about your test scores, that goes to show why requiring intellectual output is better than just Mensa. Mensa might be filled with people like you! We don't have a good science of temperament but it's clear that many high IQ people have serious deficits in this regard. Some low IQ people have good temperament and are clearly burdened by their lack of g. I suspect the relevant temperamental traits all have to do with altruism, and specifically conscientiousness, disagreeableness, low status seeking, and high systematizing are probably important.
"I don’t understand why so many people are taking this comment as a good faith argument."
There's very little to lose by doing so. Even when the op is a troll, there might be lurkers who benefit from explanations. And there's always the dream of someone posting this kind of nonsense and legitimately seeing where they're going wrong through the responses.
One reason why I don't post anything is because people without intellectual achievement actually tend to prohibit those with it by sneering, making haughty, sub-literate objections, ignoring, and sending attention to less worthy avenues, making posting original stuff here a basically masochistic exercise. It's like Newton trying to discuss his Principia with the village peasants. They will not only not understand, they will actually forget their place, start lecturing him on Jesus, maybe report him to the local constable for heresy, will make objections based on the Bible to his theories, etc. Obviously he didn't do that and if he shared stuff at all it was with other geniuses at the Royal Society.
" start lecturing him on Jesus, maybe report him to the local constable for heresy, will make objections based on the Bible to his theories, etc."
Boy, do you have the wrong view of Newton. He would have been perfectly happy to discuss the Bible with the village peasants because he had his own, strong views on it and on belief, and yes he might well have been reported for heresy, but not because he was A Scientist, because he was A Heretic.
For a start, he was one of the kooks who thought you could extract the date of the end of the world from the Bible:
"In his posthumously-published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, Newton expressed his belief that Bible prophecy would not be understood "until the time of the end", and that even then "none of the wicked shall understand". Referring to that as a future time ("the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching"), Newton also anticipated "the general preaching of the Gospel be approaching" and "the Gospel must first be preached in all nations before the great tribulation, and end of the world".
Over the years, a large amount of media attention and public interest has circulated regarding largely unknown and unpublished documents, evidently written by Isaac Newton, that indicate he believed the world could end in 2060. While Newton also had many other possible dates (e.g. 2034), he did not believe that the end of the world would take place specifically in 2060."
So if you were anticipating that you, ratsoy69, would have been having elevated chats about intellectual pursuit of scientific matters with Newton had you been around then, you might have been in for a surprise.
That's definitely a problem, pearls before swine, et cetera, but on the other hand are you sure you're not mistaking creative lunacy for original intellectual achievement? It can be very difficult to distinguish, almost impossible for the originator himself. That's one reason we tend to wait, give very original ideas the test of time, to see whether their reputation improves (as pretty smart people come to recognize genius) or declines (as pretty smart people come to recognize fraud or idiocy).
To try to illustrate – let’s say I founded a running club. That’s cool, and totally unobjectionable – I doubt anyone would mind or care.
Let’s then say I decide to go for just “elite” runners and say the club is only available for people who can do a 100M dash in less than 11 seconds. That’s a little elitist, and there are a bunch of other distances I’m leaving out, but overall it’s not likely to raise much in the way of a strident objection if I advertised the club somewhere.
But then I take a hairpin turn into crazy town. Because I myself, and some people I like and want in the club, don’t actually run very fast at all. And there are other people who are really fast, but I think they're dumb and I don’t like them. So I revise the membership rules again: my club is now only available for (a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you’re a grievance studies major and (c) if I like you, you can do your 100M on a bicycle or just write a blog post about running. Now this doesn’t really look like a running club at all – what exactly is the point?
And then the point reveals itself: I announce the club in a public forum, where I describe it as the “best club in the world” and ask the audience why anyone would even speak to people “without meaningful running achievements” like the ones who would qualify for membership. The running itself was never the point - this was all about making a seemingly-exclusive group, declaring myself eligible for it along with awesome runners like Usain Bolt and Jesse Owns, and then declaring us all to be superior to others.
People, predictably, react negatively to this. Which is only to be expected since my club is less of a running club than a club for insecure jerks, some of whom are runners. I respond in kind, and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
But honestly, was this ever going to go any other way? Front-end loaded with as much vinegar as it was, it’s hard to see how it would attract anything but backlash.
>(a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you’re a grievance studies major and (c) if I like you, you can do your 100M on a bicycle or just write a blog post about running. Now this doesn’t really look like a running club at all – what exactly is the point?
I think you misunderstand, running isn't and analogy to intellectual achievement wrt to grievance studies. To make what you're saying work, you should have written something like "(a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you're on steroids or some drug or your definition of of "11" is my definition of "120" and you think "seconds" are subjective and the legacy of colonialism (c) if you are really close and can provide receipts of hard work, or you have another elite time at another distance and want to try sprinting."
It is a running club, I'm just excluding cheaters, liars, and avoiding Goodhart's law by having a little bit of spirit-of-law flexibility.
In other words, grievance studies is not intellectual achievement.
>and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
I didn't accuse anyone in this thread of that, I was talking about how people on forums like this respond to original ideas in the aggregate, in my experience. I don't bother to share any of my intellectual contributions to places with a lot of people who don't have any (any public forum) because I have learned from sufficient repeat sampling that the expected response from a person on such a forum is in fact something on {*presses downvote*, *ignores*, "Wow, what a [slur] post", "One major problem with this is [something I address at length, they obviously stopped at the 2nd sentence]", "Actually, [something off topic or totally wrong and ignorant, possibly GPT-3 generated, does not even quote what I said, has potentially not read the post and definitely did not understand a word of it]" , ... etc }
You end up just playing teacher for the latter two people but you get no pay or respect and they are under the illusion that they are equals in the conversation and generally fail to learn or listen to anything you tell them, the former two troll you into the ground and if you hit back the 0 achievement janitor bans you. Very consistent process
This thread is practically like this and all I did was share an original forum idea, why would anybody bother to post stuff that takes actual effort to make?
>>and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
>I didn't accuse anyone in this thread of that, I was talking about how people on forums like this respond to original ideas in the aggregate, in my experience.
You can’t honestly expect anyone to buy that.
If I post “all people but me and people like me are stupid.”
Then another guy posts “When have you ever said anything smart?”
And I reply “One reason why I don't post anything is because people without intellectual achievement actually tend to prohibit those with it by sneering, making haughty, sub-literate objections, ignoring, and sending attention to less worthy avenues, making posting original stuff here a basically masochistic exercise. It's like Newton trying to discuss his Principia with the village peasants.” The context makes it obvious to anyone with two braincells that it's a clapback.
Just like it's obvious in your reply to Yug Gnirob where you respond to him mocking your idea with a long diatribe about how “many people display serious literacy flaws on public forums” and how your writing is just so smart that lots of people aren’t smart enough to understand it.
This “I wasn’t talking about any of you I was just talking in general” nonsense doesn’t work in any social context. If some guy bumps into you in a bar and spills your beer and you go on a rant about how “the world is full of clumsy morons who don't look where they're going” and then he punches you in the face, you can say a lot about the interaction but it’s a really stupid look to try “wow he’s so dumb I wasn’t even talking about him I was talking about other clumsy people in other bars.”
You can try to obfuscate it if you want, but nobody is fooled by it, and that kind of behavior is a big part of why your attempt to “[just] share a forum idea” has yielded so much vinegar. Put spite in, get spite out.
So again. Be kinder. If you want people to take your idea for a forum seriously and not just bite your nose off when you suggest it, maybe next time don’t lead with “what's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements?”
In fact, for free, just as a demonstration - here's how you could rewrite that first post to not sound so nasty from the get-go. If you want to do an experiment, post this on another forum and see how many of the first replies you get (before you yourself reply to your repliers) are hostile. It's not hard - this took me all of 5 minutes:
I have an idea for a forum I think would be interesting. If a group restricted its membership to only people with significant intellectual achievements, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded), it would ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, which is very hard to come by as many forums, even with intelligent membership, can get off track and fall prey to just signaling at one another.
To keep membership broad, it wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for disciplines (a) lacking a strong empirical focus or (b) unrelated to the forum's topics would qualify on the basis of their thesis.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics limit their openness to new ideas. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to advancing human knowledge.
Having expertise in physics, as an example, in no way qualifies you to weigh in on Greek history. If you want a separate forums for people who have contributed to physics and those who have contributed to Greek history, that already exists aplenty. They're called journals, colloquia, seminars, university departments, and so on.
Why is this bad? Even assuming there are geniuses out there who know the world would be better off if they weren't a wagie yet can't quite escape, they're still likely to be uneducated an unable to contribute original knowledge to an intellectual project if all of their time is spent working for some corpo. Why would you want such people in your forum?
Huh? What I was saying was that if you wanted to gatekeep people from some forum by this criteria, this would exclude people who _aren't_ independently well off. Nothing against the independently well off, I just think there are people who _aren't_ in that category who shouldn't be barred from entry.
What counts as an "intellectual achievement" or a "contribution to human knowledge"? Does it count if all you've done is discover a new way to explain someone else's idea, that other people find easier to grasp? Does it count if all you've done is learn a lot of disparate subjects, so that if someone has questions on a variety of topics, you can put the answers together in one place?
In any case, why does it matter if someone is "truly devoted to rational knowledge"? If they have good and new ideas, aren't those ideas worth learning about regardless of how distasteful you might find the person's motives in acquiring them?
>In any case, why does it matter if someone is "truly devoted to rational knowledge"? If they have good and new ideas, aren't those ideas worth learning about regardless of how distasteful you might find the person's motives in acquiring them?
It's unlikely someone interested in money and status will consistently produce good intellectual achievement. They tend to commit fraud, lie, play politics, and even given some achievement they will be politically intolerable.
> It's unlikely someone interested in money and status will consistently produce good intellectual achievement.
With this line I think I understand where you're coming from. Do you have a mental model where smart people are above the petty concerns of the crab bucket riff raff, who fight over money and status (low down and crass things to you) while intellectuals busy themselves with meaningful pursuits?
If so I think you're out of step with reality, but I see better what you've written and what you're going for with it.
No I hypothesize that IQ and status seeking vary independently and that genius/achievement is a function of high IQ, low status seeking, and other similar temperamental traits
When I think of low status seekers I think of people happy to sit on Facebook all day. Creation/achievement seems far more likely to be motivated by status seeking than anything else, to me.
What drives a man to be best in his class, or to become skilled enough in a subject to invent things in its field, or even to learn guitar enough to compose a song?
It's really sad to me that you think that. It's evident to me from my own phenotype that status seeking and conscientiousness are two different things. Conscientiousness has more to do with time preference, I think, while status seeking fills in what you aim for if you do work hard. As a low status seeker I aim to accomplish things of intrinsic, altruistic worth, not to gain status. I am not happy with sitting on Facebook all day because I think about the future and I want a better one, and Facebook is meaningless.
Most intelligent people have made no significant contribution to human knowledge. They may still know important ideas created by others and be able to transmit them, hence worth talking with. Even if someone has made some small contribution to human knowledge, that is probably not the most interesting thing he knows and can talk about.
Do you assume that you have made significant contributions to human knowledge, important facts or ideas that nobody else had discovered? If so, is that the most interesting thing you could talk about?
I think intelligent people who have made no contribution either are not that intelligent or have something wrong with their temperament. They are less likely to be well-educated on important topics if they have not bothered to put that education to good use.
To make a significant original contribution takes a mixture of imagination, luck, and capacity and inclination for hard work (in various proportions, generally mostly by far the last). But some intelligent people have none of these.
Some fields are also not well-suited to producing generally-useful knowledge for the world. Engineers, doctors, programmers, and lawyers all pretty routinely work to solve a problem in a novel way, but often one that really only applies once in a specific set of circumstances.
Getting a Nobel prize takes luck, I just want something like a PhD thesis, potentially just done in spare time to filter people who only got a PhD for status reasons. Imagination and conscientiousness are part of what I mean by temperament, so you're just repeating my comment back at me.
>> What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge?
What is your goal, and why do you think a filtered group of people meeting only this extremely narrow definition of “intellectual achievements” would better achieve it? If you’re going to create some sort of exclusive group, it should ideally be tied to a goal you are trying to achieve (i.e. only including certified architects in your building-design team, or only including writers with at least 3 hit songs to their name in your songwriting feedback group). Exclusivity just for exclusivity’s sake (i.e. just to filter the people who “are worth talking to” from the people who “aren’t worth talking to”) makes a forum seem more like a self-esteem project for the people inside it than anything useful or worthwhile for society at large.
A “special people club for the very very special among us" with custom entrance requirements stringent enough in some places (‘grievance studies’ intellectuals and English Lit intellectuals don’t count) to keep out people the founders don’t like, but loose enough in others (“even a blog post” on a topic we like is enough) so that the founders can declare all people outside the club "dumb and not worth talking to" without ever feeling threatened that they themselves may not qualify for membership accomplishes fairly little outside of making its member feel more special than non-members – as an aside, this is why I’ve never been impressed with MENSA, or people who make much of MENSA membership.
True - if one's goal is just to found a social club, then that club probably works better as a more intimate group. But if one then takes the position that one's small social club consists of all the people in the world worth talking to, and everyone else outside it is a dumb peon unworthy of the time of club members, well, it seems like a pretty distasteful club.
And besides, the club rules proffered here don't really lend themselves to keeping the group small for social reasons - it may be very exclusive insofar as it keeps out people with the wrong politics no matter how productive or brilliant they are, but its membership requirements seem quite lax if you have the right politics.
A group that dismisses the worlds foremost Hegelian philosophers and experts on English Literature as "lacking intellectual achievements" on the one hand, but lets in people who make "a blog post with a lot of data" on the other may be very effective at excluding people with certain disfavored beliefs from membership, but it probably won't be small. Or if small, it will only be so because the aforesaid distastefulness leads lots of people who would otherwise qualify to decline membership.
As far as I can tell, what you're describing is just "academia". In the sense of pick the smartest of the population and let them talk together about something that isn't this year's lettuce harvest.
Academia immediately fell prey to its own status games, and as a result its quality has decreased to the point you're now trying to create a new Academia 2.0 that excludes the undergrads and the grievance studies professors.
But if you don't want someone else to have to create Academia 3 in one epoch's time, you really ought to give more thought to the construction of the bubble you're building.
Status games will come for you whether you want them or not. If you don't understand them or plan for them properly, they'll take their most natural route.
Funnily enough, my problem with academia is not the status hierarchy (which happens everywhere). It's that they've ivory-towered themselves and their bubble has drifted so far from common sensibilities that those grievance professors are actually able to be taken seriously there.
Your approach feels to me like doubling down on that mistake rather than fixing it.
Everyone takes things personally. I presumably wouldn't qualify for that forum, and I'm truly grateful that people with official intellectual achievements talk to the public and I can see what they say. Or maybe I'd qualify with a body of sensible social media posts, but I wouldn't want the job of evaluating social media posts of all your non-academic applicants.
Little as I like Social Justice, I've learned some things from it.
If it hadn't been for your clickbait first sentence, I'd be more sympathetic to your idea of a selective forum, though if you think people with solid intellectual achievements are immune to status and politics.....
"What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge?"
In order to inspire people to achieve and contribute. If you don't inspire the unachievers, then eventually the achievers die and nobody replaces them.
Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
I'm pretty sure your suggestion already exists, and it's some kind of in-person elite international conference that only the leaders in their field get to attend. There may or may not be a digital equivalent as well.
Knowledge is one good thing but not everything. If you restrict your world to a small circle of elite intellectuals you would miss out on Also, I am convinced (with Jonathan Haidt) that academic intelligence doesn’t correlate with moral wisdom / pro-social values. If you select only for knowledge you are likely to miss on other non-correlated perspectives. For example, 1) you would lack the understanding of humanity that comes from broadening your circle beyond elite academics, and 2) you might be leaving your sense of morality and values to chance. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that moral perspectives do not correlate with intelligence and arent derived from intellectual reasoning alone.
>Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
Just let it be the admin using very clear specifications like I laid out. Not really a problem.
>I'm pretty sure your suggestion already exists, and it's some kind of in-person elite international conference that only the leaders in their field get to attend. There may or may not be a digital equivalent as well.
Doubt it, I'm imagining a political forum, not a group for discussing asymptotic behavior of generalized eigenfunctions in N-body scattering replete with uncritical, status-seeking believers in the Current Thing.
>In order to inspire people to achieve and contribute. If you don't inspire the unachievers, then eventually the achievers die and nobody replaces them.
I highly doubt access to achievers on internet forums prior to one's first achievement is a factor in achievement given internet forums didn't exist 30 years ago.
You could lock members of a policital forum, or an economic forum, in a room for twenty years, sliding food under the door, and when they were let out at the end they'd have hair down to their waists and would have barely agreed on anything (except the benefits of hygiene! :-) )
> I highly doubt access to achievers on internet forums prior to one's first achievement is a factor in achievement given internet forums didn't exist 30 years ago.
The Usenet forums have been around for over 45 years now, and their groups were largely bear pits even when their users were exclusively from academia (at all levels, students to professors). I haven't checked any Usenet groups for several years, but I imagine that by now the spammers have completely taken over and the unmoderated groups are an almost perfect verbal approximation of white noise!
>>Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
>Just let it be the admin using very clear specifications like I laid out. Not really a problem.
I suggest that if you spent more time talking to the people you consider not to have any intellectual merit, you'd understand what a funny thing this exchange was to read.
As Nancy pointed out, you misread the post. This is part of why I want a forum like I described, many people display serious literacy flaws on public forums. It's not surprising given the distribution of SAT/ACT/GRE reading scores and the relative ease of getting a 99th percentile one if you are functionally literate. Texts on those tests tend to be as dense or less so than my writing and getting a 99th percentile score just requires actually understanding the texts upon reading them. People with less than an 80th percentile score, if not a 90th, probably can't understand my writing well; this is probably why the NYT best seller style as well as the typical substack style is so fluffy. To be popular, they need to write at a middle school level so that >50% of the population find the writing appealing.
"People with less than an 80th percentile score, if not a 90th, probably can't understand my writing well"
Hang on a sec, haven't I read this exact argument somewhere before? If not here, then over on TheMotte? "You are all too dumb to understand my advanced intellect arguments"?
This level of discourse is what I want to avoid, it's a waste of time, you're just communicating feelings with no substance. I have learned that you feel that way, and that's all. I want people who post data and who think quantitatively, not people who think a joke is a "point"
Maybe he is making a joke, this is the trouble with text, I can't hear tone so I take everything literally. Nonetheless, such a joke is basically a worthless comment so all the more reason for my forum idea. "Oh haha, politics without historians, how wacky. Do you have any substance or do you just feel that way?"
Is Moneyball one of the worst things to happen to modern American intellectual life? It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart. It falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out- in fact, modern teams use a mix of both together. Sabermetrics certainly added a lot to baseball, but it only complements existing methodology.
In general Moneyball, plus some kind of vague Silicon Valley worship, suggests that generally smart people don't need subject matter expertise or a qualitative background to enter a particular field- they can just Use Analytics. This is very appealing to engineers, finance types, etc.- they can arrogantly ignore people who have been in the field to date, those guys weren't smart enough to Use Analytics like I am, etc. My life experience suggests the opposite, that subject matter experts are in general much better than smart outsiders. In particular quantitative methods mean little if you're asking the wrong questions or starting with the wrong assumptions- garbage in, garbage out.
Kind of reminds me of the late 19th/early 20th century, when it was in vogue to call whatever you were doing Scientific. I.e. Communism had Scientifically Proven that they had the best approach to running a society, etc.
I disagree with you completely when it comes to baseball, but you may have a point when it comes to other domains. Give me any current front office in baseball today (the Colorado Rockies excepted), and I'll put them up against any front office from the 1980s. Baseball was inefficient, and the nerds knew it. There's a reason the game is run by quants today: the strategy is successful. Part of the reason it's successful, however, is that baseball is a closed game. The rules remain (largely) unchanged, the number of teams in the league remains static outside of carefully (and centrally) planned expansion and the objectives are clear. Whether you win or lose is immediately apparent. However, this is not true of society generally, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that some people saw the success of Moneyball and baseball and decided that it could be applied to all businesses and other walks of life. When you step outside of games, the number of variables becomes significantly higher, and in many areas it's impossible to know all of those variables, let alone capture how they interact with each other. To that extent, Moneyball may have convinced people who were very smart in one domain that their intelligence and quantitative skills translate to all other domains, despite this clearly not being the case.
Obviously not. Almost no one on earth has seen Moneyball. It made around a 100 million dollars in theaters, and at an average movie ticket (US) price of 8ish dollars, that translates to a mere 12 or so million people. Out of 7 billion on earth.
A film about baseball, much less one about "this one weird trick turned a team of losers into champs!", is not going to attract an audience outside of people who know about baseball, watch baseball, have played baseball at some level, even as kids, etc.
So that pretty much restricts it to an American audience (maybe some of the other few countries that play baseball may watch it also).
Your last paragraph goes against your argument. Marxists are the experts in field of Marxism, and it’s considered by many intellectuals to be true. Get some actual scientists or applied scientists to look at the claims of this “science” and they will find dozens of holes, no empirical evidence, dubious claims and methodologies.
This has not been my experience. In fact, Moneyball, while far from perfect, does a good job of showing how a subject matter expert like Billy Beane can take advantage of statistics and data to dramatically improve his team's performance. In general, most subject matter experts don't have the time or talent to really do data work, so teams need to bring in data people, data people who often don't have the time or talent to catch up to other specialists.
If you've ever worked in hospital administration, this is extremely common. A good hospital administrator usually has significant medical experience and (often) is a doctor. It's simply not realistic to have someone go through all the training to be a doctor, do a decade of grad school/residency/job and then go on and become a competent manager and administrator and then on top of that learn to code in R or Python and get the equivalent of a years grad school in stats. One of the nice things about being a competent professional is everyone is generally about as smart as everyone else and most of the differences are in training. In any exec meeting the data scientists are roughly as smart as the doctors who are roughly as smart as the lawyers and nobody is going back to grad school again. So, ya know, teamwork.
Moneyball is more about proving that the data guys deserve a seat at the table than that they should head the organization. Billy Beane was still running the show, after all.
Having said that, a lot of computer programmers do seem to have the "smartest guy in the room" issue but data people, in my experience, have to do so much more communicating and persuasion with senior people to have an organizational impact that its not really an issue.
In my on-the-job experience, it's often possible to go into a new domain and solve some of their problems analytically, or provide analytic tools that let them achieve better or faster results, because the domain experts don't know math or optimization theory, and have studiously avoided ever quantifying their domain, preferring to see themselves as artists who follow some mystical inner voice. Usually, they stubbornly resist the very notion of optimization, preferring to believe that they don't ever have to make trade-offs if they have the right qi or whatever.
I'm sure there are arrogant analysts who can't, in fact, improve on what the domain experts do; but it is the domain experts who hold all the power in these situations, and are usually able to squash the analyst. We need more, not less, application of optimization. So I believe Moneyball did more good than harm.
This is a really strange take....can't tell whether you're talking about the book or the film, because your description doesn't fit either very well.
"can enter a field they know nothing about" ? The hero and focal character of "Moneyball" is Billy Beane, who'd been a fulltime baseball professional since he was 18 years old. There's a reason that was the character that Brad Pitt signed on to play, and it's even more true of the book.
"falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out" -- no. "Moneyball", the book, is clear and thorough in getting across that the problem with the existing scouting practices was mostly that they were shallow and stupid. Unfortunately this comes across less well in the film, but anyway professional sports teams today do not at all use the scouting practices that were industry-standard prior to around the 1990s. (And which were very garbage in garbage out.) Sports scouting today is vastly different: less anecdotal, more systematic, far more analytical. That change has come about not entirely due to "Moneyball", it was already underway to some degree, but that book and a couple others sure did help enable it.
"In general Moneyball" kids get off my lawn etc -- both the book and film are very clear that they are about a specific industry, professional baseball, at a specific time. The idea that professional baseball was a poorly-led closed loop of assumptions and anecdotal stupidity was well documented starting long before Billy Beane decided to try something new. He was just the first high-level person in that industry to be willing to take a sledgehammer to how "real baseball guys" (such as himself) were used to operating.
>It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by Moneyball here, but the main sabermetrician in the book is Paul DePodesta who, yes, went to Harvard and studied econ, but who also played baseball at Harvard. He was no no-nothing about his subject matter. In the movie the character is played by Jonah Hill, who played up the nerdiness and didn't seem to have ever stepped inside a batter's box, but he was nevertheless a baseball nerd not an arrogant statistician disinterested in the subject.
I view Moneyball as being more generally about statistically inclined people who were also obsessed with X, so obsessed that they figured out smarter ways of doing X. They were outsiders, but outsiders in the way that a 17-year-old computer nerd is an outsider to the software industry, not in the way that Isaac Newton was an outsider to the finance industry. In the former case, the individual might naturally become an insider one day because she is focused on studying the right subject. In the latter case, math ability didn't do Newton much good in a field he knew too little about.
IOW, sabermetricians are hedgehogs not foxes. With that noted, I believe the phenomenon you are talking about has more to do with Superforecasting and Nate Silver. Superforecasting emphasizes that great forecasters don't need to be experts in the subject matter. They are foxes in the Isaiah Berlin sense.
I'm not sure that they are bad for modern intellectual life though.
i.e., if he uses his social capital to look weird on this he'll get in trouble elsewhere?
I kind of feel like a CS professor gets more than most. And something long and nerdy is probably not that unusual there. Just saying I've had leftist people suddenly turn very nasty after I mention this site.
Given the presence of stuff like Sneer Club, I kind of wonder if this might be inviting attack from the wrong sort of leftist in your department, if not a prof then support staff. Universities lean really far left, and rationalism has a bad rap with those people.
Totally possible! Thanks for the heads up, that hadn't really occurred to me. Still going to go for it, but having some possible responses pre-prepped will help.
Sure! There's a difference between knowing something is dangerous and taking a stand, and getting blindsided. Good luck and I hope it makes you some new friends!
I was thinking that on the one hand, it parses as appropriation, but on the other hand, "Occam's Razor is sufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents". undercuts a lot of pro-racist arguments. I've seen people say that racism doesn't exist because it would get competed away.
Probably on some level. But there's also a large number of productivity improvements that have happened even at the fanciest restaurants. In the 1970s, when Alice Waters had the realization that people were willing to pay for quality ingredients, getting quality ingredients required getting an individual well-trained shopper out to all the different markets at the right time of day. Nowadays, with enough high-end restaurants caring about this, I believe it's become easier to source high-quality fresh ingredients (and many restaurants have developed relationships with individual farms that help with that). Similarly, it's much easier and cheaper nowadays to start an authentic Korean restaurant in some random town in the United States than it would have been forty years ago, because the supply chains for many of the distinctive vegetables and condiments and such has been built out.
I don't know what other sorts of productivity improvements there have been behind the scenes at restaurants, but if there's enough of these, then that might help keep costs down even as labor costs rise.
There is some savings on the production side, (We get fully cooked roast beef and brisket shipped in.) You are supposed to tip ~20% now, which is up from 15% ~20 years ago.
It's not a solid division. Most restaurants have some combination of both with the degree of how much one or the other is present putting it anywhere from fine dining to fast food. But market research firms can nonetheless get at least a sense of it over large scale.
If you're asking if I can walk into a restaurant and know then I'm afraid I have no special trick.
"Today, if you took your date to Keens Steakhouse—one of the most famous steak joints in New York City—a sirloin would set you back $56 per person. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, that same dish at the same restaurant would cost you just $2.25."
$2.25 in 1955 is $24.87 today, so the cost of a steak at Keens Steakhouse in NYC has risen 125% in real terms since 1955.
I have never heard of "famous steak joint" Keens Steakhouse, despite working and living in NYC for a while in my youth.
I don't understand "per person." A steak is a steak. It has one price. And $56 sounds low to me. I wish I could take a field trip to Peter Luger's tomorrow night and report back....
The largest concern for restaurants in Manhattan is RENT. NYC real estate has surely gone up at 2x inflation since 1995, so the comparison is not shocking.
It is a bit shocking if you buy the argument that we put up with the annoying bits of capitalism because they are offset by the increased prosperity of most of the people who take part in it.
How do progressives reconcile the huge error term between their self-image of oppressed minorities and how corporations treat them ?
Yesterday, I was banned from HackerNews, probably the only social media I truly loved, because of my participation in the KiwiFarms vs. CloudFlare discussion. (Long Story Short : Forum makes fun of <bad people>, <bad people> organize a mob outrage campaign against CloudFlare which is a corporation which provides very vital protection to websites against a low-effort form of cyberattacks called DDoS, corporation first says no and yay free speech then capitulates.)
This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, <threat>, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?
Now, I'm aware of the famous general purpose reply here :
GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there).
GPR2- In the context of ingroup vs. outgroup confrontations, the above translates to deliberate sensory and memory bias for ingroup and against outgroup, such that ingroup always appears to be in danger and on the brink of annihilation and the outgroup always appears tyranical and unstoppable. In one memorable example from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/), Scott cites an example of what's called the " hostile media effect ", where Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel both perceived the same documentary to be heavily biased against them and for the outgroup, despite that being apriori impossible.
This seems to explain my question, people in a literal war for survival can't agree on who's more oppressed, so of course the progressives can't see they're not oppressed, the literal opposite in fact. Neither is most of us and our ingroups for that matter.
But, general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations, my reptile brain is still not satisfied with this perfectly good answer.
1- Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely today's morning by it's *Russian* DDoS protection company, probably because it was more trouble than the company could handle (but of course, the company didn't forget to virtue signal in its announcement.). KF is now accessible only via tor (a convoluted technology that - in a nutshell and very loosely speaking - circumvents censorship via repeated re-routing.)
2- An Australian company that allocate IP addresses is being pressured to revoke allocation for KF, which - according to the forum's founder who is very law-savvy and internet-savvy in general - is "unprecedented in the history of the Internet".
How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ? Anyone who had dealt with this group extensively enough to know their thinking can illuminate me ?
Addendum : This comment and its username was edited because it contained insults that others found too insulting to merit a serious reply to the rest of my points, as well as a threat made out of hopeless anger and despair rather than any real malice. The edited section are between <> angular brackets and do not exceed a sentence in length. The heretical words used are linked to in interest of accountability and responsibility for words said.
>general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations
It seems like we can't do any better than the general purpose explanation. Most responses answering my question here boils down to explaining that the World or the Media is big enough that you can always find evidence of anyone being oppressed, and from there the relevant brain circuits engage and it's smooth sailing to ♫♫ I'm The World's Most Oppressed Victim ♫♫. It's not a bad explanation, but I was hoping for something specific to progressivism or the type of people attracted to it.
>across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude
This is actually a false assertion, because USA, Russian Federation and Australia don't encompass all habitable timezones or habitable latitudes. Anger really does cloud your knowledge of geography.
That said, now I do have an idea of a crowdsourced global geographical map of Woke influence (people fired or deplatformed, laws passed, corporations acting on their crybullying,...) across Earth, as a helpful resource for the weary traveller and the freedom defender everywhere.
> Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely
More updates regarding the astonishing power of the Woke trash to censor and gay-ify the Internet :
- Iceland (!) took down KF's new domain.
- The Internet Archive (!!!), a non-profit institution whose supposed mission is snapshotting the Internet to act as a historical record for posteriority and prevent authoritarians from rewriting history, has deleted the forum's snapshots. <sad sigh>, Okay Internet Archive, you want to stand up to Putin or Xi Jinping but you're afraid of hurting the feelies of she/her majesty.
- "We are receiving hundreds of login attempts a second from automated traffic" ; "hCaptcha, the tool we used to help mitigate bot traffic on the login page, received enough complaints from the mob that they dropped us, making it significantly more difficult to deal with this threat."
I'm impressed, honestly. The Internet Archive stunt in particular, *that* got me. I had heard rumors about them deleting things before because of copyright and whatnot, but that's the first time I saw a non-profit that I previously respected and thought was a force for good succumb to deletionist censorship-loving scum. No profit motive, no bad press, no credible legal threats, just pure spineless cowardice. Fascinating.
I'm can't remember from the earlier version of your post whether the situation that got you banned from HackerNews was mockery of trans people, or whether trans people were just an example that came up somewhere. But let's say for the sake of argument that the incident concerned mockery of trans people, and perhaps also arguments against various arrangements that many trans people prefer, such as being called by the pronoun that matches the gender they identify with & being able to use public bathrooms designated for use by the gender they identify with. So the trans group is relatively powerful in the sense that many organizations would be pretty willing to stick up for them -- way more willing to stick up for them than they would be to stick up for, say, anti-abortionists who were being mocked and attacked. On the other hand, trans people are in many ways more vulnerable than other outgroups. Transexual teens are 7 times as likely to attempt suicide as other teens, for instance. Clearly, whatever "wokeness" there is that weighs in favor of trans people is not neutralizing the difficulties they face and putting them at some sort of advantage. Being sexually non-conforming is illegal in many parts of the world, and is despised in many parts of countries like ours where it is legal. I'm not saying that because of this trans people have more right to be defended than other groups -- though I don't think that's an absurd position. I'm saying that even if trans people are more powerful than your group in a setting like HackerNews, and can get your group cancelled, in many other ways they are far less powerful than gender-conforming people. It is not absurd for them to think of themselves as oppressed, even though in some dimensions they are powerful.
As always, I feel compelled to point out that (unless there's new data I missed) Trans teens are about 7 times more likely to REPORT suicide attempts than other teens. This matters, because reported suicidality is basically uncorrelated at a group level with suicide rates, even sometimes seeming to have a protective effect. Good starting point for reading about that here: (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide).
This doesn't mean trans people's lives are without trouble, but I'm going to grind this until people notice: Suicidality has basically nothing to do with suicide rates at a group level.
Anyone who uses suicidality in an argument as if it has to do with "probability to commit suicide" as opposed to "differences in communication styles" but doesn't begin by explaining why there's a negative association between suicidality and age (or suicidality and gender) is right to suspect as someone either uncurious or motivated towards a preferred conclusion.
One theory I've heard (from Sister Y's now-defunct blog) for why women are more likely to attempt suicide but less likely to successfully commit it is the gender difference in preferred methods:
Gunshots are much more lethal than drug overdoses, and men are much more likely to prefer the former--possibly due to greater access to and comfort around firearms, less visceral discomfort with violence, and even less concern about leaving a disfigured corpse behind.
The best piece of evidence that women's preference for poison over more violent methods *isn't* due to lesser desire to die is that in countries with much less access to firearms and much greater access to highly-lethal agricultural pesticides, gender differences in suicide rates are much smaller than they are in the US. Most notably, in China, women are significantly *more* likely to commit suicide than men.
So this is a common counterpoint. But not only is it not true most places (more on this later) it's doesn't even make sense *here*. That's because of two relevant facts:
1. Men commit suicide four times as much as women.
2. 42.1% of all male suicides are not by guns.
In a world where there were 100 female suicides per year in the US and you were able to completely stop every male US suicide-by-gun, you'd have 100 female suicides (with guns included, we didn't stop theirs) and 168 male suicides. We don't even need an experiment to know it - we are already doing the "what if men used less certain suicide methods overall than women" experiment as a subset of our current suicide rates, and men still commit suicide 168% more.
Just as telling is *how far from home, how different a culture* sister Y had to go to to find something that fit with what they wanted to believe. Like, look at Europe - they have fewer guns than the americas, by far. Their gender/suicide ratio has EVEN MORE men killing themselves than the Americas. If the pesticide thing is true, and pesticides are about equally dangerous between the regions, you'd expect for suicide rates to be closer in europe when judged by gender, because guns are taken mostly out of the picture. But our 4:1 ratio is dwarfed by, say, Poland's 6.7:1.
However, I'm not sure what plausible explanations there are for the paradox that adolescents have the highest rate of suicide attempts but older adults the highest rate of completed suicides.
I wonder if there any countries where the age distribution of completed suicides is different.
One of the biggest problems with discussions about which groups are powerful is that the answer is different in different context, and more importantly it is usually individuals rather than groups that are powerful. Highly educated middle-class whites are as a group surely more powerful than working class blacks, but if I get pulled over by a black cop who decides to rough me up and put me in jail for the night because he's in a bad mood, he's got nearly all the power in that situation, and looking at the group global power balance tells us almost nothing about the individual situation.
I may be wrong, but I have the feeling you basically want to pick a fight about this topic. I'm not interested in having that kind of conversation, and am going to decline to engage.
> How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ?
I think you’re asking the wrong questions. The answer is pretty simple. Power, oppression and underdog status can align on different dimensions, and so there’s no logical in-consistency to resolve. I know this is the answer for groups that behave this way and make me angry, and so I doubt an answer to this question would be helpful to you.
I *think* you’re saying: I’m angry because I’m seeing an example where there are people who are clearly not without power, yet they claim to be oppressed. Further, they are using this claim itself to wield power, and that claim is socially accepted.
Is it this idea, in abstract that makes you angry, or the specifics around the the groups in question?
Speaking for myself, this idea doesn’t make me angry. I don’t even think it’s an immoral or even non-rational way for a group to behave. I *do* get angry when some groups do it, but I think it’s sometimes acceptable, or even virtuous.
Edit: fwiw, Jack seems to be engaging you in good faith, and imho is giving good advice. Your responses seem far from rational: you seem to have positive engagement with an online community as a goal, but you’re not positively engaging. What gives?
>Speaking for myself, this idea doesn’t make me angry.
But it's dishonesty. How is it sometimes acceptable and virtuous? I do hate some specifics about the group I used slurs against, but it's not enough to explain how much I hate how they use obvious crybullying tactics to get what they want, and how most people are too spineless to stand up to them. It's very plausible the tactic itself is what gets me.
>Your responses seem far from rational
In what way? My response to Jack is, in a nutshell, that his advice is too quokka-optimized. My aggression towards progressive values is not (just) a spontaneous emotional reaction from losing an HN account, that was just a trigger, the deeper realization is that I can't have a free and fair Internet while the progressive religion is still respected and its wrath feared.
Jack is giving superb advice but for the wrong person, it would be like telling early 2000s Dawkins that he can simply just build relationships with Muslims and bit by bit nudge them towards his values, Dawkins doesn't really want that necessarily, he just wants to establish that it's okay to shit on the Muslims' religion, and he did that by, what else?, publicly shitting on the religion himself and publicly supporting those who do. Was he an asshole? Yes. Did he build meaningful relationships with Muslims? Probably never. But did he stand up to an authoritarian religion and bravely ridiculed it in a manner extremely few people were willing to even go nearby? Also yes.
I'm not as smart or as influential as Dawkins of course, but he inspires me. The central lesson is that religions only impose their prestige by fear, they exploit people's natural social intelligence and reluctance to rock the boat, and that's why a public asshole very conspicuously shitting on them in the most gruesome manner is so effective, it breaks the spell.
Would you mind expanding on this comment you made elsewhere in the thread?
>The slurs are the result of a deliberate vow to attempt to retaliate against a group towards which I had nothing but a desire to protect and live in peace, and towards me they had nothing but contempt and mockery.
Were you conveying a desire to protect and live in peace with them in the discussion? Just trying to understand what would have prompted a ban.
The original HN discussion weren't about them, they were about CloudFlare and how much private companies can get away with silencing things said on their infrastructure and how much right does a lobby have to make companies do this. My comments were increasingly angry remarks about they have no right to this without courts on their side (and even it would be unfair, at least then we would have a discussion with the bare minimum of legitimateness.)
I would link my HN account, but the comment I was banned for is flagged, that means it's hidden from view to anyone but the person who made it. I reproduce the exchange below :
>>HN User : [Something to the effect that this obviously correct and anyone "screaming" (exact quotation) about free speech doesn't understand it and is not interested in education]
> Me : I hope you still have this view when your turn comes soon enough, but then again I would very much love to see your tears when the corporate dicks you suck realize they would lose money by allowing your kind.
Saudi Arabia and China exist, the world can't live a minute without them, and they're going to teach people like you, by example, what "Muh PrIvATe CoMPaNy CaN dO AnYtHing" means.
(Is this extremly angry and against HN guidelines ? yes it is. Is the thing I'm angry about worth it and progressives are bad faith actors willing to let corporations trample over a free internet to vindicate their sick pet religion ? I percieve the answer to be yes.)
I think your problem is that you are projecting 4 groups into 2. Namely, you are neglecting the clout/power/influence/whatever-you-want-to-call-it axis. The everyday, average progressive is a secular poor city-dwelling minority member. The POWERFUL progressive is a rich, wannabe do-gooder with too much time on their hands and massive social capital/influence over the progressive base. The average conservative is a religious small- business-owning rural white person. The POWERFUL conservative is a wealthy, wannabe do-gooder with too much time on their hands and massive religious capital/influence over the conservative base.
In other words, you're assuming that every member of the group has the same capabilities, when that couldn't be further from the truth. The total force multiplier of a group is a function of its most powerful members, while the oppression of a group is a function of its average members.
If there is a contradiction within a grouping, maybe you aren't being granular enough with your boundaries?
It depends on how you define "progressive", but if you define it as "someone who always votes for Democrats" then it's surely a slightly above middle-class suburb-dwelling white woman, just as the average "person who always votes for Republicans" is surely a slightly above middle-class suburb-dwelling white man, just because the average *voter* is slightly above middle-class, and the average American is a suburb-dwelling white person.
If you're defining the term restrictively enough to get to "upper-middle-class city-dwelling", then I think it's not at all clear that the group you're singling out is majority female or majority white (because there are several groups in here, some of which have very different demographics from each other).
I read your original piece, including your user name, and actually had a hard time figuring out whether you personally despise members of of certain groups, or were mostly angry at the power these groups had to cancel the group that was mocking them. I actually came back here to make the case that there is no rule here against the use of slurs. As I understand it the guidelines for acceptable communication here are that it must meet 2 or all 3 of the following:
-It is kind
-It is right.
-It's a point worth making (Scott's version of this one is "is it necessary." That doesn't make much sense to me -- when is it every *necessary* to write a certain paragraph? So I have modified it to say what I *think* Scott really has in mind, but in any case the only version of his statement that makes sense to me.
So are/were you flunking the "kind" criteria? I personally wouldn't consider all cases of using the word "faggot" to be unkind -- for instance, it's not unkind to use it in discussions of the derivation of the term. I can't really tell what your attitude is about this stuff. If I were to announce that I am a trans man who lives as a woman, would you have a particular dislike of me and the way I live? Or is your point that you object to having mockery of trans people or other sexual minorities be censored in online forums? As for that being a point worth making, criterion 3, I'd say it definitely is.
"This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, taking a vow to forever refer to their most cherished groups by the most vile slurs they hate, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?"
Well to the overwhelming majority of people who had absolutely nothing to do with your banning, their experience is meeting someone who hates them enough to use "the most vile slurs they hate" before meeting them. When people have traditionally used hateful language against people for involuntary associations (race, sexuality, etc.), it's often been associated with the threat of force or violence.
"GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there)."
This is working from a false premise. There is no a priori optimal way to balance false positive and false negatives. In ML, you have to calibrate your classifiers on a case-by-case basis. One technique for this is using an ROC curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic
In terms of "practical utility", it isn't very rewarding to treat hostile people with respect. If someone signals, "For every tiny bit of utility you give me, I will use it to hurt you and everyone like you," there isn't much utilitarian loss for saying, "I will calibrate my epistemic norms to assume bad faith in all these people."
The best way to sway the tiny minority of people willing to apply impartial reason is to reward people who do so, which is the opposite of exercising high degrees of prejudice and bigotry. (What I'm trying to do with my comment, btw).
I honestly hope you consider some of these points and have a nice day.
I just reported you for your name, and i imagine you will get banned for it at some point.
I'm not reporting you because I am personally offended. I am reporting you because you are a) not respecting the norms of this community, b) literally announcing that you are going to call people slurs, and c) very angry and combative in a way that doesn't add to any discussion, at all.
Communities will continue to ban you until you learn how to communicate better. I don't agree with some of your views, but we could have a civil discussion on those things. Instead, I'm hoping that you get kicked out because everything about you is a red flag.
This will keep happening to you, over and over and over again. You will either learn and improve the way that you speak to people, or you will stay the course and get more angry and bitter. Up to you, man. I wish you the best and hope you find some peace of mind.
>I'm not reporting you because I am personally offended. I am reporting you because you are a) not respecting the norms of this community
It sounds like you are personally offended that he violated your norms? Why do rationalists engage in so much double speak?
> b) literally announcing that you are going to call people slurs,
What's wrong with calling people slurs other than that it violates the progressive religion? Sometimes a "slur" is the best word for what one wants to express, how are you "rational" if you can't handle slurs? I can handle them just fine, if you post a long data driven argument and happen to call white people honkies and crackers in the same post, I can still be rational about your comment. People who can't be tend to not add anything to the discussion.
>very angry and combative in a way that doesn't add to any discussion, at all.
Anger is normal and good! People should be angry at eunuch cyber felons who don't get held accountable for their behavior because the ruling class wants to destroy Western civilization.
Because slurs are not just a way to virtue signal or show off that you're an edgelord (depending on which side of the fence one falls), they are genuinely offensive and genuinely means of discrimination, racism, and bias against minorities or 'that lot are not like us'.
It's not about the progressive religion, and I don't give a tuppenny damn if "oh noes gypsy is a slur", it's about using terms that really were meant to be derogatory and indicate the inferiority of the people you were referring to with those terms.
"Eunuch cyber felon" is a dumb insult, by the way, because it's lacking bite and wit enough to sting without falling into vulgar coarseness. What does "eunuch" mean here - impotence? There's enough of that in modern men to enable Viagra and its knock-offs to be profitable. Can't get it up? Ditto. Hasn't fathered children? All the men who use, or take advantage of their partner using, contraception in order to avoid paternity are eunuchs by this measure.
Weak, limp, not a real man? Okay, so what is a real man? Muscles and aggression?
The avoidance of slurs on here is to keep things civil, but I also appreciate it because it's a change from other places where you can just keep calling each other "you effin' so-and-so" back and forth, and nothing fruitful comes of it. If I want to listen to drunks swearing at each other, I can just open my window on Friday nights when the pubs let out.
There is a difference between anger as wrath, and righteous anger. Sometimes I too want to shout and yell insults and kick the cat. That gets nothing done, in the end. Righteous anger produces results.
And the kind of anger you are talking about is precisely the kind of anger in that post by a medical examiner I was talking about - in the end, it was nothing but a means of showing off how *good* she was, how *virtuous*: she was angry, dammit! she wants her readers to be angry! but what did she do with that anger, did she even attend the funeral service for the girl she was angry about?
No, what she did was write a piece about "look how *angry* I am, give me head-pats and notes of approbation about what a superior specimen of humanity I am". Performative anger of the slur-yelling sort is meaningless.
Which does uniquely define the group I used one of the slurs against. It also alludes to the hidden power they have, as eunuchs were historically used in royal or imperial palaces and thus had tons of influence.
As for why cutting a specific organ in your body is supposed to be an insulting thing, well, why is any word an insult at all? A canine bitch is on average a better person than most humans, and a "cunt" is a life-giving organ crucial in reproduction, which most people value and view as positive, as well as a sexually desirable body part. Insults and slurs aren't supposed to be literal signals, they are more like money, what's so valuable about a dollar ? it's literally just a green colored piece of paper with weird pictures and slogans on both sides.
>give me head-pats
I don't know if this was supposed to model me or just the woman you're talking about, but I do not desire head-pats for my anger with progressives, at least not more than the usual human baseline of my demand for head-pats for anything I say or do.
My anger has a purpose, which is to signal contempt for a lying, deceitful, bunch of humans. It's also a practical demonstration of how you, a spine-ful human who loves mutual respect and uniform standards, ought to treat people who are not fans of these things, in fact explicitly arguing for the opposite (e.g. 'punching up' and 'punching down').
To the extent that I pussied out my earlier use of slurs, it was 100% just special-purpose respect for Scott and (by extension) his audience, it doesn't apply anywhere or for anyone else.
Wasn't offended at all - had a good and productive discussion with OP, you can see it downthread.
There are perfectly rational reasons to have a community norm of intolerance for slurs. Also, I would add that this is Scott's personal Substack, and this community is here because we enjoy the environment he has built. Part of which involves being kind to each other and conforming to basic social norms.
Last, anger is not good. Anger is. And misdirected, purposeless anger is almost always bad.
You said "I'm hoping that you get kicked out". The state of "hoping that you get kicked out" is the state of being offended. You are double speaking and it's bizarre.
I guess Robin Hanson the pre-eminent expert in the psychology of rationalists would say you're trying to signal something? "offended" has a bad connotation, so you're just "hoping he gets kicked out", just like I'm not "weird", I'm "eccentric" etc
>Also, I would add that this is Scott's personal Substack, and this community is here because we enjoy the environment he has built. Part of which involves being kind to each other and conforming to basic social norms.
compromise fallacy, when your argument against a theoretical ideal is that the current point is a local optimum, hard to change, suitable enough, etc. Can't have a reasonable conversation if people can't think abstractly enough to get past fallacies like this. Destiny's fallacy is another one related to this, that's when you reject an ideal because bad interests might not understand its theoretical properties or desire an ideal etc. The basic flaw is resorting to statements of consensus/authority in lieu of discussing the topic itself. The topic here is what norms are ideal, not whether you find this specific forum currently enjoyable or rather this specific forum's owner thinks something, as if he can't be mistaken.
>Last, anger is not good. Anger is. And misdirected, purposeless anger is almost always bad.
Being offended is an emotional reaction. Hoping someone gets kicked out can occur completely in the absence of emotional reactions, perhaps because the person's behavior is making the space less usable. I wouldn't be *offended* by someone who posted hundreds of top-level single-word comments in every post, but I would hope they get kicked out. Similarly, someone who really wants to argue about some 17th century social issue, complete with the use of 17th-century slurs against the people who disagree with them.
There are many things that might not offend me but I would still hope get removed. Unless you tautologically define offense as anything I wish removed, which is weird. If someone tried to inject malicious JS into a comment, I would laugh, but still report it as spam.
> Typo?
I don't think so. Anger is. It doesn't have a goal. It merely exists.
But I am pretty sure we do not have a community norm of no slurs. Well, I guess we have a norm -- I can't recall seeing any slurs used here. But I'm pretty sure there isn't a no-slurs rule. The rule we have that comes closest to applying is "be kind". But unkindness can be balanced off by having a great point to make and making it well -- you then meet 2 of the 3 criteria, which is the minimum standard. Hey Scott? Am I allowed to say faggot or cunt if I do it in the course of making valid points about a matter worth discussing?
I think it would be rare to use those words in the course of making valid points about a matter worth discussing other than the very use of those words themselves.
I mostly agree, but think it would be possible to talk about these terms in a somewhat more real way than the current one, where we are just talking about using the words faggot and cunt, rather than actually using them. For instance, as someone who has occasionally been called a cunt, I could unroll quite a few reflections about that word, and what it means to me. Ten years or so elapsed between my adding "cunt" to my vocabulary and my learning that it was a derogatory term for woman. So I have always had a sneaky fondness for "cunt" because I associate it with frankness and awakening sexuality. Maybe because of that association I have been irritated but never deeply distressed when I've been called a cunt, and have sometimes come back at strangers hooting the word at me with "what's the problem, you don't like cunts?" And then I feel like I've won, because I show I'm not embarrassed by the word, and not terribly upset, plus I'm zapping them back by implying that they're gay and guys who holler cunt at you from across the street are generally pretty into being macho. But then again I think about how cunt is hardly the smartest part of me, and only looks attractive in sexual contexts -- and I don't like the idea of having that part of me taken as the whole. As for calling somebody else a cunt -- yep, I've done that. How bad does that make me? I have one Reddit alt that's male -- in fact the username itself incorporates one of the other slang terms for female genitals -- and as him I've occasionally gotten into verbal duels with other (presumed) guys, and hauled out both "cunt" and "cocksucker," while the guy raved on about banging my mother, etc. I wasn't even fully angry in those duels -- I was more role-playing being an angry guy, and enjoying what it felt like. Also I occasionally call one of my friends, both male and female, a cunt, but always as part of kidding around, and nobody has minded. (When my friends mind things, believe me they tell you.). Anyhow, I guess my overall feeling about these words is a wish that everybody could just unpack with some other people, what the words mean to them, and desensitize a bit, so that using one of them loses its poisonous bite. It seems like a much better solution to me than forbidding their use. You wanna talk about "faggot," Kenny, or is this kind of unpacking not your cup of tea?
I imagine the way you just used it is fine. I'm pretty sure the way he used it is not fine. Up to Scott, of course.
I think OP has walked back his comments enough that - with a name change - I'd personally give him a half ban. Seems like a decent guy having a tough day.
Using a slur isn't enough to get banned, according to the latest guidelines I've seen, but it is definitely unkind. To avoid a ban, what you have to say has to pass the other 2 tests, in order to score the required minimum of 2 out of 3: Are you right? Is your point worth making?
Hey there. I am a progressive, and when I have time in my day I enjoying talking about these sorts of things. I won't be doing that here. When you lead with calling me pathetic and brain-dead, you mark yourself as someone I'm not super interested in conversing with. Life's too short to hang out with people who hold you in contempt.
Anyhow, just so you know, I'm reporting this one. This sort of invective-filled free-for-all is not really the atmosphere our host generally likes to cultivate, even though he himself is also pretty anti-woke.
Eh, fair. Especially the point about my insults being too personal and unprovoked, and unlike the thread opener this has no other points besides insulting. I guess even war has principles and protocols, and firing in a place as peaceful as ACX is going too far.
I would apologize, but I hate progressivism so much I'm not sure I would be sincere, and I know nothing else about you to arouse sympathy. Sorry I insulted your brain, I have nothing against it besides how I fucking hate what it thinks. Here's a photo of a small kitten[1], and another one of a large kitten[2]. You're a progressive eh? You would probably like this photo of a lesbian couple[3]. Dogs, you like dogs? Of course you do, who hates dogs, here's a small dog[4], and here's a large dog[5].
>Sorry I insulted your brain, I have nothing against it besides how I fucking hate what it thinks.<
Heh heh heh. I'll probably use that at some point.
In truth, I sometimes find myself thinking, involuntarily, something along the lines of "you've got to have some sort of honest-to-God emotional problem or a fairly low IQ to be a modern progressive" — like, as soon as I started questioning my political positions, I immediately found clear and obvious (as it seemed to me, at least) evidence that they were completely wrong about everything; there's just no way to be "woke" and actually be able to think...
...but then I think about some progressives I know who are able to manage better spelling and grammar than a good 95% of the population (although mine are, of course, even gooder), and even seem to be basically well-meaning people. It's truly a mystery to me.
I think maybe there's some sort of mental-trait axis, somewhat orthogonal to g, along which one could plot people by something like "precision of thought". I find that a sort of general lack of precision is usually my main objection, in arguments with the Left; and not any lack of elaboration in thought — quite the opposite, sometimes!
Rather, e.g., it is often — perhaps *usually* — very hard to get my opponent to stay on topic, and separate assumptions from arguments, and disentangle correlation and causation (and not always in the direction you'd think), and stop setting up weak- or straw-men, and stop switching from one principle to another nearly its opposite depending on convenience, etc. etc.
This also explains how some (hard science!) PhDs I've known seem kind of... dumb. One fellow was not at all a bad physicist — indeed, perhaps even above-average — but he *lost an eye* because he refused to get it checked out... while relying entirely on homeopathic remedies.
Eh. I don't hate dogs but I'm not a fan. They like to lick, and I'm persnickety.
Anyhow, you might try over at DSL. I don't think they're really anymore slur positive than here, but they're more concentratedly rightwing, and, IMO, more sharp elbowed.
The reason I took the time to type something out instead of just reporting you is that I’m trying to convey a lesson that it to me a long time to learn.
I am not a progressive, not even close. I am anti-PC, anti-woke, anti all the things that you appear to hate. I know that every Karen says “I’m for free speech, but…”, so I might sound like that to you. I’m not. I was an infantry Marine - just trust me when I say that I love inappropriate and transgressive humor. I’m anti Canceling, pretty much across the board.
Point being, I’m as close to a receptive audience as you will find in this community. And I still think you should be banned.
You will become a better person when you start to respect peoples boundaries. You are writing people off because they respond negatively - without taking responsibility for the fact that you threw the first punch.
Sorry for writing you off as a progressive. I didn't mean any of the insults even as I used them. I really loved HN, my anger from losing my 2-year account is probably clouding my judgement and noising my responses heavily. I'm probably violating every norm Scott argued for on old SSC.
>You will become a better person when you start to respect peoples boundaries.
Is there a reason why respecting people for ~10-15 years is not enough for them to respect my boundaries and the things I value (freedom, anti-censorship, the internet as a sacred "edgy" place far from the hands of corporations and nation states), in fact gloating about how those things are irrelevant to them, but respecting them some more after their latest transgression against me will for some reason make them rethink ? Why is my defection unfair but every single defection to them is tolerated and encouraged ?
As for your question... there's nothing fair about it. You absolutely don't have to respect people. Particularly people who you perceive as disrespecting you or your values. But what does that accomplish? You're going to continue getting banned, and continue pissing people off who you might have a good conversation with if you took a different approach.
I recognize the anger that you have, and the hurt that it stems from. It's super cliche, but at some point I realized that the anger was only hurting me. The people I was angry at felt justified by my reaction. And everybody else supported the other side because of my response.
Your anger won't change anyone's mind. It won't do anything, at all. You'll just sit in your room, brooding about injustice and filling your veins with poison. What's the point?
The world is a lonely, hateful place if you reject people because you disagree with them about something important. But you can have cool relationships with those exact same people if you focus on the big things that you agree on.
I know that this all sounds like platitudes and empty talk. I just know that I personally felt the way that you feel for a lot of years. I let the hate go, and life is a lot better. People like me more. People respect me more. People listen to me more.
I'm much more effective at changing people's minds, too. You don't shift opinions by calling people out and challenging them directly. You meet them where they're at and gently nudge them in the right direction. Over time, they'll completely change their views - often without realizing it, or giving you any credit or admitting that they were wrong. But what's more important - being acknowledged as right, or building quality relationships with the people around you?
I sincerely wish you the best, and hope things work out well for you.
(The new name got a chuckle, but you still gotta cut that shit bro lol)
I wouldn't like to overstay our conversation, but I want to respectfully call bullshit on your call to tend to our own gardens only.
The advice about not dwelling on our anger is, as far as my experience goes, 100% correct. I brushed with suicide once because I dwelt too hard on an injustice, so I learned the hard lesson the hard way. I'm not in danger of that anymore, not by a long shot, not because of HN at any rate. My anger is more "favorite team lost the finals" calibre than "life is not worth living" calibre.
However, this doesn't translate to us being quokka pushovers, there are predators in this world, and they won't be won by your friendly gestures and chocolate gifts. If you counter by the fact that *some* of their species can be won, I would say that's irrelevant, both predators has the same phenotype, while you're distracted building relationships and institutional power for your friendly tiger, the bad tiger will use them to eat you, and your friend won't shed a single tear. We wouldn't be having this conversation if this wasn't true.
My hands are weary from extending olive branches. I will try aggression for size. This doesn't need to translate to my personal life, my close circle is very far away from all of this shit and is thankfully not inhabited by a single one of the predator groups, so the change in my internet behaviour is largerly transparent without my usernames and passwords. All what needs to be done is finding some efficient method to spread some poison back to those spreading it to the internet, and that can still be done.
You will recall that when Voltaire encouraged us to tend to our gardens and forget everything else, that was a cynical last advice to live your remaining years in old age, after you had toured the world and tried everything else you can. I'm not an aggressive person, but I really fucking hate unfairness and disrespect. Punishing the people who built themselves the capability to unfairly censor people and disrespect my values (partly on the back of the niceness and goodwill of people building relationships like you advocate) strikes me as very fair. Unfortunate, but very fair.
The slurs are the result of a deliberate vow to attempt to retaliate against a group towards which I had nothing but a desire to protect and live in peace, and towards me they had nothing but contempt and mockery. They had been edited out to not insult the dominant religion of 2022 anymore.
It might seem pathetic and fragile to reverse a life-long policy because I was banned from 1 obscure pile of 0s and 1s, and it is. A straw is also a very pathetic and fragile thing, yet it can break an overloaded Camel's back. We humans are small things, small things make us happy, small things make us sad.
Also, more to your point - things are bad, ngl. But if you are still looking at this as progressives vs everybody else, left vs right, or whatever else, you are totally missing the boat. We are living through the downslope of a declining empire. This is not a new pattern, and there probably isn't a way to fix it. It won't get fixed even if the people you like and support are the ones that win. Stop blaming the other side, start considering things from the perspective of your family/friends/personal life instead of macro politics. It's not a single ideology or group of people that is the problem - things are breaking, and they will continue to break no matter who you vote for or what ideology wins out.
Yeah all that. I've also stopped consuming 'the news'. Media sites are not out to inform you. They want you back tomorrow, and one way to do that is to outrage you. Fear and hate are strong emotions.
I better jump on this to reply before this comment gets deleted for self-avowed hate speech.
Anyone who thinks this is unprecedented in the history of the internet has literally not been paying attention -- the same thing happened years and years ago to a variety of far-right extremist sites. alas I cannot recall what any of them were named, but if you poke around you may be able to find some record of the conflict. And, in poking around, you'll find the answer to your question -- it's preemptive. Sure, internet neo-nazis, TERFs, or whoever else don't have any actual political power to hurt people, but they say they would if they did. They're oppressors per se in themselves, but don't have the opportunity. This is the same argument as when someone with a knife is approaching someone who has a gun, shouting "I'm gonna kill you!". At 50 feet he doesn't have the power, at 30 feet he doesn't have the power, but at some point between 30 and 0 feet he will and he's already said he plans to use it.
Sure, kiwifarms by this analogy is about 10,000 miles away from knife range, but also nobody is shooting them, just shutting them down.
"At 50 feet he doesn't have the power, at 30 feet he doesn't have the power, but at some point between 30 and 0 feet he will and he's already said he plans to use it."
21 feet is the conventional distance at which a knife outguns a holstered gun, as famously asserted by the Philippine police.
Kiwifarms has, afaik, run campaigns of harassment that have resulted in more than one suicide.
Sure, they are not capable of physically breaking down trans peoples' doors and murdering them, but it's also not correct to say "they don't want to hurt people." They want to inflict as much pain as is possible via an anonymous internet connection.
(And if all you care about is physical harm, well, Cloudflare hasn't done any physical harm either.)
Doesn't it? He asked how they justified it, and I presented their argument as best I could.
Ask any transwoman who has been told to kill herself (which is one of the most common negative things to say, along with "you will never be a woman") if she feels that the person who is expressing a desire for her to be dead is likely to have her euthanized if given total state control. I'll bet she'll say 'yes'.
Is that what the antagonist is actually saying? Presumably not, but if that's how it feels, that's how they justify it. And I thought that was the question.
No, not AFAICS: although that question is probably implied, he *explicitly* asked only three or so versions of "how does this group think they're oppressed when they clearly have the power" — not "how do they justify banning KiwiFarms", necessarily; though I just sort of skimmed the post and maybe missed this question made explicit.
I interpreted your comment as saying not "this is what they *feel* is happening ", but rather "this *is* what is happening" — e.g.: not "they feel right-wing groups want to oppress people", but "they want to oppress people"; and the analogy of the knife-wielding attacker seems to place the pre-emptive banner in the right, with no mention of agnosticism as to whether it is or isn't really analogous — but if I've misinterpreted, I apologize for the error.
Fair enough, thanks for the clarification. I interpreted his "How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog?" and the part about if anyone knows how they think as looking for the kind of response I gave. Nobody else at all did in the many replies so he may have been speaking rhetorically.
Also, just for the good of the Overton Window, I sure hope that at least a few 'rightwingers' in the first world really do still want to oppress and possibly execute anyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. If not it would be like finding out the desert wolf is extinct -- sure it's close to identical to the timberwolf but still a distinct sub-species.
I'm not in any position to ban anyone from anything, so I haven't bothered to form an opinion about whether or not it is 'right' to do so. People with power do what they can convince themselves is right.
Is it just my morning dumbness or does the bank robbery example pre-supposes that slurs are indeed inherently morally bad? Because from my pov it's more like """If somebody falsely accuses you of not caring about Allah and you say "you know what? Fuck Allah, you will end up in jail for heresy""". But recall that I can say Fuck Allah on the Internet with relative impunity, and the net result would be me publicly disrespecting an authoritarian religion and therefore decreasing its grasp on public speech by a little bit.
But I did learn a lesson from the responses to my original comment, it just wasn't "don't ever use slurs".
We will just have to agree to disagree on the relevance of slurs. You view them as irrelevant as a clown custom worn during a speech on inflation, I view them as relevant as the insults a militant atheist might use while decrying religion. (i.e. Not strictly necessary, but they support and underscore the sentiments expressed, and are a deliberate expression of disrespect and irreverence.)
I do think that using slurs in my post was a mistake, but that has more to do with ACX's atmosphere and character, not a general purpose case against slurs like yours.
Does anyone here have any experience with remote.com, both in general and from the perspective of a US employee looking to keep his US job but live/work outside the US?
My current company allows completely remote work inside the US but not internationally because of legal complications. I've been looking around at options for setting up 100% internationally remote work while keeping a US salary, which is harder than expected. I'd like to broach this HR and my manager as potentially adding this as part of my benefits package. I'm hoping it's basically just a simple legal solution to this problem, my company can just pay remote.com the $300-$350/month to handle all the legal complexity and I can start working out of Italy or Thailand on a six figure salary.
At this point I'm just exploring options and I'm hoping someone else has used remote.com before and can share some experience, good or bad.
I work for a Canadian company in Europe I earn local wages. To pay taxes efficiently I am part of an umbrella company which then contracts to the Canadian company. They can’t set up here without paying some corporate tax. What you are asking for is unlikely, but not impossible.
Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful.
My job has nothing to do with sales, but it feels like one of those versatile human traits that has really high returns if you can learn to do it well.
It's an interesting topic, even if one is only in "sales" tangentially (like "selling" stuff via retail jobs). I think a lot of the in-field stuff is pretty myopic though...a common failure mode of academic sub-genres. "There's no such thing as consumer psychology, just psychology"
Andrew Carnegie's classic "How to Make Friends and Influence People" holds up pretty well. Productive interpersonal relations are just sales opportunities in disguise. (The whole "personal brand" bullshit of yesteryear vaguely gestured in this direction, but of course got high on its own woo. Remember when straight-faced government-backed career navigation centers dispensed such august advice as astroturfing your LinkedIn?)
If you wanted something shorter, the concept of "weirdness points/budget" is relatively quick and easy to add to one's repertoire. If you can't compete on being the best (and you probably can't, not sustainably anyway), then it's better to compete on being different or interesting. Everyone's a sucker for novelty.
There is a company called close.io that (in the past at least) released a lot of good resources on this. I have also been somewhat impressed by Alex Hormozi and his content on social media, but i am not in sales so not an expert.
The best book I've read about the subject (admittedly, not many) is Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got by Jay Abraham. I'm not in sales, but it really helped me to understand how those people are able to be so successful at something that seems totally foreign to the way my mind works.
"Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful."
I'm not answering your question, but I am answering an adjacent question.
lol. Cialdini is good. Tim Ferriss always recommends the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and he's an all-time self-promoter so he probably knows what's what.
I hear Getting to Yes and Getting Past No are both good.
Any feline psychologists out there? The Warrior Princess is an indoor/outdoor cat that I raised from a kitten and is now eleven years old. Suddenly last week she decided that being inside makes her absolutely crazy—I mean yowling at the doors, scratching the window screens crazy!
The routine up to two weeks ago, was I would get up in the morning, feed her and her brother breakfast, then an hour or so later, let them out for the day. Between 5 and 6 pm, I'd clap my hands and call them in for dinner. They'd both come running, and they'd be indoors for the night.
Maybe a month ago, Princess started being a bit tardy for the dinner call, but she'd show up 15 or 20 minutes late and meow at the front door or the kitchen door to let me know she was there. This may be because she had been wandering further from my yard, but I'm not sure. Starting last week, she'd show up at my door but was reluctant to come in, so I'd grab her and bring her in for her dinner. After dinner, she'd be restless and she'd meow and then yowl to go back outside. Then she became rmotr and more reluctant to let me snag her, and the evenings became such restless high-drama of yowling and scratching at doors and screens (I couldn't get to sleep), that I gave in and let her out.
For the next several days, she'd stay 50 or so feet away from the door, and the only way I could snag her was by luring her close to me with Temptation cat treats. Now we've come to a compromise. When I step out to greet her, she'll come up to me to let me pet her. She allows me to snuggle with her a bit and carry her inside. She'll eat about half her food and then she'll make it quite clear to me that she wants to go back outside NOW!
Yesterday evening after I had let her out after her brief dinner, I was sitting outside on my back patio as the twilight settled in and she came by me to say hello and head butt me. She hopped up on my lap and we had a session of snuggling. I didn't try to bring her inside. She hopped down and trotted off into the shadows. This morning she allowed me to snag her without objecting, but after eating half her breakfast she made it clear that she wanted to get back outside.
BTW: breakfast & dinner are high-protein/low-carb cat foods(Blue Buffalo) for middle-age weight control. More for her brother (who was porking up) than for her. Also, over the past month, she was only eating half her normal food—even while she was still staying inside at night. But she hasn't been losing weight, so I assumed she was eating food that my neighbor puts out for the ferals in the neighborhood. My mom also has been coming by to put out food for a couple of ferals who she's bonded with, but I put that Purina Meow Mix away when I let my two cats out every morning—so they wouldn't get at the cheaper food with grain in it.
I was told by a vet that cat food with grain in it can cause kidney issues and one of the signs is that the cat gets moody. My current vet has told me that that's crap. But I'm wondering if my former vet wasn't on to something. Is my Warrior Princess eating grain-based kibble at the neighbor's house, and she's going psycho because of the food that she may be scarfing up around the neighborhood?
I have a cat-sitter who looks after my cats when I travel, but both of them would stay in the house while I was traveling so that my cat-sitter wouldn't have to look for them. I'll be going on a trip at some point in the next month, I can't deal with a semi-feral cat tearing my house apart while I'm away. The only alternative is to leave the Warrior Princess out to fend for herself for a week. There's plenty of food and water in the neighborhood (my street is like a Club Med for cats). But I don't like that idea.
Thanks for all your comments. Here's an update on The Warrior Princess — evidently she got into a cat fight and her paw got slashed and infected. I found her under my car. She came to me when I called her, but she was limping badly. I took her to the veterinary ER. They cleaned and drained her wound and dosed her with antibiotics. I explained the situation to the vet — i.e. that Princess didn't want to be inside at all. I said that one of my regular vets had suggested cat food with grain filler could be affecting her kidneys and making her crazy. The ER vet said that was possible, but she said usually that affects their coats and skin — and The Warrior Princess has a healthy coat of fur.
Anyway, because I have to keep her in the house while her wound heals, I asked for some kitty downers to calm her down. The vet prescribed gabapentin — which totally knocked Princess out. I halved the dosage because I thought she was too out of it. The halved dosage kept her calm until it began to wear off at the 12-hour mark. For the first two days, she'd yowl at the door until I gave her some drugged tuna fish. On the third day, after the gabapentin wore off she got up, used the litter box, drank some water, and she went back to the nest she had created in the spare bedroom. On day four, I stopped giving her any gabapentin. For the past couple of days, she's made short excursions from her nest to use the litter box, but she doesn't want to leave her room for very long. It's as if she's transitioned from being claustrophobic into being agoraphobic!
I've been trying to lure her out into the rest of the house, but she's pretty adamant that she's happy where she is. Her wound seems to have healed, but she's still limping a bit. She likes to snuggle with me, but I have to be in HER room to snuggle. Otherwise, if I carry her out to snuggle in other parts of the house, she quickly gets restless and heads back to her room. Not sure if the gabapentin has changed her neural wiring or if the high-protein diet has calmed her down. Weird stuff!
I had cats in my crib, and pet cats my whole life. I know them well. Here's my theory: The gabapentin gave her a sense that an unidentifiable something is different and wrong. What's kicking in is the same thing that does when they are gravely ill: They crave sameness, safety and privacy. If they are sick enough, they'll start looking for hidey-holes, places like deep in the corner of the closet. Fortunately she's not gravely ill, but she may think she is. Probably her caution will wear off naturally over time, but it would be a good idea to try to nudge her in the direction of using the whole house. Maybe try things like feed her wet cat food in small dabs all day long, rather than as one meal, & someplace else but the room she's in. Also, that page I linked of cat puzzles looked promising to me. I have not had much luck getting cats to play with puzzles to get kibble or treats, but most of the puzzles on that page say they can be used with wet food too, & that virtually guarantees enthusiasm on cat's part. (Probably also guarantees puzzles will get messy & smelly & be a nuisance to keep clean.). Anyhow, a wet-food puzzle would keep her out of her spare bedroom longer, and might also give her some entertainment. Plus of course lots of petting, but I'm sure you do that anyhow.
Also, have you tried catnip? A good stimulant and euphoric for most cats.
Sometimes I wonder if animals' dreams can have an effect on their behaviour, even changing it semi-permanently if they remember them after waking. After all, I don't see how they could clearly understand that dreams are not real, even if they are wildly inconsistent in themselves and with the animal's waking reality.
My cat seems out of sorts and distant sometimes after waking, and clingier than usual at other times, although this doesn't last, and I wonder whether that isn't the result of a remembered dream that she is confusing with reality.
So if there was no obvious physical/medical reason for your cat's sudden compulsion to be outdoors, maybe she was remembering some ghastly nightmare involving being stalked round the house.
I mostly agree with you — except for your statement that dreams are not real. I have a rather self-consistent dream reality that I have an alternative existence in. Dream reality has different rules from waking reality, but consider them to be equally significant. If I were for some medical reason never to wake again, but could continue in my dreaming existence, I'd be perfectly happy.
My cats are exclusively indoors. But I've always had the guilty feeling that if they could have the choice most cats would live outdoors and fend for themselves, leading shorter but more exciting lives. I had one indoor cat who was very docile, and once during heavy snow I carried him outside and let him feel & smell and taste the fat snowflakes. We were outside for maybe 3 minutes, but that cat remembered the experience for the rest of his life, and frequently stood at the door we'd gone through and cried to be let out.
PS, Just noticed who posted this. Hi beowulf! On Twitter you know me as Pat W.
Anyhow, I think your Warrior Princess has gone partly feral, and is telling you she wants to go the rest of the way. I don't think there's much you can do about it. She'll probably keep dropping by for friendly visits for the rest of her life.
You can certainly do something about it! I've recovered one cat of my own who was going in that direction, like Warrior Princess, and many other half- or mostly- feral cats.
(In general, you need to keep them inside without letting them out for a long time, along with some behavior encouragement/discouragement; they'll be upset for a while — but stay strong. It also helps if they have a full life indoors, with catgrass to nibble, playtime with their humans, occasional treats, a window or balcony to sun in and look out of, etc.
And, just to note, it's also the case that lots of my cats have been obviously much happier indoors! My Peanut wants nothing more than to chill with me and get cuddles. If I may brag for a second... he is truly the sweetest creature I have ever encountered; literally won't even hurt a fly! Never scratches or bites, never damages anything at all, never fights the other cats, will bunt and purr and curl up on your lap at the slightest opportunity... I have even seen him *chilling with birds on the balcony*. I don't know how he managed to survive at all, on the streets, but I'm so glad I found 'im.)
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I commend you on keeping your cats inside. I think many people have too rosy a view of what life is like for a feral cat; more "exciting", yes, perhaps — but one reason they don't live as long as indoor cats isn't just accidents, but because once they get a little ill or weak, that's often it: a miserable death of starvation or thirst or predation, unable to handle the athletics required of a wild cat.
In the beginning of their career outdoors, or if they've been lucky, they can seem in good shape and pretty happy.
But cats are stoic: we found a sweet female kitty that seemed in good spirits, and would come eat the food we put out and hang out a bit if we didn't try to approach her.
Over time, we were able to finally tame her enough to pet her, and eventually grab her and take her to the vet. (We thought she wasn't that hungry, despite being sort of thin, because she wouldn't eat dry food, only wet; but mainly took her just to get checked out.)
Turned out she was seriously ill — and her teeth were all messed up; the vet said it must have been awful pain all the time, and especially when trying to eat.
This story has a happy ending — we got her fixed up and she was just the sweetest, most grateful kitty — but most cats we've rescued that have been on the streets a long time are in similarly bad shape (although not usually to that extent).
It's a hard life. Don't let your cats go feral, please.
I thought it over, and I think you're right. I have no illusions about the downside of being a feral cat -- just thought that it would be awfully hard to bring Warrior Princess back to where she had been, a housecat who roamed outdoors part of the time. But maybe it would be possible either to convert her to a permanently indoor cat, or to get here back to where she was before by keeping her indoors for 6 months or so.
So OK, beowulf, here are some ideas for making her happier with indoor life. I've been researching ways to entertain cats indoors because I just got 2 Devon Rex kittens. Devons are a *very* active, smart, muscular breed, sort of like a cross between a cat and a monkey, and if you don't keep them entertained they turn into house-dismantling maniacs. So here are things that look promising to me:
-cat climbing structures. There are all kids of cat trees and cat walks you can buy. Some are quite handsome, though pricey. I think what I'm going to do is build something in a spare room using cardboard tubes designed for making cement pillars (you pour the cement in, then peel off the cardboard after it drives). I built something like this for cats before out of these things, and it works well. The tubes are very thick and strong, maybe 10" in diameter and at least 4' long -- maybe there are longer ones available too. You can cut them down the middle lengthwise and get 2 half-tubes, too, each strong enough to support a couple cats' weight. So there are lots of ways to suspend and connect these, and it's not much trouble to rearrange them and make a new structure. The only real downside is that they are too slick for cats to get a grip on. You have to hot-glue chunks of carpet to the parts of them cats will be walking on.
You are a good person, and I hope you and those kittens bring each other lots of happiness! o7
("Sort of like a cross between a cat and a monkey" — haha, oh jeez... I found a kitten about half a year ago, and she wasn't even a monkeycat, but holy Jesus I had forgotten how much energy some of those little suckers can have!
After growing up and getting spayed and making friends with the other cats for extra playtime, she's become a lot easier to handle. Still super silly and cute when she gets "ferociously" into chasing a toy, though!)
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Just to say: I don't think you're wrong about WP, either, btw — she definitely seems to *want* to be an outdoor kitty, and it won't be easy "re-civilizing" her — but I do one-hundred-percent think it's worth trying, at least. I can only think of one failure in attempting this out of the dozen or so cats I've tried it with... but there *was* that one. I hope Beowulf reads your excellent suggestions, and plays and socializes with Warrior Princess until she's back indoors!
Right a cat door sounds like a solution. The only down side is that my cat will sometimes bring in whatever she's caught to show us. Which is not a big deal unless it is still alive.
If it's a mouse, try this: use blankets to block off anywhere in the room that looks like a good hiding place, then put a large box on its side with something covering most of the opening so that it looks like a safe, dark place for the mouse to run to. Move whatever furniture it's hiding under so that flees into the box, then just take the box outside and let it out.
In my experience, this only takes a few minutes to set up and works pretty reliably.
1.) Kidney problems are common in cats as they age like this, because they don't tend to drink enough. Unless they have had clean, flowing water constantly available (flowing because that encourages them to drink — standing water, even if clean, doesn't tempt as much) and/or have been fed lots of extra-juicy meals rather than dry food, kidney problems are not at all unlikely.
I've definitely had cats start eating the food neighbors put out, btw!
2.) Place her at reputable kennel for the week, perhaps...?
Leaving her out for the week sounds like a recipe for losing your cat, to me. At best, she'll recognize you even less and return to your house even less. At worst...
I had a sort-of similar problem. I do not let my cats out without me watching, so they were never used to being outside all day or anything, but for a bit one of them started being mad when I'd take her in and asking to go out *all the time*. I fixed it by ignoring all demands to go out except for at the designated time and taking her in regardless of complaint, and she got over it.
Kinda broke my heart to do so, but a) she didn't tear the house up or nothin', and b) "an indoor cat is a happy cat" my vet always said — which may not always technically be true, but an indoor cat is a *safe* cat.
Your neighborhood may be safer than mine, but I only mean: I'd rather angry kitty than dead kitty; they get used to it and stop being angry kitty anyway; and... I can fix damage to an object, or replace it, but you cannot always fix damage to — or replace — a living thing.
Im no expert in cats but from a rationalist perspective i see two options:
A: She doesn't like it insight anymore
B: She has another place (insight or outside) where she prefers to spend the night.
Since the sister post already talks about reasons why she might not like it at your place anymore i'll focus on B.
Have you considered that she stays at another house?
Maybe try to use a tracking device (e.g. Apple AirTag) to see where she spends the night. Or as a low-tech alternative, but a capsule on a necklace and but a message in there with your contact info.
11 years is quite old for a cat. So could it be she is losing her sense of smell and the house doesn't smell as familiar and thus welcoming as before? https://betterpet.com/how-do-cats-smell/ That seems to me FWIW the most likely explanation, although I don't claim to be Jackson Galaxy the cat guy!
Loss or suppression of a sense of smell is apparently quite common with elderly cats. It can be either temporary (due to viral infections, even Covid!) or permanent, generally caused by nasal cancer.
Also, have there been any recent changes in the house, such as redecorating, or new equipment or pipework that might make a repellent smell or threatening noise?
Damn, talking of cats, mine has jumped up on the table. So I'll quickly post this before she treads on the keyboard and trashes the post! :-)
I've been playing Fallout 4, there are a ton of side quests (including recurring missions to defend town from attack, to rescue abducted townspeople from other locations, and to kill groups of people who have been harassing the towns), and it got me thinking about how realistic they were. A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today. Here's a source I found: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/police_dispatch_stats
With that in mind, I think a post-apocalyptic, open-world game would generate these types of side quests for the player, in this order of frequency:
1) Deal with transportation accidents. Either someone alerts you to an accident that just happened around the corner (e.g. - mule-driven cart flips over, motorcycle hits a kid, etc.), or you see it happen in front of you, and you decide whether to help. You would also have your own personal vehicle accidents. Maybe you give the victims medical help, fix their vehicles, or stop a fight between the involved parties.
2) Deal with heated arguments and fist fights between people. Such confrontations would auto-generate between NPCs in your vicinity at random intervals. This includes domestic violence. Some NPCs would also start arguments with you.
3) Deal with thefts. Maybe a store owner complains to you and you have to decide whether to track down the thief and retrieve the items (and punish them however you please). NPCs would also steal from you, and your perception / awareness level would determine whether you noticed before they fled.
4) Deal with trespassers, loiterers, etc. NPCs would ask you to help remove obstinate drunks from bars, homeless people from sidewalks, nonpaying tenants, etc. If you owned a house in the game, you would also periodically deal with these problems directly.
5) Deal with noise complaints. The lack of electronic music devices would make this a less common problem, though people would still complain about the loud bar next door, or noise from a machine shop or something.
6) OK, I'm tired of writing this. Just look at the list in the link.
Note: I omitted "Parking violations" because, in a post-apocalyptic world it probably wouldn't be an issue since there would be so few vehicles left.
"A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today."
Given the state of the Commonwealth in Fallout 4, I think a better comparison would be an active warzone with a myriad of different militia and insurgent groups all fighting each other. I know the Raider factions are referred to as "gangs," but they're less like modern street gangs and more like pillaging warbands. They're not petty thieves or even the Mafia, they're literal barbarians with automatic firearms and high-tech slave collars. So the right comparison would probably be something like battles, skirmishes, and terrorist attacks in Iraq during the immediate aftermath of the American invasion, rather than police incidents in New Haven.
I do like your ideas though! A "softer" post-apocalyptic game with an emphasis on resolving minor disputes sounds fun, immersive, and unique. I just don't think it would be Fallout anymore, unless you set it someplace like NCR territory where things are more peaceful and people are further along in the rebuilding process.
In Fallout 4, when you complete a side quest, you usually have to go back to the person who assigned it to you and tell them it is done, so that covers that base.
Long time reader, first time poster feeling a bit weird that my first comment is basically an ad.
I’ve started a Substack where I plan to tackle some topics that I think ACX readers will likely be interested in. I’ve planned out one post every two weeks for the next few months. Today’s post is “All Poverty is Energy Poverty” (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-poverty). Would really appreciate any feedback you all can give- I’m aiming for something that is interesting to ACX types but also intelligible to normies.
Very minor and surface-level critique, but defining the joule seems to be too basic. I'm not saying don't define very basic terms, just do it in a way that deosn't sound like a school lesson. Maybe do it in a footnote or a side remark or a small caption on a relevant photo.
I don't even know why the reader needs to know about the joule, all industrial and real-life users of energy describe their usage in <Power_Unit>-<Time_Unit> terms as far as I know. So I think the only memorable thing a reader would get out of that section is that sentence about how much energy a kilowatt-hour is in an intuitive terms, but running is not that intuitive to people who don't run. You can pick a more mundane and universal activity, like cooking a common food or showering for X amounts of minutes.
Overall, I agree with your main argument: High enough energy consumption is necessary / sufficient for significant reduction in national poverty, and we should treat economic indicators as trailing, not leading. I also appreciate the reminders of the scale of the energy consumption gap between the first and third world, and the life impacts implied (only ~1000 refrigerated trucks in Nigeria is eye-opening; your link for this is broken by the way).
Feedback:
However, your title is a bit… clickbaity… as is. Especially if you’re going for a non EA-aligned-type audience, “poverty” means a lot more than just national poverty. It means what’s happening in your community, it means the homeless on American streets, it means crippling medical debt. That poverty, imho (and I don’t think you’d disagree), *isn’t* energy poverty.
Also, the overall tone of the post felt optimistic (which I appreciated). But ending the piece with “and renewables aren’t sufficient / impact less either” left me a bit confused what the emotional takeaway should have been.
EDIT: Doh! I just clicked on the blog post to discover that this article is mentioned in the first sentence! I won't delete the below since maybe the excerpt will be useful to someone else reading this thread.
Apparently without a seamless cold chain the benefits of some refrigeration, like on a truck, is not as useful, so you end up with some chicken/egg problems in putting the whole cold chain together from farm to table.
From the article:
"In 2018, Rwanda announced a National Cooling Strategy, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, and, in 2020, it launched a program known as the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or aces. A collaboration between the Rwandan and U.K. governments and the U.N. Environment Programme, aces is designed to harness expertise from within Africa and beyond it. Several British universities are involved, as is the University of Rwanda, in Kigali, where the new institution has its campus. aces’ mission is wide-ranging and encompasses research, training, and business incubation, and also the design and certification of cooling systems; once construction is complete, early next year, its campus will have the country’s first advanced laboratory for studying food preservation and a hall to demonstrate the latest refrigeration technology."
I still don't entirely understand why it isn't just a lack of energy problem, since refrigeration technology has been around a while, but it seems to be more complicated than that.
Thank you! All of the feedback you mention is something that I think nagged at me as I was writing but but that I didn't sufficiently address in editing. Really good points, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. I was unhappy with my ending. What do you think would have been a better parting thought?
Maybe you could have helped the reader quantity the investments we’re making in renewables + near-future energy technologies today, and how we can re-frame or think of those investments as global anti-poverty investments.
We spend a lot on various anti-poverty measures today. How do those expenditures compare to our investments in near-future energy technology? Should we use the framing your proposed to encourage more investment? Etc.
Apropos of the "how much do billionaires deserve" thread (which I was way too late to comment on)--
Isn't all of that just what the 10th commandment was warning about? "Thou shalt not covet" and all of that? "I don't like how much money you have and want you to have less." That's the root of punitive taxation. And it's an awful, destructive tool, one that corrodes the body politic.
My answer is "as much as they earned while obeying the laws that existed at the time it was earned, minus the minimum amount of tax, as flat as possible, necessary to maintain the obligatory functions of the state, just like everyone else." If you want to penalize them, make new laws for money earned going forward. Subject to the normal democratic procedure, ideally without demagoguing about what they "deserve" or not.
Tax law should not be used to enforce social policy, because tax law *stinks* at doing so, and that makes it worse at its actual function, which is providing funding for the (necessary) operations of government. If you want to subsidize something, do so openly. If you want to penalize (civilly or criminally), something, make a law regarding that. Don't build loopholes and curlicues into the tax law. In part because those inevitably hit people you *didn't* intend to hit worse than those "big bad rich people"--rich people can structure their income (et al) to minimize the tax burden. Regular employees can't. So it mostly hurts people who *want to become* rich, not those who *already are rich*. And is just pure envy and spite.
I'll also note that this sort of flaw comes up with any attempt to centrally plan the economy. The society *most* captured by its elites I've ever seen[1] was the old Soviet Union. Once you put some people in charge of deciding how much everyone else deserves...well...the ones making that decision deserve the most for their hard work, of course.
[1] even a lot of feudal countries were less captured in practice, because of the complex web of obligations and the general poverty of the situation. Although often the Church was heavily corrupt and acted like a fully-captured elite. But I'm focusing on ones in relatively modern times.
The problem is that concepts like 'earned' start to fall apart as soon as you start digging into the details. _What_, exactly, is being earned?
Here's a thought experiment. Let's say that someone amasses a huge fortune through business. Over time they come to dominate the economy, with serious distortionary effect - liquidity problems, unpredictable inflation or deflation, etc. So the rest of the populace gets together and rewrites their constitution to establish a new government, new central bank, and new currency. Everyone wakes up tomorrow, and suddenly the wealthy hoarder is cut out of the economy. But they haven't lost anything physically - they could show up with their money anywhere and proffer to buy anything, theoretically.
Would that be 'stealing' from them? Absolutely! But why? They haven't lost any of their wealth, have they? Of course they have, because what they were really amassing, with their money, was not physical currency but rather a _claim on future resources_. Their money was a contract with society at large. Imagine our hypothetical mogul going into hiding for 30 year, then re-emerging. Upon returning to civilization, they could walk to the nearest farm and proffer money to buy an apple that didn't exist 30 years ago, from a farm that may not have existed 30 years ago, from a _farmer_ who may not have been existed 30 years ago. And that farmer would be perfectly happy to trade an apple for some dollars that were earned before they were born.
And lots of things could have happened since then. Inflation will have cut into the purchasing power of those dollars. Apples might be subject to punitive sales taxes for some reason. Lots of things could have happened in the intervening time period to change the way that society fulfills their side of the contract, in a way that nobody would describe in that way even though that's exactly what's happening.
This does not invalidate what you're saying, by the way ... but it does complicate it, when you acknowledge that both sides (society & mogul) are signing up for a trade that will be consumated some time in the future, under possibly different circumstances than exist today. It would be folly for society to abrogate its obligations to those who hold wealth, but it's a great over-simplification to say that what the wealthy have 'earned' is set in stone.
The 10th commandments are not a treaty on political and economic organisation.
And the Bible on the whole is not kind with the rich. See Zachaeus, the rich young man, the parabol of Lazarus, and so on. Read the book of Amos to see what the Old Testament thought about rich people too...
The economy is a complicated mix of positive sum games that create value on net and negative sum games that destroy value and unevenly distribute the remainder. We ought to try and encourage the former and discourage the latter- not because of envy, but because winning a negative sum game, by definition, involves taking things from people without giving anything in return.
Obvious examples of negative-sum rent-seeking includes things like monopolies and regulatory capture. Less obvious are things like advertising competition, speculative bubbles, situations with a lot of information asymmetry, very subtle anti-competitive behaviors, etc. The mix of positive and negative-sum games is also fractal- you can find examples at the level of industry, company, department and individual.
The wealthiest people in a country will have won a ton of both positive-sum and negative-sum competitions. The poorest will have benefited from plenty of positive-sum competitions and also suffered from losing a lot of negative-sum competitions. It doesn't matter that the benefit of the former tends to outweigh the harm of the latter- people being unjustly harmed is still a problem.
We unfortunately can't just regulate away all harmful economic rent- except in very obvious cases, it's far too hard to disentangle from beneficial profit-seeking- but we can recognize that it exists and ask the clear winners to compensate the clear losers.
If done to excess, this kind of thing will also penalize winning positive-sum competitions in a way that discourages finding them in the first place. In moderation, however, we can see from historical and international examples that progressive taxation doesn't reverse the incentives of entrepreneurialism- arguably the most innovative period in US history, for example, had more progressive taxation than we see today. And when you don't model every economic activity as positive-sum, there also seems to be a pretty clear moral need for it.
Or maybe something more like Roman client-patron relationships, in which rich dudes are so insanely rich that they just straight up pay normies to come see them every day and "be loyal."
We could speculate about signals of loyalty in a high tech society. Possibly checking in at a kiosk will be enough. It would certainly be too time-consuming for the rich person to check on all their retainers personally.
Maybe living in a trademarked city will be enough.
It happened historically and rich people generally use their money to enhance their status. Having lots of people who literally owe their livelihood to your generosity is a huge status enhancer.
Sure, they do, I just don't see why buying loyalty couldn't make a comeback. I'm sure it wouldn't look exactly the same as Roman patronage by any means, but something strikingly similar could easily come about.
Look, I really don't want to be rude or make this overly personal, but why do you always insist on bringing everything back to this particular topic? Because I really don't feel like this line of thinking is contributing a whole lot to the discussion here.
It's not that I'm offended. It's not even that I disagree (and for the record, I *do* disagree, but that's besides the point here). It's just tiresome to see you bring up the same point in nearly every discussion you participate in, even when the topic is only tangentially related. And worse still, it tends to derail those discussions and make everyone start talking about your pet issue instead of whatever the original topic was. There's a reason Scott banned Steve Sailer on the old SSC forums for bringing up this exact issue all the damn time (the final straw was when he brought it up, apropos of nothing, in response to a discussion on Bush-era housing policy).
Just because you're carrying a hammer doesn't mean that every object you see must be a nail.
But my point is that you don’t need an underclass living in mud huts to have feudalism. You need a fairly fixed series of strata with wealth and power gaps between them. We are almost self organizing into that.
Moguls associate primarily with other moguls. And I can barely think of an acquaintance of mine without a graduate degree, and they mostly have professional degrees.
The nature of economic systems is to concentrate wealth amongst the wealthy as times goes on: r > g. If you want a slight correction here, lets say Neo-feudalism.
I disagree, I think "oughts" should be considered separately from policy discussions.
Suppose Alice and Bob live happily in a regulation-free world where Alice makes $26/hour and Bob makes $24/hour for exactly the same work. The overhead of regulating this unfairness doesn't come for free: we need to raise taxes by $1/hour for both Alice and Bob to pay the people regulating their pay. The end result of regulations is that Alice makes $24/hour and Bob makes $24/hour. Nobody wins.
I think it's appropriate to say that it's unfair that Alice makes more money than Bob, but that nothing should be done about it, because the cure is worse than the disease. These are two separate points!
Similarly, you may argue that taxing billionaires more is bad and we shouldn't do it, but we should separately discuss what the fair outcome would be. Since nobody on this blog is a dictator in charge of centrally planning the economy, I think we're safe from the terrible outcomes of having that discussion.
That’s less a question of fairness and more a question of market inefficiency.
Or maybe not. Maybe Alice has a better understanding of the value of her labor to the business and was able to exact better terms than Bob, and society is promoting Alice’s skill at allocating scarce resources as broadly desirable.
Or maybe Alice is attractive and friendly and Bob is slovenly and sour. Maybe it’s worth an extra $2/hr to hang out with Alice most of the day, every work day instead of Bob. Certainly studies back the notion that attractive people out earn ugly people. I bet funny, gregarious people do better too.
Is it really ‘fair’ to limit the measure of an employee’s value to the work being accomplished independent of everything else in the human experience?
I didn't want to go into that much detail in a very simple example. But of course if there are some kind of differences between Alice and Bob that explain the difference in pay, then we can argue that it's fair for Alice to get paid more. On the other hand, maybe Bob gets paid less because someone doing data entry made a typo. Then it's probably not fair.
There are good and bad reasons and we can debate what is a "fair" or "unfair" reason to pay someone more - but you seem to agree with me that at the very least fairness is a meaningful concept.
You’ve used all of the detail a bureaucrat meting out ‘fairness’ could be reasonably expected to consider. Which I think is my point.
Maybe we should just presume that 300 million people negotiating with each other in their own self interest will come to more ‘fair’ and efficient arrangements than if we shackle them with a bunch of arbitrary restraints based on cursory optics.
"Fair" is a shibboleth for "what I like". It has no other meaning.
My point is that when anyone looks at someone else and says "they shouldn't have that much", the person making that judgement is committing the theological sin of envy and unjust judgement. And envy is corrosive to societies. So I disagree that it's appropriate to say that it's "unfair that Alice makes more money than Bob." Now it may be appropriate to try to inculcate in society an attitude of generosity, an attitude that Alice should, *voluntarily* redistribute resources to others. But the attitude that says "darn, if only we could make it worth it to take Alice's resources and give them to Bob" is poison. It's (metaphorical) bucket of crabs thinking.
And I'm against any kind of thinking that assumes that such a discussion has a point. Because that's where it leads--to societies thinking that industrialized envy is a good thing.
Fair isn’t a synonym for “what I like”. The concept of a “fair wage” for instance means workers should be paid, at the least, a living wage. If you think the term can never be employed except as a form of envy then slavery couldn’t be condemned as not being fair, since by your account fairness is just an attitude. In fact the slaves could be condemned as being envious.
"Fair" may be used as a shibboleth for "what I like" but every toddler who learns to say "that's not fair!" knows it means more than that.
It's the common intuition at the heart of Big Important Ideas like "theory of mind", "strategic coordination", and "rule of law". Not to mention the Golden Rule and its corollary "don't dish it out if you can't take it."
Actually, IME toddlers go through a long stage where they way overuse "that's not fair." As soon as they learn it has power in some cases they will try it in every situation where they don't get what they want.
And as a teacher, I see plenty of high schoolers who haven't grown out of it yet.
Oh yeah - I think that kind of massive overuse is why some folks get the impression it's really just "what I like." I'd argue it's a developmental milestone, like the "asking 'why?'" phase. They're figuring out where the lines are, trying to use it anywhere they think it might work and, eventually (for some this might be after high school), mastering the logic of where it applies and where it doesn't. Some less empathetic folks might never master it. Other people, more gifted with high social/emotional acumen, often understand it much earlier.
> "Fair" is a shibboleth for "what I like". It has no other meaning.
Yeah, this is a great point.
But… the “sin of envy” doesn’t seem impactful to this conversation. I think those far wealthier than I should have higher taxes, at the benefit of the poor. I think *I* should have higher taxes, at the benefit of the poor. How is envy involved in my reasoning?
You're right about the first part, but why presume that anyone in the discussion cares at all about sins and virtues? With all possible charity and compassion on my own part, here, I'm tempted to answer my own question by saying "because you're very young, and possibly a recent convert to religion". Your calling envy a "theological sin" (to the extent that's a real category it refers to sins against the 'theological virtues' of faith, hope, and charity; i.e. doubt, despair, and hatred) in a discussion that has nothing to do with theology strengthens this assumption.
There's nothing wrong with being young, of course. If you are young and are tempted to cry 'ad hominem' or 'bulverism' at me right now, have at it. I'll return to this point in a minute.
As to the point itself, consider that envy didn't even make it onto the list of seven deadly sins for a very long time in the history of Christianity. When it did, it was (rightly) identified as downstream from vainglory. One sin that always has been on the list, however, is Greed. If you hear someone criticize a wealthy individual and you do not have the ability to read this critic's mind, and you assume that his only motivation is actually sinful and is envy in particular, he very well could cry "bulverism! ad hominem!" at you as well. In fact, there are a wealth of other possible motivations for such a criticism. One, in fact, is the theological virtue of charity -- I see someone like Bezos in an occasion of sin (note that I do not assume he is himself actively sinful -- only that his situation is in relation to Greed what living full time in the world's most luxurious whorehouse is to Lust) and would advise the monarch (whom God has been given the power to punish sin for the saving of souls and the building up of the society) to tax him.
Envy (ie covetousness) has been part of the roster of significant sins since, well, the 10 Commandments. If not sooner. For good reason--it's one of the more destructive social maladies. It kills society quicker than random murders do because it tears at the societal fabric itself.
And why should anyone care? Because envy is entirely destructive in all its forms. And it's *addictive*--destruction is always easier than creation, so given a normalized choice between *tearing someone down who has more* and *building yourself and others up*, the first will win. And society as a whole is worse off for it. Envy is negative-sum--*no one* is better off as a result. Not physically, not mentally, not spiritually.
And, for the record, I reject your ad homs. I am neither rich, nor young, nor a new convert.
Charity is an individual matter. Given willingly, it enlarges the giver and *possibly* helps the receiver (that's up to them). Taken forcefully, it *embitters* the victim and promotes dependency on the part of the receiver, thus harming all of them. The only one helped is the grifter who stands in the middle and now has a new client.
It is given to a few to be judges, but the judges must live the law as well. Which they do not--they fan the flames of hatred for each other for their own benefit. And, for the record, there are no monarchs "whom God has given the power to punish sin for the saving of souls" except One--that is flat blasphemy in my mind. All things belong to God. Society taking it upon itself to judge whether someone deserves things is putting society and man in the place of God.
Good job missing the point -- you have no evidence whatsoever that anyone you accuse of envy is engaging in it. If you were interested in self-reflection you might ask yourself why you're projecting so hard.
Haven't been in that employment situation for a long time, but: be wary of "we handle the logistics of marketing for you!"-type services. I'm pretty confident we got burned bigly by Constant Contact and similar. You know your buiness better than anyone else, and also your median customers (ideally).
Word-of-mouth is highly efficient for how much it "costs"...so many of our customers were friends or family of existing clients. They'd end up doing "free advertising" by posting about our services on social media or whatever. Conversely, of course, a sufficiently motivated pissed-off customer was a big liability. Some such cases were, uh, not handled effectively...big businesses can routinely shrug off these sorts of problems, due to scale and Lizardman's Constant. But a little one, especially in fungible industries like consulting? Uh oh. Better a big quiet fuck-up than a small loudly-broadcast one.
(It really is a different mindset...sometimes I think it's distorted my expectations of what chain stores "can't get away with". Turns out that even really vocally unhappy customers often matter very little...not without being centered by friendly media, anyway. Which just means they become a pawn in someone else's axe-grinding.)
This varies so widely by product and industry that without further context it's unanswerable. Small technical consulting firms and restaurants attract customers in completely different ways.
I suppose. But without either arbitrarily picking "here's how X does it" the minimum answer to such a broad question would hit the character limit. At least for me, perhaps other people are less verbose.
I used to own a circus gym. I tried various online search ads and social media ads. Targeted search ads worked well for things like summer camp. Social media ads were pretty worthless. Word of mouth was the biggest contributor to growth overall. Groupon was a money loss but generated enough word of mouth to be mostly neutral.
So I have not seen anyone say this, but this seems like as good a place as any to bring it up.
We're told a lithium shortage is slowing the adoption of electric cars. If there's a scramble for lithium, how is that going to affect availability of lithium (carbonate) for treating bipolar disorder? I know the quantities are much smaller, but you can't make the element outside of a reactor, and then it would be radioactive if you get the wrong isotope, right? Do psychiatrists need to advocate for a strategic lithium reserve?
Availability isn't the problem, price is. As price rises, previously uneconomic mineral deposits become economic and production increases (and also more exploration is incentivized). It's like those projection saying that we've only got X number of years worth of Y metal left that never materialize because the price increases which leads to more production. I would imagine the cost of lithium medication would not vary enormously based on the price given the very small quantities used, but even still, shortages won't be an issue.
People are being slightly disingenuous when they say there's a shortage of Lithium. It's just that the price has gone up - anybody who wants to buy some Lithium can do so. It might cost you 50 dollars for a kilo, but bear in mind that that much raw material will provide enough Lithium carbonate for many patient lifetimes.
Scott's review of Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer is one of my favorite book reviews of his of all time. I finally got around to reading the book myself, and reviewed it on my blog: https://nicholasbruner.com/2022/09/05/what-im-reading-albions-seed/ If anybody were interested in reading it and wanted to leave a comment about what you think here, I would appreciate it. I am considering entering the next book review contest, and so would especially like to hear what changes or improvements I could make to a review like this to increase its chances of getting picked.
I read Albion’s Seed 30-something years ago, and it made a strong impression. Awarding it a “Shortcut to Smartness” designation sounds right. My kid’s AP U.S. history class used a more recent book which acknowledges and builds on the separate founding cultures approach, extending it to discuss the French influence on Louisiana and Canada, the Spanish influence on the Caribbean and the Southwest, and the various Native American cultures for good measure. So it does seem to be regarded as an influential modern classic of history writing. I enjoyed reading your take on it - your writing is clear and engaging and moves along at a good clip. Regarding the book review contest, I’d say the average ACX voter tends to favor discursive, longish reviews where the reviewer’s opinions and ideas are prominent. And if you see an opportunity to sprinkle in some humor - little joking asides or maybe unexpected use of irreverent tone - that usually helps. This crowd generally enjoys talking about Big Ideas with people who don’t take themselves too seriously
Any Kabbalistic significance to the word 'capital', having originally come from describing 'heads of cattle' and transmuting, in modern parlance, into a kind of 'economic control plane', where capital describes 'a system which makes choices as to the allocation of energy' - as the word 'capital' went from 'an organic reproductive force of nature' to 'a cerebral control mechanism' ?
This isn't true. Capital doesn't come from head of cattle. The expression "head of cattle" is an English thing. The Romans would have only said "caput pecua" to mean the literal head of a cow.
The term capital entered English in the 17th century where it originally meant the assets necessary to carry on a business. Literally a Latinization of the idea of "the chief things" meaning the most important things. It referred to tools and the like. Then in the 18th century the economists extended it to mean "the surplus which a business or farm produces which allow the production of new businesses/farms." And then Marx came along and wrote his famous Das Kapital. So it has an association with "head" as in "important, the thing which you can't live without."
You've got it backwards; "cattle" meaning livestock comes from "capital" meaning property. I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence that the phrase "head of cattle" contains two different head-related words. (But of course it's not really a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.)
Ukraine cannot execute any kind of co-ordinated combined-arms military operaton, at this point. There is no possibility of driving Russian forces from any city or territory the Russians want to keep. And there is nothing I can imagine, short of a nuclear or other mass-casualty atrocity, that will cow or scare Putin, or the sentiment of the Russian people.
Ukraine is out of materiel except what is trickling from the WEST. they still have manpower, desperate mnpower, but Russia is content to bombard Ukr troops wherever they gather.
Ukr's best option is to sue for peace concededing most of its former Eastern territory to Ru.
I have no idea what the US or NATO or any EU govt is doing or thinking, or what they expected to achieve, other than some expensive show of "look! we are helping the underdog!" Any diplomatic halt to this must and should have gone straight to Putin, this proxy war BS is just wasting $ and time and lives, and also the Economy of Europe.
I think that is the one of the big dangers the Ukrainian offensive poses to Russia. It isn't likely to fundamentally alter the course of the war on the ground, but the way official Russian media immediately responded by declaring the offensive a complete failure, and the more they insist that it cannot possibly succeed, the more they open themselves up to accidentally discrediting themselves to their own population if the offensive *does* see success to even some marginal degree.
And that credibility, tenuous as it is, is key to keeping their population on-board with the war. The more you say "it isn't raining and people who say it is will be imprisoned for inadequate patriotism" when people can look out the window and see the rain falling, the more they will doubt things like "this war was a necessary defensive response to NATO encroachment," "there is an ongoing genocide in Ukraine against ethnic Russians," "Ukraine is run by nazis who are molding it into an anti-Russia," "we withdrew from Snake Island as a good will gesture," "Kyiv was never the objective we always were only focused on the Donbas," and the other various official lines necessary to keep the population behind the war and trusting that those executing it are doing so competently.
(Just for clarity sake, this post is about official Russian media and not the BRetty specifically. I doubt anyone would make that inference, but considering I just posted a big soliloquy about "being kinder" elsewhere in this thread I want to be clear that there isn't some soft-accusation that BRetty is somehow "official Russian media").
Is Russia capable of executing co-ordinated combined-arms military operations, at this point?
They seem to have stopped using large numbers of tanks for offensives after their staggering casualties in the early months of the war, and their airforce is flying an anemic 100-200 sorties a day, which show scant signs of being co-ordinated with their ground forces.
The last vestiges of Russian "co-ordinated combined-arms military operations" appear to be "lots of artillery bombardment in the Donbas, with slow infantry advance once an area has been sufficiently damaged". Ukraine appears to be using a similar playbook to advance on Kherson, but with quality (HIMARS) substituting for quantity (Soviet-era shells).
If the Ukrainians have more men capable of fighting than the Russians do, and their HIMARS systems can destroy Russian artillery in the region of Kherson, they will probably be able to retake the city. Note that these are both big ifs since we don't have a clear count of combat-capable Ukrainian infantry, nor do we know if the Ukrainians can continue to knock out Russian artillery systems.
- If Ukraine doesn't recapture all their territory, including the Crimea, will the rest of the world be OK with that? Are the US and Europe holding back certain weapons because they don't want Ukraine to recapture all that territory?
-If Ukraine does recapture their territory, what will they do with all the Russian immigrants who moved there and then prepared the way for the Russian invasion? Won't they NEED to do ethnic cleansing to hold onto it?
- If Russia manages to repopulate the Ukranian cities they depopulated with Russians, what would the world do when Ukraine then tries to kill or expel those Russians?
Why would Ukraine need to do ethnic cleansing? They are not Russians and not thinking that way. Property of the "new population" gets officially confiscated in favor of previous owners or the state, if people disagree, they get evicted, if they make trouble they go to jail. Active collaborators could suffer extra-judiciously in the first weeks after liberation but after that will be just tried in courts, which are not known to be harsh in these matters either.
If Ukrainians actually capture Crimea, there is zero chance of the active anti-Ukrainian partisan warfare which I think you imagine, first because the majority of population there is pre-2014 and they just accept the power change like in 2014, second because actual Crimean aboriginals are rather pro-Ukrainian, and third because Russian culture is the culture of submission to power.
No it would not, removal on citizenship/visa grounds is not an ethnic cleansing. Thousands of ethnic Russians who lived in Crimea pre-2014 would remain there if they so choose, and non-ethnic Russians relocated to Crimea would lose the right to live there they had under Russian authorities. Russia is a multi-national country and I personally know non-ethnic Russian but Russian citizen who acquired property in Crimea post-2014. All these "new arrivals" are simply illegal immigrants from the Ukrainian pov and so can be deported to the country of their passport, and that does not constitute any "ethnic cleansing".
Here are the 4 biggest "known unknowns" for the conflict as it presently stands, in my opinion:
(1) How much military equipment will the US keep feeding Ukraine [the US has given Ukraine a lot of new systems like HIMARS that are proving to be quite effective; this current offensive appeared to be stalled until the Ukrainian government got a commitment of a regular resupply of HIMARS missiles from the US]
(3) Will Russia announce conscription of its own, and will Putin survive announcing a general conscription [my read is that he's reluctant to announce a general conscription because he thinks that doing so would threaten the stability of his regime]
(4) Will Europe run out of gas this winter and bargain with Russia in a gas-for-pressure-on-Ukraine deal [Europe appears to be trying to inflict present-pain to avoid running out entirely over the winter, avoiding getting zero'ed out would substantially strengthen the European/Ukrainian position]
All 4 of these are, IMO, more important than:
(5) "How will the offensive in Kherson go for the next month" -- possibly well, probably not catastrophically, and the Ukrainians are bringing in lots of troops capable of defense if not offense
(6) "How will the Russian pressure in the Donbas develop" -- Stalling out due to lack of military capability to advance at anything faster than a crawl, especially when being disrupted by HIMARS fire
(7) "What will happen to Russian's industrial economy" -- Seems capable of keeping the population fed and the military resupplied, but mainly out of outdated Soviet stocks of weapons that can't be used for a breakthrough
Basically, we're in a war of attrition at the moment, and in wars of attrition one side can win by:
(A) developing new manpool sources -- [see (2) and (3) above]
(B) changing the game with new advanced weapons [see (1) above]
(C) changing the strategic situation [see (4) above]
That's a great overview but I think Ukraine getting concrete wins on the ground would help tremendously for both 1) and 4). European countries will be more motivated to eat out the price of the sanctions if they think it will actually turns into a victory for Ukraine and the US will also be more motivated to keep sending weapons if they seem to make an impact.
That's a reasonable analysis, but I'm not sure I totally agree with it.
Ukraine has been loudly asking for more heavy offensive combat gear (planes, tanks, etc) for months and so far hasn't gotten it. These systems are very expensive, so it's possible that America/the EU are waiting to see if Ukraine can be trusted to not fall apart, but I think there's a better explanation (given that America blocked Poland from transferring planes to Ukraine [https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-reject-polands-plan-give-ukraine-soviet-era-fighter-jets-rcna19396]):
American and European decision makers aren't sure what they want a Ukrainian victory to look like, and are weighing possible paths to victory against risk of Russian escalation [to full war status & conscription and/or to tactical nuclear weapon use]
America has been extracting promises from Ukraine to not use American tech to attack Russian soil [https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-has-promised-us-not-fire-new-50-mile-range-rockets-russia-1711887]. My best guess is that American decision makers want to feed Ukraine enough hardware that Ukraine can "win", but in a way that is slow enough that Russia can choose to withdraw in good order instead of collapsing on the battlefield*, since a full battlefield collapse would be a chaotic crisis that could prompt Putin to escalate to trying to use a tactical nuclear weapon.
With that in mind, I think the impact of a concrete battlefield success on (1) and (4) becomes weaker/less clear. But, I do think that a concrete battlefield success could help with Ukrainian morale and therefore increase the number of soldier-recruits enthusiastic about getting through the training to become new combat units (2)
*Whether or not you think there is a risk of Russia's army collapsing comes down to what you think morale + command & control + reserves are like on the Russia side. The conventional read [that I agree with] is that the Russia army was much more deeply flawed & rotted than anyone thought, but there are hot takes that are claiming that this is still all going according to plan or back-up plan and Russia is withholding huge fractions of its combat capabilities.
The fog of war is thick but the Ukrainians seem to be advancing steadily and the Russians retreating for the first time in months. Overall, it's pretty bad news for the Russians. You can't win a war on the retreat and it seems unlikely that the Russian forces have the ability to go on the offensive force any time soon. After all, that's what they've been trying to do for the last three months and it's gotten them basically nowhere. If something major changes like they get a new source of military equipment and troops or Ukraine loses access to the same then it'll be an open question again, but right now it looks like the beginning of the end of Russian ambitions.
My non-expert opinion is that we'll see slow but steady progress towards Kherson. Ukraine can't spend its army too aggressively, so I don't think we'll see huge breakthroughs or armies getting pocketed, just slowly taking Russian defenses apart (with the help of their new Western weapons) until their position becomes unsustainable.
Well, Ukraine has gone and made a fool of me by just straight-up blitzing to Izium while everyone was looking at the offensive in Kherson. Happy to be wrong about this one.
I am trying to signin to remind everyone thatis putting away a boat,trailer, or RV today to please checkit THOROUGHLY for hitchhikers such as cats, squirrels, raccoons, etc. Look in cupboards/cabinets, drawers, j\luggage, appliances even if you don't remember them being open when youc leaned/aired out. Check stuffed furniture, big vases and buckets, tool/instrument cases, luggage....
Thank goodness all I've got is a Ford Focus. I'll just pick up a half-dozen or so Rastifarian hitchhikers and get them to generate enough smoke to run the critters out -- monkey disease and all.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Covid lockdowns implemented in most countries have produced an almighty log jam and muddle in trading networks that had been built up over decades and were enormously complicated and very delicate (in the "just in time" sense). If that is so then what is the best way to untangle the mess, if the best solution is not to leave it to untangle itself over time?
I don't know about "best", but I dream of a counterfactual world where I never hear complaints about """price gouging""" ever again. See the other top-level comment about lithium shortages. Turns out that being able to set prices at market-clearing levels is really important, especially under high volatility: https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2021/MaloneLuskfoodprices.html
(I like food as an example better than gas, since the latter carries a lot more...political baggage...)
Small point of optimism: despite constant product delays and capricious deliveries, customers have adjusted with remarkably little complaint. I think it's finally trickled down to the median consumer that "supply chain issues" really is a valid Fully General Excuse, not some BS we spout to avoid responsibility. A far cry from the early days of covid, when people were having absolute literal meltdowns over a lack of frozen imported macarons (customer threatened to kill herself, I am not making this up). The necessities of life, indeed...I think it'll be a better normative expectation if people get more used to non-infinite-always choice. JIT is great in many ways, but it sure does help enable customers to be insufferable picky brats.
I've had non stop supply shortages in my industry. In almost every case it is related to raw ingredient shortages 2 or 3 suppliers down the chain, whether we're talking equipment, building supplies, food etc,so.my guess will be things settle down as this gets worked out in the next 12 months, except for more specialized industries like auto manufacturing.
Interestingly, all sorts of things we might assume would cause shortages, such as government regulations, labour shortages, coordination problems, shipping capacity, etc. are all proving to be a big pain in the ass but are not stopping products from getting on shelves for the most part.
The biggest sources of friction appear to be ports that are prevented from clearing the tangle due to government regulations and/or union agreements, I think?
Apart from the still-backed-up-ports, the rest of the supply chain appears to be correcting itself, based on the combination of "which things have I seen missing from the store" and "what are the architects in my industry saying about lead times for materials"
1) basically nothing whatsoever. I'm unlikely to get the new "Too Little Too Late" booster, unless workplace decides to pay me for it...Original Antigenic Sin, some small worries about myocarditis, possibility of even-better updated vaccines later on, currently ~zero news of concern in Covidland to make me exert special effort. More likely to get annual flu shot than Omicron booster - actually did catch the flu earlier this summer, and it was pretty painful. But more bearable in warm weather than during the dead of winter.
Of possible concerns, I worry more about vaccination mandates locking me out of things, than any actual prophylactic value versus covid. The college next to where I work has triple-vaxx requirements for the kids, *and* requires them to wear paper masks in the dorms...so such silliness still abounds locally, and I'd rather pre-empt that than show up for work one day and arbitrarily be turned away. But I'd like to think they'd give some advance notice.
I do still avoid certain activities, like mall window-shopping or eating out...but that has __way more__ to do with social discomfort under covid hawkery norms, than any actual fear of the disease itself. As an autist, I don't do well with judgey capriciousness and informal rules, so when I don't know what to do with my face...well. I'd rather just stay home instead. After having done sweaty blue-collar work for almost a year under mask mandate, it's just a total nope for me. Never again, if I don't absolutely have to...but it's *also* not something I feel like fighting people over (irl). So necessary trips like to the bank mean masking up, to avoid unpleasantness. But all those formerly-fun voluntary activities remain on hold, until the madness subsides. Frustrating.
I also notice that actually-sick people (sniffling and blowing nose, sneezing, coughing repeatedly, etc.) attract my attention a lot faster than they used to. I suppose I do try to give them a wider berth than I would have, pre-covid. But, once again, this isn't due to caring about covid itself...it's more that being incapacitated by illness is extremely inconvenient. I don't like being kept from my job, especially now that covid sick pay isn't on offer. So it becomes that classic poor worker's dilemma: go to work sick ("I'm fine, really!"), or stay home without pay, possibly attempting to pick up a replacement shift on a different day off? I do not like being in this situation. Given the poor cost-benefit ratio of most reasonable NPIs, "avoid obviously sick people" is one of the few that passes muster.
3) Sure, in a "the dose makes the poison" way. It's better to not get sick versus get sick, but with my demographics and the way things have progressed, longvid danger is no longer even on my Top 10 Tail Risks To Keep Me Up At Night listicle. I'd need to see *a lot* more robust research to change my mind. Bias note: as far as I know, am still a "novid"...can't prove I ever got it. Most of my friends and acquaintances never got it either. I'm likely over-discounting because of this.
The stronger/broader argument that "long-term risks from viral infections of all types are poorly understood and underpriced" I'd actually agree much more wholeheartedly with. Longvid makes me cagey cause of how hard The Narrative's been railroaded.
About mask-hawkery and masking in public places and eating out: Are you in a place where most people mask in those settings? I live in a very blue state with a high vax rate, and see a number of people on my state reddit sub are in favor of school masking, but in malls and stores I'd say only 10% at most of people wear mask these days. I'm curious what it's like in other parts of the country.
Hmm, well...I live in San Francisco. Quite a number of businesses and institutions here still have mask and/or vaxx requirements, which actually do get enforced to some degree. Other places you won't be kicked out exactly, but people will absolutely give funny looks, and you just know you're showing up on their Twitter later or whatever. At the very least, it's fairly easy to tell when People Are Uncomfortable. Easily over 50% mask in grocery stores, malls, public transit...outside while wearing gloves, even. Iirc we have one of the highest vaxx rates in the country, and possibly the whole world. Hand sanitizer and wiping down handles, etc. continues to be a common ritualistic ablution, including for those wearing gloves.
It does seem kinda arbitraryy for some people that I see regularly, though...they'll mask for some time, then they won't, then they will again. People have their own reasons...I know many like not having to show their faces, for example, and the covid part is mostly irrelevant. (This more for the paper maskers, I'd suppose.) Highly doubt they're tracking the case loads, hospital admissions, deaths, etc. and making a daily micro-covid decision based on ongoing metrics. And of course, for all that masking, it's still very common to see the nose-out phenomenon. Are they practicing circular breathing? (I've even seen nose-out with N95/KN94, which...*shrugs*) A few people still pull up their shirt collars or whatever, but that's thankfully mostly gone away. No shortage of disposable masks anymore, many places hand them out like free condoms.
I don't mean to come across as judgey in these statements, incidentally...but it's sorta like the arguments you had elsewhere in thread: some amount of spillover frustration leaks through, no matter how diplomatic I try to be. This isn't because of being strawmanned, but mostly that as an autistic extrovert, other people wearing masks makes both my job duties (customer service) and socializing much more difficult. I'm really shite at interpreting ambiguous vocal cues and body language...without being able to read someone's face (decent at this), effort goes way up and efficacy goes way down. Especially when I literally can't hear what someone is saying - I'm mildly hearing-impaired as well. So, yeah, libertarian principles: they do them, I do me, everyone's cool and should try not to Fundamental Attribution Error. And yet...life really is harder and less rewarding now, versus 2019, even without factoring in any disease-related stuff. Makes me sad and more unlikely to Make An Effort to surmount these challenges. So I just stay home and browse ACX Open Threads instead of having A Life...
(To a lesser degree, there's also lingering after-effects of "social distancing", where people command a lot more personal space now. This I don't mind so much - really didn't miss those days of packing onto sardine-crammed trains, trying to fight for a seat while wearing heels. It's great having an entire bus/train car to yourself.)
Well, thanks for writing. Even though you think of yourself as a bit disabled when it comes to reading people, etc., I certainly feel like you are seeing me much more clearly than the people who came down on me like a ton of bricks. And, for what it's worth, I want you to know that if I saw you
in the mall or wherever without a mask, I would not be secretly judging you at all. It's really hard to know how worried to be about long term damage about covid -- that is mainly what I'm worried about, and it may turn out that long term damage from covid is no more likely than long term damage from lots of stuff, and my wearing a mask in public places has been pointless. Anyhow, even if it isn't pointless, so many people go without masks these days that it's senseless to feel resentment of any one maskless person. Even if you have covid right this minute, the amount of covid you're putting into the air will make basically no difference in how much is in the air in the mall, because lots of other covid-positive people are walking around without masks too.
About life being less rewarding now than in 2019 -- yeah, I feel that too. For me, it has little to do with covid precautions -- mine really don't change my life much. It's more the feeling that things are a mess, and the knowledge that there's even more rage and misunderstanding between people than usual. Of course people always bicker on forums, but there's a whole added element now, of people being in different camps when it comes to covid, and being so full of anger and misconceptions that they can't even communicate. I identified myself as a precaution-taker, and that led some people to assume all kinds of infuriating things about my attitudes that just are not true -- and to hit me with the anger they have at government officials and private citizens who have been major assholes about covid restrictions. Anyhow, thanks for not doing that shit yourself. I hope things work out well for you in San Francisco.
For sure, I'm sorry you've been strawmanned as one of the Permanent Midnighters when it seems you're being really quite reasonable. Every Contentious Issue does this, and it's sad to see people in the crossfire.
> It's really hard to know how worried to be about long term damage about covid
Yeah, I'm more skeptical than most regarding Longvid due to Base Rate Fallacy (and all covid research in general being rushed/politicized, it'll take years to sort out for good). But it'd take not that much evidence to update in favour of Precautionary Principle instead. As you also note, the huge prevalence, intentional or not (undercounting by millions or maybe billions of cases!) means both: Situation Less Bad Than Seems, since everyday life largely carries on; and also if longvid does turn out Kind Of A Big Deal, then, uh, whoops? Still, for those without risk factors and such, Longvid far outweighs dire illness and literal mortality, and the reverse for those less health-advantaged. (I always find it interesting how it's possible to get these sorts of roundabout admissions out of people who are otherwise very opposed to QALY-style thinking. Generalizing is hard!)
>there's even more rage and misunderstanding between people than usual
Not just you, it's showing up in aggregate data as well[1]. These trendlines from January haven't really abated yet...it genuinely is a more dicey world in all kinds of subtle ways, and I'm a lot less inclined to be confrontational with random strangers as a result. Forget covid lurking in the background, all it takes is pissing off the wrong guy who decides to get physical...it's game over, man, game over. Not worth it, even moreso than in the Before Times. Principle of Charity: good practice even outside ACX.
1. I wear masks when in airports, and try to eat/drink outside whenever possible at restaurants and bars (which is already a preference I had, but now I have it more significantly). Probably in the winter, if there's another wave that looks comparable to delta, original omicron, or the May/June wave, I'll be a bit more cautious about some activities too. I'll get an updated booster probably in a few weeks, when I'm close to 6 months out from my infection but still a few weeks before peak winter.
2. I don't know what great research there is.
3. I think covid seems to increase these risks more than flu but less than Epstein-Barr. It's hard to tell how much it increases those risks, and whether it increases risks a little in most people, or just by directly causing long covid in a small fraction of people and nothing in others.
1. The vaccinations and boosters. Also, my wife and I tend to stay at home a lot, so we aren't at a lot of risk of contagion on any given day anyway.
2. I don't know. One article that I read mentioned that the NIH has a long covid study underway.
3. As you said, the data seem murky (in the absence of a RCT, digging out confounders always has ambiguities...). Also, the pandemic is only 2.7 years old. It is just too soon to know what will happen after 5 or 10 or 20 years.
1. I stopped taking any precautions six months ago. The juice no longer seems worthy of the squeeze, as they say.
2. Don't know.
3. I think "long covid" is overblown but there are obviously potential long term effects. What I do not find terribly plausible is the idea that you can have an extremely mild case of covid that you recover from quickly only to have some awful complications six months or a year later. Much more likely would be someone who has a particularly nasty case of covid that permanently harms their health in some way that would have been mysterious to no one in 2019.
I also do not find it terribly plausible that someone who had a mild case could have significant complications months later. But sometimes unintuitive things are true, you know?
I'm keeping up with the research on this stuff, trying to figure out how much to trust my intuitions, which say that I'm in good health & fully vaxed, so really do not need to to worry about all that long-term shit.
1. I have not had covid yet, and do not want to get it. I go to indoor public places whenever I want, but invariably wear an n95 or kn94. At work, where I meet with 1 or 2 clients at a time, we do not mask but I have an enormous air purifier running all day that gives 11 air changes per hour, and we sit 8 or so feet apart with the air purifier . Before indoor get-togethers with friends we all do rapid tests.
2. I don't know. The upshot of what I've read seems to be that Long Covid is not a discrete, distinctive illness -- different body systems are malfunctioning in different sufferers. If that's the case, there would be multiple lines of useful clinical research, each devoting to understanding and treating one of the malfunctions. The best way to keep up on this stuff is to following the virologists and epidemiologists on medical Twitter.
3. I agree, but also agree it's murky. One of the major studies offered in support of the idea that covid raises the risk of heart attacks, neurological problems, etc. is a study of VA patients that was heavily criticized for methodological problems. However, there are other studies finding changes in the heart, brain & elsewhere visible in autopsy, and post-covid brain changes visible via imaging in live subjects, also decline in cognitive test scores post covid, and studies besides the VA one finding increased rates of cardiovascular and neurological disorders in people post-covid. None of these are "Long Covid" studies, just studies of people who had covid, most of whom now feel fine. Most of the changes they are finding seem fairly small to me, and as someone not medically trained I don't feel able to judge how worried to be by them. How do they compare to what you find in people who have had flu or some other virus? Also, do they compound? If you have covid multiple times, does the amount of damage and the chance of neurological and cardiovascular problems increase with each episode of illness?
Your description of what it's really like isn't accurate. I do about one nasal swab a week. It is mildly unpleasant, about as unpleasant as flossing, which I do most nights and which takes about 10 times as long. My air purifier does not roar, and I'm in fact pretty picky about noisy machines in my office. Choose my window air conditioner with a lot of care because I can't stand noisy ones. You can definitely hear my air purifier but it more swishes than roars, and in my conversations in the office I and the other person do not have trouble hearing each other with it on high. In fact its sound bothers me so little that I sometimes forget and leave it on for a couple hours when the last person has left and I am doing paperwork. Ditto the mask -- occasionally I forget I'm wearing it, and wear it through my whole bike ride home, even though I feel no need to mask outdoors. In the few years prior to covid I have made 2 other lifestyle adjustments for the sake of health: I stopped eating sweets and refined carbs, and I started working out 5 days a week. I do not miss the sweets at all, but giving them up was quite hard, far harder than giving up eating indoors in restaurants. (You can still have lovely special meals if you give up eating indoors in restaurants, but you can't have cookies without eating cookies.) The working out was quite hard to get myself to do at the outset, and sometimes still is. But I stick with it because I know it's good for me, and I like the stronger, more energetic feeling I have these days as a result. But the working out is WAY harder on me than masking indoors and nose-swabbing, and on the days I do it I lose 90 mins of time I could be using for other things. In contrast, my covid precautions are not difficult at all to get myself to do, and in total they take about 15 mins a week out of my life, counting popping the mask on and off a bunch of time, swabbing once a week, and clicking m air purifier on at the beginning of the day and off at the end. Honestly, your idea of what a lousy life people lead who take my level of covid precautions is just not very accurate. I can't tell you how many people have offered me their mental snapshots of what it's like, and they all sound hellish and quite unlike my actual life: Shut up indoors almost all the time, never seeing people in person, and when I do go out I'm all scared and quivery, clutching at my mask to make sure its on right, thinking every moment about choking on my own mucus in the ICU . . . It's not remotely like that. I'm not even exactly scared of covid -- more just determined to try my best not to get it. A couple of times I thought I had it, & my reaction was "damn, this is the end of my winning streak. OK, well I'll settle in and ride it out. Shit."
Anyhow, I am aiming to skip carbs and sweets and do regular workouts for the rest of my life. I'm fine with doing the covid precautions for the rest of my life too. Presently I'm keeping it up because I'm worried about sequelae and I can't yet decide based on my reading how worried to be about that stuff. If the sequelae turn out to be nothing much, I'll probablu drop the covid precautions.
When I see people taking precautions, such as wearing a mask, I instantly think they are very mentally ill and suffering greatly internally.
But your reply has given me another perspective.
I exercise and workout most days a week. Partly for health, part for fun, part to look better.
I can imagine some people look at me doing that and think I'm nuts. "What the point?"
So it's really just about what we're happy doing and whether we feel the effort is worth the rewards (covid or non covid related).
I guess if the masks hadn't been made into such a moral issue and mask wearers weren't trying to be so hard to be virtuous (not saying you are, mask twitter people I guess), I probably wouldn't be so quick to assume mask wearers were only doing it due to personal difficulties rather than they just enjoy it.
It's hard when things get politicized or moralized.
No, I would have seen that as a big loss. But prior to giving up sweets and committing to working out, 2 other lifestyle changes I've made in the last decade, I would not have volunteered happily for either of them either. They would have looked like big losses. Now I am used to the last 2, and glad I made the change. So if I had to cover my face for the rest of my life in order to enjoy equivalent benefits, I think I might have adjusted. But I do not. I probably cover it for an average of an hour a day. You know Trebuchet, it happens to me over and over that I describe the precautions I've adopted pretty clearly, and then I get questions like yours, and StoryGirl"s: "Don't you hate wearing a mask all the time?" "is that any kind of life, shut up in the house all the time alone?" It's as though no matter what I say people cannot stop having this vision of a lonely hypochondriacs staring out the window at a world they cannot be part of, thinking of nothing but covid covid covid and pissing themselves in terror every time they think it. Don't you people *listen*? I wrote in the original 1 - 2 - 3 question that I mask in indoor public settings, but I do not mask in the office, relying instead on an air purifier, and I do not mask when visiting friends -- instead, we test prior to getting together. (An of course I do not mask at home.) Having heard that, how can you possibly think I am wearing my mask anything like all the time? And if you grasp that I am not logging a lot of time in a mask, wutz the point of your thought experiment?. In 2019 how would I have about covering my face for the rest of my life? I dunno, Trebuchet, how would you have felt in 2019 if somebody told you that in a couple months you would begin spending 18 hours a day having online exchanges like this one, and that you would continue doing so for the rest of your life?
1. Avoiding in-person gatherings as far as possible, n95 when it's not. No-contact delivery. Improving ventilation (air purifiers and/or cracking windows) in spaces I control. New boosters as available.
(Hoped there'd be a summer lull as in 2021 that would allow more activity. But nominal cases never got better than 15x last summer's low and ascertainment is down, so real cases are even higher.)
2. There are some larger studies getting started, but so far the data quality isn't great and better data are clearly going to take some time. That said, the dearth of studies that give low percentages for long Covid, reasonably convinces me that it's a substantial problem when combined with steady pandemic-level prevalence. If it weren't, I'd expect more of a spread in the results of the studies we have.
The NYT site gives last year's hospitalization low for the US as a bit under 17,000, vs about 37,000 today. It is way down from the peaks.
That said, while my risk of hospitalization and death isn't quite as low as I'd prefer, that's something vaccination and boosters seem to help quite a bit with.
My primary personal concern at this point is long Covid, which so far seems to be helped less. While I hope for data that shows otherwise, so far I'm still waiting to see it.
I'd be much happier if we were actually funding at least an Operation Full Impulse for the potential improved vaccines that might help with transmission (nasal for improved mucosal immunity, pan-coronavirus vaccines so we don't have to keep chasing variants). But even without that, I still retain some hope that over time prevention and treatment will both get better gradually over time.
(Not as soon as I'd like. But with neither party very interested in funding priority Covid research anymore there's not much to be done about that.)
At the current rate that may take some years. But the alternative appears to be rolling the dice with long Covid a few times a year (that seems to be the expectation with current transmission and immunity decay). For now that strikes me as unacceptable odds of putting me in a worse situation than I'm in now.
There are lots of things that could change that. Some good, like solid evidence long Covid isn't as common or as serious as most current studies indicate it is. Or that vaccines reduce its incidence by orders of magnitude instead of maybe 15%. Or those new vaccines arrive and turn out to help more against transmission. Or better treatments. Some unlooked for random luck. Cases have certainly been much lower before (e.g., in the middle of summer 2021 they got two orders of magnitude lower than they've ever been during summer 2022), maybe they will be again for a bit someday. Maybe the horse will learn to sing.
Some bad: Social or economic pressure makes it untenable to continue avoiding it. One truly obligatory gathering or another catches up with me. The trend of new variants becoming ever more transmissible overcomes any practical infection control on the individual level. Some other life or health crisis takes priority.
Eventually some such change for good or bad will happen. Or my assessment of the costs and benefits will change.
Till then, I'll take it day by day and month by month, and make choices based on case levels and what the latest research seems to be showing.
My sense is that more people than not are in fact undercounting risk. (Which of course varies. If I were 20, I'd doubtless see things differently.) But even with a realistic estimate, it's certainly possible to decide that a 70-95% chance of avoiding long Covid each bout, multiplied by 2-3 infections per year, is an acceptable risk.
For myself, I don't like how those chances multiply out in the long run. So I'll keep kicking the can down the road for a bit, and see how much better or worse things get over time.
(I'm told predictions are hard, especially about the future.)
1. I'm an extreme introvert, and already avoided large groups of people.
2. No idea.
3. Yes. The increase seems to be variable, and alter with age. "long term" so far means "after 2 years" for the longest report I've seen. The percentage increase seems to be around 2%. For some reason the reports of epilepsy and seizures seems to be restricted to children.
(Note that wasn't an increase of 2%, it was an increase in rate of problems compared with what would be expected of something like flu, so the actual increase is a lot less.)
Regarding (3): I think there's a flaw in the logic of this statement. Two, actually, one minor and one major. The minor one is that covid almost certainly will *not* come for everyone. There's almost *nothing* that happens to everyone, except death of course. I am positive that even if covid continues at its present level for another 30 years there will be a few outliers on the planet who do not catch it even once. Currently I am in the 5% or so of people who have not had covid yet, but I do see that if covid continues for years to be as prevalent as it is now, it's extremely likely that sooner or later I will end up in a situation where my precautions are not a match for the amount of virus in the air and I will catch covid.
The major flaw in the logic, though, is the unexpressed idea that the only difference that matters is the one between having covid zero times and having it one or more times. It then follows that there's not much point in avoiding catching covid, because it's going to be almost impossible to stay in the zero times group. But covid isn't a one and done, and there are excellent reasons to try quite hard to have it as few times as possible. Each time you have it, there's a tiny chance you will die, maybe so tiny it's worth discounting, depending on your risk factors. But there's also a small (my best guess is 5%) chance of developing Long Covid, and a small increased risk of cardiovascular and neurological illness in the aftermath. Why roll those dice any oftener than necessary? And then there's the evidence of lingering damage in the body after even a mild case of covid. Seems plausible, though not a sure thing, that this damage would accumulate with each additional episode of infection.
The vast majority of people who try hard not to contract covid will still catch it at some point. But if they continue to try hard after that first case, they're going to have a lot fewer cases of covid than those who do not take precautions.
Dude, I was using a variation of the phrase "comes for us all" in its colloquial sense to communicate a kind of indifferent fatalism about struggling against a force much greater than myself. You might have also pointed out that COVID isn't an entity that can "come for" anyone in the sense that "come for" indicates forethought and intentional pursuit.
I haven't had antibody testing to be certain, but I also appear to be amongst those who haven't had COVID yet, despite working with the traveling public throughout the pandemic, working near infected coworkers, going out to restaurants, movie theaters, stadium sports events, and doctor's offices literally the day those things reopened in my area, went unmasked whenever I could and started flying to other states as they also opened. I also dated a guy throughout the pandemic who had kids who went back to in-person school. I elected for the less effective J&J vaccine because I was wary of the speed with which mRNA was brought to market.
I should have been tagged by COVID at some point - but it appears I haven't been, despite taking far more risks than many folk I know who got triple vaxed and continue to isolate and mask up to this very moment and long to eat a fried dish that hasn't steamed soggy in transit from a restaurant but still got COVID from...somewhere.
I prioritized the certainty of happiness that would come from enhancing my quality of life over the uncertainty of a very minor risk of severe COVID, and so far that calculated risk has worked out *great* for me. If I contract COVID or suffer long COVID tomorrow, I can at least take comfort in knowing that I lived a better life for two years than the folks who lowered their quality of life trying to avoid it and then suffered it anyway.
Well, I think it was reasonable to take what you said the way I did. I have heard that exact line at least a dozen times on Reddit, and it generally clear in context that the person literally means that since there's almost no chance of having covid zero times, you might as well drop precautions. Look at FskaFitzgerald, below, who is clearly believes they are speaking in support of your point of view, and who actually spells it out: once you have it once, successive cases make no difference. I have gotten pretty sick of the covid-will-come-for-everyone line, which doesn't make much logical sense.
I have also gotten pretty sick of the assumption, which you also seem to be making, that I am choosing a lowered quality of life over taking a chance on covid. I really do not think my life is much different from the way it was pre-covid. I do not work from home, and I do not avoid public places -- I just wear a high qualify mask when I am in stores & other public places, and take it off the minute I'm outdoors. I go to movies. I take trains. The next time I want to fly somewhere I will board a plane. I just do all those things masked. The mask does not bother me. I am so used to the mask at this point that I occasionally forget to take it off after shopping, and bike all the way home with it still on, never feeling oppressed by it or even noticing it. Where I live I am able to eat outdoors for about half the year. The rest of the year fancy meals happen at friends' houses.
As for your never having had covid -- well, congratulations on your immune system. It must be an extraordinarily good one, or perhaps you have some quirk in your respiratory track or blood chemistry that makes you highly resistant to covid. Your experience is very unusual though. Every person I know who dropped precautions when "covid is over" was announced has since had covid. Most of the people I know who take precautions about like mine have still not had it.
How much longer do you intend to keep up your precautions?
Do you intend to wear a properly fitted N95 mask (presuming you were trained by a professional to use one), social distance, and take rapid tests before seeing friends for the next...year?
I do not think I am social distancing -- if you mean by social distancing not going to events I normally would so as to avoid crowds, etc. And, as I said, I do not work from home -- I go in and see people in person. My life is not very different from the way it was before. The change covid precautions have made in my life is much smaller than some other changes I have made for health reasons in the last 10 years pre-covid: I stopped eating sweets & refined carbs, and found that I lost weight, felt better, and stopped craving sugar. All that was a big adjustment, though, and involved changes that were much more difficult and depriving than the change to mask-wearing in indoor public settings and testing before I see friends. I also started doing pretty heavy workouts about 5 days a week. That cost me a fair amount of money for the equipment, and was quite difficult to get myself to do at first. And it uses up about 8 hours a week of my time. That too was a more costly change than adopting the set of covid precautions I take. I really think you have the wrong idea of how much of a bite basic precautions take out of many people's lives. Anyhow, in my case, I hope to maintain my improved eating and exercise habits for the rest of my life, and am quite willing to also maintain my covid precautions for the rest of my life too, if covid continues to be as prevalent as it is now. I think I would drop the covid precautions if continuing research indicated that "Long Covid" lasting longer than 3 months only happens to 1% or so of people, or that it's curable, and if the findings about damage to the heart & brains even of those who did not have severe cases turn out to be mistaken. As a matter of fact I think it is likely that I will be taking precautions of this kind for most of the rest of my life. Seems to me we are entering the Age of Pandemics, set off by climate change and encroachment by the ever-growing human population on animal habitats. I hope I'm wrong, about that, though.
And why on earth is there this continuing note of irritation at me & my covid take in your posts? You don't even know me. Why do you even give a shit about my covid precautions? And don't say something like you're just saddened to see somebody limiting their life, etc etc, because you don't sound a bit saddened, you sound pissy.
If you get through Covid once, the successive cases will be of less to no consequences unless you are extremely unlucky or have systematically bad health. How many cases exist of someone dying solely from a Covid reinfection? Like some probably but also I’ve never heard of even one case
Moreover, this concern does not factor in the quality of life lost or opportunity cost from continuing to avoid other human beings indefinitely.
Isn't the point rather that I don't like being sick, and I don't really care whether it's my third or fourth covid or my 70th cold or my 10th flu or whatever? I don't want to have three days with an awful fever, and so if there's a simple thing I can do that appreciably risks my chances of that (wearing a mask while waiting in airports, only going to concerts or bars when I'm enthusiastic about it) it seems to be the same sort of cost/benefit tradeoff that makes people wash their hands before eating or after getting off the subway.
It seems to depend a lot on the individual. After doing the entire gamut of vaccines, I finally got an omicron variant. I felt wonky the first 8-12 hours, sore throat, maybe a hint of fever, but the next day that was gone, and then I had a mild cough that took like 4-5 days to resolve, and that was it. An ordinary sinus cold is much worse. But others I've known have had significantly rougher experiences.
If you don't care about the difference between your 3rd Covid, your 10th flu, or your 70th cold, then it would seem reasonable that your precautions against getting Covid this year should be about the same as your precautions against catching a cold three years ago. Is this the case? If not, why?
Seems like you didn't read what I said carefully. I made clear that I am not very worried at all about dying of covid. I am vaxed & in good health, and my chances of dying of covid are very low. Even if I got it 10 times in the next year, my chances of dying from it during that year would still be very low. I am worried about developing a post-viral syndrome, i.e. "Long Covid." I had what I'm pretty sure was a post-viral syndrome after a mildish case of the flu 20 years ago, and it lasted for 3 years. 3 years of feeling like *absolute shit* -- exhausted, achey, no appetite, exercise-intolerant, low fever that came and went. I never want to go through that again. I also am concerned about post-covid findings in people who do not have long covid, and in fact feel fine afterwards: Weird changes in their brain scans, small reduction in cognitive test scores, doubled (though still small) chance of strokes, psychosis, deep vein thrombosis, myocarditis . . .
As for "avoiding other humans indefinitely" I do not. I mask in public places but go into them as often as I like. In my office I use a powerful air purifier but do not mask. For indoor get-togethers I test first. I would say that my total time spent on precautions is max. about 15 mins a week: occasional mask-ordering, stopping for 20 secs to put on a mask before intering stores, sticking a swab up my nose once a week or so. Oh, and clicking on my office air purifier when I arrive, and clicking it off when I leave -- add 20 secs/week for that.
"Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection exhibited an increased risk of all-cause mortality (Hazard Ratio (HR) 2.14; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.97, 2.33) and excess burden of all-cause mortality estimated at 23.8 (95% CI: 18.9, 29.2) per 1000 persons at 6 months; all burden estimates represent excess burden and are given per 1,000 persons at 6 months "
Possibly. But the perfect study probably isn't out there. (Certainly the study that's fully controlled for every imaginable confounder isn't.)
Pending a better one, I'm inclined to conditionally rely on what's available over argument from incredulity. But if there's something more rigorous that can be linked, great.
As Kenny Easwaran pointed out, there most certainly are useful precautions:
"we understand that avoiding people who are currently sick, and washing your hands before eating, are simple and helpful things that somewhat reduce the probability of infection"
Did we though? I'm a tabletop gamer, and in the beforetimes it was typical in my group that if you were a little sneezy but otherwise ok, you'd show for a game. That's definitely changed.
Ok - some of this is a matter of degree. As it happens, both I and my wife tend to prefer being at home most of the time, so most of our risk comes from grocery shopping. If we were regularly at potential superspreader situations, we'd need to consider our exposure more carefully, but we aren't in such situations anyway.
This comment assumes that it is impossible to even change the probability or frequency of a common event. We have all known for our entire lives that this is false - we understand that avoiding people who are currently sick, and washing your hands before eating, are simple and helpful things that somewhat reduce the probability of infection. We know a few more tricks now too.
Michael Shellenberger --former CA Gubernatorial candidate, whose book "Sanfransicko" Scott reviewed recently -- lobbied hard to keep CA's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant from being shut down. Thank God it paid off. He celebrates a bit here:
Yes, CCTV reduces crime. Not all types of crimes, though. It hardly affects violent crimes, but strongly reduces property crime like car theft. Cameras in car parks are highly efficient.
Don't expect wonders. A typical reduction may be 10-15%. In crime hotspots or car parks, the reduction can be stronger.
If they are *not* monitored by security staff, then they are also very cheap and definitely cost-efficient. The monitored version is much more expensive and a bit more effective. This may or may not be efficient, depending on the situation. In the UK, there was a movement to bring bobbies back on the street, because people assumed that they would be more effective there than watching screens. (I don't know whether it's actually more efficient or not, but this was the sentiment.)
And obviously, there are costs in terms of privacy. Whether you want to trade privacy for security depends on your values. Many countries try to hit a compromise. For example, if you privately want to install a camera at your front door, then it is not allowed to capture the ground of your neighbor, or the public pavement in front of your house.
Regarding privacy, I would think the same laws apply as organic vision and audio recording. If a person can see public spaces from their private property, and record an event using their phone, why would a non-sentient camera not be permitted to? I think of these things as prosthetic devices.
Similarly, the authorities are not permitted to enter a private residence or wiretap private audio devices without a warrant, so they should not be able to install cameras without a warrant.
Businesses do not enjoy the same privacy from entry by authorities. Code inspectors are allowed to enter and inspect businesses so this would be the gray area. Some businesses are open to the public, some not.
Uhm, I can only speak for Germany (actually for EU, I think), but here you are not allowed to just make a recording of another person, public or not. The German name of this is "Recht am eigenen Bild" ("right to your own images").
There are some exception to this. If you blend into an anonymous background mass in my photo of a public building or event, then you have to tolerate it. If you act in a public role (e.g. at demonstrations), then you have to tolerate it. But if you just walk alone in the street, then I am not allowed to make a picture or record you. That's the reason why every car in Russia has a dashcam, but not in the EU. They are simply illegal here.
Now, if your camera only transmits without any recordings, then that's probably fine. Doorbell cameras are often like that. But the typical surveillance camera records at least for some hours, and then it is not allowed to record the pavement (let alone the neighbor's ground).
Thanks for sharing this different approach to images of oneself. On social media, I wish others respected privacy enough to not post photos they take of me without asking first. This is legal here in the U.S., and is just addressed through social convention. I believe the person who takes the photo even has the ability to copyright it and own it.
Someone should start a prediction market on how the German lawsuit against Tesla will go.
Cars and homes being covered with cameras is -- fortunately or unfortunately -- the future. I genuinely wish the citizens of Germany well in this fight, but as far as the war on privacy is concerned it's a desperate rear-guard action.
Great suggestion about a study. Anecdotally there are so many news examples of public surveillance permitting the identification of criminals, the car they used to abduct someone, etc.
Surveillance does not seem to be deterring crime. In the current Seattle and Portland crime waves, perpetrators are using Covid masking, hoodies and sunglasses to evade identification.
I see no reasonable objection to cameras in public locations, which could as easily but more expensively be occupied by a human law enforcement officer with eyes. Private surveillance is another story. Someone just won a court challenge to their school's policy of recording their room during take-home tests ... don't recall the source.
I wonder if there's technology that could penetrate or get around the masking, hoodies and sunglasses for people who are already in the system. Is there some data that law enforcement could collect that they are not collecting now when they arrest someone?
As cameras on everything become standard and machine learning becomes more involved, directly circumventing masks/hoods will become as unnecessary as breaking the encryption on specific text messages. Why? As a former NSA guy once said "You don't need data if you have enough metadata". I.e. if you can track someone back five or ten or fifty cameras until he goes into his house or takes off his mask, you don't need to defeat the mask itself. If you know exactly who he messages at all times you don't need to know what's in a message he sends to a suspected drug dealer at 2 am.
High school student here. I plan to get a CS degree but it occured to me that CS may be attracting too much talent. No doubt it's a field with a bright future, but supply and demand.
I find most STEM subjects interesting (although CS is my favorite), and I consider myself good enough at math to handle any of them if I had to. So what major(or field of study) would you recommmend?
From personal experience recommend double majoring as a good way to gain both option value and synergy. CS works very well for this because it is both viable as a standalone and for becoming the person in the lab who can program for other fields.
I'm skeptical that anyone who hadn't a double\triple education in several STEM fields and an intimate knowledge of your psychology and circumstances can give you a good recommendation.
My first and foremost advice to you is to not listen to your passions, filter the most obviously unviable degrees depending on your local economy and the best guess of the future (e.g. "X degree is mostly useless and all of its majors are doing something else with it, don't bother"), and listen to elders in the all the fields you're considering (preferably ones you know personally, but take everything you can get). If your college allows you some time to safely switch specizializations after starting study, milk it for all its worth.
CS's problem, in my very partial and biased and almost-certainly-not-from-your-country view, is not too much talent, it's too little talent-worthy work. The vast vast majority of work an average dev does can be taught to an intelligent and logic-loving adult in 2 years with a leasurly schedule. If you allow me to pontificate a little, this is a general problem with all-people-must-work civilizations, too much education and so many heads to receive it, but too little fusion reactors and cutting-edge blue-sky skunk-works problems and research to work. Academia is *infamously* competitive, and it's not even "interesting" most of the time - there is still a whole lot of paperwork and dumb meetings -, and even there the amount of "interestingness" is differential, some areas has super stars and some areas are relative backwaters.
There's a lot of talent, but its not a winner take all industry the way many other things are. You can have a great career without being an _exceptionally_ good computer scientist.
Usually applied math or statistics are pretty reliable STEM fields (statisticians are probably still going to be relevant for a while, and unlike CS, far less people seem interested in going into the field)
What degree? It makes a difference. If you're going for an advanced degree, one of the biological sciences may by very hot in a few years. (And many of them are already rather hot.) But when I checked (admittedly decades ago) the entry level positions were either undesirable or required an advanced degree.
Software eats the world, but most of it is just plumbing.
Ideally find something that allows both research and a comfortable salary, so you can mess around depending on your priorities. I'm pivoting from programming to bioinformatics because the first bored me to death, and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
Despite the fact that everyone I know went into/is going into CS, there's actually going to be a shortage of programmers/developers in the coming decades and the supply won't meet the demand.
"In 2019, there were 389,000 computing job openings but fewer than 72,000 computer science graduates to fill them"
If you're actually interested in CS go for it. The reality that I've seen is that maybe 1 out of 10 people have the combination of intelligence and patience it takes to make it. I see the stats of how many people are going into it, but most will flame out pretty fast. If you're one of the survivors, great. If not, you can always switch majors and still have benefit from what you learned since you're going to need CS-like skills no matter what you end up doing.
I think one consideration would be your future job. E.g. if you wanted to work in a lab, math or CS would probably not be ideal.
The software industry feels like the biggest consumer of STEM graduates. In my experience, an adept programmer can likely find a job there, not matter if they did their thesis on software design or string theory. Within academia (or research in general), employment prospects are much more uncertain. While getting a PhD grant is mostly possible, getting long term employment as a postdoc is difficult. If you want to do research, it might be worth to think about which fields are less crowded or might benefit most from your specific skill set.
Biology, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit if you're quantitatively skilled. But maybe do a CS or physics major in college and also take some bio classes, then move more into biology after you graduate.
(I did chemistry as an undergrad and am now a stem cell biologist.)
I forgot to publish my predictions for this year, but no surprises here. The winners tick all the right boxes on the social justice scorecard, and that's still the way to bet for the Hugos.
I had liked Arkady Martine's first novel, "A Memory Called Empire". But the sequel had way too much idiot plotting for me to tolerate. Of the ones I had read, I'd have given the nod to "Project Hail Mary" on the basis of the exact opposite of idiot plotting. But concern for logical plotting is very much *not* the way to bet for the Hugos these days.
Of the best novel nominees, I've read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, both of which were excellent.
Andy Weir is great at writing satisfying competence porn- The Martian consisted almost entirely of that, while Project Hail Mary maintains that appeal while pretty successfully combining it with more traditional character writing. Strong recommendation for just about anyone.
Becky Chambers has an incredibly unique writing style focused on cozy slice-of-life stories about very compassionate people being kind to eachother- often without any sort of adversary or significant conflict. A lot of people assume that a story like that must necessarily be bland and slow, but I think Chambers proves that wrong- I've found all of her novels to be engaging page-turners, able to evoke a lot of very strong emotions. Though her world-building is pretty generic, I think that's forgivable in light of how original her plot and character work is.
Her novella that won this year is one of her weaker works in my opinion, but I'd recommend her novels to anyone who finds themselves in the mood for something unusually light and cozy.
I liked The Galaxy and the Ground Within quite a bit, right up until it seemed to go all in for an ethic of space settlement that seems like the interstellar equivalent of Breathairianism.
I'm a huge fan of Arkady Martine's work, so I'm thrilled that A Desolation Called Peace won! Both it and the previous book in the series (A Memory Called Empire) are a tiny bit rough around the edges, but I think they're quite innovative and really good.
If they're nominating MtG short fiction drivel, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. These are consistently unreadable, on a level embarrassing even to an AO3 author.
The story might have been interesting if the author had noticed the comfort vs. greatness element embedded in it. One character may have found a happier and mentally healthier life, but the other made a Nobel-worthy advance in physics following a path their counterpart abandoned early.
A story that looked at whether it's better to be well-adjusted or Isaac Newton might or might not have been Hugo-worthy (though I wouldn't necessarily dock it points for the medium), but I'd have found it more interesting.
Revealed preferences indicate I'm more a length of days than glory person myself. But there are literal millennia worth of art showing the question is worth examination. The story as it is feels much narrower, more didactic, and much more conclusory.
It's the trans angle that has me rolling my eyes (and before anyone gets up on their high horse, I would equally be rolling my eyes at a story where Person was using this McGuffin to contact their alternate universe selves to persuade them to marry Carli, because that was the maximum happiest outcome and it's impeccably cis-het).
It's the same as the one about the magic rain, which at least was better written: LGBT++++ issues happily resolved via wishful thinking, with the SF element only being there as a thin veneer. Trans Person calling up on the magic phone across the universe to contact their other selves who did/didn't transition and nag the ones who didn't into "yeah, you're me, so you're really trans, so go get that treatment gurl!" is "that's nice, dear" but what has it got to do with SF as such?
It really is slipstream fic, and that's a term I first thought rather pretentious but it honestly is the best descriptor for current Hugo bait.
(The bad writing is just another element for me disliking it; if it's well-written, I can appreciate that at least. But this is bad writing on top of it all).
I don't really disagree. I found the story annoyingly didactic. (Though while that sort of thing has a big constituency among current Hugo voters, it's worth noting that it didn't win.)
But there's an SF story available for exploration in the premise. Especially if it's possible to bring more people into the group text. Sure, some of it overlaps with, e.g., Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", and there's at least one recent story involving the ability to communicate but not travel between branching timelines that I can't quite remember. (I recall lots of angst over seeing dead loved ones who survived on the other side of the glass.)
But while it hasn't been a new idea since at least "Sidewise in Time" in 1934, I think there's room for more exploration. Especially around what knowing about the roads not taken does to someone.
(Or for someone. But I suspect that transworld texting as useful therapy would be an outlier in practice.)
In a way, Marvel's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is *also* about that, but I can't say it was handled much better there.
Mmmm. Anything I might comment on would be snarky, at best, and culture-warring at worst, so I'll keep my trap shut.
I recognise some of the names, but I haven't much, if any, of their work. What I have read by some I didn't like enough to become a regular reader of that author.
I am a little surprised that the winner of "Best Dramatic Presentation, Longform" was the most recent movie adaptation of "Dune", over works like "Encanto" and "WandaVision" - it's old SF, it has a literal White Saviour figure lead, it could be looked at as colonialist, etc.
Maybe the voters just all really really like Timothée Chalamet?
I mean, the story is critical, Herbert wanted Dune Messiah to be a part of Dune (which apparently will be realized in the movie adaptation, as a trilogy). The cut at the peak white savior moment was the publisher's idea.
I'm not sympathetic at all to the leftie critics but I prefer a more nuanced take, instead of "noble savage good, noble savage with white overman even better" - so I have high hopes for the movies to frame this well.
I was not aware of that, and certainly you can read it that way - Paul fails as the Messiah because he is not able to control the jihad launched by his fanatical followers, and he is not willing to go the route that his son is in order to assure humanity's future.
But nevertheless, the native Fremen don't/can't rule themselves, they are 'corrupted' by the environmental engineering which is terraforming Arrakis into a fertile world and which is making them 'soft' and the Atreides line is cemented in power with Leto's ascension to a type of god-hood. The outside saviours are there to make sure the Fremen continue on their assigned path of being Big Tough Hardy, and that humanity in total will be just Too Darn Cantankerous for an AI or any charismatic leader to take over and control.
So there still are a lot of colonialist/saviour/messiah tropes going on throughout the books. The value of Arrakis is the spice, and the value of the Fremen is to be totally loyal to the Atreides line as well as examples of tough primitive-living humanity.
This has nothing to do with the movie, as I don't watch movies.
In "God Emperor" someone (Leto?) explains that the Fremen followed Paul because they saw that as a path for them to grab power. So following Paul *is* ruling themselves.
In "Dune Messiah" Paul walks into the desert (to presumably die, though apparently not) to cement the loyalty of the Fremen, by following their customs to his death.
Any reading of this as "white savior" is exogenously imposed. It's not inherent in the story. (Admittedly, its also not contradicted.) To me the Fremen were clearly Arab-mimics and Paul was a constructed after the pattern of "Laurence of Arabia", though with LOTS of differences, and in a different context. But "race" as such is not what it being talked about. There is talk about genetic lines (NOT race) and culture.
It is really weird to have the Atreides line be so eulogized, if you look up the history of the children of Atreus. (The surviving Atreides have to be the descendants of Orestes after he went mad and fled to Athens. Or, of course, some totally different group who are just called Atreides.)
I remember the good old days when movies and games were mostly an escape from all that bs. Now it seems a lot of them try to embrace it as hard as they can.
I can watch the news on repeat when I want to jack up my cortisol levels thank you very much.
Hell I don't like cancel culture, but when I watched 'Dragged Across Concrete' I remember the constant whining about cancel culture ruining the movie for me (and the pacing that was too slow didn't help either).
The only embarrassment in this whole debate are the frothing-at-the-mouth zealotry for "Ivermectin is a miracle cure!!!!"
Probably it works in areas where parasite infestations are more common, and it works in conjunction with other treatments. Unless you're regularly in contact with cattle, I think that a Westerner living in good conditions doesn't need to bother with it. Certainly not "Dad contracted Covid and is really ill, we are desperate for a miracle cure" cases, sad as they may be - it won't do anything in the nature of "Well I had Covid and I took this and now I'm 100% with no lingering effects!" as some people are claiming.
Mostly I'm fed-up of the calls for Scott to re-enact Canossa, with Alexandro in the role of Pope Gregory VII: just admit you were completely and utterly wrong and Alexandro was totally correct in every detail all along and write an article retracting all you ever said on the topic, that's all we're asking, not much!
It doesn't sound like Central Europe is getting along well these days. I assume Poland is angry about Germany's pussyfooting regarding Ukraine.
I'm a bit angry at Germany too. Sorry, but they seem like a culture of conformists who goose-step to Nazis or liberal politics or Russians or whatever the fashion of the day is. That this overly conformist, fashion-sensitive culture is the most powerful polity in Europe concerns me.
Germany shouldn't pay reparations for something 70 years ago of course, but they should grow up and show they are a serious country. I'm a moron and don't know much about Germany and have no right to say that, so do educate me: In what way is Germany a serious country now? I characterize them above as a bunch of conformists. How is that characterization wrong?
I think historically speaking, we are still getting along pretty much okay in Central Europe.
With regard to German conformity, I think that your description is a bit of a catch-22: At the moment, we have a complicated political system with federalism and lots of internal squabbling, which mostly gets moderate, pragmatic policies enacted. Granted, such a system is not great on taking a firm principled stand no matter the cost. Some time in the past, we had a different political system much more given to extreme responses, but a lot of internal conformism. It was horrible, so we don't do that any more. (As an aside, while Kanzlerin Merkel was certainly not exciting, I will take the system that produced her over the system which sometimes produces Obama and sometimes produces Trump any day of the week.)
Seriousness is under-defined. Who is serious? Nazi Germany, with Mr. Mustache as a parody of Chaplin? Colorless Merkel? Twitter-obsessed Trump? Winnie-the-Pooh? Boris Johnson? NATO in Afghanistan? Obama, the Nobel laureate with most drone strikes to their name? Putin with his clique of yes-men who thought he could take Kiev in a week?
The amount of sanctions appropriate is up for debate. I can't help but notice that even hawkish Poland will only get rid of Russian oil imports at the end of the year. While I personally do not feel the increased price levels for energy beyond my pain tolerance, I can also understand politicians who are wary of a looming recession.
The reparations thing is a PR stunt. Granted, what the Germans did to Poland was horrible, and I generally support reparations payed to individual victims of German atrocities as well as the return of any looted objects of art, but reparations on a country level generations after a war seem like an excessive demand. Unlike with colonial reparations, I think it would be hard to argue that German's economy advanced itself at the cost to Poland's economy to a degree that is still felt today. From my understanding, both economies were pretty much kaputt at the end of the war, but while West Germany got the Marshall plan, Poland got some 40 years of communism. Speaking of which, was there not also another state which attacked Poland in WWII? I wonder if the Polish officials have yet identified a successor state to that attacker, and if they tried sending a bill to them yet.
Germany didn't advance itself at cost to Poland's economy, Germany destroyed Polish economy at no long-term benefit to itself. It doesn't make us any less salty about it.
And yeah, I suppose once the whole Ukraine thing blows up into WWIII we'll go 100% Versailles on the successor state's collective ass. In the meantime we just shake sabers at people who need things from us.
The reparations demand is a PR stunt. Mind you, it is perhaps fair - the subsequent marginalization of Poland under USSR until 1989 was a direct consequence of the German aggression, though strangely nobody is trying to get half of the reparations from Putin. We don't really expect them to pay up.
As TM mentioned, polarization is welcome by the ruling party. They also need to turn the attention away from their gross mismanagement blowing up in their faces, as the energy crisis is showing how helpless all governmental agencies really are - and nobody is fooled by the claims that everything will be okay, anymore. We've seen how they handled covid, we're not impressed, we'll be relying on ourselves and the govt should be happy if they ride this out just ejected from power, not imprisoned or worse.
Problem is that the governments will have to face their public opinion, and that public opinion will not remain the same in the US and in Europe (if it was the same before the crisis). Within Europe it will start to diverge more and more too. The consequences of the conflict and the prefered end state are just not the same, at all. It seemed so because there clearly was an invader/invaded moral narrative to tell and it was played well by both US and Ukraine. And because EU can not really present any convincing military force outside Nato. But politically, especially after covid years, the moral narrative will not be enough if the energy/economic crisis last more than one winter. European governments will start to fall one after the other, and who knows what their replacement will be (I guess technical temporary technocratic ones will be pushed, but it will work only if social trouble is moderate. Which may not be the case)
As someone who is familiar with both Poland and Germany, and traditionally has been rather soft on the first one and critical on the second one, my understanding is this:
The current Polish government doesn't aim to appeal to the bigger part of the population, but invests heavily in a strategy of getting 50%+1, and polarizing is a welcome measure here. They were heavily under pressure from the EU (and member states) when they started to dismantle the judiciary system, and decided that 'Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung' (offense is the best defense). Being angry at Germany fits the ideology & convictions of the supporters, and also Germany was seen as a perfect 'foe' to rally supporters behind the governement. This all happened long before this year's Russian invasion in Ukraine. Whether you agree with my interpretation or not, a future potential demand of reparations was voiced by the Polish government already in the past years, and there was a publicly announced process of calculating them which predated this year.
Now as for the ah, so soft stance of (only) Germany against Russia, honestly, my reading is, that this is a made-up story. One which gets repeated astonishingly often both by serious media and by serious public personalities. If you have a closer look, I think you'll find that in most instances currently the countries that are closest to Russia and for historical and cultural reasons most fearful of Russia, play the hawks within EU (especially Poland and the baltic states). And that many of the more western countries are more hesitant (which includes Germany or France but is in no way limited to those). So there is a difference between the Polish and the German approach, but not: Germany as a single country is so different in its policies from other EU states.
I think apart from Germany playing a great role as a scapegoat here, this is also a result of Germany being taking quite seriously in this context. Everybody seems aware that by putting pressure on Germany they have the most effective leverage on a broader coalition of countries and voices within EU. (Please note that I'm explitely not talking about UK, which is not EU any more and also traditionally has a specific role.)
So yes, I think Germany is rather behaving as a serious country now (not sure we mean the same here though). Which is far from saying they are perfect. I don't know about conformism, maybe as Eugene Norman said, you can specify this a bit. As for democracy, my taking is that Germany is doing comparatively well. I'm talking about the past decades! Which in my unterstanding is due in parts to mechanisms for safeguarding democracy installed in West Germany by the US after WWII. Ironically, mechanisms, which I doubt the US would currently be willing to come even close to themselves.
- that the "promise" to Russia that NATO will not be extended to the east is directly related to the German reunification. (It is totally up to interpretations whether those were promises; but if you take this interpretation, then it was made by German politicians.)
- that it has a shorter history of wars after WWII than France or UK. The first one was 1999 in Kosovo, and back then Germany considered itself not a "normal" country. But that self-attributed special role has been much debated and basically abandoned since then, except for the relations to Israel.
- that it is the biggest EU country in terms of population and economy, and is often playing a central role for forming coalitions and negotiating compromises in the EU.
Perhaps these things make some people in Germany a bit more hesitant to be on the hawk side. But I agree with TM that those are minor differences. The positions and actions of Germany and France and Netherlands and Italy are not fundamentally different.
By conformists what do you mean exactly? You haven’t exactly said what it is except that they aren’t as hostile to Russia as you would like? But Germany might well destroy their country over sanctions, what more do want?
I can't speak to what the previous poster meant, but the extreme energy policy, which included shutting down nuclear reactors at the same time they were trying to push down CO2 emissions, struck me as ideological conformism. The ideology was modern environmentalism, including its anti-nuclear weirdness. It felt like "we are doing what is good and holy whatever the cost."
I'm not exactly sure how this is "conformism" unless you think that other countries are doing this so much that Germany is following. It's usually not "conformism" to be the leader on something new (whether bad or good).
Under this rubric any politicl action whatsover could be characterised as conformist, as long as it conforms to one ideology or another. You may argue their decision was unwise (And I'd agree!) but stupidityy is not conformism. Conformism would require that people voting for this policy out of peer pressure, and I don't see any evidence that this happens more in Germany than anywhere else. If anything I would acciate that with highly polarised societies such as the current United States.
Stupidity is not conformism, but conformism is one explanation of why a large number of people would support the same stupid policy, and I was conjecturing that in this case it was.
The trade policy of almost every country is stupid, at least from the standpoint of an economist who wants to maximize the welfare of the country's inhabitants. But there are explanations for it — the difficulty of understanding comparative advantage and the public choice reasons that make tariffs politically profitable — that don't depend on conformism. I don't see similar explanations for Germany's energy policy, although perhaps I am missing them.
I think it is simply a radical misestimation of the safety and enviromental risks of nuclear power plants. Nuclear waste seems really scary to a lote of people, and culture has always portrayed it as such. Nuclear power plants hardly kill anyone, but when they did (Chernobyl) they did so in a way that is deeply ingrained in the clllective conciousness. Add to that the association between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the image of nuclear looks rather scary indead. Of course when you look into the actual number all of these concerns are nowhere near as bad as they seem, but few people do as much as that.
Caring about emissions and supporting the continued operation of nuclear plants strikes me as categorically less ideological than caring about emissions but shuttering nuclear plants
Maybe in part, but they strike me as primarily ultra-earnest, in that anything they do, whether good or bad, they go at it hammer and tongs! An American might drink five pints of beer at a party and stagger off to bed at 2am, whereas a German would be more likely to drink ten, and tickle their throats half way through so they can honk up and carry on until morning! Where a Frenchman might write a three volume treatise, a German academic would write six volumes! In the UK and US, the motorway speed limit is 70 MPH, but in Germany you can be haring along the fast lane at 170 MPH, when suddenly you find there is a manic German driving a foot behind you, flashing their lights for you to get out of the way. And so on, you get the idea - They never do anything by halves!
Since WW2 they have been on their best behavior, and maybe in striving to be ultra-virtuous, their former leader Angela Merkel was perhaps a bit too trusting and accommodating towards Russia in making Germany reliant on Russian gas. But it may have been partly a hard-nosed assessment that Russia would thereby become equally dependent on Europe paying for it.
So the general consensus of this blog is that MAOIs are pretty safe/underrated and that tyramine isn't that much of a concern.
But the first observation of serotonin syndrome was in patients on MAOIs (phenylpropanolamine 25 mg) given only 20 mg/kg of tryptophan [1]. That doesn't sound like that much. That's like a quart of milk[2] and half pound of chicken[3] which seems like not that unusual of a meal.
Am I missing something regarding absorption rates or just bad a math? Maybe this is less of a problem with selective MAO A/B inhibitors? This seems like a much more problematic thing than the tyramine reaction right?
I'm pretty sure I triggered this with a simple salmon dinner and drinking a bunch of milk.
"Tryptophan. Tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the brain by tryptophan hydroxylase and decarboxylase. As a dietary supplement, tryptophan (6 to 18 mg/d) is contraindicated with MAOIs because it is a sympathomimetic compound."
I don't know if one dinner of salmon and milk would trigger seretonin syndrome by itself; were you taking any other prescribed or over-the-counter medicines? had you been drinking a lot of milk over a long period? And excuse the question, but are you sure it was seretonin syndrome and not something else - some of the symptoms sound similar to food poisoning:
"Serotonin syndrome is characterized by autonomic, neuromotor, and cognitive-behavioral symptoms. The most frequently reported symptoms are changes in mental status such as confusion and hypomania, restlessness, myoclonus, hyperreflexia, diaphoresis, shivering, and tremor. Diarrhea, incoordination, and fever can also occur. Severe hyperthermia with complications such as disseminated intravascular coagulation, rhabdomyolysis, and renal failure can sometimes precede death. Clinicians should be aware that serotonin syndrome has overlapping signs and symptoms with several other hyperthermic states or syndromes such as lethal catatonia, anticholinergic toxicity, malignant hyperthermia, and neuroleptic malignant syndrome."
Yeah I'm aware of the tyramine interaction but I was contrasting it with the lack of documentation about tryptophan. Not sure why a 6-18 mg supplement is problematic when food easily gives an order of magnitude more or why it isn't listed as a cause of serotonin syndrome.
I tend to drink a lot of milke (~2 liters a day) though lately it's more like 1 L a day.. It's possible that it's just anxiety or something else but I'd also be interested in that too as it triggered 2 nights in a row so I can avoid it. I had really bad Akathisia (restlessness) and hypomania but my pulse was only potentially 15 bpm elevated, I didn't get a significant blood pressure reading, and I don't think I was hyperthermic so it probably doesn't technically meet the criteria for serotonin syndrome. It's set in after dinner and resolved by morning both times which fits with serotonin syndrome.
I'm only taking fexofenadine which shouldn't have any interactions with a MAOI.
"While tryptophan consumed through food is typically safe, some people experience adverse effects from the supplement form.
While tryptophan supplements are available, they may have side effects for some people. Because of this, it may be safer to obtain tryptophan through the foods that naturally contain it, like meat, fish, and cheese."
"There is evidence that blood tryptophan levels are unlikely to be altered by changing the diet, but consuming purified tryptophan increases the serotonin level in the brain, whereas eating foods containing tryptophan does not.
Tryptophan taken as a dietary supplement (such as in tablet form) has the potential to cause serotonin syndrome when combined with antidepressants of the MAOI or SSRI class or other strongly serotonergic drugs".
So it *may* have something to do with bioavailability of tryptophan; dietary sources may be more quickly converted into niacin, whereas taking a supplement is a purified form and has a stronger effect, which is why the warnings about taking supplements but not dietary sources.
It might be that you bumped up enough consumption of dietary tryptophan to have side-effects rather than full-blown serotonin syndrome, but I am not a doctor:
"Potential side effects of tryptophan supplementation include nausea, diarrhea, drowsiness, lightheadedness, headache, dry mouth, blurred vision, sedation, euphoria, and nystagmus (involuntary eye movements)".
And this guy here got off luckily, all things considered, even though he did knock himself into mania:
"L-tryptophan, an essential amino acid, has been used as an OTC supplement to treat a myriad of conditions: insomnia, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia; etc. However in 1989, an epidemic of eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome from contaminants in tryptophan supplements involved 1,531 cases and 27 deaths. For a period afterward, the sale of tryptophan was prohibited. Tryptophan supplementation became risky and was replaced by 5-HTP as the preferred supplement.
5-HTP, metabolized from tryptophan via hydroxylation, freely crosses the blood brain barrier and gets converted to serotonin by aromatic L-amino-acid decarboxylase. This patient took 5-HTP for several reasons: 1) He remained symptomatic with depression. 2) 5-HTP was not on his list of foods to avoid in a tyramine-free diet. 3) 5-HTP, unlike tryptophan, was not produced by fermentation, a process he knew might contain tyramine contraindicated for someone taking an MAOI. 4) The lay literature suggested 5-HTP was not associated with the serotonin syndrome.
The differential diagnosis included serotonin syndrome and drug-induced mania (MAOI vs. steroid vs. 5-HTP). The combination of tryptophan or 5-HTP with MAOIs can cause a serotonin syndrome/neurotoxicity. Furthermore, the combination of 5-HTP with MAOIs or SSRIs in rat models can produce a malignant serotonin syndrome. Although this patient had hyper-reflexia, he had no other signs or symptoms of serotonin syndrome. Therefore, his provisional diagnosis was drug-induced mania."
"A dose of 3 g/d tryptophan is ∼12 times the requirement of an adult human. Therefore, it appears that tryptophan doses of at least 10 times the daily requirement are necessary to elicit pharmacological responses."
So that seems like 0.2 g per day of tryptophan is the human requirement. Another source says "The US Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) is 250-425 milligrams per day."
Great, now I have to try converting quarts to litres, thanks US measures!
"Whole Milk is one of the largest sources of tryptophan, including 732 milligrams per quart. 2% reduced fat milk is also a good source, coming in at 551 milligrams per quart."
Okay, if a US quart = 0.95 litres, that's close enough for 1 litre per day of whole milk = 732 mg of tryptophan. If you were drinking 2 litres a day, that's 1,464 mg/day which is, if we take the upper limit of 425 mg/day recommended, about 3 times what you should be consuming. That's a little on the high side, but nowhere near the 10 times figure.
You possibly did have a build-up of dietary tryptophan which triggered some side-effects, but it doesn't sound like full-blown serotonin syndrome. Once again, however, I Am Not A Doctor.
Which hormones are billionaires taking and should I take them too? Recent pictures of Elon Musk showed that he seemingly took growth hormones (?) and if you look at before/after pictures of Jeff Bezos, it's clear he also took something, probably testosterone? It seems that growth hormones have an anti-aging effect? And testosterone gives you more energy as you're getting older? (And studies seem to show that testosterone doesn't actually make you more aggressive?)
I'm currently in my early thirties so I probably don't need to take anything, but should I in 10 years or so?
I would NOT take growth hormone. I did, many years ago, and it made my intestines and internal organs grow. Any muscle growth evaporated when I stopped bodybuilding, because muscles are constantly torn down; the gut's still there. That's why I'll never have nice abs again, and why pro bodybuilders today have disgusting barrel bellies instead of sleek Arnold abs. Also, growth hormone can cause the heart to grow, which is dangerous for several reasons.
Taking some kind of testosterone can have good effects on your mood (if you're depressed) and on your energy level (if you're tired all the time), and on your sexual arousal and endurance.
You should never take natural testosterone. The testosterone esters were designed to be released slowly, rather than all at once. All of the synthetic injectable anabolic steroids other than the testosterone esters were designed to improve on natural testosterone by having a higher myogenic / androgenic ratio. That means they all give more muscle with fewer side-effects. Ideally, you should take a mix of synthetics and testosterone esters (for complicated reasons), but good luck finding a doctor to help you with that.
High testosterone can cause blood clots. No one has yet tested whether this is true of high testosterone without supplementation; I suspect it is.
You should never take testosterone or synthetics continuously, even though your doctor will tell you to. It will shut down your own testosterone production, likely permanently. AFAIK only bodybuilders know how to use testosterones "safely". But they don't, because they use way too much.
Taking steroids for physique without lifting weights would be dumb, and you'd get more benefit from the lifting than from the steroids. Lifting weights gives the greatest return per hour invested when you do just a little lifting; steroids give the greatest return when you do a lot of lifting. So using steroids to build muscle isn't really worth it IMHO unless you're testosterone-deficient, or you want to be a freak.
Also, you'd probably get more health benefits from taking the time it would take to lift weights, and using it to get more sleep instead. Likewise, more health benefits from eliminating sugar, reducing wheat, rice, and maybe caffeine, and getting down to 15% body fat. Don't risk your health with drugs or waste your time with lifting until you've fixed the easy things (except for losing fat, bcoz muscles burn fat 24 hours a day, even if you're not using them. If you are fat, just walking around a lot is lifting weights.)
If you want to lift weights, here are some tips:
- You cannot learn how to do an exercise from watching someone do it. Exercises for different muscles can look identical to an observer. You have to feel which part of which muscle you're using.
- For each major muscle, do one set each of many different exercises, not many sets of one exercise. The first set of any exercise provides more benefits than all subsequent sets combined. All bodybuilders deny this; all good recent research supports it.
- Recent research agrees that what counts is weight "volume". To a first approximation, 30 reps of 10 pounds is as good as 10 reps of 30 pounds. All bodybuilders deny this.
- Don't drop the weight after the lift. Lowering the weight (the eccentric phase) is at least as important as lifting it.
- Never compare how much weight you're lifting to how much someone else is lifting. For one thing, different bodies have different comparative advantages. More importantly, how much weight you lift isn't important; how you lift is important. You can always lift more weight by using a sloppier form that's less effective.
- Never measure your 1-rep max on any exercise, especially bench press. 1-rep max bench press will injure you. The only reason to do a 1-rep max is to compare it to other people's 1-rep max, which is dumb.
- Never lift so much weight that you can feel or hear your joints grind against each other. Especially watch out for this on bench press. That will eventually wear your cartilage away, and you won't be able to do that exercise anymore, ever. Also you'll be in pain every second for the rest of your life.
(If you do grind your cartilage away, the only proven way to grow it back is by taking Adequan for the rest of your life. It builds cartilage, but low-quality cartilage that wears away again. Unfortunately, Adequan will never be approved for humans anywhere in the Western world, because the patent has expired. The US government has been insanely zealous over the past few years about preventing humans from getting veterinary drugs. Getting Adequan is now harder than getting any kind of dangerous and addictive drug you could mention. Google and Ebay have cooperated in purging listings of people selling Adequan without a veterinary prescription from their results. It's been used for 30 years with a good safety record, and until just a few years ago you could buy it over the counter everywhere in the Western world.)
If you DO want to be a freak, read this:
Anabolics won't have much effect on your physique unless you also work out a lot. And it's gonna have bad consequences if you don't learn a LOT before starting. As in, spend a year studying first.
The most common problem a guy has when he jumps into anabolics without studying is that he goes on a steroid cycle, gains muscle, then stops the cycle and loses the muscle. This is because a lot of that excess testosterone is converted to estrogen, so your body has a big estrogen load and a high estrogen/test ratio just after you stop taking steroids, and aggressively destroys muscle. There are approaches to dealing with this, but to do it well you'd have to constantly measure your hormone levels, which would be expensive, and also impossible unless you know a place where you can get blood tests (not just the saliva tests) without a doctor's prescription.
Even if you lift, anabolics still won't be very helpful unless you've already done enough bodybuilding (years, not months), and read enough journal articles, to understand how to lift weights effectively. You have to learn about a hundred exercises and practice each one.
Even if you take anabolics, and read journal articles, and know how to lift, and get your nutrition and sleep right, and do all the right things, you still won't look like a bodybuilder. Genetics are the most-important factor. If you don't already look like a bodybuilder before lifting weights, nothing you do will ever make you look like that guy in the magazine.
Anabolic steroids aren't nearly as dangerous as the drugs bodybuilders take to prevent side-effects from steroids. (And as all the other drugs they take as well, like diuretics, fat-burners, and HGH.)
Muscle itself shortens lifespan. The reasons aren't fully understood. Certainly having more muscles wears your heart out faster.
Unless you're genetically gifted with not being able to get acne, you're gonna get acne that may cancel out any cosmetic improvements. Pro bodybuilders are all genetically gifted to not get acne. Almost no one can take the huge doses of steroids that they do, and have the perfect skin they do.
The hardest part of bodybuilding isn't lifting weights; it's starving yourself so that your muscles show. I believe that successful bodybuilders are also genetically or environmentally gifted to not feel hunger as much as others. I say this because they never talk about cutting down weight as being especially difficult, while for normal people who try bodybuilding, it's impossible.
The second-hardest part of bodybuilding is doing it FAST. If you look at the exercise programs touted by pros, you'll find they often claim they're doing over 30 sets a day, but spend just an hour a day in the gym. Try to do 30 set at a gym in an hour. I certainly can't. I think this is where steroids are useful--they help people do very heavy sets (which are faster), with short recovery times. When you're over 40, your joints aren't going to let you do that.
It's more about time management than about metal. If you add in time studying, recording progress, going to the gym, changing, showering, tracking what you eat, etc., we're talking upwards of 3 hours a day for people who are serious.
Never take oral anabolic steroids. They're bad for your liver.
All this advice is for men. Women shouldn't take testosterone if they like being women. They can lift weights, but IMHO it's a waste of time for most of them, and they'd be better off pursuing fitness than muscle. Boys who are still growing also shouldn't take testosterone or lift weights.
At least one study concludes that, at the right dose, it anabolics have a significant effect on body composition even in the absence of stimulus from weight lifting.
I knew it might happen, but at the time, the muscle gain obscured the gut growth. I don't know about health effects of larger organs other than the heart, which is a special case. I think it's more likely to do harm than good.
In seriousness, I would be very careful about any of this stuff. Definitely find a knowledgable doctor (not just your local family physician), maybe even an endocrinologist, before taking anything. Testosterone supplementation can cause your body to stop making it, meaning you'll need to stay on it for life.
This guy is very good to listen to on the topic of supplementation. Don't let the goofy name put you off, he's the real deal: https://moreplatesmoredates.com/
I'm sure he knows how to shred, but hugeness in muscles that are easy to inject (like the lateral delts), combined with smallness of those hard-to-reach (here the lats), screams "Synthol!" to me. I'll retract that if his rear delts are comparable to his lateral delts.
Not that I have any moral qualms about Synthol as "cheating". I've never used it, but only because I don't understand how people can use it without accidentally killing themselves now and then.
Start with a really comprehensive blood panel. Because I'm a Huberman Lab listener I'm likely to go on and tell you I've heard Inside Tracker is good, and then am likely to tell you to take your results to Examine dot com and look at the research on supplements to correct whatever identified deficits your tests turn up. I'm even more likely to end by telling you to listen to the Huberman Lab in general and start lifting heavy, using a sauna, eating better, doing cold exposure, doing at least three hours of zone two cardio a week, look into NMN, etc. (Scott did a insanity-wolf 'take all the supplements live forever' post a while back that i believe was titled "pascalian health practices".)
I.e. do everything low-impact that you can and see what happens. By the time you hit 40 if you've been doing so you'll have a better idea about what harder-hitting next steps to take.
(Might be better to just look up Joan Macdonald, if you can't stand Greg.)
That's all my knowledge on the subject, but I'd say only take stuff if you have a specific problem you're solving. Worst case, you take it much later in life and it still works.
Testosterone is commonplace for old guys right now, prevents muscle loss. The trouble IIRC is that once you start taking it, you'll have to take it until you die - the endogenous production shuts down.
That's a legit concern. IMHO the most-serious dangers of testosterone are prostate cancer and stroke. The effects of testosterone on stroke has only been studied in testosterone supplementation, and the studies didn't control for how much endogenous testosterone the subjects had. I suspect that in both stroke and prostate cancer, it doesn't matter whether you're getting a supplement or just have high natural testosterone.
I volunteered for a clinical trial of testosterone supplementation to prevent muscle loss and indeed my PSA levels shot way up and they made me see a urologist. Had other negative side effects too - I do not recommend.
Yeah, Bezos took something to bulk himself up and look more manly than a boiled frog, which is why he shaved his head and got some muscles during his mid-life crisis.
I do wonder why he didn't go for hair treatment instead, he can certainly afford it. I also would be dubious about trying to find out "what hormones are billionaires taking" because they have enough money for a lot of expensive cosmetic treatments, including plastic surgery, and including hiring on personal trainers, nutritionists, chefs, etc. to improve their looks.
The best advice is to eat healthily, exercise, and generally look after your health, rather than hope that when you hit forty you can just take a magic steroid pill to rewind your body back to when you were twenty. Don't take anything unless medically prescribed because you need it.
> Recently, a rising number of hair-loss dermatologists have been giving the low-dose pills to patients with male and female pattern hair loss, a normal occurrence with age. “It is just starting to see a surge in popularity,” said Dr. Crystal Aguh, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “More and more at conferences, we are sharing our success stories.”... Without a rigorous trial leading to F.D.A. approval, though, the use of minoxidil pills for hair loss remains off-label.
So, what are people willing to take without seeing at least one RCT? In general, I assume that a decent nutrition/medicine heuristic is: what portion of affected specialists themselves are taking this? (Affected specialists in this case mostly being male dermatologists who saw their forefathers go bald.)
By the way, thanks for writing your long post in response to Thomas's original question. It's not too relevant to me, but I appreciated all the effort you put into reviewing your own experience and explaining how you would make decisions in the future.
I hadn't heard about that! I've used topical minoxidil, and it even worked, once, suddenly and mysteriously, for a few months. I think it's still working, very slowly; but the hairs that grow back with minoxidil are so tiny that the portion of the scalp that has them still look bald from a distance; and they've remained tiny and nearly invisible for a year.
Generally I'd expect the topical drug to work better, but minoxidil has real problems penetrating the skin, because it's so slippery, and the head is so round that you can only apply it to one small spot every 15 minutes (and then have to hold your head for like 5 minutes so that spot is uppermost).
The temptation is to keep it in the bathroom and use it in the morning when you do your bathroom stuff, but you have to NOT use it before or after you shower for it to work. Showering washes it off, and it won't even touch your scalp if your scalp is wet, it will just run off. I scrub my scalp lightly with a plastic "brush" before applying it; don't know if that helps.
Also it helps reduce hair loss to just not rub your towel over your head when you dry off after a shower. I never saw this mentioned anywhere, but I found lots of torn-out hairs in my towel after rubbing my hair dry, and don't anymore now that I pad it dry. Microfiber towels work better for this.
Finasteride is also a good "treatment", but all it usually does is stop you from losing more hair.
Re. "thanks for writing your long post" -- thanks for thanking me! I was just feeling stupid for having written it. I've too-often prioritized AC10 above the things I actually need to do.
You're not yanking hairs out of your scalp when you towel off. Those are hairs that fell out by themselves. Each hair has a cycle: it grows, then nothing happens for a while, then it falls out, then it grows back. Baldness happens when they fail to grow back.
What, can't current-day billionaires do as the Romans and the greatness of the past did?
Roman women would have wigs made from the hair of German women (slaves or captives of war) in order to have that fashionable blonde look (although interestingly, prostitutes were required to dye their hair blonde as well so that they would be marked out).
Can't modern zillionaires find some Third World guy with bounteous tresses who would be willing to have his hair, follicles and all, extracted and transplanted onto the bonce of a baldy billionaire in return for cold hard cash? There are debates about why isn't it legal to sell your organs, surely selling your hair is less contentious? 😁
Or do as George Washington did, who replaced some of his own bad teeth with some pulled out of a slave's mouth. Oligarchs have interns. The kids can always buy new teeth. One needs to make some sacrifices if (s)he wants to get ahead. On the other hand, it could be a slippery slope: one day it's hair or teeth, and the next day the oligarch might come for their kidney or liver.
I have no idea. But that's what being a multibillionaire is all about; try it out on those Third World volunteers and iron the bugs out before trying it on Bezos' bonce.
If it's good enough for IVF clinics to use people in the Third World for the benefit of rich Westerners, it's good enough for trichology clinics!
To be fair, it's the 21th century, "hope that when you hit forty you can just take a (...) pill to rewind your body back to when you were twenty" seems more and more like a viable strategy - if you're a teen right now that's kinda likely, if you're a child that's probably going to happen.
Does anyone here know anything about rituals of 'totemisation' among native peoples? Like, a sort of coming-of-age ritual where someone would have to complete one or more challenges and thereby gain a personal animal totem.
Some scouts groups in various countries have rituals like this, and many claim to have been inspired by Native American, African, or Aboriginal peoples. But while the idea of a totem is certainly derived from indigenous cultures, I haven’t been able to find an origin for the totemisation ritual from before the scouts, and am starting to suspect it was largely made up.
Robert Steven Grumet, Native Americans of the Northwest coast : a critical bibliography 0253303850; Hilary Stewart, Looking at Indian art of the Northwest coast 0295956453; and Franz Boas, Primitive art 0486200256?
I feel like US politics is now a populist race to the bottom. Both parties want to outspend the other to buy votes from fools. I believe this will lead to a collapse of the USD over the next 30 years. (Yes, I am gradually shorting the dollar against other major currencies.)
Americans tend to severely punish parties that preside over periods of bad economic performance (Hoover 1932, Carter 1980, Bush 2008). The current bout of inflation caused by government spending + money-printing for COVID is having a large negative impact on Democratic party fortunes relative to the counterfactual where we had 2% inflation but all other factors the same.
The fact that bad economic times will hurt the party in power is the ultimate eventual constraint on bad economic behavior by the US government, and it's been a fairly effective one and appears to continue to be effective despite a $5 trillion money drop.
If you compare the US to other major currencies (I assume you mean the euro, yen, and pound, since the RMB isn't freely convertible), the euro is subject to much larger existential risk than the dollar, the pound is shackled to a very poorly performing economy, and the yen is tied to a country with abysmal demographics. Also, all of these countries are democracies with the risk of the same giveaway to fools dynamic.
That's measuring "strongest" relative to other currencies, which are also administered by governments in the buying-votes-from-fools business.
Measuring the strength of the dollar in relative to the dollar's ability to buy stuff, which is what we ultimately care about, the US dollar is about 8% weaker than it was this time last year.
The biggest reason is that other countries are not only not immune to this process they may be more vulnerable. Only your excess exposure to the US makes you see the problem there more acutely.
1) How certain are you that the race will be locked in for a long time? Sometimes frugality regains popularity.
2) Have you checked whether the US are actually an outlier, compared to other major countries/currencies? Like EU/UK/Japan/Switzerland?
I did not actually check and compare (my guess: EU and UK are similar or worse, Switzerland is better, Japan I don't know, but they were much worse in the past decades). In any case, other countries also had pretty heavy expenses to deal with the corona crisis. Right now, the EU has even higher expenses to deal with the energy crisis.
Historically, I know the situation of Germany, and I can easily think of policies that were expensive as well: the cost of 2 trillion for the German reunification after 1990; and the insane solar politics in the early 2000's, with a cost of perhaps 500 billions (did not check the actually number), stretched over the years 2010-2030. Plus the cost of the usual catastrophes like financial crisis, corona crisis, energy crisis etc...
I don't think the debt level is the issue. It comes down to your #1: is the race to the bottom locked in? (And will it be perceived as such by investors?)
Maybe I'm 50% certain, which is high considering the stakes.
Populist politics is just so easy to fall into, and social media (on the left) and Tucker Carlson (on the right0 are leading the way. I don't see a near-term path for responsible governance by either parties. The game these days is to out-populist the other side. I suspect this will last for at least a few more cycles, long enough to bankrupt the country. I expect the giveaways will grow bigger with each cycle.
What politically powerful group is for fiscal responsibility these days?
This seems like an odd level of certainty given that as recently as 2009 policy was erring in the overly austere, not-populist-enough direction. Do you think there have been changes since then that will definitely not change back?
1) The Republican Party went populist in 2016. This will be hard to reverse because they won the white working class (a populist class) and it will be very difficult for them to willingly give up those constituents. Just as it would be hard for Tucker Carlson to.
2) Demographic change among Democratic voters in generation, race and sex has made the Dems much more populist than before. That change has been more gradual in the making than in the above and will be even harder to ratchet back for that reason.
Austerity-minded folks are dying off like the Dixiecrats did.
I think the other relevant factor is that the U.S. has abused its status as global reserve currency to the point that half the world is chomping at the bit for an alternative. Russia is currently pivoting away from US dependence - with tacit support from China *and* India. If we keep forcing those three countries into each other's arms, then it's only a matter of time before a dollar alternative gains steam.
The problem there is the lack of any plausible alternative. Both China and Germany are committed to maintaining massive trade surpluses which would be hard to square with being a reserve currency, and what other possibility is even in the running?
I'd guess c probably doesn't take more than about three or four months. But maybe an annual booster cancels out a slow drop in X over years. Just guessing though.
It's important to differentiate antibody titer - proportional to the current immune response that's hypervigilantly scanning for a specific threat - from having the relevant antigen memorized and ready to ramp up said response when encountering it again (which lasts for years, possibly longer, depending on memory cells).
"Benign" cancers: still worth treating if possible? Or the risk of medical intervention is simply too high vs. potential benefit? I'm thinking of stuff like moles or prolactinoma, not "elderly guy diagnosed with colon cancer which will kill him in another 10 years, which he doesn't have, so irrelevant".
I've lost at least four family members to cancer directly now, a couple "prematurely", so...feeling slightly more paranoid about tumorous tail risks than before.
It also depends on location of the tumor. My memory is that any kind of brain surgery has about a 2% chance of death/serious injury in general, just because they're dealing with such delicate stuff. Whereas if it's just a mole that you could get cut out, probably not as bad a risk for operation
This cannot be overemphasized. There is also the matter of the efficacy of ‘salvage’ therapies if things go the bad way (recurrence or spread). In some cases, there are half decent ones.
A good doctor will know the guidelines and know how they may or may not apply to your situation. Using the internet to inform is good, but I wouldn’t advise letting the internet be your own doctor (or your lawyer)
Why don't politicians go after TicketMaster for anti-trust behavior? They are the poster boy for it, yet congress doesn't care. Why not? Wouldn't busting TicketMaster be popular with anyone who has ever bought tickets? I'd vote for any politician who wanted to destroy them.
Doing a quick check and the last 12 months, with record margins and revenue, they generated $550m of adjusted operating income on $11.6 billion in revenue. And they had to pay $270m of interest payments on their debt from that $550m.
So a meagre 4.7% operating margin. And in the end only about 2% of revenue goes to shareholders. Hardly the income statement of a price gouging monopoly?
The defense of TicketMaster that I've heard is that their primary business is being the fall guy for venues and artists. Some big chunk of the fees they charge actually does go to the venue, but setting up TicketMaster as the bad guy lets them put a lower list price on the tickets.
This is absolutely true and has been for a long time. I accidentally learned it firsthand in 2003 or 2004.
I had been temporarily thrust into the position (longer story being skipped) of negotiating a Ticketmaster contract renewal on behalf of a medium sized music-and-theater venue in the Chicago area. I primarily represented the largest presenting user of that venue which was a professional live-theater company that had just signed on as the primary presenter in that venue.
Literally every person who worked for the theater company at any level was certain that Ticketmaster was the devil incarnate and that we should not inflict them upon our ticketbuyers. But the owners of the venue politely insisted, and apparently decided to let me discover for myself the actual facts of how Ticketmaster (TM) worked.
During the first serious meeting with TM reps about a new venue contract they laid out the proposed terms (fees), and I literally thought I had misheard. I made them repeat it twice, slowly. "Explain it like I'm 5 years old", etc. It was completely astonishing to learn that more than half of the fees TM collected from ticketbuyers went to the venue or act that TM was contracted with. But it was true. And they candidly explained that a larger venue or act -- the Rolling Stones, or the United Center, whatever -- would be getting much higher fractions of those fees. The deal offered to our well-known but strictly regional suburban venue (about half of the fees as I recall) was towards the low end of a TM contract deal.
We took the offer, and signed the nondisclosure agreement which TM required. They were frank and clear that their whole business model depended on protecting the reputations of the Rolling Stones and etc, of "taking the public relations bullet". Indeed that was in their view their primary value proposition to the parties they contracted with.
I went home and explained it to my wife because I couldn't resist, and somewhat later explained it to a few close friends. Absolutely none of them believed me. Zero, zip, nada. They were certain that I had simply been conned by TM.
A few years later TM got a new CEO who decided that taking that bullet had gotten old, and he opened the books to some journalists, and there was a major-magazine article about this. I shared that article with the same wife and friends. They still didn't believe me.
Yes, this. Live performances have naturally limited supply: even if your venue is a stadium there are only so many seats. If you’re a superstar performer with millions of fans then the natural place where the supply and demand curves meet may be a very high price indeed: if TicketMaster didn’t arbitrage a bit then scalpers will happily do it for them.
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I think that's an extremely reasonable response - and reason for posting as you did. Forgive my snark below. @demost did, as it happens, give you the appropriate and diplomatic reply.
Something that's been bothering me and no one's been able to adequately explain. Putin's invasion in Ukraine is called Special Operation Z or the Z Operation or whatever. Z is the symbol at any rate. It's all over Russian propaganda. Here's the thing: Z is not a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Why are they calling it that?
Could it be that because it *is* a Latin/Western letter, that makes it recognisable to Westerners? No need to know Cyrillic alphabet or speak Russian. And this is a PR war as much as a war on the ground, it's being fought with memes as well. Counter-Western Russian meme letter that Westerners can recognise.
Random question as I'm new to Substack: I was notified that you liked my comment. How does one like a comment? I don't see the option, nor do I see a graphic indication that my comment was liked. Thanks.
I got an email notification about your comment, and I had an option to like your comment in the email.
And yes, it is hilarious that we both tried so literally to post the same. I guess at some point twitter stopped working properly for both of us, and we found the same alternative. At least that's what happened to me.
Yes. I'm not actually a Twitter user - I just browse it. But it started throwing a message up saying that I would need to log in to content. Around the same time DuckDuckGo very briefly started showing Nitter results by default, which is how I discovered it. For some reason DDG quickly went back to showing Twitter results by default.
Unrelatedly, the Nitter.net instance is often slow for me, but Nitter.hu and Nitter.ca seem to work pretty well.
As far as liking comments, is there any way to like a comment that is not posted in response to yours?
"As far as liking comments, is there any way to like a comment that is not posted in response to yours?"
Probably not directly. When Scott switched to Substack, they personalized some functions for him. One was to remove the likes, because they scrambled up the message order too much, and produced too many emails. It's probably a bit by accident that likes from emails are still working. There was a discussion about it at the very beginning: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-157
Anyway, Pycea wrote some browser plug-ins which allow you to customize this blog. They also allow you to turn on likes again. I have never tried it out myself, but others were positive about it.
The Z was originally a picture of a folded ribbon. Specifically, a ribbon that's been used in Russian military decorations since Catherine the Great: https://youtu.be/EqbEM600LVQ
You mean more information about the Z symbol than in English? No idea. I've seen quite some articles about it, maybe also because showing it in Germany (as a symbol of supporting Russian war) can be punishable by law.
'Dass die russischen Kampfabzeichen mysteriös bleiben, spielte der russischen Propaganda in die Hände, denn die Spekulationen zur "tatsächlichen Bedeutung" der Buchstaben nährten das Interesse daran.'
At least initially the markings on the vehicles (necessary because UA used much of the same visually indistingushable hardware models) represented their army group - Z on the Western (Zapad) group, V for the Eastern (Vostok) and O for ... can't remember. Why they used the latin letters is hard to guess, however, as far as I remember it seems that the propaganda branding came *after* that, not before.
By the way, З and В, inaccurately painted on the tank, will differ minimally. It is unclear whether the vertical line has already been erased or it was not there.
The internet noticed (organically) that lots of Russian vehicles in the invasion had been labelled Z, and pro-Putin people started using it online to symbolise solidarity with the invasion (along with anti-Putin people talking about the war as the "Z-invasion" or similar terms) - I've seen, for instance, someone posting on a forum with a signature of "Slava Z!" ("Glory to Z!"). Then Russian propaganda noticed that people were being pro-Putin using a certain symbol and decided "hey, let's run with that".
I know a lot of community moves have been difficult due to the previous host actively memory-holing any attempt to point people to the new site (wikis attempting to move off Wikia and channels attempting to move off Freenode are the cases I remember).
Themotte never got to the point where they were explicitly banned on Reddit. It's also a small community. Both of those have helped avoid attracting attention about the move.
Well, it's good AEO aren't attempting to interdict the leaving attempt (though the ground had been well and truly prepared there with the new site going up in advance). Was concerned since they implemented an auto-delete upon anyone mentioning r/Drama (to the point that the leaving discussion in theMotte was calling them "llamas" to evade), which sounded like the shit the Freenode admin did.
Would you like to take a short survey about your memory and thought process?
A while back I was extremely interested in an ACX book review (one of the non-winners but a finalist!), and it made me wonder if a specific hypothesis about memory and consciousness of self was true. I made a very short survey to try to answer the question and posted it on the ACX subreddit. The responses were very interesting and suggested, upon analysis, that my hypothesis was... more or less true, but that there was something else more important going on.
I also received some great suggestions and another related hypothesis to test. With these suggestions and taking into account the results of the first survey, I have created a new version of the survey, which should take about 7 minutes to complete. Here is the link, thank you so much if you choose to participate!
I took the survey. I think the results would be more reliable if the statements were positive. Having to disagree with a negative statement takes a little extra processing, and I may have made some mistakes.
“After reading a book or seeing a movie, I can tell the story in detail to someone.”
Overly literal me wants to answer No to this because I'm bad at explaining things in detail, which is different from not remembering the details.
---
“When I remember events, I remember a lot of details.”
This one's tricky to answer; it's a thing where I often don't know what I remember until someone asks me about it.
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“I often enjoy the use of mental pictures to reminisce.”
This one's a bit vague. I don't enjoy reminiscing often, but when I do I use mental pictures, so is that a Yes or a No?
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“I am not interested in abstract ideas.”
I'd like an example here. Are we talking about The Invisible Hand Of The Market, or are we talking about de-scrambling an egg? Likewise “I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas” depends on what we're talking about.
I agree with you that the negative statements are a bit problematic. I reused validated scales that included negative statements and hesitated to rephrase them as positive statements, but ended up keeping them, so I could compare the results to previously published ones. I hope this was the right choice.
Thanks a lot! I have taken the survey. When the results are out, please mention it in an open thread as well. I'm interested and do not follow the subreddit regularly.
I took the survey and I look forward to hearing your hypothesis and the results! I did want to take a couple sentences to describe how things works for me, because i'm not certain that'll come through in the survey results. Personally, I have an excellent memory, and I'm also am very spacey and forgetful about things. The differentiator is whether something enters my conscious attention. For example: I never forget a face. I forget names all the time, because I wasn't fully paying attention.
Likewise, I am an excellent navigator - when I am driving. On the other hand, I can go somewhere two dozen times as a passenger and still not really know how to get there, because I never focused on it.
I can see very well what you mean about having both an excellent memory and being forgetful, depending on you attention level, because it is the same for me. You are right, it is unfortunately the kind of thing that is not well captured in simple quantitative surveys like the one I proposed.
In my case I know a very large amount of poetry by heart, most of it learned with little effort, but I am very bad at remembering people's names and, with age, increasingly find it hard to remember a word I know or where I put something.
Strangely, I really struggle with placing long strings of text in my long term memory. I'm a verbal guy, not a math guy at all, but random dates, data, etc.. sticks in my brain for decades, whereas I have to keep looking up movie quotes and whatnot to make sure i have it exactly right.
In my case, I have a really strong visual and emotional memory. I think long stretches of text are harder for me to memorize because it's harder to visualize. When I remember a date or a number, I am literally picturing the thing that I read it on to recall it.
I do very well with memorizing text as well - had to do a lot of that in military (warrior's creed and whatnot). But it doesn't stick in my long term memory the same way. I have to keep refreshing things or they fade.
Also, I'm 31 and have noticed a slightly decline in how snappy my recall is. Not looking forward to the back nine.
In the meetups thread, Scott mentioned reciprocity.io as “the rationalist friend-finder/dating site”. But if I understand it correctly, it looks like it only connects you with people you are already Facebook friends with? This seems very limited as a dating / friend-finder site. I want to find new people to meet.
Which got me thinking… why don’t we have some kind of site set up for this? I’d love to see an EA or rationalist dating site. I’ve seen a number of people sharing “date-me” docs, but surely there’s a better option than some scattered Google Drive docs. Is there no platform available that could accomplish something like that? Or if not, does anybody want to build a very simple version of it?
I know the gender ratios would be bad, but it still seems like it would be worthwhile to have and better than nothing.
Cool, that’s good to know! I signed up, and can now see the list of users who are also public. It's still not perfect, but closer. (For one thing, everyone’s profile pic is displaying as a question mark. Is that normal? The profile pics are hidden for all non-friend users maybe?)
I do wonder sometimes that if rationalism is systematized winning then it ought to invest more in things like helping its members win in life. There's fairly basic human flourishing that seems... ah, absent in the community.
At the end of Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" he says that raising other people's (especially youths') ambitions is one of the best things you can do. For those of you who have been on the giving or receiving end of an interaction/relationship where this occurred, what was it like? How can we encourage more of these interactions?
I arrived at university having no real ambition, I was just really curious. My parents weren't that wealthy or well-educated, so they didn't really have any aspirations for me other than staying out of trouble. First week of university I met a girl and we became a couple pretty quickly. Her family was very wealthy, and her father came from a similar background to me, so out of what I assume was pity they offered to let me spend summers with them.
It was these summers that raised my aspirations like nothing else. Every person in my girlfriend's family were such hardworking strivers that it felt weird not to do the same. They heavily valued achievement, excellence, and money. At some point, I guess the Girardian mimesis kicked in and they became my values too. To be clear, they raised my aspirations not by saying "you could do so much more!", but through the implicit message within the family that "you are not valuable unless you are excellent".
Consequently, I ended up getting a really competitive graduate role that paid A LOT of money. Something I would have never even considered before.
Tyler recently spoke about raising aspirations at the end of his latest Podcast concerning his new book "Talent", which is definitely worth listening to. My personal take is just telling people they can do more is not enough, you need to optimise their environment to reinforce that message. A lot of middle-class kids are born to families that do this for them somewhat. For others, you'll have to either go to an elite university if you can, or move to a somewhere like the Bay area where ambition and hard work is the norm.
Always think of my past self as a bit of a loser but this idea, even if I don't fully believe it, is really nice to consider. Thank you so much for saying it :)
Any thoughts on the social value of luxury cars? I’m interested in how the confer status signaling among peers and help form connections (romantic and otherwise). For a young single bachelor, the expected value from a luxury/expensive car might valuable? Or it might attract the wrong type of people?
Everything is a signal of the sort of person you are, and has a strong influence on the sort of person who will want to spend time with you.
Trying to over-spend on a car to appear to be the sort of person you're not is a mug's game. On the other hand, being the guy with millions in the bank and a $5000 Prius sends out a whole different set of signals, which may or may not be the signals you want.
I recommend buying the sort of car that a person like you would naturally tend to buy. And if you're unhappy with that sort of car, then become a different sort of person.
I'd like to point you to Simler and Hanson's "The Elephant in the Brain" on precisely this point. I'll try to tl;dr it for you: luxury cars sell not because anyone thinks they signal anything good, but because people think that other people are dumb enough to think that they signal something good. You asking this question in the first place is proof of the power of this type of marketing -- the target is what you imagine other people think, not what you think.
I think it probably depends on the type of luxury car at some level. If you own a Tesla X (which I'd consider a luxury car), you'll probably get a different reaction than if you own a classic Cadilac, vs a modern Mercedes Bens, as each of those "luxury" cars sends a different signal (imo)
Two ancient memories from my teenage years, as best as I recall:
1. There was a Doonesbury paperback c. 1974. The cover had a picture of a young man having pulled up in a shiny new muscle car, and his lady friend on the curb looking alarmed. The title was "Wouldn't A Gremlin Have Been More Practical?"
I would have replaced "Gremlin" with "Civic", but the message came through fine.
2. Mad Magazine from the same era - remember that gasoline rationing was happening in the US in the wake of the OPEC embargo, the result of the US backing Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Odd-even days (based on licence plate) to fill up, 10 gallon limits, public appeals to conserve, Popular Science stories about miracle carburetors, etc. ...
Dave Berg's cartoon showed a middle-aged man in a suit driving a big square shiny luxury car, likely a Lincoln, with an American flag and perhaps a VFW pennant flying from the radio antenna.
A long- haired bedraggled hippy pulls up in a VW Beetle adorned with mactac flowers and peace signs, and says to the respectable man, "Hey dude, why're ya drivin' that gas-guzzler? Are ya unpatriotic, man?"
*********
And one more - Chrysler had a clever TV ad perhaps 25 years ago.
They showed these men driving various 2-seat sports cars while a sultry-voiced woman spoke of a man needing a vehicle that displayed his virility. They then panned over to a Dodge minivan with a husband, wife, and five children.
********
All this to say, who are you trying to impress? And why are you trying to impress them with what you drive, rather than who you are?
It mostly comes down to vibe. If you come across as someone who bought a nice car to impress women, people will think you're a tool. If you come across as someone who has a nice car because you can easily afford it, then you might get some social benefit. You will definitely attract some of the wrong types though. The richer you present, the more you will get people who care about that sort of stuff.
If you're young and single, focus less on the status signaling - focus on contrast and underselling. Don't lead with all your best stuff up front - as long as you keep getting dates, you don't need to wow them right off. Let them discover you. "I didn't know you could sing!" I didn't know you could cook/dance/fight/hunt etc.... That is your money maker. Develop contrasts - if you're nerdy, cultivate non-nerd hobbies and interests. If you're organized/Type-A, do some stuff that is a little wild and chaotic. If you're distant and reserved, find something that shows your thoughtful side.
Everyone, including your dates, typecasts you in the first 30 seconds. Figure out what those assumptions are, and figure out ways to violate those assumptions. Then - slowwwwlllly, over time - let those layers unfold naturally. (Don't lead with or flaunt all the ways that you violate your type, it just makes you look self-conscious and insecure.)
Do that and you'll have as much success as you can handle. As an added benefit, if you do it for real and actually develop skills and interests that are outside your wheelhouse, you'll genuinely become a more well-rounded and interesting person.
The expected value of a luxury car is circumstantial. From what I’ve seen, a car is one of the many factors that may signal wealth. Since it’s usually ones first impression of another, sometimes a lot of value is placed on the car. But, ultimately, factors like ones current job, intelligence, education, money saving skills, are much more important than the car one has.
In my social environment (European and high education) having a big luxury car will have you laugh at rather than admired. I suppose it's different in the US.
If you are thinking about romantic connections specifically, there are lots of ways to spend money to improve this life area. All of them are vastly cheaper than a luxury car, so I expect that a luxury car would be a very ineffective way to spend your money.
The most important of them is this: Work 1on1 with a competent dating coach (get one who focusses on honesty and authenticity and self-improvement). That would give you insights into your way of relating that would potentially improve all connections in your life, not just romantic and sexual.
You could also get a fitness coach, style advice, better clothes, travel to communication & authentic relating workshops, online dating coaching, etc...
Also keep in mind that many groups of people care very little about cars. It depends on what social circle you are in. 90% of the people I know in my European city couldn't care less, and they wouldn't even see your car because European inner cities are not very car-centric.
The value of a real "luxury car" is not in impressing passers-by. It's the feeling of confidence and lack of worry about your transportation, that is the actual luxury.
I would recommend a used Mercedes-Benz. They can be a PITA to service, and parts cost $$$$, but you can get an AWFUL LOT of automobile for your money in the used market. This 1973 280SE sold for $25,000, but It will run forever and gets ~30-35MPG!
Years ago I got a slightly used BMW Z3 convertible roadster for $16,000 and have never loved a car before or since. My first and only car love.
In Seattle, the cool car is the Tesla, even though Musk is personae non grata among the woke.
Cars do matter in the U.S. As a female, I saw my prospective date's face fall when he saw my pick-up truck. It was clear I had sent a signal that I would not be acceptable date material. He went on to be a major California politician and was looking for the appropriate female accessory. My kind of male partner would probably have seen the logic of a truck.
The expected signaling value might be high if you're the kind of person who'd drive an expensive car. But you read ACX so you probably aren't, don't do it just to impress girls, they'll know.
They're generally louder and have faster acceleration, which causes more particle emissions pollution, so pretty large negative externalities. Otoh luxury sedans might help counteract the trend towards pickup trucks and SUVs which are even worse, so there is that.
Besides any benefit to the owner, there's also the positive value of keeping skilled specialised (?) car repair and maintenance mechanics in work, which is a benefit to them and to society by helping preserve mechanical skills generally.
In general, women don't care much about cars. As long as it isn't obviously cheap, old, or poorly maintained, a car is just a means of transportation to most people. Unless you are trying to impress people who are into cars, or want to conspicuously display a high income, a midrange Honda or Toyota that carries what you need is more than sufficient.
I would expect the vast majority of the value (if any) to come from your personal enjoyment of the car. Although this might also depend a lot on what "the wrong kind of people" means to you- if you're someone who is interested in luxury cars you might find the kind of people they attract less off-putting than I would.
A car with good pre-set seat settings (so my partner and I can easily switch) and better silencing of road noise, would definitely make a big improvement to my driving life! I think that luxury cars often have those features.
I'm married to a mechanic, and we own several performance sports cars. THIS is the truth. If you can't repair it yourself, you need to have the income level to pay someone else, and that gets very expensive.
What is the future outlook on quantum superweapons? For example something that could create a mini black hole that swallows the planet. Any good resources would be great.
Have a PhD in the area. Tiny black holes aren't good at swallowing planets, despite the sci-fi depictions. The reason is that they are too small for their mass, so they go right through most everything without any resistance. A Planck mass BH (10 micrograms) corresponds to 1 Planck length (10^-33 m), much smaller than anything else. Basically, everything is vacuum for an object like that. Even if you carefully place it inside matter, the cross-section is too small for it to grow at an appreciable rate. And that assumes they do not instantly evaporate to begin with. Small black holes also tend to get spun up a lot by the stuff falling in, and once close to max spin, they can't consume any more stuff. One would need something really big to start with, so that the weaponized BH is at least as massive as a planet to begin with. Or at least the Moon. And if you have the tech that can turn a planet into a black hole, something that, as far as we know, has no analogues in Nature, then you might as well use that tool as a planet killer, no need for an intermediate black hole.
When I see discussions of synthetic mini black holes, the usual proposal that I see is to create a kugelblitz with focussed lasers. To 0-th order, it looks to me as if the peak energy needed to create a black hole from light (or relativistic particles) looks like it would be independent of the black hole's mass.
Say one was trying to create a black hole of mass M. Very roughly, it seems like a pulse of light with the energy needed has to all be within the Schwarzchild radius at one time, so the pulse length has to be roughly 2GM/c^3. So the peak power needed looks like it always needs to be around Mc^2/(2GM/c^3) = c^5/2G (independent of M), roughly 1.8x10^52 watts. Is this crudely right?
This looks like an intimidating amount of power. Even a hypothetical Kardashev III civilization, with control over all the power in a galaxy, would only have 10^36 watts available.
Yes, your estimate is largely accurate, though a better calculation is probably not quite that, because of the Lorentz contraction and quantum effects. Basically, each "particle" is compressed almost to nothing in the direction of propagation, as seen in the other particle's or in the center of mass frame. There was a back-of-the envelope estimate, called the hoop conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Conjecture, where a black hole would form if the colliding objects can fit through a "Schwarzschild-sized hoop". This was confirmed in simulations some decades later, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1780.pdf. This was strongly hinted at earlier, by considering two "infinitely boosted" colliding particles (which can also be photons, since rest mass does not matter much at these energies, hence "kugelblitz"). What you end up with is two colliding gravitational shock waves, which can form a so-called trapped surface at the moment of collision, nearly guaranteeing black hole formation. The lower limit is imposed by the de Broglie length, hc/E, which for light is equivalent to the classical wavelength.
The upshot is that the minimum combined energy one would need for black hole formation is of the order of Planck mass (some 20 micrograms) and is independent of the colliding objects' rest mass, like you said. So the energy in a single laser pulse is roughly E=sqrt(hbar*c^5/G), and the pulse duration is one wavelength at least, or h/E, resulting in average power in one pulse E/t = E^2/h = c^5/G.
However, this is average power over a single pulse, the total energy required is on the order of a MegaWatt-hour per pulse, which is high but not impossibly so. If large extra dimensions exist, then the effective G is higher, and the power requirements are lower.
I think at a fraction of the cost you could just launch a relativistic projectile and be done with the planet? Though "crushing your enemies" does get a lot more literal if you can pull off the black hole thing...
When a black hole has evaporated down to literally sub-atomic size and then finally vanishes it releases a flash of energy equal to roughly 5 million megatons of TNT. So to create a mini black hole in the first place would require at least that energy concentrated and confined in a tiny space, and that seems highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Besides bioweapons, which seem to me, FWIW, by far the greatest future risk to mankind and even to other life on Earth, when these days already one can almost literally print viruses, something else to worry about in the medium term is large asteroids deliberately nudged out of their orbit and sent on a collision course with Earth.
But I suppose we can be reassured that by the time asteroid belt dwellers are present in any numbers, some possibly with evil intent, no doubt there will be effective ways to promptly detect and prevent any errant asteroids heading our way!
That is true for parasites, not for weapons. First infect everyone, then kill is just one very obvious way around. Replicating in e.g. soil is another.
I don't think that first method is plausible. Hiding from the immune system long enough to infect more hosts -- ideally all possible hosts -- would be such a wonderful evolutionary advantage for a virus that it would be very strongly selected for. If it were possible to do such a thing, then it's very likely natural selection would have found it sometime in the past 500 million years of virus-immune system warfare.
Even conceptually, the two goals -- high infectiousness and hiding from the immune system -- are antithetical. To spread fast, you have to subvert millions of host cells and have them crank out trillions of viral particles to spew into the environment. But of course that much abnormal extracellular activity is a giant red flag to the immune system. The only way viruses successfully hide long-term from the immune system is by reproducing slowly, if at all. They can sometimes have episodic infectiousness, where for brief periods they become much more infectious, and then subside again before the immune system wipes them out. But brief periods of infectiousness and long periods of latency leads to an overall slow spread.
Even some pathogens manage to do this just fine. Herpes, Lyme or AIDS come to mind for example, but you are thinking way too much about evolved organisms and too little about purpose build constructs.
Guns are obviously very useful for predators. Did a predator evolve a gun? If you have access to different chemical spaces than your host, immune evasion becomes a lot simpler.
But even failing that, reproduce in soil or whatever until enough resources are gathered, then have the killing fog rise at a signal.
How hard it is to prevent such attacks using the same tech is an open question imho, but the existence of immune systems suggests it is possible. However, killing off current humanity is an incredibly easy once you can really build on a molecular level. If the path from here to there favors defense or offense remains still to be seen.
No, they don't. All three of those pathogens spread very slowly. That's the point. There *are* no pathogens that both spread very fast and also persist. They all fall into the class of (1) slow spread, slow disease, or (2) fast spread, fast disease. Your combination of (1) slow spread, fast disease isn't found in nature.
I'm thinking about evolved organisms because that's the class of organisms that are known to exist. What I'm pointing out to you is that we have no reason to think organisms that differ from those organisms in major important ways are even possible. Just because you can write a sentence that is linguistically sound doesn't mean you're describing a conceivable reality. You can say "a disease that spreads fast, lies in wait, then strikes suddenly" but that doesn't mean the thing you describe is possible in reality, any more than the fact that "Star Trek" had a consistent (on-screen) theory of how warp drive worked means it could really exist.
Your statement that building on a molecular level makes it "incredibly easy" to kill of humanity is simply an assumption, and as far as I can see all the indirect empirical evidence we have, and some reasonable theoretical grounds, suggests it is more likely false than not.
Nevertheless, all I'm saying here is that you should not just assume it's possible because it seems intuitive. People made all kinds of intuitive assumptions about what electricity could do in the 1880s (cf. Captain Nemo), and about what nuclear power could do in the 1930s, too, which turned out to be ridiculous. You can't assume what is intuitive bears any relationship to reality. It rarely does. That's why science is harder than it seems.
"Hiding from the immune system long enough to infect more hosts -- ideally all possible hosts -- would be such a wonderful evolutionary advantage for a virus that it would be very strongly selected for"
Isn't this what AIDS does? It's obviously difficult-- most infections don't manage it, or not that effectively, but it's possible.
AIDS spreads very slowly, because it is doing a good job of hiding. The first known confirmed case of AIDS has been traced back to 1959, and it was first identified in the US in 1981, and had a ~100% mortality rate until the first protease inhibitors were introduced in 1995. That's 26 years from emergence to effective treatment, in which time if it spread like measles (or even COVID) it would have wiped out hundreds of millions, or even billions, instead of the hundreds of thousands it did kill.
That's not to say there aren't some gruesome optimums, like the Black Death, which hits a particularly unfortunately effective combination of speed of spread and speed of disease, but even then the best it was able to do in the past was deliver a severe (but nowhere near existentially threatening) blow to European civilization, and that in an era when knowledge of infectious disease processes was almost zero.
Why is the infectous agent killing everyone again?
Yeah, yeah, some mad scientist made it that way. But it's a living organism, and living organisms evolve. As we've recently seen, they evolve quite substantially in the course of infecting even half of everyone. And high on the list of evolutionary adaptations, is going to be jettisoning any excess baggage that doesn't contribute to survival and reproduction.
Like that "...then kill everyone" functionality that your mad scientist put in the original design, which the pathogen clearly doesn't need to survive and reproduce.
Viruses can evolve away from virulence, but that's not guaranteed. Polio doesn't seem to gain *anything* from its ability to cause paralysis (it's basically a not-very-serious stomach bug), but it still has held onto that ability.
Not necessarily. It is pretty easy to prevent evolution in a designed system. You just have to make mutation impossible. One way to do so is to make sure that every mutation prevents reproduction. There are e.g. cryptographic systems to do so, though discussing them in detail is beyond my crypto pay grade. Another way is to have multiple independent DNA copies that get checked against one another in each generation to fix mutations.
You (and "a real dog" and probably a lot of other people thinking about bioweapons) are thinking way too much about evolved organisms and too little about purpose build constructs. Btw. I am not saying that we can do such stuff now, just that it is certainly possible in principle.
Why would someone build such weapons? Well, I don't know, but I imagine ISIS would have plenty of motivation to name an example. "Final deterrence" could be another. It is also certainly possible to build something that does not target "everyone" but "the outgroup" for many values of "the outgroup".
Wait what? I can't think of any form of DNA in which any mutation prevents reproduction. DNA is designed to fit the protein/RNA machinery that uses it, and vice versa. As long as you are using the same machinery (which you must if you are designing an agent to infect human cells) most areas of abstractly conceivable DNA functionality are impossible to access even in principle.
We don't actually know whether it is even hypothetically possible to design a true novel viral bioweapon. It may not be, it may be that there is no conceivable set of DNA instructions that would fit with molecular machinery to execute the necessary tasks, for the same reason no conceivable software could make my computer get up and walk into the kitchen -- the hardware isn't there.
This is true for most bioweapons but not all. As magic9mushroom wrote:
"Synthetic biology is a significant X-risk via essentially organic grey goo; stuff like a nondigestible synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate (which would pull all the carbon out of the biosphere and dump it on the ocean floor)."
Although I think any life remotely related to ours will need phosphate as a building block for nucleic acids, this is still a big concern.
Peter Watts explored this idea in Behemoth, though it seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Your example sounds more like nanotech - at some point you have, at best, a design inspired by life. And as you said, such designs are subject to a lot of non-obvious constraints, and they would also have to outcompete existing microorganisms.
I'm not betting on a half-baked lab prototype vs. rapidly evolving veterans of all niches everywhere in the world, the only advantage the new guy has is not being trapped in a local fitness minimum. And local fitness minima may be illusory (in a high-dimensional space there are almost no true minima, only saddle points).
EDIT: IIRC this already happened. Cellulose-producing organisms had this property of sequestering massive amounts of carbon while being indigestible to anything else, for quite a long time.
There are places evolution can't go because of biochemical lock-in. You can't evolve to not use DNA by using errors in DNA replication - that doesn't make sense. Life 1.0 is basically stuck with nucleic acids (phosphate requirement), ribosomes (more phosphate requirement, and probably bigger than it needs to be), phospholipid membranes (phosphate requirement) and a few other things; a de novo created organism (Life 2.0, as I call it) can go outside that space and thereby access large chunks of the globe with no competition at all (phosphate-poor water - nitrogen and carbon can be taken from the air, but if there is no phosphate Life 1.0 is barred from the habitat).
There's also the somewhat-less-obvious fact that RuBisCO is probably not optimal as a carbon-fixer (it's notoriously nonspecific), but nature hasn't been able to cobble together a mechanism that works better while under competition.
The hard bit is the extraordinarily-difficult computation of how to make a full working biochemistry, and with AlphaFold and the continuing miniaturisation of computers we're actually making progress on that front.
I do agree that something would eventually evolve to eat whatever you make - possibly even *from* what you make - but "eventually" doesn't save us. It'd be tricky to get and deploy counteragents before the researchers starved to death, because it's like the rice grains on the chessboard - by the time the problem is noticeable it's most of the way to killing you.
I do agree, incidentally, that "synthetic biology" and "organic nanotechnology" are just different ways of describing the same stuff. As I said, organic Grey Goo.
> You can't evolve to not use DNA by using errors in DNA replication
You can easily bootstrap an RNA-only system starting from DNA replication, DNA is just optional long-term storage. An argument could be made that one mechanism of storage and replication existing will not let any other, better mechanism emerge, but I'm uncertain - nearly anything imaginable exists in some obscure archaea.
How sure are you that replication in a soup can be efficiently done without phosphates? Given that there exist phosphate-poor environments, you should see adaptation to low (but nonzero) concentrations all over the place.
It depends on what happens when a black hole evaporates down to the Planck mass, which AFAIK is not currently known due to lack of quantum gravity theory.
If black holes that have fully evaporated become stable (i.e. there's a block preventing the hole from disappearing, but anything that gets put in comes back out as Hawking radiation immediately) and black hole information loss is real, then a minimum-mass black hole (which potentially only requires a Planck energy to produce) is a total-conversion engine (matter goes in, mix of matter and antimatter comes out, M+AM annihilate to energy). Obviously, if one of those fell into the Earth and had a sufficient rate of conversion, the Earth would melt and/or explode.
Re: GCR/X-risk landscape:
Nuclear war is by far the largest GCR IMO, but is not an X-risk because even nuclear winter can't actually render the entire globe uninhabitable.
AI is a big X-risk.
Pandemics are a GCR, but not an X-risk. Pandemics can't kill everyone because R drops below 1 before the human population drops under the ~30,000 or so needed to sustain the species; 99% kill seems somewhat-plausible for engineered pathogens, though.
Synthetic biology is a significant X-risk via essentially organic grey goo; stuff like a nondigestible synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate (which would pull all the carbon out of the biosphere and dump it on the ocean floor).
New physics is worth watching for X-risk potential, but probably doesn't pose as much risk as AI or bio.
Bad/terrorist geoengineering is a plausible GCR that's hard to quantify, but getting to X-risk (forcing runaway greenhouse with fluorinated gases and dropping a 100km asteroid on Earth are the ones I can see working) seems hard. Notably, solar shading is not an X-risk because people would notice that you blocked out the Sun and blow up your solar shade with missiles, and aerosols are pretty short-lived so that also seems hard to get to X-risk.
I think that, while bioweapons are an extreme threat, they are not species-ending in the same way since there will be some small (< 5%) proportion of mankind who are either isolated enough or survive and develop immunity.
There are many reasons why it would be very interesting to have optical fiber that works in the UV spectrum. Sadly, none of our normal materials really work, the attenuation is too much. There is a material that ticks all the boxes, but it has the issue that you can't manufacture it with high quality in a gravity well. The best samples have been made in orbit, and there is a company currently chasing commercialization of it.
There's something that might be worth the expense of *collecting* in orbit and returning to Earth, and there are definitely things that are worth building in space to use in space, but I can't think of any examples of things that both need space manufacturing and are useful dirtside.
Harvestable stuff = antimatter from the van Allen belts.
Build in space to use in space = stuff that would fall apart under its own weight dirtside because it's too big. Megametre telescopes, and the like.
Thanks Jack. Post comes across as a bit weird just sitting out here on its lonesome doesn't it? Weirdly, I posted it as a response to a post of Kenny's, which was itself a reply to an earlier post of mine. But I did it all from within my email account. Kenny's comment arrived as an email, and at the end I was given the option to reply, which I did. Guess that's another Substack bug.
Apparently, there was an Early Modern theological debate about whether parasitic species had been part of God's original unfallen creation.
The most widespread view that, in Eden, parasitic species *would* have existed, but would have functioned as beneficent symbiotes, helping the creatures that they infested--including Adam and Eve themselves.
The incredibly negative responses people have to your post underline the common (evolutionarily selected for) fear of parasites, I think. These things are dangerous!
I don't know what counts as negative. I was horrified, but I like horror fiction and generally think fiction writers can use science as a prompt for imagination, so I shared it on facebook.
It's not suffering, but I was abstractly horrified at the virus which has moved in on an organism so the organism recreates the virus as part of reproduction. Ultimate malware.
The human genome, IIRC, contains many thousands of Endoretroviral sequences that are leftover from viral infections of our germ line, fully integrated into our DNA. I'm not sure if any of those ever turns back into an actual virus anymore, though.
Not the same thing-- you have to catch the micro-organism for STDs. This one is about the virus using the reproductive system of the host to reproduce itself, even without contact.
I think wasps might still bring home the incest prize. In many insects, males develop quicker to fight over females before they emerge - in some butterflies, the female even mates while still in the pupa. It's also common for wasps to have a smaller number of males compared to females, by purposely skewing the sex ratio (which they can control because they're haplodiploid). The downside of this arrangement is that some late-bloomer females may find that all the males have died out before them... but Melittobia wasps have a solution. A virgin female, if she has no suitable mate, will find a wasp grub and lay a tiny haploid egg in her, which will quickly become a miniature male and sire a larger brood with his mother. As a bonus, this single egg uses very little resources, so the poor grub is often alive to receive a second, fatal dose of eggs. While Sister Princess type arrangements are common in weevils, bed bugs and wasps (including Melittobia itself - the strongest male in each batch will typically kill his brothers and mate with his sisters), this type of Agata-style mama-shota scenario is (to my knowledge) unique to this wasp.
Flies have some gnarly parasite tactics too. Bombylius flies are named after bumblebees, but calling them "bomber flies" is not inaccurate either, as they launch their eggs into the cells of ground-nesting bees with startling accuracy. Snot bots have a similar strategy, but instead launch their own already-hatched maggots in a spray of sticky mucus, aiming for the noses and mouths of deer. The flesh fly Tripanurga is attuned to the smell of hatchling turtles: when the first turtles of a brood emerge, the flies will move in and lay their maggots (like snot bots and tsetses, they are live bearers) to prey on the remainder. This, alongside the snake egg specialist Nicrophorus pustulatus, makes them the only insect parasitoids of vertebrates, as far as I'm aware. Flies also have futuristic transforming robots like the hypermetamorphic Acrocera orbicula, which bites a hole in the cuticle of a spider in its "armored form", and then molts into an "ooze form" to slip in and start eating.
Moving from flies back to wasps, and from Agata to Ishimura, we have Elasmosoma wasps: They lay eggs exclusively into the anuses of ants, and since this is a relatively non-invasive place, most ants actually survive - up until the point they give anal birth to a maggot half their size! If Haiboku Otome Ecstasy plots are not to your liking, beewolves instead bring a Yuri Hime Wildrose approach to things: they're famous for catching bees mid-air, forcing them to the ground, and molesting them until they start drooling honey, which they eat (well, the truth is they just squeeze the bee like a juicebox until her honey crop explodes, and then feed her alive to their larvae, so maybe it's not a very good yuri story after all). And of course there's stuff like Reclinervellus and Polysphincta, which brainwash spiders to create webs that protect them from the rain instead of catching prey, and Allochares, which takes matters into her own hands and personally re-weaves the web of her victims.
But my personal favorite is Philanisus plebeius, a caddisfly that accomplishes the rare feat of interspecies pregnancy - they lay their eggs directly into the body chambers of a starfish, of all things, and neither the caddis nor the starfish is particularly harmed by the interaction. This is sort of similar to how the starfish (Patiriella) broods its own offspring, so here you have an animal that co-opts another's "womb" for its own use! To my knowledge, the mold Smittium is the only other organism that can do this (it replaces the eggs of blackflies with egg-shaped balls of mold, which the fly can lay without issue), unless you count stuff like sperm-jacking bivalve lineages. If I ever get good enough at drawing, and Kill Time Communication decides to publish another of these yuri pregnancy anthologies in 2056, I'm going to submit something based on 'em. They had a whiptail lizard in one of the previous volumes, it's not that far-fetched!
Anyway, my point is that bugs aren't horrific, they're erotic! You just need to see the entire world through the lens of Panda and 'booru tags.
And by the way, how'd you add hyperlinks and italics to Substack posts? Would love to add references to this stuff, and not putting binomials in italics will make me lose biologist cred.
I did a stint in an entomology lab as an undergrad where they were experimenting with trichogrammas as a non chemical way of controlling European corn borers. They - the trichs - preyed on the egg masses of the corn borers.
British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” Beetles (phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Coleoptera) account for a greater number of species than any other single group of living animal. Approximately one out of every four animal species on Earth is a beetle. However, in more recent times entomologists have posited that there may in fact be two species of parasitoid wasp for every species of invertebrate, one for the living creature and another that targets the eggs of that species. So it would seem God must have a great passion for wasps. Of course this only brings into question the 'beneficent' aspect of a creator not the omnipotence.
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Im Ernst, ich wäre sehr vorsichtig mit solchen Sachen. Suchen Sie auf jeden Fall einen sachkundigen Arzt (nicht nur Ihren örtlichen Hausarzt), vielleicht sogar einen Endokrinologen, bevor Sie etwas einnehmen. Eine Testosteron-Supplementierung kann dazu führen, dass Ihr Körper aufhört, Testosteron zu produzieren, was bedeutet, dass Sie lebenslang darauf bleiben müssen.
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I wonder why, from an evolutionary perspective, beauty exists?
What survival value was gained by all of us finding certain things beautiful and others ugly?
We mostly see the same things as beautiful/ugly, so I think it has to be partly inherited.
Human beauty:
Avoid mate with high mutational load because your children will have less children.
(For men) de-prioritise mate that is not well-fed/unmaimed, because she may die in pregnancy.
Natural beauty:
Avoid hanging out on lava flows because there is no food there. Hang out in woodland because there is food there.
Prefer clean stuff over dirty stuff because it is less likely to infect you with diseases.
Those are the ones I can spot offhand. If you have some specific sense you want explained that I didn't free-recall, ask.
I have a bit more on Human beauty:
- Men are attracted to youth, because that maximizes the number of possible kids before menopause, and to thin waists as proof she's not already pregnant.
I'm more mystified by the beauty of sunsets, flowers, open fields, wildlife, art, music...
We can spot predators in open fields. Maybe sunsets are similarly reassuring--we can see to the horizon. After we descended from the trees we needed savannas where we could see our predators and prey from a distance and exploit our ability to run. Art and music are variations of patterns and symmetry. Perhaps for reasons touched on by magic9 above, and maybe there's something deeper too--our bodies are symmetrical, to one degree or another, so are our brains. Perceiving patterns has high survival value, e.g., to keep track of when animals feed and approach the waterhole, to know when to hide and when to hunt, and to judge the likelihood of bad/good weather, and so on. Hence we create and play with patterns in art and music?
Does anyone have experience using CBD for lower back pain? If so, what worked for you?
I would say why not try it. It seems to work for some people, not others. I tried it for aches after skiiing, and it had no effect whatever even after I doubled, tripled and quadrupled the dose.
Not exactly the same, but my wife has arthritis in her hips. She uses a CBD ointment, which she finds to be very helpful.
Any opinions on Nassim Taleb's 2019 post "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"? https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
Saying IQ is “pseudoscientific” is like saying “paper job applications are pseudoscientific”.
Are they perfect for their intended use? No.
Does that matter if they more or less work? No. Ditto say standardized tests.
Yes it might be better for each kid to have a 4 weeks multiphasic intellectual inventory instead an IQ test. But when you don’t have time/resources for that.
The way I understand things (very much not an expert):
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in both school and work at every level, from janitor to physicist. People with very high IQs tend to do very well in all kinds of intellectually demanding things.
IQ is a score which is correlated with intelligence--it's not intelligence itself. (To make an obvious point, if I let you copy down the answer key and then gave you an IQ test, this wouldn't make you any smarter.) So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case. There are also people who get high IQ scores and never do much impressive with their brains--that can happen for many reasons, but one is that they're really not as brilliant as their IQ score would normally suggest.
Also, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
>So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case.
This is kind of a pointless thing to say without data. Okay, "some people" are like this....how many? If we don't know what proportion of the population this applies to, then this point is not useful.
>so, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
Okay, and why does this matter? The problem that people, especially on the political left, have with IQ is most emphatically *not* that it is not useful for distinguishing geniuses from hyper-geniuses. The problem is precisely that it measures the intelligence and predicts the life outcomes of a majority of the population, and given the heritability of intelligence, this is potentially devasting for left-wing narratives around inequality and "privilege".
IIRC different kinds of IQ tests have a bit over 90% correlation with each other, which gives a rough measure of how well each correlates with the 'true intelligence' that they're trying to measure.
In short, it's not a perfect test of intelligence simply because perfect tests are impossible to devise - suppose you test 100 meter sprint speed by asking people to sprint 100 meters; you're literally testing the thing you want to measure, but some people will still have unusually bad days and get unrepresentative scores
I'm not trying to argue with NNT's flat-earth-level critique of IQ scores, nor with people whose whole knowledge of IQ is that it's somehow got intellectual cooties and must be avoided. What would be the point?
But the two points I made are places a lot of people who try to intelligently engage with IQ scores and related statistics get mixed up. They start thinking about IQ as what we care about, rather than as an imperfect measure of what we care about, and they don't realize that IQ scores at the high and low end of the range are probably less accurate representations of where the people who got them really fall in the distribution.
It is complete and unadulterated nonsense. It's embarassingly bad.
And this level of claim is warranted on my part given the fact that Taleb does not argue in good faith. He smears his opponents and blocks and curses out people on twitter who disagree with him. He invites much worse than what I've said by saying his post is "still unchallenged". He will say this no matter what happens, no matter what people say, no matter how much research contradicts his views. He's an arrogant ideologue interested only in pushing a narrative which he feels makes him look enlightened and virtuous (and sells more of his books).
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
Taleb is a dishonest debater. I remember reading a few good point-by-point refutations shortly after he published this rant about IQ being a swindle. It's just, if you disagree with him, he blocks you on Twitter and pretends that you do not exist. This is how he remains "unchallenged" in the eyes of his fans. Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights, but ultimately, he is in a book-selling business, not truth-finding business. It is better for book sales when his crackpot theories remain "unchallenged" no matter how wrong they are.
OK, I guess this sound too ad hominem. Sorry, I am not an expert and I do not want to spend my entire day fact-checking all citations and verifying all complex claims. I am only going to spend like 15 minutes writing this comment, please keep this limitation in mind if you are dissatisfied with the result. But other people have already written much better responses.
So, Taleb starts with repeating the popular myths: (1) IQ is just an ability to do IQ tests, or maybe tests in general, but definitely unrelated to anything that matters in actual life; (2) yes, low IQ is a thing, but high IQ is definitely not, a person with IQ 80 might be less smart than a person with IQ 100, but a person with IQ 180 is indistinguishable from a person with IQ 100... except for the ability to do IQ tests much better, I suppose. Also, don't forget the mandatory: (3) some racists talk about IQ, therefore everyone who talks about IQ is a racist.
My response to (1) is that this is an "all or nothing" fallacy. As an analogy, consider this argument: "There are people who are tall, but suck at basketball. Therefore, height is irrelevant for playing basketball. No, let me say it openly: the very concept of height is a pseudoscientific swindle!" Okay, slow down, dude. Yes, it is true that some tall people suck at basketball. But that only proves that height is not the only thing that matters at basketball. You also have to practice playing. Or maybe you are tall but also blind, so you are out of luck, even if you tried to practice. It can be simultaneously true that in general being taller is helpful at basketball, and that being tall is only a part (perhaps a very small part) of the entire package. Also, the accusation of pseudoscientific swindle is completely undeserved. Even in a hypothetical reality where height is 100% irrelevant to basketball (which is not the reality we are living in), height could still be useful for other things, for example easily reaching the objects on the top shelf.
The same is true for intelligence. It is just a part of a larger package necessary to succeed in life. Like, maybe you have a high IQ, but you also have ADHD so you actually can't focus on doing the smart things, or maybe you were born in a poor family so the idea of studying hard and getting a prestigious job simply never crossed your mind. Yes, you can point at some Mensa guys and laugh at them. The fact is that Mensa is mostly a selection of people with high IQ who failed to achieve anything spectacular, because those who did are typically too busy to attend Mensa meetings. Why is it so surprising that "the top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors"? Looking at the graph, it simply means that a person with IQ 110 could have an either job. Sounds plausible to me, considering that some colleges suck.
My response to (2) is that I have no time to check how cherry-picked / edited / taken out of context are the few graphs in the article (I vaguely remember reading that the graph was edited to make the point), but the very idea that above IQ 100 everyone is the same, is quite absurd. I think most people underestimate how diverse people are, because we typically live in "bubbles", surrounded by people similar to us. Thus e.g. a person with IQ 130 mostly keeps friends with IQ 130, and then concludes "yes, all humans are intellectually about the same". Then they step outside the bubble, and are shocked by the sheer incompetence of other people, who have e.g. IQ 100, i.e. not retarded, just... not smart either.
I have a repeated experience (a few years ago when I was a Mensa member) that when a person who seemed smart to me considered themselves intellectually average, I told them "nope, you are smart, and you should take a Mensa test to confirm this". About half of them actually accepted my challenge, and all of them passed the test. Some of them were quite shocked by that. If only 2% of population can pass the test, and they supposedly do not differ from the rest of the population at anything meaningful, how could my predictions be so accurate?
My response to (3) is that intelligence is an exciting topic many people have an opinion on, so of course the racists do, too. It would be suspicious if they did not. And by the way, many racists also take positions quite similar to Taleb's. There were probably historical Nazis who said things like: yeah, maybe the Jews have a high IQ, but who cares, that's just some academic nonsense, in real life they are still inferior to an Aryan Fat Tony who is street smart and has the will to power, or something like that.
I also notice that all graphs used in the article are cut at IQ 130. I find that suspicious. Perhaps there is a good reason for that: many IQ tests stop at some relatively low value, because people with higher IQ are rare, so calibrating the tests for them is more expensive. But I strongly suspect that adding e.g. the incomes of people with IQ 160 to the graph would make a visible difference. (I suspect than on a typical ACX meetup, IQ 130 would be the average, or even below the average. In Taleb's graphs, it is the highest intelligence considered.) Similarly, the categories of occupations are just too wide. Perhaps the lowest-quartile "college professor" is completely unimpressive, intellectually. What about a lowest-quartile quantum physics professor, though? Is he also indistinguishable from a smart janitor?
Oops, took me more than the originally planned 15 minutes. Still didn't check the article that Taleb was taking his graph from. Anyway, nothing I wrote here is new or particularly insightful. Remember that the next time Taleb calls himself "unchallenged". The counter arguments are obvious, he just doesn't listen.
Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side? It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians. I'm going to have to think about how that works.
> It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Nazis and the woke would agree that the important thing about you is your ethnic background (although the woke would also add gender, sexual orientation, etc.), and that your individual traits or skills are irrelevant. IQ tests measure your individual trait, i.e. an unimportant thing.
IQ tests measure the individual; both Nazis and the woke are collectivists (although in different ways).
Interesting point, though I don't think all racial egalitarians are woke.
> Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side?
In the linked article he says that "Different populations have different variances, even different skewness and these comparisons require richer models."
(In other words, it's complicated, and Taleb is the only person smart enough to understand it. And no, he is not going to tell us.)
>Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights
No, no, he's not smart and has no good "insights", mostly because "good insight" is an oxymoron. Think about what "insight" means. Does it mean scholarship? Knowledge? No, it means something consumers can easily easily consume. It's intellectual candy, intellectual crack. Real knowledge is hard, cheap and easy "insights" are never good, and insight merchants are a cancer.
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
I guess Taleb's response to the first table would be that all those correlations are produced by the lower half of the IQ distribution. (The rest of the article, I agree with.)
Here is my attempt to "steelman" Taleb:
There are various reasons to study IQ. We want to understand those below the average. We want to understand the average. And we want to understand those above the average. Different people care about different parts of the intelligence spectrum.
Specifically for the purpose of studying people with high IQ, the usual research is often not helpful. First, many IQ tests are capped at IQ 130, which for some people is actually where the interesting part *begins*.
Second, calculating the correlation between IQ and some measure X for the entire population conflates "people with low IQ suck at X" with "people with high IQ excel at X". Even if both are true, the correlation measured for the entire population does not *prove* it. To make a claim specifically about high IQ, we should calculate the correlation for the part of population with IQ greater than 100. And then maybe again for the part with IQ greater than 130, to check for the hypothesis "...but *too much* IQ is harmful".
Some people believe in significance of low IQ but insignificance of high IQ, for both good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are, of course, ideological. A good reason would be the law of diminishing returns.
For example, if you have an IQ 70 and can't get a good job, it is quite obvious what is your problem. If you have an IQ 130 and a relatively good job, but you would like to have a better one, it is not equally obvious that magically changing your IQ to 150 would solve the problem. Chances are, your greatest problem is something else (such as low conscientiousness, lack of social skills, etc.), which might still prevent you from getting the desired job even if your IQ magically changed to 150. Perhaps not... but that needs to be shown by a research that compares IQ 130 and IQ 150 directly, and not just says "comparing IQ 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, and 150, greater values correlate with greater success".
Makes sense. Thanks.
To be honest, I don't think the post even warrants a response from intelligence researchers - half of it is just crying about racism, the other half is "High school student who just finished AP stats"-level objections like the average not being the same as the entire population or that error bars somehow invalidate the mean difference between professions.
He also claims the IQ-income correlation is ~0.01, which is shockingly wrong. The Mind-Killer really can infect anyone, I guess.
When I first saw that article I had never heard of the guy. It's an incoherent article on Medium with myriad spelling mistakes, I literally assumed it was written by a mentally ill nutcase. I have continued to be profoundly shocked that anyone takes him seriously on anything.
His apparently astroturfed, mediocre "book" The Black Swan is devoid of math. His case against "The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud" is: https://dl.abcbourse.ir/dl/Library/book/Taleb_The-Black-Swan.pdf
"Forget everything you heard in college statistics or probability theory. If
you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.
THE GAUSSIAN AND THE MANDELBROTIAN
I was transiting through the Frankfurt airport in December 2001 , on my
way from Oslo to Zurich.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me
to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The cashier
handed me, among other things, a ten deutschmark bill, an (illegal) scan
of which can be seen on the next page. The deutschmark banknotes were
going to be put out of circulation in a matter of days, since Europe was..."
Where is the math? Who takes this seriously?
He then argues against Gaussians with ... wealth distributions. This guy is a fraudster btw, he claims to be a statistician but he only has business degrees. Something is really off about this guy. He basically argues for "fat tails" and talks about how Gaussians can't model stuff but Pareto et al were on this years ago. He seems to fail to understand that the Gaussian is the distribution with the most entropy of any distribution with finite mean and variance on the real line. The Pareto Distribution has finite mean and variance, models wealth, and has less entropy than the Gaussian. It would be stupid given this, additive genetics, and the CLT to "reject Gaussians" or whatever weird English-major thing he wants us to do. Gaussians are a specific thing, he has literally no point other than that some phenomena are not Gaussian.
As for the post itself, https://www.reddit.com/r/nassimtaleb/comments/x8a7rz/taleb_on_iq_he_claims_his_medium_article_has_not/
Grey Enlightenment starts with noticing the same thing, Taleb's really creepy, skeezy nature:
"I’m guessing he chose 35 because that is when he became rich writing mediocre books, trading (he claims to have gotten rich with trading even though no records or second-hand anecdotal evidence exists of any actual trading prowess on his part), or kinda being a thin-skinned blowhard online."
Basically it seems like he wrote this stupid business book NYT best seller fluff and has been making up lies about himself ever since. He is probably a compulsive liar or something. Ironically it seems like he won the lottery with his book -- funny enough this can be modeled with Bernoullis, making the number of winners a quite small tailed distribution that looks like a bell curve. I wonder if he knows what it's called? Probably not.
Thanks for the Reddit link.
1) This is the link I wanted to post as a reply: http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/
2) It is amazing to read the reactions of Taleb's fans on Reddit.
"You cite your own blog?" -- yes, of course, because Taleb's fans will keep saying the same things over and over again across the entire internet, no matter how many times it was debunked, so it is much smarter to just write a response once and keep linking it.
"He's probably angry because he realized that Mensa is a club of idiots after paying for their expensive tests and memberships." -- uhm, in my country that is €10 for testing and €25 for yearly membership. I don't think it is a money well spent, but I wouldn't call it expensive either.
"Lmao wtf is this sir ??? what are your credentials??" -- haha, so Taleb keeps talking about how Fat Tony can outsmart all intellectuals-yet-idiots, and accuses scientists of fraud, but hey, if you point out on your blog a mistake he made, you suddenly need a PhD to be taken seriously.
(All these comments are upvoted. All comments critical of Taleb are downvoted.)
i think thats just humor, not an actual belief
The point I find interesting is that IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence and that it might work well for that, but it's accuracy isn't particularly good in the direction of measuring above-par intelligence. The scatterplot on the post shows how much noise there is in correlating IQ with lifetime income results, something it has been purported to be meaningful for.
Incorrect - stop taking Taleb's word for things: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
Terman's work on highly mathematically gifted kids and how their lives turned out (impressively, as you'd expect) seems to contradict this claim.
> IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence
The original purpose of IQ was to measure whether small kids were intellectually ready for school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet
The original formula was literally "mental age ÷ physical age × 100", which meant like "if you are 5 years old, but your reasoning abilities are on the level of a typical 6 years old, your IQ is 120".
Only later, when the concept was generalized for all ages, the formula was refactored, because it doesn't make sense for older people to assume that intelligence is always increasing with age... and you also can't find such N that Einstein's reasoning abilities are "on the level of a typical N years old".
As you see, Taleb is wrong (yet "unchallenged") even about things that are quite simple to check.
Right, the latter is humor, but he does seem to believe that IQ is largely pseudoscientific.
**Stuff on Class Inequality**
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
An AP statistics practice test from 2012 gives a curve; a 70% is a 5 so under a 5 is a typical failure in a college class. a 3 is a 44%. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-statistics-practice-exam-2012.pdf?course=ap-statistics
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
The average IQ of a college graduate is about 108. https://pumpkinperson.com/2017/01/17/iq-academic-success/
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
Now for some reading. In 2003 NCES estimated that only 57% of adults are functionally literate. https://archive.ph/o/NZicZ/https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
That's charitable, only 13% were in their top category where texts could be "dense."
Robin Hanson gives us a classic post with similar figures: https://archive.ph/MGAja
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
Anatoly Karlin also gives some numbers like this: https://archive.ph/vxN69
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
Lawrence Kohlberg found that about 85% of the population is like this. This correlates with IQ but not by much, it's about .3 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/016235329301600304
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
A final thing is intellectual habits. That 3.75% might not care for politics even if they aren't conventionalists. The average American reads 12 books per year https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
No, of course not, they're reading this: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Nonfiction/zgbs/digital-text/157325011
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
I think this is a good post overall, but using HBD as your stats example is needlessly polarising - none of the rest of your post cares one whit about racial anything.
As to object level critique - I tend to think of intelligence as "potential", and while (assuming for argument that your numbers are correct) you convincingly paint a picture of how many Americans are *currently* functional independent thinkers, the data you've presented doesn't in any way rule distinguish between lack of natural aptitude and a horrific failure of the education system and societal norms - eg. there's definitely no ability barrier to all "3.75%" of your 'sufficiently literate and numerate' group having a "good reading habit", that's purely social.
If you want to flesh this out into a standalone post elsewhere, I suggest elaborating on why you've picked the AP stats exam as your test of mathematical numeracy (I believe I get it but it's worth spelling out), why you've picked the grade you've picked as your threshold (because a 5(/5?) is equivalent to only 70%? % marks don't necessarily translate well across systems, American undergrad courses are unusually easy to get high % marks in), and similarly it's worth elaborating on the literacy measure you've used - quoting a definition and/or example of a "dense" text would be nice.
Finally, I'd be fascinated by cross-country comparisons if you can get them - those would help shed light on if the primary problem is the education system and/or local culture. Eg. French people have a much greater social expectation of being politically informed and opinionated.
Since I do not know what HBD stands for, and 5 minutes googling didn't help, I'm going to ignore this thread.
I'm trying to get into this "conventional morality" thing but the Defining Issues Test is pretty opaque. Are you sure it shows what you claim it shows? Can you go into more detail on the data you claim shows that much of the population have "conventional morality"?
Great post, if this forum had decent people on it they would be hailing you as better than Scott Alexander. He's never posted anything even half as intelligent. Goes to show that their attention and compliments are totally performative, political, and cynical. Sadly, your data proves why spectacle merchants receive so much attention and why this kind of thing is sneered at and ignored by people who probably don't have the reading skills or mathematical literacy to understand it.
VERY good comment. Thanks for posting.
Banned for this comment.
I wish your new blog still had tags. It was super useful to have a list of all AI-related posts on the old SSC at the click of a button.
The fiction tag was really great as well
So I just put down Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses” and picked up Erik Hoel’s The Revelations”.
Am I going to have to draw a crazy family tree with a bunch of ‘?’s in it for this one too?
Just checking. Getting low on scratch paper here. :)
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
https://justpaste.it/7h3q6
Thank you for this. I hadn't heard of him but I find this philosophy/outlook to largely align with my own (though i am in the US so the slavic specific parts are bit foreign to me). “freedom moderated by a vision of eternity” really connects with me. I will seek out more of his writing/speaking.
In my view, Arestovych is a psychiatrist more than a philosopher. His nebulous and utopian "fifth project", in which he tries to combine all the good features of liberalism, socialism, progressivism and pan-Slavic nationalism, doesn't strike me as particularly thought-over or coherent (to the extent I can extract it from the occasional interview with Latynina), but I have seen him use it to bottle up some common sense sorely needed at certain moments, and deliver it to the right places at the right time, and I am immensely grateful to him for that. (Among other things, he spoke out against the cancelations of Russian culture in the West during the first months of the 2022 war; against Zelensky's push to stop giving Schengen visas to Russians; against an idiotic project by the UA military to restrict freedom of movement inside Ukraine for mobilization purposes. At least in the latter case, the project was quickly scuttled.) He is also fun to listen to to a certain point (and gets annoying beyond that point). All in all, he strikes me as a Jordan-Peterson-like "applied thinker" (some of the similarity is explained by both being Jungians) doing an important job. If you're looking for a political philosophy that stands on its own, however, you'll be disappointed.
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
One of George Stigler's humorous essays imagines product liability law being applied to universities. One line — by memory so not verbatim:
"The branch of economics that dealt with how to enrich poor nations, I think it was called 'economic development,' was enjoined by the courts on the grounds that no university could afford to pay for the amount of damage its professors did."
You might need a bit more specificity, because I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
So, as a factual matter, yes, a lot of countries have developed significantly, no, there has not been any replicable model to bring their per capita income to Western levels. There's a lot of countries where per capita income is between $1000-$3000/month. Which is not a "Western" lifestyle but is a significant and radical jump from being a "developing" economy.
So, hopefully without getting too technical, just take a look at a list of countries by gdp per capita (PPP) (1). There's plenty of countries like Chile or Thailand or Serbia or even Ukraine where people are making $12-$30k year which, ya know, isn't great but it's far from where they were 30-40 years ago or where still developing countries, like most of Africa, are. And it's not like their growth rates are bad; I certainly wouldn't say Chile is growing as fast as China but they don't compare too unfavorably. (2)
As for development economics, while I'm no expert, I thought the field was generally a mess and hasn't had a persistent message since the Washington Consensus, which has been dead for decades now. And Chile/Thailand/Serbia all certainly pursued different economic development plans.
Soooo... it feels like you're trying to argue against someone who's not really there, pointing to a lack of economic progress which....kind of exists, like "developing" economies haven't closed the gap with developed economies but they're certainly much better off than they were 30-40 years ago. What exactly are you getting at here?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
(2) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=CL-CN&view=chart
There are some methods that have shown consistency in results like land reform/redistribution. From the "How Asia Works" book review:
"'Klaus Deininger, one of the world’s leading authorities on land policy and development, has spent decades assembling data that show how the nature of land distribution in poor countries predicts future economic performance. Using global land surveys done by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), he has worked out that only one significant developing country has managed a long-term growth rate of over 2.5 per cent with a very unequal distribution of land. That country is Brazil, the false prophet of fast growth which collapsed in a debt crisis in the 1980s in large part because of its failure to increase agricultural output. Deininger’s two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich. In short, if poor countries are to become rich, then the equitable division of land at the outset of development is a huge help. Japan, Korea and Taiwan put this in place.'
Unfortunately, it's not on the table anymore, which means we might not see many more East Asian - style economic miracles:
'Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based Landesa, is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring'"
In general though, I agree with your sentiment. This doesn't just apply to economics, it's everywhere; people start with their pre-concieved conclusions and work backwards to a model that makes it make sense. Just goes to show that the scientific method is not a natural way of human thinking.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
Arctic civil engineering. That’s a a pretty interesting major. I was going to say a cool major but didn’t want to make anyone groan. :)
You'd be right. I can't say too much about what city planners learn in universities in Denmark because that's not what I studied, but I know from some city planner friends that Jan Gehl is a superstar in the field, and Jan Gehl does take notes not from theme parks, but from holiday resorts (especially the maze-like slow down and have a spa experience kinds of places), which I feel like is pretty much the same thing in this respect?
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
There are quite a few traits where opposites attract and likes repel.
Stubbornness and desired level of responsibility are the obvious ones.
How similar? How different?
I would probably say "similar" because it is a safer answer, if I am not allowed to specify which differences are okay and which are not.
Also, because the people I have met so far seem different from me, so meeting a clone would be a new experience.
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
*royal We, local conditions may differ
There are surely huge gains to be made outside of the western world. Especially around child birth where poor sanitation has a very large negative effect. But hard to say if there are easy solution in more developed countries. Some things that come close would be if everyone got a flu shot and/or wore n95 masks a lot more effect like in Asian countries (not something i do or really want to do). That would save lives by reducing disease transmission. Also resolving all the lead in water issues that have been popping up in the US recently. Might not save lives but should increase quality of life.
I seem to recall that on balance, a properly-used N95 reduces covid transmission by roughly...10%. Dunno how that compares to flu...probably unfavourably, given Omicron's pretty high infectiousness. The whole sick-pay thing matters here too, even if it's not a direct intervention...although there's definitely people on the margins who literally can't afford to miss a day out sick, many more opt to go to work anyway. Incentives matter, and theoretical diffuse harms are way less salient than immediate paycheck hits. The same plays out in school attendance...there just isn't always Slack in the syllabus to accommodate proper lengths of staying home. (I remember some classmates in highschool who were held back entire years due to catching mononucleosis...that was pretty scary. Like, yeah, obviously better not to attend...but that's an incredible humiliation, and disruption of social network + educational progress...being sick already sucks enough!)
Lead, asbestos, etc. removal: diminishing returns, although I'm still surprised how common lead paint is.
Given the increasing number of allergy/auto immune disorders, yes, we are clean enough.
Hmm, it was my understanding that allergy prevalence is more tied to kids not getting outside often enough young enough, or otherwise exposed to a variety of potential triggers (such as pe dander)...with some degree of heritability as well. Although it might well be the case that safetyism attitudes towards not letting kids get """dirty""" contribute to keeping them confined indoors, safely glued to hypoallergenic screens.
Food allergies: I sure do miss peanuts in public. Amazing cooking oil, great snack. Other "nut butters" really don't compare, imo.
Does bathing really help much?
I wonder about that. Presumably baths and showers disrupt our skin microbiome. We know from experience that too much washing dries out the skin. Do or did stone age tribes suffer from chronic skin conditions? Analogizing from the gut microbiome, eradicating pathogens is not a feasible goal. It seems the healthiest guts have a diversity of bacteria, which presumably keeps the pathogens in check.
Yes. Reduces pathogens and promotes healing and food preservation.
Granted, most of the world solved this at least in part, but in a costly, time consuming fashion.
Food irradiation, maybe. A lot of reduction in food-borne illness, less waste, and reduced need for refrigeration and preservation is being left on the table because of consumer distaste for the word "radiation."
That was one of my favourite "alt-history" scenarios as a kid...atomic development going somewhat differently, certain nuclear failures not happening. Steaks that last for months? Wow, that sounds amazing. A world we could have had...still could, I guess. All it'd take is a norms shift. "Gentlemen, we have the capability"...
There's been some talk about installing UV lights all over the place to reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases. I'm not sure if that meets the criteria though.
Murderous UV lights in ventilation ducts is one thing that was discussed during Covid, which could possibly reduce airborne disease a *lot*.
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
Great resources, many thanks! I've read David Sinclair's book, and a recent book not on your list, Eat Like the Animal, by Raubenheimer and Simpson. The latter's thesis was a new one to me, that our bodies want a target amount of protein and we overeat if our food is low in protein. Do you have any thoughts on that thesis? Not a longevity theme per se, but an interesting explanation for the obesity epidemic.
I don't know much about that; basically all I know about nutrition and hunger I know from Scott's review of "The Hungry Brain": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Thank you for this!
Been interested in this field for awhile but so much of what comes out about it seems based on shoddy or overstated experiments.
Also it's quite hard to separate the wheat from the chaff if you don't know the field that well. Will look at your recommendations and hopefully they will clear some things up :)
The current hardcover edition of Methuselah's Zoo has a couple minor errata that I brought to Austad's attention from the advance proof, too late to be able to change before it printed. Maybe he'll edit them for the paperback. They mostly don't affect the scientific content, just a typo here, getting slightly wrong an old cultural reference there.*
The main scientifically-relevant one iirc was that the comparison of cancer resistance in naked mole-rats vs blind mole-rats wasn't clear. For a good review of comparative cancer resistance in mammals including those, see Seluanov et al. 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0004-9].
*Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" is about searching for life extension and finding it by eating carp guts. It also plays with the idea that humans are neotenous apes, similar to axolotls being neotenous salamanders [this juvenile chimp looks more human than does the adult chimp: https://images.wtmfiles.com/NeotonyChimpsProfile_Crp_TxtCa_WEB_1122x449.jpg]. Aldous Huxley was familiar with his brother Julian Huxley's experiments de-neotenizing axolotls so they finally anatomically "mature". In the book, life extension results in the long-lived humans also finally anatomically "maturing", to look more apeish! But the current version of Methuselah's Zoo got it backwards, and said that the carp guts made the humans look like "fetal apes."
I remember reading that book years ago, and its satirical ending. Spoilers ahead:
“What’s that?” he whispered.
“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.
…Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.
“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.
…Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.
…“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”
“But what’s happened to them?”
“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.
“Time?”
…. “But the Earl there — let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”
Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.
Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor.
…“No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
…Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock — well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.
Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again."
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence
Donals Hoffman argues that the current scientific paradigm is at a dead end, citing leading physicists like Arkani-Hamed, who says "space-time is doomed". Hoffman uses the analogy of video-games. While we wear the headset it "looks like" e.g., a car (or whatever") is speeding past us on our left, but that (obviously) is an illusion in the virtual world. We can't understand the principles underlying the game by examining the world inside the game not matter how thoroughly we study the virtual world within the game. The reality has to too with transistors and diodes and software and whatnot in the computer generating the virtual world of the game. Physics has reached its limits, he argues, because we're analyzing the world inside the headsets, convinced that if we can enlarge the pixels sufficiently, we'll understand everything. In other words, w're at a dead-end not just because of limited intelligence but because we haven't figured out that we're studying the virtual reality within the game revealed to us by the headset. We have to figure out what's outside the headset.
I'll have to look up Hoffman. But I'd agree with his analysis.
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
To the first question: yes.
To your girlfriend: she might have processing issues, where she's quite bright but unable to deal well with certain sorts of situations or tasks. There are evaluators for this sort of thing, but they tend to be spendy.
My middle kid is like this, with an IQ in the mid 130s but some trouble applying it. There are drug and non-drug interventions. We're currently working through the non-drug coping techniques. The assessment ran us 2000+, and wasn't covered by insurance.
Good luck.
What? No, of course not. IQ correlates with educational outcomes to some degree, but there's so many not-strictly-smarts things that go into Doing Well At School. For example, I'm not quite at the super-cynic level of Bryan Caplan where the entire edifice comes off as a costly signalling trap...but it's absolutely true that formal education rewards obedience, conformity, and putting up with *a lot* of dreadfully boring arbitrary crap. Temperament matters so much. This can be just as hard for those with +SDs on IQ, as for those with -SDs...just in different ways.
I was a Precocious Prodigal Child growing up, always able to ace schoolwork and do reading/writing/math way above my "grade level". (Like doing 10th-grade math in 4th grade, or setting historic school records for Most Library Books Read In A Year, that sort of thing.) But the actual process of school was lonely, tedious, and cruel, and so many times my grades suffered because I'd consider doing the work "beneath me". You can't do no work for an entire semester, then bust out every assignment perfectly on the last day for full credit - since Being On Time is more important than the actual quality of the work. (Okay, that's not true, I actually did manage to pull that stunt off several times. Boy, those professors hated me.) By college, I'd fallen pretty well behind my definitely-less-smart peers...not for lack of ability, but because the education system was Just Not For Me.
They graduated and went on to degree-premium jobs. I didn't, and now bag groceries in my 30s. Constantly catch myself making "intellectual class" mistakes, like trying to explain to my bosses how X process would be so much more efficient with a simple spreadsheet...then I remember they can barely wrangle Microsoft Word. (You do not want to see our internal memos and emails...my God, so painful to read.) Good folks, love them, fight in the trenches back-to-back every shift...and yet. There's a reason I don't ever mention places like ACX at work. Just Not For Them.
I'm pretty sure I responded to a previous thread you had posted, several OTs ago, but: on the old scoring system, 2230/2400 SAT (perfect reading/writing, worse on math), ~130 WAIS-IV (again >99th percentile reading/writing, worse on math/shape rotator stuff). [ETA: took these tests *after* flunking out of three colleges three times, was feeling really stupid then and wondering what happened to that whiz kid...more fool me, she never left.] But school was a hellish nightmare that almost broke my intellectual curiosity for good, even given those proclivities. Many Such Cases, including most of my friends (borked minds think alike!). Your girlfriend isn't an outlier. Says a lot more about the school system than her.
I kind of thought of you when posting and was wondering what you'd say.
But the big difference between you and her is that your cognitive surplus, even if it hasn't dramatically improved your income, it still manifests in ways that make it obvious that you are likely smart. For instance, you voluntarily read a blog by a pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes short fiction, comments on Effective Altruism, and posts long speculative essays on the implications of a Carthaginian demon mentioned in a poem.
You also frequently like to ask and answer questions on complex topics written on threads like this one.
It does, though, make me consider that almost all the smart people I know of are quintessentially male. Not in that they are all men, but all have male interests and reasoning styles (the kinds of people attracted to this blog). So I could imagine that a really smart person that has more feminine interests would be more difficult to notice. Can you speak to that at all?
It's nice to know I've made a memorable impression on someone!
Feels like a "Categories Made For Man, Not Man For Categories" thing to do (sex- ?) gender-essentialism with interests and reasoning. There are definitely __trends__ with some predictive power (wordcels vs. shape rotators[1] really hit some nerves, I found it hilarious how like 99% of commenters here always claim to be shape rotators), but a lot of it just seems really context-dependent. Is a female computer[2] quintessentially male, for example? Less feminine than Rosie the Riveter, or more? It's easy to delineate broad distributional trends, but the exercise quickly gets absurd in the particulars. And totally-external social conditions (e.g. labour market dynamics) can shift such Timeless Trends surprisingly quickly. Incentives, ah, find a way.
That being said, I'm not sure what proportion of my traits are quintessentially male (QM) vs. quintessentially female (QF). I like to joke that being a Gemini means it's easier to get away with being both male and female at the same time. (This was a lot more ironic after I came out as trans.)
QM: working with hands/physical labour, tomboyish behaviour, stereotypical nerd interests like D&D, metalhead, aggressive/direct, appreciation of fine tools (knives are cool!), empathy-deficient, economic-thinking
QF: total wordcel (awful at ~all math and spatials), feminine fashions, submissive/accommodating, small talk and gossip, homebody, Lots Of Feelings Always (lol, hormones), conscientious neuroticism, shoe collection[3]
Basically, I guess I don't feel like intellect pays no dividends in QF areas? I'd much rather read Jia Tolentino than Terry Grossman; or gab with my geeky female friends about pan-coronavirus vaccines, rather than my female coworkers about who's sleeping with who (okay, I lied, that can actually get really fascinating). Smart is smart, no matter how it's channeled. Not __better__ - life isn't a morality play - but it's easier and more comfortable to be around intellectually-similar people. As with so many other traits.
What you might be gesturing at is QM things being more *legible*...computer science, academia, research, Nobel Prizes, even stupid shit like Jeopardy! championships or chess mastery. Men Being Really Smart is, like, a whole industry of respect-generation and -redistribution that tries really hard to pretend it's not. School definitely falls under this category, although I'd expect some shifts as the sex ratio in education achievement continues to distort further. (Didn't Andrew Yang say earlier this year that women graduate college like 35% more, or something? Crazy...)
I really don't like fuzzy wokeisms like "the invisiblization of women" or whatever, but there is some kernel of truth in that direction. A really smart person with feminine interests will mostly be recognized *within* that niche, not outside of it; I'm thinking of how even highly-successful female politicians/CEOs/whatever tend to get treated with the same paparazzi-Gawker vibe as celebrities, instead of the focus being on actual achievements. Conversely, channeling that intellect into perhaps-less-authentically-felt QM interests is likely to be more noticeable. This really seems unfortunate, cause incredibly-important QF things like parenting[4] sure do benefit bigly from applied smarts. We ought to incentivize this more!
I guess I'm sorta just rambling on with no clear closing, though. So I'll end by saying that one can chase __being noticed__ or __being smart__, but doing both at once is like serving two masters. Not impossible, but better check real carefully about that moonlighting clause. Additional terms and conditions may apply.
[1] https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)#Wartime_computing_and_electronics
[3] I think it's really precious how guys have tried to reclaim this QF interest under the "sneakerhead" rebranding. Makes for a great co-ed icebreaker, at least. Guys really ought to care more about teh fashuns, it's a strong comparative advantage...
[4] Who would you rather turn to for evidence-based parenting advice: Emily Oster, or Amy Chua? (Assume Scott is indisposed.)
Literally wrote a long, thoughtful, reply then my phone deleted it when I accidentally swiped away.
But to make long story short, I think your points about the "wordcel" thing and respect-generation get to the crux of my oversight.
Think our culture teaches us to instinctively value literary brilliance less than scientific smarts, hence why everyone wants to be a shape-rotator.
Also, appearing smart is a huge status game for men, who are more status-seeking by nature. For those reasons obviously the more conspicuous displays of what most people would deem smart are going to disproportionately come from men.
Was recently reading American Prometheus and was amused at how hard Oppenheimer tried to appear even more smart than he was.
You might be in a bubble. It seems more like everybody wants to be a Twitter or Youtube influencer, or maybe just make it to the next paycheck.
Maybe she needs to find a passion that fits her talents.
I had a shitty attitude in school, and didn't do very well until I encountered computer programming, and got swept away in productive passion.
Depends on the tests and what they are measuring. She may be spatially gifted/good at pattern matching, or she might be making up for poor/average maths scores with really good verbal abilities.
What course did she do at university? Maybe it didn't suit her talents, and insurance broker may be difficult because (to me) that's a sales job. High scoring on an IQ test doesn't mean you'll be good at sales, that's a whole other set of skills (including being able to manipulate people so that they happily sign up to buy the product you're selling).
To answer everything in order:
1. The tests were the Cattell B and the Culture Fair. The latter is purely pattern matching, similar to Raven's. The former leans much more on verbal reasoning and working memory.
2. To answer your question from the other thread, she's never been assessed for dyslexia or dyscalculia, but her vision isn't great generally due to an eye condition. Also, anything beyond basic mental arithmetic is something she struggles with in particular (3x13 is fine but 14x24 isn't). Even something like differentiating a basic term she would need to write out in order to solve, but her working memory appears to be otherwise fine when it comes to other things.
3. She studied econ, and despite struggling a lot with the mathier parts of the course (game theory was not fun for her) she still got a first-class degree. Oh and we grade things differently in the UK so I think her percentage works out at around a 3.8 GPA. Also, a lot of variability in her marks by subject. Like she either completely crushed it or did really bad. Little in-between.
4. That's the funny thing, because she's not very senior at the moment most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel, preparing PowerPoints, and occasionally using Power BI to visualise some stuff. She's generally A LOT better at the client-facing stuff, despite having a fair bit of social anxiety.
"most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel"
That makes me laugh, because I am atrocious at maths, yet somehow the office jobs I ended up in have me handling accounting, payroll, and creating spreadsheets in Excel to keep tracks of money etc.
We are not being assessed on our strengths!
I have the same problems with mental arithmetic and needing to write things down to work them out. I don't understand the magic words, I just do it all by rote memorisation.
I think she is a bit weird (not in a bad way!) Some of that 98 percentile IQ ought to show through in day to day life.
My cousin tested out 4 standard deviations above the mean. She always knew she was smarter than other people, and she had fun showing off. I don't think this helped her get along with people, though. My cousin never did anything with her genius, though. She went into the Army instead of college. Developed some post-Iraq health syndromes which VA couldn't really help her with. Now she's an alcoholic living on disability. I had my IQ tested four times, and I test out in the middle of the two standard deviations above the mean range—but my cousin, who is 20 years younger than I am, when she was just a kid would leave me in the dust with how quickly she could figure out a problem. And she had fun proving she was smarter than I was! But the thing I noticed about her was she was tremendously incurious. I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity? As for me, I'm a sub-genius, but I've always known I was smarter than most people, but I've always known that there were people who were smarter than I am. Kept me humble, but I'm always shocked how *focused* many geniuses seem to be.
Yeah definitely don't get that vibe from her that you got from your cousin. Like, I've taken Wechsler and scored pretty much the same as you, but my girlfriend generally struggles with things more than me despite trying harder. Her parents made her study like hell in high school, while I was coasting but she still scored worse than me in Math and English.
Definitely think the curiosity component has something to do with it. In many ways, it's hard to tell in every day life that she's smart simply because she's not really curious about stuff. In fact, she actively loathes me engaging her in theoretical about economics (what she majored in) or philosophy, and doesn't have many hobbies.
Think it's possible I was just under the illusion that smart people generally find life easier and maybe that isn't the case.
Here's a stupid question about the bleedin' obvious: is she dyslexic or has trouble with dyscalculia or something of that kind? If she tests as smart but has always struggled despite studying hard, something might be amiss in that department, and if nobody ever consisted testing for it, it can go undiagnosed for years.
"I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity?"
I can confirm that no, not so much. I was 115 IQ when I was young and 130 when I was older, and am currently doing seasonal cashier work with no idea what to do for the winter. IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
You can solve puzzles, at least. Do you try to solve harder and harder ones?
Not usually, I mostly hover at the same strength. Harder ones just make me think about the meaninglessness of spending time on puzzles. They've got to be solvable quickly enough to outrun ennui.
>IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
Citation needed
My older relative tells stories of getting D's in all his classes before getting a 97 Aptitude score in the military. He's both very smart and extremely hyperactive, so school was misery for him.
Spill some matchsticks and see how fast she counts them.
That is an interesting one. Sounds like a possibility of a learning disability to me. Dyslexia making reading difficult? ADHD making concentrating difficult?
I don't think you should automatically assume ADHD. Terman's study of geniuses showed that, although most did OK financially (most became professionals who earned better money than the average population), many geniuses didn't do anything with their "gifts". There were geniuses who became janitors and bus drivers. None of the Terman study geniuses earned any major prizes or made any significant advances to human knowledge. While one of the people's whose IQ wasn't high enough to qualify for the Terman study went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
She has an eye condition, but it doesn't effect her ability to read as far as I know. That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all! ADHD might be something to do with it, as she gets bored of everything apart from football (soccer) really quickly. Only other thing to note is that she's always had a lot of sensory troubles- textures, smells, tastes, and sounds REALLY bother her.
The fact that it turned out that way in two tests makes me think it's highly unlikely to be a fluke (and she's not lying, i've seen the results). Also her younger brother is at Oxford, so maybe something genetic there?
"That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all!"
Even if we don't assume dyslexia, an eye condition that makes it hard to focus on text would be a stumbling block when learning, and that would only reinforce itself - trying to read/study hurts her head, so she hates reading, so she doesn't read unless absolutely necessary, so it's harder for her to pick up information.
The sensory issues do sound like a problem with the wiring, as it were. Raw intelligence is all very well, but we have to process our environments through the equipment we have, and if she has the physiological equivalent of bright lights shining in her eyes while horns are blaring while sitting on tacks while smelling rotting fish, that is not going to make it easy to concentrate on learning and doing well.
Is she curious, though? Is she interested in learning new things? If not, I don't think you need look any further than her "curiosity quotient". If you're not curious about learning new things, you're not going to crack open a book nor want to spend your time school work. I've heard there are tests for CQ, but I've never seen one.
Also, there's the tall poppy syndrome. I'm not saying this applies to your GF, though.
I don't think you need to be curious to not struggle in school though, as in Shane Glean's example. Being a genius who works hard would be enough for most programs.
I'd agree, except if you don't give a shit about getting a degree, you're not going to make the effort. And maybe I'm old school, but I wouldn't want to take courses in anything I'm not interested in or curious about. Of course, the modern educational system is all about turning out cogs for the Machine.
but in this example, his girlfriend worked really hard in college
Reading adhdmemes suggests that sensory issues seem to be pretty common. They can't force their brain to stop focussing on the texture/smell/taste and focus on something else instead.
I agree.
As for the test question, I got high scores on standardized tests and also always felt like I processed information pretty quickly. That doesn’t always mean much for real world performance, though.
Yikes; here is what happens when liking or disliking a show (Rings of Power in this case) becomes a tribal identity marker:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Out of curiosity, does this crowd believe that either a 10 or a 1 rating is justified?
Neither, from what I can tell, though I haven't seen full episodes. If asked, I'd definitely be on the side nearer a 1 rating for casting decisions and what they've done to characters (CELEBRIMBOR SHOULD NOT BE THAT OLD, I WILL DIE ON THE COLD HILL OF HIMRING OVER THAT, ALSO WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THE 90S BOYBAND HAIR FOR THE MALE ELVES????) but visually people are finding it impressive.
I've seen online that Amazon owns IMDb and has put in place a moratorium on reviews in order to "filter out trolls" or something. That is the kind of action that will both artificially inflate ratings, and get people to give 1 or 2 star ratings just for spite.
https://deadline.com/2022/09/amazon-prime-reviews-moratorium-on-its-site-1235107016/
I have seen reviews and criticisms that were unfair and very harsh and very critical on grounds of wokeness. But there are some problems with (the little I've seen of) the show, e.g. the ponderous dialogue that is meant to sound profound but is just awful: "stones sink because they look down to the darkness"? "It is said the wine of victory is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it has fermented"? "I've seen some shit, no really I've seen some shit" (paraphrasing there, but that dialogue exchange really was just "i know you are but what am i?" level).
A 10 or a 1 - relative to what?
Imagine, for a moment, somebody takes the most sublime story every written, and manages to turn it into a slightly bad movie, which, in any other context, would "deserve", say, a 4.
I think people rating that slightly bad movie as a 1 is fair. In fact, I'd say it deserves worse than a 1.
I think there are, conversely, going to be people who will rate it a 10, not because they like the movie, but because they hate the story, or the people who like the story. If there's a substantial audience who genuinely loves it, great - but I think the people who rate it a 1 are generally accurately conveying their disinterest in it, and the people who rate it a 10 are not, in fact, accurately conveying their interest in the show.
Mind, I don't think the Elf Bible is the most sublime story ever written. I'm not a particular fan of Tolkien's work; it's all too ... unnecessary, for my tastes, and I would say that Peter Jackson's original trilogy were quite good, and the Hobbit trilogy - well, I'm not sure, I never bothered finishing them.
However, I think it's perfectly fair that somebody attempting to trade on the reputation of somebody else's work gets held to a different kind of standard than somebody making something on their own, and I think in particular that it is fair to judge on a curve that will make it much harder to achieve a given number. Which is to say - if you're trying to make money on somebody else's work, you, in a significant sense, start in the negative numbers, and have to work your way up.
Diversity is "Whatever". Either you do a good job with your show or you don't; if you do a good job, your show will stand on its own merits. If you start complaining about how racists don't like your show - well, I know that your show is shit, and you're just pulling a Sony to try to get as much money out of your bullshit as you can before the house of cards comes tumbling down.
"If you start complaining about how racists don't like your show - well, I know that your show is shit"
Part of this is that there is (so far) one village where the inhabitants could legitimately be brown (or BIPOC, or whatever the non-offensive term is) - the village of Tirharad, which is invented for the show, and is inhabited by descendants of humans who fought in the armies of Morgoth. Well, two actually - the other village is Hordern.
So this could and should be a village full of brown-skinned people. But the shots I've seen show it as majority white. Bronwyn, played by an Iranian-British actress, and her son Theo, played by an Indonesian-Australian actor, are the only two who are not white-white. So when the show had a chance to show us genuinely diverse setting (these villages are most likely populated by descendants of Men from Khand and Near Harad), no, they didn't do that.
But they did give us a black (or rather, mixed-race) Elf and a black Dwarven princess, also in a sea of mostly white members of their respective societies. So those decisions do seem less like 'organic diverse cast' and more like 'make Big Point of having Diverse Inclusive Characters'. And of course, ask how come there's a black Elf (and a solitary one so far, there's no hint of other black Elves) and bingo, you're a bigot who hates this show because you're a racist!
Harfoots: "They were browner of skin than other hobbits, had no beards, and did not wear any footwear. They lived in holes they called smials, a habit which they long preserved, and were on friendly terms with the Dwarves, who traveled through the High Pass.[1]"
Just make them somewhat darker, and you're pretty consistent with canon. Even if they appeared later than the Rings of Power is set, Harfoots have to be descended from someone.
"Browner" is doing a lot of work here. The showrunners are using it as justification for having black British and Australian actors among the Harfoots.
But "browner" in the context of "based on English people" can mean more sallow in skin tone when compared to peaches-and-cream complexions, but not black/brown in the current US racial categorisation. And even there, the irony is that our two main Harfoot characters, Poppy and Nori, are fair-skinned and (in Nori's case) blue-eyed. Kavanagh (even if it is spelled 'Kavenagh') is an Irish name and she's got the colouring to go with it.
I do understand the need to collapse the timeline and have all your major characters in one place, and the Fall of Númenor is one of those Big Damn Epic Events (if it ever gets made) that they really do have to include in the course of the proposed five seasons.
But they've chucked in some "who that?" original new characters, and why should I *care* about some woman out in the back-end of nowhere making googly eyes at an elf serving his term in the outpost? You haven't given me any reason yet to know who they are or what they are going to do. We get Galadriel, we get Elrond, we get Gil-galad, we get Celebrimbor, we get Durin, but we get the new showrunner versions of all these ("oh no,they're not Hobbits, they're Harfoots wink wink") and I swear, if Meteor Guy does turn out to be Gandalf I will do damage (though I'm kind of thinking he might be Saruman?) Creepy Morgoth cultists? Raft Guy (again, ton of speculation that this is the show's version of Sauron as Annatar, which I hope not)? Galadriel deciding to swim all the way back to the shores of Eriador through the Sundering Seas after she noped out of going to Valinor? (That one was really special).
So Galadriel is young Warrior Princess who is *so* bad-ass she can dispatch an ice troll all by her ownsome with a couple twirls of her sword while her useless, stupid, men stand around doing nothing but being a distraction. The reviews I've seen said that the fight is over so fast, it's anticlimactic. So that's a mistake they made: they want to show that she is Just That Awesome, but they made the fight *too* easy for her so people don't care.
Ah well, it's early days yet and the rest of the season might turn out to be good. The general consensus so far seems to be "Don't go in expecting 'Lord of the Rings' and you won't be disappointed; if you think of it as a TV high fantasy show, then it's pretty good. If you're looking for Tolkien's lore, you won't enjoy it".
Fantasy as a genre is the kind of thing people tend to love or hate. Doubt tribal identity has anything to do with it. Maybe, maybe generational identity has something to do with it.
The people who hate fantasy aren't watching Amazon LotR and giving it bad reviews, they're just ignoring it.
And the people who love fantasy do tend to be somewhat critical, they don't just give an automatic 10 to anything with an elf in it.
I suspect that a lot of reviews both for and against are from people who aren't fantasy fans and only care because of the culture war angle.
Neither 10 nor 1 is justified in my opinion. I was the disappointed by acting (especially among the elven actors), and the narrative involves too much in the way of explanation and flashbacks. After watching the first episode, I'd rate it 6. If it were less than 5, I probably wouldn't watch any future episodes. But I'll stay tuned for at least the next couple of episodes to see if it gets better.
Would you watch it if it was Generic Fantasy Adventure?
No, not if it didn't hold my interest. I have no problem with them taking liberties with Tolkien. Just don't rely on special effects to get past poor acting, plotting, or pacing.
Right. I don't have an issue with changes to Tolkien, either.
But, if you are trading on Tolkien's name, then I do think it is fair to come in with a set of expectations such that what would, with a generic fantasy story, be a 5, might instead be rated as a 1 - because they're trading on, and making money off of, Tolkien's reputation.
I said taking liberties with Tolkien. Whether you think they took too many is a different kettle of elves. But just thank your stars that Disney didn't get ahold of the franchise. We'd have a Little Galadriel cartoon movie and Orcs on Ice skate shows.
If there was a show called Generic Fantasy Adventure and it was a clever parody, I think people would watch it.
I struggle to come up with a sufficiently generic title, lol.
Rings of Power works for me. But I suspect that was exactly your joke.
An interesting take which isn't about the casting.
https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-watch-the-rings-of-power?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I disagree with this part:
"For the most part, we all scarcely noticed because neither the source material nor the adapations were very good. The Shannara books? Who cares. Wheel of Time? Eh, ok. Narnia? Nice start, but the 2nd and 3rd movies were failures, if of different sorts."
The Narnia movies are different, yes they were trying to leap off the success of the Tolkien movies, but so too were they (and the adaptations of His Dark Materials) trying to stand on their own as (ugh) properties. (That the Pullman adaptations sank after one movie just brings out my Schadenfreude).
TV adaptations of Shannara - agree there, those books had their time and that was the late 70s. Nobody was really expecting much there.
But Wheel of Time *was* expected to be The Big Fantasy Doorstopper Novel Adaptation. This was taking on not Tolkien, so much, as GRRM and *his* creation. Bezos allegedly wanted a GoT of his own, and while this is being talked up in relation to Rings of Power, Wheel of Time was the first attempt at this. It's been renewed for a third season, but the fact that the writer can dismiss it as "Eh, ok" is damning for the failure of WoT to become the new GoT.
A lot of the complaints by fans of the books for the WoT adaptation sound familiar when it comes to Rings of Power. Are Jordan's fans all racists and bigots, too?
The rest of the review is spot-on; the showrunners are woefully inexperienced and it shows in the writing. I'll pull out a chunk of quotes from Tolkien's letters about the language he uses, but let me finish here, first:
"There's only three ways to make this feel special--to essentially reclaim the Iron Throne of High Fantasy, as it were"
No. The pinnacle of High Fantasy is not the Iron Throne, which is but a debased imitation in deliberate contra-distinction to the real pinnacle.
That peak is the three Silmarils, and the attempts here at using Tolkien's name and characters for their own grandiosity is the creation of the crown bearing the three Silmarils, which burns its wearer, because they were never meant to be so used, and the wearer is unworthy.
No-one can claim the Silmarils for their own. Create your own work, in tribute or in defiance, as it may be, but do not stretch out your hand to take that beauty high above your imagination or capability to create yourself.
This relates to a point I was going to make-- a major reason for revising and recasting older work is that we don't have enough good new work.
From a draft of an unsent letter of 1955:
"(T)he pain that I always feel when anyone – in an age when almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or 'personal expression' – immediately dismisses out of court deliberate 'archaism'. The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like. But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom. Of course, not being specially well read in modern English, and far more familiar with works in the ancient and 'middle' idioms, my own ear is to some extent affected; so that though I could easily recollect how a modern would put this or that, what comes easiest to mind or pen is not quite that. But take an example from the chapter that you specially singled out (and called terrible): Book iii, "The King of the Golden Hall'. 'Nay, Gandalf!' said the King. 'You do not know your own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better.'
This is a fair sample — moderated or watered archaism. Using only words that still are used or known to the educated, the King would really have said: 'Nay, thou (n')wost not thine own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall . . .' etc. I know well enough what a modern would say. 'Not at all my dear G. You don't know your own skill as a doctor. Things aren't going to be like that. I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casualties' — and then what? Theoden would certainly think, and probably say 'thus shall I sleep better'! But people who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom. You can have 'I shall lie easier in my grave', or 'I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed at home' – if you like. But there would be an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual 'archaic' English that I have used. Like some non-Christian making a reference to some Christian belief which did not in fact move him at all.
Or p. 127, as an example of 'archaism' that cannot be defended as 'dramatic', since it is not in dialogue, but the author's description of the arming of the guests – which seemed specially to upset you. But such 'heroic' scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs. Why deliberately ignore, refuse to use the wealth of English which leaves us a choice of styles – without any possibility of unintelligibility.
I can see no more reason for not using the much terser and more vivid ancient style, than for changing the obsolete weapons, helms, shields, hauberks into modern uniforms.
'Helms too they chose' is archaic. Some (wrongly) class it as an 'inversion', since normal order is 'They also chose helmets' or 'they chose helmets too'. (Real mod. E. 'They also picked out some helmets and round shields'.) But this is not normal order, and if mod. E. has lost the trick of putting a word desired to emphasize (for pictorial, emotional or logical reasons) into prominent first place, without addition of a lot of little 'empty' words (as the Chinese say), so much the worse for it. And so much the better for it the sooner it learns the trick again. And some one must begin the teaching, by example.
I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as 'contemporary' – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one's friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!"
And this is where our showrunners/scriptwriters fall down. They try for archaism, or at least profundity, and they fall face-first into tushery instead (the difference between ships and stones) because they have the modern mind-set and can't think themselves into the cast of mind that can say such lofty sentiments and mean them and use them naturally.
What is more natural to them are the (terrible) attempts at banter ("you smell of rotting leaves" dear oh dear) and informality.
Agree this is an interesting and worthwhile take. Thanks for the link.
What do you think the relevant tribes are? I don't know if the show has gotten linked to political identity. One alternative split is between those who have read the _Silmarillion_, or fans of Tolkien's writing more generally, and those who haven't.
I watched the _Fellowship_ movie. It was better than I expected, but bad enough so I didn't watch the next two. The things that bothered me probably wouldn't have if I hadn't read the books.
But why are certain books so precious? People who like Dickens tend to like the musical Oliver! which changes a lot, people dance and sign along the streets for instance, something that just wasn’t in the book. And all of the multiple versions of A Christmas Carol are different - the sequence, the events, and ghosts are nearly always different from the books. Nobody cares. Hamlet is always curtailed, or it would run for 4 hours. In fact the point about seeing multiple hamlets is seeing different interpretations.
What’s the reason for the demand for total onscreen loyalty for Tolkien and other similar books? Something to do with genre fandom rather than normal readership.
Not *necessarily* total onscreen loyalty. I have my disagreements with some of Jackson's choices (e.g. making Gimli comic relief, the treatment of Denethor and so on) but to be fair, I never expected anything to ever come out of trying to make movies of the book(s). Animation seemed the nearest medium to come close to portraying them, and Ralph Bakshi's attempt was honest but a failure.
Then the movies were announced, and I was torn between "this will be a mess" and "who on earth will they get to direct it?" When Peter Jackson was chosen, I was astounded: a guy from New Zealand best known for some B-movies of gross horror (though enjoyable) and questionable taste (Meet The Feebles, ahem ahem) was going t be given this project?
I didn't know what to expect. That we got something as good as we did was amazing. Of course, greed kicked in and they stretched The Hobbit out into three movies when it should have been one, but even there, when he got it right, he got it right.
And for all the complaining I did about The Hobbit, boy did I not know when I had it good. Little did I know that Bezos was going to spend hundreds of millions for Warrior Galadriel, The Little Bullied Elf Girl That Could (outdo any of those stupid guys and who is right and they're all wrong).
Shakespeare adaptations, like opera productions, routinely get put through the latest wringer of artistic interpretation (mainly down to directors needing to do something novel this time round because there are centuries of productions of the play) but even the most excessive do generally stick to the main plot (I've often thought that a race-swapped version of Othello where everyone is black but Othello is white would be striking enough to make the point about race and discrimination and being an outsider fresh once more, I have no idea if anyone ever tried this).
But imagine a version of Oliver Twist which decides that really, Oliver is a young trans kid, Fagin is a Hispanic drag queen who takes in and shelters runaway queer kids, Nancy and Bill Sykes are a pair of gay lovers who are murdered by a homophobic mob on trumped-up charges of crime, and Mr Brownlow is really a white supremacist paedophile whom Oliver/Olivia kills in the end, while burning down the luxurious mansion (Brownlow made his fortune in the slave trade, naturally), and then we see Olivia and the Dodger emigrating to America to start over in the New World where nobody knows them and they can be who they really are.
"But that's not Dickens", people protest, to which the reply is "Oh, so you're all transphobic racists, that's why you're criticising this!"
>Warrior Galadriel, The Little Bullied Elf Girl That Could
I mean, she did follow Feanor (even when her father turned back) and then she refused the call to return and took a Ring, all because she wanted a realm of her own; she was certainly an ambitious warrior. But this is a negative thing in the source, something which she has to overcome when Frodo offers her the One.
An ambitious *ruler*, which is not necessarily the same thing as an ambitious *warrior*. If she'd taken a magic sword, the latter case would be much stronger.
This puts a finger on an issue of a lot of feminism-- the kickass heroine and such, where bad behavior gets valorized because it's a woman being aggressive.
I don't think that extreme inequivalent to what is going on with rings of power, which in any case isn't based on much, just footnotes.
And I wasn't just talking about the latest opposition to wokeness but people who hate any interpretation of a book on screen, there are people who hate any representation that isn't scene by scene, and word by word the same as the book.
The ruin of the story of Denethor took away at least half the value of the LoTR movies for me. It's one of the best character stories in the book, much more interesting than Theoden's remembering he's a king. I don't know whether Jackson didn't understand despair, despaired of conveying it with the tools at hand, or didn't think his fat rich American audience would have any truck with it. But...what a loss.
I've seen a theory that the first LOTR movie was good because it was at a never-to-be-repeated sweet spot when CGI was getting good, but it still also made sense to have practical special effects.
I still have some hope that good movies can be made that include strong practical effects and enough CGI to handle things that previously would have been terrible (like the brief claymation stuff in Terminator 1) or impossible.
What we seem to be getting is almost entirely CGI, even when practical effects would have been (by historical standards) easy and effective. That the Star Wars prequels were practically shot entirely in front of a green screen, something went wildly awry. Sometimes we get a good modern movie in which there is clearly some CGI, but appears to be there to touch up the edges instead of be the core of the movie. Dunkirk, which I watched recently for the first time, seemed to have a really good mix - mostly practical.
I think people have gotten pickier about details in recent decades. There didn't used to be dialogue coaches.
yeh I dont think the dialogue coaches on Rings of Power were as good as you think :-).
I have often heard complaints about movie adaptations of popular books.
Jackson's LOTR movies did change some, but were masterfully done. As far as movie adaptations go, they are some of the best ever done. I have heard very few complaints from anyone about them.
People just get upset when their favorite books get done poorly by someone who doesn't care about the stories. If Jackson had turned LOTR into some kind of self-insert fan-fiction, people would have hated that too.
The cast diversity sucks all the air out of the room in online discourse, alas. That is part of the story, but I doubt it's the whole story.
The creators are inserting a lot of their own material (that's not in Tolkien). I would be surprised if Tolkien Purists per se are *that* big a slice of the population, but I could be wrong (disclaimer: I have read all of LOTR, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, parts of the Unfinished Tales, and I've had a beer at the Eagle & Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met). I haven't seen much *subversion* of Tolkien yet, if we make a distinction between adding material and subverting existing material.
Galadriel, Warrior Princess is not in Tolkien, to be clear (she is a *powerful* character, but doesn't show that power by wielding a sword). Maybe some people see this as a dramatic subversion in itself.
As I recall, Galadriel struggled mentally with Sauron-- that doesn't give anything to put in a tv show.
This is Second Age Galadriel, she does a lot of travelling around Middle-earth to find where she can found a realm of her own. And she doesn't need to be the main lead in this adaptation; if you're going for The Rings of Power, that should be Celebrimbor.
Celebrimbor taking over in Eregion from Galadriel could be an interesting sub-plot because you have all the potential of family drama and trying to avoid starting yet more internecine Elvish conflict, now that Morgoth is defeated and his forces (including Sauron) scattered to the four airts of the world. That must have been a delicate political situation to handle.
Celebrimbor founding the Gwaith-i-Mirdain, setting up as Lord of Eregion, establishing friendly terms with the Dwarves and a friendship with Narvi, the desire for peace in a land exhausted by war, Númenor at its peak, and the rumours of something stirring once more, are they true or just people jumping at shadows, and then the arrival of Annatar. Elrond and Gil-galad distrust him, so why does Celebrimbor allow him in? The entire backstory of Celebrimbor and his heritage.
There is a lot you can focus on, if you don't try to shove in diddley-aye fake Irish accent Hobbits and Original Characters whose only function is to have an Elf-Human romance (just like Arwen and Aragorn!)
Give us Khazad-dum. Give us Gil-galad in Lindon. Give us Elrond as his herald, and Galadriel finally arriving in Lothlorien. Give us the forging of the Rings and the dreadful revelation of Annatar's true nature. Give us Númenor, at once at its greatest and its most decadent, falling into the same trap of pride and desire as the Elves did in their fashion, and bringing about its own downfall in a cataclysm that haunts human imagination to this day. Yes, and give us Near Harad and Khand too, if you want to tell tales of non-white people. Are there any of the people of Bor the Faithful left at all, after these many years?
I've avoided the show because I watched part of the Wheel of Time series that Amazon put out a little while ago, and it was actively different than the books. One of the main characters was inexplicably married in the first episode, and then his wife is killed in the first episode. That kind of change makes no sense to me at all, and *should* result in a different character, so he either is the same as before and they added a major plot change for no reason, or they made him a different character. There were also a lot of continuity issues, like meeting characters at different times and in different ways, resulting in some people never meeting that had relationships in the book. It also apparently got much worse than the episodes I watched, with significant amounts of gay sex (up from none in the book!) and a significantly different ending.
Even from the first scenes it was obviously pushing some "diversity" angles as well, with people from a tiny village and no outside contact (an important subplot related to the lack of outsiders and the fact that almost everybody looked similar) being various mixed races. On some level it's not a big deal, and doesn't change the story much. On another level it shows a willingness to change the story to tell a different story, and given the other changes it felt like you weren't really watching the story you already knew and liked, but a completely different story.
If someone wants to make a Tolkien-like show and make it super diverse and tell whatever story they want, that's fine with me. If it's well made I'll probably watch it. If someone wants to bank on a major name, but then change it to be super diverse and tell whatever story they want, then that frustrates me. They bought the rights to use Tolkien's stuff because of the fanbase that comes with it. You can't go against that same fanbase or pull a bait-and-switch on what the story is and expect people to just be cool with that. That's the whole point of making it Tolkien-based!
For what it's worth, I think there was a lot more gay sex in Wheel of Time than you think. It was just couched in aphorisms like "pillow friends".
That was in later books (like book 10 and later, not a core part of book 1) and is not necessarily sexual. Some of the references (Moiraine and Siuan in New Spring for instance) seemed directly related to having a shoulder to cry on because their training was so hard.
"One of the main characters was inexplicably married in the first episode, and then his wife is killed in the first episode."
- That was it for me. I didn't continue past the first episode entirely on the basis of that. The only possible narrative reason you'd do that was to simplify his story (allowing you to skip the actual source of the character's angst) - but his entire narrative arc flows from the scene that you can now skip, and if you actually skip it, you've completely fucked his role in the first five books, at the very least. As you say, it's a completely different character.
(Also I didn't like how pathetic they made Moraine, or how useless they made the villagers, in the battle. Also we shouldn't have even seen that battle. Also that battle went on way too long, and it just got boring. Also why did they add a kidnapping?)
I've really been looking forward to a professionally done WoT series or movies for a long time, so I stuck it out for a few more episodes. At first I thought I was mis-remembering parts (like Thom being in Emond's Field when they met him), but quickly realized that they didn't care at all about accurately relating the story as written.
Unfortunately, there is almost no chance of anyone ever doing a different version that's more accurate to the books. Amazon isn't going to create a new series using the rights, and nobody else is going to touch a series already being done, even if they had the rights.
On the plus side I re-read all of the books and enjoyed that more than watching the series anyway.
"Unfortunately, there is almost no chance of anyone ever doing a different version that's more accurate to the books."
I dunno, man. Have you seen how many Three Musketeers and Zorro movies there are? Hell, there are like three film versions of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Basically, "it's bad to make movie versions of the same popular stories over and over" is a naturally arty opinion and only fairly recently got mainstreamed.
I don't mind changes, in and of themselves; you have to make changes to adapt the media to the format.
But you should, I don't know, do a good job?
The wife was introduced solely to be shoved in the fridge. That's astonishingly bad writing. Weren't they trying to do the "diverse" thing? And they rolled right out of the gate with one of the cardinal sins of anti-diverse-writing? And then they added a bit where another strong female protagonist gets kidnapped and now we have to go rescue her? These books are fucking long enough, work on condensing the material down, instead of adding pointless plot points that add nothing to the story, and are sexist to boot.
I've also heard folks over at the "SilmarillionMemes" subreddit complaining about a lot of the elves having short hair.
I know it sounds like petty nit-picking, but it really doesn't work when (a) trying to both evoke memories of the movies while being constrained by Warner Studios that 'you can't copy the visuals of our movies or we'll sue your asses off' and (b) even black reviewers are laughing about Arondir's hairstyle (here around 35:28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMXL4NiKJ0A).
Gil-galad is the only male Elf allowed to have long hair. Galadriel's long hair is treated stupidly in the one scene where she *should* have it tied up or tied back, when she's fighting the ice troll and looking like she's strolling onto a shoot for a shampoo advertisement with it falling loosely all around her shoulders.
As I said, Warner Studios are making sure that Amazon can't copy the movie look, but surely they could have done better for the Elves than 90s hairstyles?
https://manforhimself.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/james-van-der-beek-1200.jpg?v=1617096315
I thought he was actually writing a mythology for England. Why do you think he wasn't.
I don't know where you're seeing people who insist that criticism of the show must be racism. I'm seeing people who dislike the show for being uninspired and they aren't being called racists.
No, they made the cast diverse, and the predictable right-left split emerged.
yeh, that's it mostly. Although the Irish harfoots have other criticisms.
Of course these "races' who intermarry would in fact all have the same skin colour, but so what? We can hardly exclude all non white actors from a lot of historical fiction and fantasy for that reason. In the excellent The Personal History of David Copperfield, Dev Patel -- of British Indian descent - plays the titular character. However he is playing a white man, or else the reactions of everybody around him would have been different.
I was going to mention Dev Patel for a different movie; he stars in The Green Knight, playing a nephew of King Arthur. It was a little jarring at first, but race is a complete non-issue in the story so it's not a big deal.
Also, if King Arthur had actually existed, his nephew would have been in no way English. Arthur is famous for having fought to keep the English *out* of what would later become known as England, and the warrior aristocracy of the British Isles at that time would be a mixture of proto-Welsh and ex-Roman. Nobody knows for sure what that would have looked like, but it would have been on the dark and swarthy side of contemporary England.
The “romans” were romanised proto-Welsh for the most part. The romans weren’t that dark either, but if you were being accurate then the Britons would have had darker hair, but not skin. That’s visible even today in the U.K.
I'm assuming you don't mean "diverse" in the sense of, a fellowship of humans, elves, dwarves, wizards and hobbits unites in the face of evil and learns to get along despite ancient elf-dwarf grudges?
LOL. Good point. I was trying to be as neutral as possible. They cast actors of other than European ancestry, and people got very angry. I admit to not having watched the show, more because I'm too lazy to get Netflix than anything else, but I knew what the fuss was about.
Sounds plausible. That hadn't occurred to me.
Can I come and live in your world, it sounds very peaceful.
Is it just me or is Astral Codex Ten much slower to load than other Substacks?
- When I try to load the site it hangs for 30 seconds to a minute
- The first time I scroll down to the comments the site can hang for 2-3 minutes.
Does anyone else have this problem? I am reading in Safari on an IPad 9.
Have you done a Wi-Fi speed check with your iPad lately? I sometimes see slow loading on my iPhone.
yes, this open thread makes my computer sound like a jet engine
Yes , I think it's the volume of comments and use of JavaScript..
I haven't noticed any difference, but then I'm on a desktop PC so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
If you were given the following brief, how would you even start?
We are looking for ideas for a system to objectively grade ability.
The goal is an alternative to existing institutions that grade on a bell curve - instead we want an absolute yardstick that allows us to compare any two individuals worldwide (provide they have both gone through the process/taken the test.)
Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire.
Ideally the test (if there is one) can be taken multiple times by the same individual. It can be taken at any time by any individual. Very ideally, it is a simple process to organise/distribute, such that rich and poor communities alike can participate. But most important is that it cannot be cheated or gamed and end up lying about an individual's abilities.
This process might be applied to the academic fields or practical ones, but really we're interested in any area where skill, competence or knowledge need to be guaranteed.
Right now I'm thinking about procedurally generated challenges, and grading somehow (by time taken or quality of result) the way they get solved. But right away that limits the system to only those fields that can have challenges procedurally generated and algorithmically graded (like, for eg. GCSE-level Maths but not higher level Maths, and certainly not English.) It also probably allows a determined-but-stupid individual to simply take the test enough times to learn the shape of all possible problems by heart*.
*this isn't necessarily a problem if the space of generated problems maps perfectly onto the entire domain the subject was supposed to be learning - but that itself is a pretty big ask.
I feel like I'm probably missing other promising avenues though.
Did you read the entries above on IQ?
"Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire."
Are you going to check if your modern-day applicant can plough a field with a horse-plough, write copper-plate as a professional copyist, or knows how to make an axle-tree?
Because if you're testing for "what can people of today do that people five generations ago could have done?" you are selecting for a limited range. Someone a hundred and fifty years ago could probably have driven a horse and cart, but not a modern car; someone who can drive a car probably can't harness a horse to a cart and drive it. So basically clerical work, though cooking might work (can they both cook an edible stew?)
If you're asking about "who would have been the better hire?" then you are definitely asking about clerical work, and even then office work in 1872 would not be very comparable to office work today.
Several people have taken this line and I just don't see where it's coming from. Geometry for example hasn't fundamentally changed in a thousand years. New skills may appear, that did not exist before, and that will simply lead to new tests being added to the stack.
With Carl below we ended up breaking subjects down into many atomic parts. It may be that some atoms fall out of favour over time as employers stop needing them and people stop wanting them. So, eg "Use of an Abacus" or "Coding in FORTRAN".
But anyone who does decide to learn those things could still be compared directly to their forefathers. The point is to move away from grade inflation.
A couple of people have answered as if we're looking for a single test event that grades ability in every subject at once. Maybe thinking I was after a replacement IQ test?
So I'm just clarifying that what I'm thinking about is a general approach to testing, which will still end up having lots of different implementations for different areas/domains.
If the general testing process is, as it is right now, "sit silently in a room and answer questions written on paper, which a trusted authority then marks using a rubric" - that doesn't necessitate that we all sit one huge test that covers everything. The general approach is used to make tests for English, Maths, Science, etc. and the results are good(ish) at letting us know if a given person has any understanding of those things.
The main issue is your desire to avoid having to renorm the test. It's straightforward to construct a test for a given ability: if you want to who's the best at running 100m, have people run 100m. Norm against your desired time, done. But a test like that would need to be renormed because the applicability of the quality measured to the goal will drift. It'll turn out that in 10 years we want to hire people who can run 110 yards, over hurdles, or swim 100 yards, et cetera -- and of course our 100m run test will start to produce inaccurate predictions -- or we'll have to renorm it. Same thing happens even for stuff as quantitative as mathematical aptitude: at one point we test for constructive geometry proofs, because logic and geometry are the desired abilities, and later we test use of logarithms, and still later quaternions or God knows what, whatever is useful for the current jobs.
The only way I can see to avoid that, for a test of intellectual abilities, is if you believe in general intelligence g, and construct a test that measures that. But then you run up against all the conventional criticisms of IQ and standardized tests, which is that the "language" in which the test is expressed (possibly literally its vocabulary and grammar, possibly its notation, context of problems, et cetera, even in something as clear-cut as math) may change in its penetrability over time, and between demographics, so your test may be irrelevantly extra hard or extra easy for different groups, and change over time -- again, necessitating renorming.
The only thing I've ever heard gets sort of close to what you want are those parts of the standard IQ test which consist of mental spatial manipulation ("Consider this drawing of a 3D object, and draw what the object would look like if you rotated it 90 degree about a vertical axis.") Those I've heard are well correlated with IQ and have almost no "language" issue because they're very easy to explain how to do (but difficult to actually do, particularly when under time pressure).
You can probably find some IQ tests with those kinds of tasks on them, and maybe try to find other abstract manipulation tasks which are very easy to state, but which someone has found correlated with g (assuming you believe in g).
Going to read this through again in the morning. I think the re-norming thing might be a good lead - because your example of sprinting 100m is a case of something that's naturally objective (the definition of metres or seconds won't change) but then gets "normed" into something that drifts.
Presumably this conversion is happening for the convenience of the employer, so they don't have to understand metres and seconds themselves even while making decisions to hire people who do.
No, I get that, but you're asking for a test that doesn't need to be redesigned or renormed over a long period of time -- let's say at least a decade. What are the odds that the exact detailed job requirements desired by the employer don't change at all? What would an employer looking for a programmer put in his job ad in 2022, and how would it differ from 2012, or 2002? That's a problem. The only way to avoid that is to measure some "timeless" ability that *underlies* these more detailed job requirements.
The equivalent for athletic vents would be measuring something broad like VO2 max, which should give you a broad "aerobic endurance" ability that will rank first-rate marathoners and 1500m freestyle swimmers and championship cross-country skiiers all high, and people who aren't good at those things low. That way if the Olympics gets rid of the marathon and substitutes some weird obstacle course instead, your test will still be useful to predict who will do well.
The only quality in the human mind that seems like this is g, the famous "general intelligence" ability, the very existence of which is debated popularly, although I think the pros are pretty united in believing it does. So basically only an IQ test will sort people well however the detailed job requirements change over time.
What I'm thinking of now is that there's a bright line separating the individual's tested abilities on one hand and the employer's requirements on the other.
An individual's "objective" skill level could be written as a long list of atomic "achievements": this guy has geometric, logic and logarithms but quaternions are as yet missing from his list.
This presentation wouldn't even need to have "Maths" as a subject, except as a categorisation to filter the atoms with - so you're not wading through the guy's equally verbose Dancing repertiore.
Presumably the only reason this seems ungainly is that the employer doesn't want to wade through it all. So we use this higher-level concept of Maths-the-subject which arguably introduces subjectivity and uncertainty.
But actually, if you look at eg, coding jobs, it's very much granular. They want Angular, React, DevOps, whatever, because they know the exact skills they need and they need them now.
If someone tried to hire a coder and all they said was, "you need to be good at Coding", most coders might conclude that this employer doesn't really know what he's talking about.
And of course the employer wouldn't be wading through individual atoms, they'd be being matched automatically against a list of requirements he'd assembled previously.
EDIT: and of course if job requirements are going to change over time, that just means new little atoms are going to keep appearing for people to collect.
I'm very much now thinking about lots of small, quick, "tightly scoped" tests rather than very broad, profound ones like IQ.
Probably depends on the employer. I happen to be hiring right now, for a job that requires some pretty strong technical skills, but my #1 criterion is actually a certain way of thinking, which can be proven by skills in a number of areas. I know some of them, so I can pick out certain aspects of candidate life histories as signals, but I'm concerned I might miss something because I may not realize a certain line item in a person's CV indicates competence in this broad area of thinking that I need. So if there were a test that I could give that would measure this stuff well, I would definitely pay money for it.
Just out of interest, are you able to put into words the kind of thinking you're looking for? Or is it a know it when I see it situation?
What you've described cannot be done, though I'm not sure exactly what problem you have with the general intelligence factor? It does most of what is important here, and indeed is probably the best we're likely to be able to do for the forseeable future.
If anyone here "knew where to start" on this problem (in terms of creating something more than tests of general intelligence), then it would be a problem that would have been solved by intelligence researchers/psychometricians/corporations/the military long ago.
It's also likely that even if you were to somehow come up with some amazing test of "general ability", it wouldn't receieve any kind of purchase in terms of driving hiring and promotion decisions in the real world (at least in western countries), because it's likely to be a highly heritable trait and one for which enormous racial differences would almost certainly exist, and that by today's definition of the word would make any such test "biased".
Again, most of what you're talking about it already covered by the general intelligence factor. And even that has limited use in society today because it leads to "not enough" non-asian minorities from being hired, meaning its either illegal to use it or it otherwise makes an institution "look bad".
Unlesss you have some profound insight that allows you to know that some accurate test of "general ability" would reveal no racial differences in said ability exists (in spite of all evidence to the contrary today), there's absolutely no reason to expect that such a test would be any more acceptable than IQ tests today.
And no, IQ tests today are not "culturally biased" or whatever other flippant dismissal anybody wants to given for them here.
Ability at what? There is no generalized "ability at everything". Skills (especially) are context sensitive. This is a major wrinkle in the "just teach them how to learn/just teach critical thinking skills and let them figure stuff out" fad in education--it's self-defeating. Critical thinking only happens in context of a topic. And is massively sensitive to *having stuff to reason from*. Without core content knowledge, all the "higher order skills" are useless and, in fact, detrimental. Because it's really easy to reason yourself into believing all the things you want to believe without the real world there to tell you that no, balancing a pyramid on its tip isn't going to work well without massive support structures.
So a test that detects ability in one area will be necessarily very different than one that works for another area. And it's fractal--the more sensitive you want to get, the more that even *similar* areas will differ.
My first impression is you can't make a test that can't be gamed for the same reason you can't make a lock that can't be opened; a test is a game, to make it ungameable is to make it purposeless.
There's the problem of the scope of what you're testing; if you're testing total ability including social skills, they'll have to work with other people, and once they start working with other people there's the difficulty in figuring out which people did what.
My attempt would be something like a three-step trial period. The first step they work with the test taker who walks them through simple tasks, the second they work with the test taker who starts giving them wrong instructions and sees how long it takes them to realize, the third you throw them at something monstrously difficult with no instructions. Although that one's probably going to be a bit holistic.
> My first impression is you can't make a test that can't be gamed for the same reason you can't make a lock that can't be opened; a test is a game, to make it ungameable is to make it purposeless.
My first thought reading that was something where, like capitalism, to game the system is the same thing as using the system as intended. As long as the outcome is, "we now know how good you are at X."
Interesting thoughts on your three-step process. It brings to mind the steps-to-mastery idea where the apprentice learns the rules, the journeyman follows them, and the master breaks them.
I went and answered your social skills point under Spruce's reply instead. That's what I get for reading too quickly.
"My first thought reading that was something where, like capitalism, to game the system is the same thing as using the system as intended."
I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true for capitalism, as is evident from the abundance of financial crimes being committed all the time. If it was true, there'd be no need for agencies like the SEC to enforce the rules of the game.
Even capitalism can be gamed, through robbery and scamming.
I think one of the problems you'll run into is that hireability in many fields requires people who can come up with reasonable solutions to problems that don't have a right answer. There probably will be objectively better and worse answers, but there will also be trade-offs involved where how you argue for your chosen approach is as important as which approach you pick. This of course becomes even more important when humans are involved. Objective grading can take you further than one might think, and it's a great first-stage filter if you have a large stack of applications, but I don't think any company who knows what's good for them will stop using job interviews in a later stage of the hiring process.
And then of course there's the bit where if you're in the US, being able defend a potential lawsuit is as important a measure for your grading system than what it actually measures - even if you're tring to measure empathy (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/08/seeming-and-being-empathetic/) but definitely if you're desinging SAT reading questions (http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13956.html) - which are so formulaic they might as well be procedurally generated, I'm sure AIs will be good enough for that very soon.
I'm walking a strange line here where, to help promote a direction for thinking about it, I'm coming down with some concrete statements like "this is to help employers select people".
Yet then when we follow that thought to areas like, employers also need social skills or, employers need to cover their arses legally, my instinct is that's a direction that's leading away from the goal - which is, can we come up with a system that makes skill/competence legible.
On your first point, having no right answer is a well understood property of lots of subjects already, (ie, English essays) so there was no way to avoid grappling with it.
I would say that there's no reason to categorise subjects in the same way we do now. I could easily imagine Social Skills or Teamwork being just another axis you get scored on alongside Maths, English, Strength and Agility.
This a massive ask if the test cannot be taken under controlled conditions, but the good news is I don't think the content of the test matters as much as it's (lack of) hackability. Being that the brief states that this is the 'most important' part, I can think of a few ways of minimising that risk.
(Note: these suggestions are mostly only relevant to online tests)
1. Requiring some formal identification to be provided before taking the test. This makes it a lot harder for someone to take the test multiple times in quick succession without being caught out.
2. Making sure the participants have their cameras and microphones on while taking the test (even if it isn't live). This allows you to make sure that the person taking the test matches the identification given, and makes it harder for the participant to receive help from others during the test.
3. Have a range of different but similarly difficult problems that may appear on the test. One possible failure mode of everything I just said are many people taking the test, screenshotting the questions, and then someone giving everyone the answers on StackExchange or something. If there's a wider range of different questions, the participants are less likely to be prepared for it.
4. Have different stages of the test, where the next stage can only be reached provided the participant gets some minimum score on the previous test. This is to somewhat nullify the try-hards who take the test multiple times, figure out all the permutations of the first question, and then answer it easily. Introducing stages means anyone who wants to hack the test is gonna need a hell of a long time to do it.
5. Make some minimum 'cool-off' period for each attempt. Something like 6 months or a year. This is the kind of requirement organisations like Mensa put in to limit 'testing effects' where people's performance improves on the test due to having taken it multiple times.
6. Realise the risk of the test being hacked can never be 0% because over time, if the test gains widespread adoption, you end up with people being better prepared for it by virtue of having specialised study guides. That being said, the SAT is probably a good example of something where specialised study has probably improved grades, but the best scores tend to be people with the highest levels of ability. Slightly hackable isn't bad provided it's not mostly hackable.
If there is some way for you to design such a system that can work online, at scale, and across cultures don't think it's an exaggeration to say it may well be one of the most important things ever done. Not just for school admissions but a lot of companies are currently really awful at psychometric testing generally.
> If there is some way for you to design such a system that can work online, at scale, and across cultures don't think it's an exaggeration to say it may well be one of the most important things ever done.
That's why I'm asking you lot!
Rather than guarding who can take the test and how often, I was thinking more along the lines of idempotency: if we have some magical test that shows you how good you are at X with perfect accuracy, you can take the test once or a hundred times and always get the same result.
Then the only reason you need verification is to make sure one person isn't taking the test for someone else. If you had something else (eg biometrics) to achieve that, you could freely distribute the tests without even worrying where they end up.
>Rather than guarding who can take the test and how often, I was thinking more along the lines of idempotency: if we have some magical test that shows you how good you are at X with perfect accuracy, you can take the test once or a hundred times and always get the same result.
This is facially impossible because you will never be able to replicate the test conditions exactly. Any minor change in physical health, hours slept the previous night, emotional worries, etc. is going to produce some change in the outcome.
Well, the brief already assumes a lot.
It assumes there's such a thing as a general consistent skill level at something which can be measured, though what we really can measure is merely a result of one's effort in this particular task. If we are speaking about time indifference, the tools and techniques, and even the language have changed over four generations as well as our general attitude towards tests. And this is just from the top of my mind.
Is it actually a real practical problem or a sort of mental experiment? Are you really supposed to find the best solution or to point at incosistencies in the task?
I mean, I'm not expecting to come up with a production ready solution by next month. But I am taking the problem seriously and interested in good ideas or directions.
From an employer's perspective (they being the main consumers of existing grading systems) something like consistent skill and effort is exactly what we're trying to make legible.
If those things aren't real (and they might not be) then what is? A good "model" of how skills/skilled people "work" might be a smart starting point to go from.
> But I am taking the problem seriously and interested in good ideas or directions.
If a century of intelligence research and psychometrics couldn't come up with what you're asking for, why do you expect anybody here to have any clue what to do?
You're right, why even bother.
I've written a longread about men's suffering, titled "Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man."
Introduction here: https://elodes.substack.com/p/three-hundred-ways-it-can-hurt-to?s=w
Index here: https://elodes.substack.com/p/three-hundred-ways-it-can-hurt-to-d1d?s=w
Find me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/ElodesNL
Some of Scott's older posts such as "Radicalizing the Romanceless", "Untitled", and his Nine Meditations, were primary inspirations for this piece. I imagine that many ACX readers may value reading it.
Impressions from others include:
* "This project by Elodes is emotional, masterfully-written, vulnerable, inspiring, necessary, and deeply, deeply important to me and potentially millions of other men and women."
* "[this] is the work that everyone should have a go at - I just started it and it's fire"
* "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating that 300 ways post. I'm bawling my eyes out reading it because it resonates so hardcore"
* "In stereotypical male fashion, I am going to decline to talk about the many emotions this raised in me, and content myself with giving praise. The conclusion in particular was masterful writing. Synthetic, rigorous and tender. You should probably read this."
* "it's fucking amazing work. [...] You've done something incredibly valuable with this write-up."
* "holy freaking crap. this list should be required reading for every human on the face of the planet"
* "your writing is very lucid and your frame is refreshingly expansive. Kinda daunting in its length, but from what I’ve sampled it’s well worth investing the time to read in its entirety."
* "I've been crying for an hour at the feeling of being seen . Thanks for sharing all of this"
* "Words are not enough to describe how this resonated with me. [...] Reading this, as a proof that my suffering was and is real, not just an imagination in my head, means more than almost anything else someone has done for me. I can't even believe that a book can mean do much to me, and would not have believed anyone if they told me earlier it will mean so much."
I hope ACX readers will find it similarly valuable.
Oh, did you update that series of posts? I read through the whole original thing some months ago, and even linked it here and there occasionally...it was certainly Interesting, especially as a trans reader. Way better quality than the usual standard of Men Talking About Men's Issues discourse. Not sure I'd want to devote another couple days' downtime to reread it though, unless there were significant revisions.
(I genuinely think it coulda been condensed down to 150, or 200 at most. Certain patterns and similarities emerge if one binge-reads. You do make note of this inefficient-for-authenticity's-sake, to your credit; but it adds extra onus on the reader for, imo, not so much marginal benefit.)
I made only marginal improvements, nothing that would warrant a reread. Thanks for reading it, I'm happy you liked it.
(I mostly agree with your comment; a fully revised version would likely be shorter. Though given that the actual amount of items nears 400, I doubt 150 would be doable without losing detail. I'd sooner write a 20-item "80-20" post for people who prefer efficiency.)
> It is common for women en masse to ask men to express their feelings (“Men should be more vulnerable and open about their emotions!”), only to go “wait, I don’t like this after all” when men follow their advice. [...] It is moreover hurtful when women say they want men to be open about their emotions, only to then respond not just with “actually, I don’t want this,” but rather with, “Not like that.” “Not those feelings.” Open up — but not that much! Open up — but not about that! Open up — but not here, not now, not in this space, not at this time, not to me. Men are told to open up about their feelings, but when that’s sadness, people get uncomfortable; when that’s anger, people get fearful; when that’s lust, people get disgusted; when that’s feeling weak or incapable, people get impatient; and even when that’s love or enjoyment, people routinely mock men for who or what or in what way they love or enjoy.
100% this.
I will strategically *not* say how that makes me feel.
The generalized version is:
"Be yourself!" "No, not like that!"
This is wonderful. Thank you.
Lordy, that PDF goes on for >100 pages. I don't think I could easily write 100+ pages on the entire last 50 years of my life, let alone the suffering, which is only a modest fraction of the whole. You must have thought about this a great deal.
I did nevertheless get through the first 15 pages or so, and the thing it seems to me is you're asking for men to acquire similar habits of complaint and redress, and similar expectations of sensitivity and compassion from their surroundings, as women hold up as their own ideal expectations.
Which...I dunno, doesn't honestly appeal to me at all. I like girls plenty, but I have no desire to be one. I like the company of women, in modest numbers, for various lengths of time, but I would never want to live in a group, organization, or nation entirely designed by and around women. Even among women I respect and admire, if I'm the only cock in a clutch of hens, after I while I get...restless. Experience an urge to make a short penis joke, leave some complicated feeling unexplored and unexpressed, ignore nuance, exaggerate, bullshit, belch, fart.
As I see it for many, perhaps most of us, there's an inherent tension between how men want their surroundings to treat them, and how women do, but by me that's a good thing, the continual negotiation of how we resolve that tension in a way that gives each sex half a loaf is part of what gives our social world complexity, nuance, depth, and variation, such that each individual can probably find the particular mixture of the two currents that suits him best. I don't think it would work as well if either current dominated.
I pretty much agree with you, and I'd hope the piece shows as much, but I understand that it might not be clear from the first ~15 pages.
Well darn. Do I really have to go through it all, then? I guess I can take it in chunks, pace myself. But maybe you want to write a precis or something? I don't suggest you go all the way to This One Weird Trick clickbaity lures, but a good way to be persuasive is to offer the central conclusion right up front in a summary way, and let people read further to discover the nuance, supporting evidence, response to objections and so forth.
Feel free to read the conclusion! It does indeed summarize a number of my points, but can be read on its own without the context of the preceding items.
Is it possible that the lack of porn for men which shows them receiving affection is a missed market opportunity?
Definitely possible, though I imagine the current (American) context has little space for it. There seems to be some manner of subgenre in Japanese porn that centers androphilic affection, though.
Okay, I'm going to read it, but I have a few thoughts having just read the introduction and disclaimers.
A bad thing about being male: short penis jokes are socially acceptable, even on the left. I'm not sure how many men are affected by this.
Another bad thing about being male: casualty counts frequently have a separate list for women and children, as though men dying isn't as serious.
Do you include changes over time?
>A bad thing about being male: short penis jokes are socially acceptable, even on the left. I'm not sure how many men are affected by this.
And height jokes, and baldness jokes, and being sexually undesirable in general. But the good thing about this is how is plainly deomstrates the disingenuousness of the "body positivity" movement.
I would say that the body positivity movement is mostly left, but not dominant on the left.
When I point out that short penis jokes and fat jokes are unfair, people on the left take it pretty well, though I don't know if they stop making them.
I find it amusing the the left seems to be the last refuge of simple-minded Freudianism-- guns described as penis substitutes.-
In my experience, woke leftists are genuinely pretty good about not mocking people--including men--for their appearance.
I distinctly remember coming upon multiple online conversations about how it was problematic to fat-shame Trump.
The new, woke millennial left also seems quite good at not being opportunistically racist toward non-white conservatives (compare the Bush-era racist mockery of Condoleeza Rice et al.), opportunistically sexist toward female conservatives, opportunistically homophobic toward gay conservatives, etc.
Even class-based mockery of "toothless hicks from flyover country" is, at least in my experience, generally rare on the woke millennial left. It's *much* more of a centrist liberal thing.
They truly can't be accused of hypocrisy (at least in my experience--yours may differ) when it comes to respecting 'marginalized' characteristics even in their political enemies. They'll just call them terrible people in exactly the same way they do straight white men who disagree with them.
My impression is that big name comedians like Colbert used to insult people's faces more and have switched to insulting expressions. Does this seem correct?
"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-victims-of-war/
The Snopes fact-check is interesting in and of itself.
I want to open the link to make fun of it but I know it will arouse so much violence in me.
What an absolute joke.
What's absurd? If you click on the link, the first thing it says is true, capitalized, with a nice green check. It then gives her full quote and adds some context. TBH, I think there is at the least a colorable argument there, if you're talking about anything short of the modern era.
Yeh but “Men have always been the primary victims of war. Men lose their wives, their mothers, their daughters in war”.
See the problem.
That's why the rest of the quote matters. She was at a domestic violence forum, and she went into domestic violence.
She could have easily gone into the high level of casual sexual assault that accompanies most armies moving through territory (especially in the pre and early modern), and had a long discussion about how much of the fallout of war (as opposed to the dying) falls on women, and reflected on whether it might not be that women suffer the consequences more widely than men. I'm not really making that argument here, and I'm not saying it would be convincing if someone did make it, but I don't think it's absurd on its face.
Of course, in the event, she was just pausing here before she pivoted to talk about domestic violence. It's not a good quote, or a good transition. But Hillary never was all that good at this stuff. I'm just saying that if you read the full context it's not nearly *as* ridiculous. It's another one of those cases where you can make someone look extra silly by cutting them off in a maximally disadvantageous place.
Yeh. No workings out at all.
Your first point is included in item 10 of category 7.3. The second I don't think I mention myself, but I recall it being mentioned in an article on the (great) blog 'Because It's 2015', which I recommend in my conclusion as further reading.
I'm not sure what you mean with your last question. If you're asking if I keep a version history of sorts: I haven't, primarily because I haven't edited the piece since publishing it, and likely won't; there are a few things I'd change still, but a piece like this is never finished, so at some point as the author you just have to make peace with it.
I was thinking about material in _The Frailty Myth_, a book about women and athleticism-- athleticism is much more accepted for women than it was fifty years ago.
The bitter version is that men are being pushed to be as vain as women, and women are being pushed to be as competitive as men.
One of the things I am thinking is that a lot of the people who care about men's issues have a sort of bimodal distribution where there's a small number of leftists thinking about these issues, and a larger number of right-leaning to strongly far-right 'manosphere' types, many of whom have their own divisions (MRAs, PUAs, MGTOW, alt-right, trads). I feel like getting all these people to cooperate on anything would be very, very difficult.
With respect, I think you've chosen the wrong way to "market" this post. When I read these blurbs of effusive praise I just find myself asking "if this work is so great, why is it that I'm hearing about it from Elodes himself? If it's that great, surely *one of those people*, or someone equally effusive downstream from them, would be the one to sell me on it". For a relevant example, I didn't hear about SSC because Scott himself showed up to sell me on it; a friend linked a post (I think it was Meditations on Moloch).
So this presentation just looks to me like you're astroturfing yourself, even though you probably aren't really. I think it would work better if you had stopped before the impressions from others (and left your Twitter out, which again just looks like unrelated self-promotion).
It's sort of an old-school book jacket idea, I think.
I like the actual document a lot. I will share it when asked for an example of 'men's issues' and am debating what the best place to recirculate would be.
I particularly like your inclusion of the categories of feminine men and masculine women; there's a lot of people on the left pretending none of this exists in nature, and a lot of people on the right who think everyone should just be the modal example of their sex. Not everyone is at the median of their sex on the gender spectrum, and that's OK.
In terms of carbon costs. Is eating at a restaurant more carbon friendly than cooking at home. Ignoring transport costs.
Maybe not if take into account the effect of restaurant food on your health, since most restaurant food is loaded with salt, sugar, and trans fats. All that medical care is hugely energy intensive.
I remember Eliezer Yudkowsky made this claim[1], at least of the Ideal Rational Society, dath ilan. No evidence was cited, unfortunately. Almost as if Arguments from Fictional Evidence are tricky at best.
Transport costs shouldn't be a major factor either way[2]: any reasonably-logistically-sound grocery run ought not contribute that much, compared to the carbon-lifecycle-analysis expenditure total. Matters more what exactly is bought, and from where...the consumer's own travel footprint is probably a rounding error. (Hitting up multiple stores for specialty ingredients, or getting such delivered direct to consumer...that might be different.)
I also notice that lots, lots, *lots* of people still cook using combustion[3]: gas, charcoal, woodfire, etc. Sure, to some extent electric stoves and ovens are still "powered by" coal/LNG...but that's still probably more efficient carbon-wise than directly and inefficiently burning shit. The fact that restaurant-grade equipment can reach much higher temperatures, faster, at larger scale, seems to imply another carbon win. (And that's just for the actual cooking parts: can't beat wholesale ingredient prices, or automated equipment with no smaller consumer versions, such as multiple-chicken rotisserie ovens.)
One possible point in favour of home cooking: __maybe__ less food waste? Restaurants have to care about presentation, and uneaten/unsold portions typically legally have to be tossed. Plus it's entirely possible to misjudge supply/demand and end up with a ton of X ingredient that no one ends up eating. (It makes me sad whenever I see dead seafood in fishtanks at seafood restaurants.) No cook perfectly upholds the Law of Conservation of Calories, but I'd imagine that home cooking allows for more flexibility of making exactly the food one wants, including portion sizes. For example, I was raised to cook for a whole family, and it took several years of living on my own to scale that down for just-myself...but now I'm pretty comfortable keeping a lean pantry. Just enough laying around for a few days' meals, a week tops. No longer do I stuff the crisper with all sorts of vegetables, racing against entropy to get everything cooked before spoilage, finally admitting defeat when Yes The Spinach Is Literally Liquid, You Can't Eat That. (No link for this paragraph, because the whole "anti-food-waste" movement got woke-captured and the evidence is shitty...)
[1] https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession
[2] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/myths-of-local-food-policy.pdf
[3] https://morningconsult.com/2022/02/14/gas-electric-stoves-consumers-poll
Thanks. Great answer despite the preamble about the evidence being sketchy. I wasn’t expecting anybody to fully answer this but that’s a good effort. On balance I’m beginning to think the restaurants are winning.
Working this out myself I think it’s clear that a mess hall feeding a large group of people a simple meal of meat, vegs and potatoes is going to be more carbon efficient than every person in the hall using their own cooker and stove. Individual cookers waste a lot of energy because there is a lot of empty space.
What about high end restaurants? It’s less clear. There’s going to be a lot of cook to order, and a larger number of ingredients even in what is nominally the same meal. Nevertheless there will be energy savings in more efficient equipment cooking multiple meals at once, even there. I’ll call it even.
Does it matter? I can't imagine this is even worth considering in the grand scheme of GHG emissions
Very little in this comment section matters Brett. Thanks for your input.
I asked a question. I do want to convince my environmental wife that eating out is fine but it’s immaterial to the workings out.
You sure it wouldn't be faster and easier to just use a little operant conditioning? Id est, ply her with first-rate merlot and dazzlingly witty banter while in the restaurant, then give her a most excellent backrub when you get home, maybe make the bed the next morning.
My intuition is, money approximates carbon costs: when money switches hands, it is a payment for the recipient making or creating or doing something (which usually consumes energy and produces carbon emissions). Then the recipient too will buy something with it (which usually uses energy and produces carbon emissions). As long as money is not exchanged but stays in your wallet, it doesn't entail production of anything or any services rendered and thus contributes to practically zero amount of carbon produced. (However, if you -- or restaurant owner -- invest it, it will probably contribute to carbon creation.) So that probably should be considered in addition to direct carbon costs.
As long as economic activity produces carbon emissions, less economic activity results in less carbon emissions (if one can't differentiate between kinds of activity, and one usually can't judge what restaurant workers and managers will with their income). Only "good" thing carbon-wise one can do is engage in carbon negative or neutral economic activity (so, pay for someone to plant trees and ensure the trees won't be burned as fuel later.)
BUT If a restaurant is more efficient per unit carbon costs and all restaurant workers are vegans who have committed to zero-carbon lifestyle and the owners donate majority of the restaurant profit to carbon negative charities ... and you instead would buy a new SUV, then it calculation is much better for the restaurant. It is different if it is you who are committed to zero-carbon lifestyle but the restaurant staff will buy SUVs with their income, despite any efficiencies in restaurant production?
(I can now totally see where the people who wish for large-scale systemic changes to reduce carbon emissions come from.)
Your intuition that you can approximate carbon impact by amount of economic activity is correct, and is the basis of the US Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (USEEIO) models that allow you to estimate the impact (warming, but also others) of a given amount of economic activity of a given type:
https://www.epa.gov/land-research/us-environmentally-extended-input-output-useeio-technical-content
And your concern that the only way to reduce the impact predicted from such models is to do less economic activity is also correct, and is a fundamental limitation of using them compared to e.g. detailed models of specific material flows.
I think there's a pretty clear case where this isn't true: organic farming. It takes up more land per unit of food, and is more labor intensive. Since one of the biggest climate impacts of food is land use, it seems like in this case cost and carbon cost are inversely related.
Are you thinking that organic farming is less carbon intensive than conventional farming per food pound, and if so, why?
Correct. There are plenty of examples of where spending more saves carbon. That's the whole pointing of re-fitting the energy grid which costs money.
This difference is probably pretty negligible and greatly outweighed by whether the meal includes meat, especially beef.
Ceteris paribus
In purely carbon terms? And keeping the menu the same? It's probably a safe bet that the more mass-produced the food, the more efficiency leads to lower carbon footprint. This effect reduces somewhat as you move up the scale, though, and might flip once you get to Michelin-star food.
But there are so many other variables involved that it's hard to make a generalization.
I think it depends on the kind of a restaurant. But assuming the restaurant cooks the same dish from the same ingredients as you would at home (maybe just buying them in bulk, though), I'd assume it's more carbon friendly in terms of cooking with professional equipment and trained staff.
Though we should consider that a restaurant itself takes quite a lot of space as well. They also tend to be finely decorated, spending quite a lot of furniture, drapings, crockery and cutlery, etc.
Moreover, it's only viable if your savings on time, psychological comfort and healthier eating are greater than what you overpay in the said restaurant. Otherwise, it's better to cook at home and donate the extra money to charity.
There's also economic incentive. Our economics consists of services and for many people working in a restaurant is a way to supply for their family or save for their future education.
So, there're a lot of factors to consider.
> assuming the restaurant cooks the same dish from the same ingredients as you would at home
I doubt that assumption holds. The nominal same dish at a restaurant likely contains more and higher-quality (more resource intensive) meat and animal fat than a home-cooked meal.
Why would the higher quality food be harder to cook, or more carbon intensive. I did say ignoring transport costs - in reality anything except cooking really.
Not in my experience in general. I buy good meat for home cooking, and generally can't afford quite as good food in restaurants.
Well I was talking carbon only. Good point about the size of the restaurant - which has to be heated and lit.
I'm starting as a new professor of Ethics, Law, AI in a research institution in Europe.
Since I don't have to worry about tenure, I am looking for broad suggestions for cool/impactful things to or advice you wish you had known at the start of your academic career.
I don't have a huge budget, but I am fairly free to do as I please.
I felt like I didn't "get" the Prophet and Caesar's Wife post. I usually really like Scott's fiction so it seemed like I was missing something. Anyone got any takes/elaboration on the point/joke?
I confess I started speed reading and skimming somewhat after about the tenth scenario, but it seemed to me the main recurring moral emerging from the stories was that at base any action or intent, however altruistic and benevolent, has an element of "n-th order" selfishness.
After all, even doing the right thing when "the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth" (e.g. anonymous charity donations) has an element of making one feel better about oneself or perhaps assuaging guilt.
I think it's not just about altruism, it's about people's demands for the appearance of altruism. And possibly about claims to know how people will be affected.
I wouldn't mind some examination of the prophet's motives and concept of knowledge. And maybe something about how people come to believe a claim.
There was some discussion in the comments, like here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife/comment/8790311
The comments that resonated the most for me were the ones about doing what you think is the right thing vs. doing what makes for the best PR
A slight elaboration on the PR vs reputation idea:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/pr-is-corrosive-reputation-is-not
The other interpretation that stood out to me was that a people are bad at being explicitly utilitarian, and would do better if they stuck to their standard way of thinking about things in most scenarios. Perhaps especially so when it comes to social cost considerations, given our reasoning abilities were optimized for navigating social situations.
What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge? Wouldn't the best forum in the world restrict its membership to just those people, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded). It wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for grievance studies, English lit, etc would qualify on the basis of their thesis. This would help to ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, something which is very hard to come by, as most forums are just people signalling at one another.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics remain stupid/irrational. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to rational knowledge.
Further down this thread (and not before some altercation and mockery), the OP gave a response to Nobody Special which I think tells us the motivation behind this post: basically, you can't post original ideas for discussion on Internet fora without getting frustrated by the responses.
In his words:
> I don't bother to share any of my intellectual contributions to places with a lot of people who don't have any (any public forum) because I have learned from sufficient repeat sampling that the expected response from a person on such a forum is in fact ...[worthless]
This is 100% true and my experience has been exactly the same. You can't further some generally original line of thought without dealing with negative bullshit.
I have found in places like this that if I'm reading someone else's discussion without any agenda of my own, it's fertile ground for having all sorts of new ideas.
But if I have a concept for something already, and I'm seeking to flesh it out and develop it a little, it's an absolute uphill struggle.
And actually, that holds true not just in other online places but in real life as well. There is definitely a pain barrier to overcome when conveying potentially new ideas to uninitiated people.
I think OP's answer is "make a place where people are more like me, because then they'll see where I'm coming from and we can skip all the frustration."
I think this won't work because if you fill a room with more people like OP (or me, for that matter) you'll find it harder, not easier, to get them to grapple with new ideas. They're more likely than the common man to be pursuing their own odd mental journeys already, which makes it harder not easier for them to jump over to yours.
I don't know what a better answer would be. My current approach is, ignore responses which add negativity or steer the convo off in the wrong direction; and, be ready to keep repeating myself alot because other people are going to need time to get to where I am before they can go any further.
Does anyone else find themselves in this situation, and do any of you have useful advice for it?
This sounds like precisely what academia is. There’s still issues with disciplinary norms, and the general sort of gatekeeping that goes with creating a safe space for novel ideas, but it’s precisely a space where a bunch of people with idiosyncratic and interesting new ideas try to sometimes listen to and provide feedback on each other’s ideas in ways that are often helpful.
Wait... are you saying "a struggle to be understood" is precisely what academia is? Fair enough, no argument from me.
I don’t understand why so many people are taking this comment as a good faith argument. You seem to be unhappy. Sorry you don’t feel well.
When you are in a better mood I’m sure you’ll be able to see that some wisdom comes from folks that aren’t Nobel Laureates. Your Uber driver may just pass on a life changing insight tomorrow. Be respectful. Be humble. Be kind. Internalize the importance of those virtues and you are on your way to true enlightenment.
This is a massive cope. The "insight" part is particularly souring to the stomach. A major purpose of restricting forum membership to people with serious intellectual lives is filtering those who believe in "insights." "Insights" are cheap knockoffs of scholarship and knowledge, mind candy for consumers with child-like IQs (my adult IQ was 110 at the age of 11, for instance, so people at that IQ level are mentally 11 to me and should be treated as such). Something is wrong with you if you think a mental child can knowledge. Calling cheap, child copes "insights" is core to this malady.
The rest of your post is you simply asserting that people with low IQs have something to offer the world except physical labor, which is untrue. The minimum IQ for contribution to the knowledge of man is about 125 based on research, that's about 95th percentile. People under that level quite literally exist just to do labor for people above that level, who exist to progress and lead humanity.
I would like such a forum as OP describes because I would like to have adult conversations free of natural laborers who feel empowered under liberalism to talk down to their natural superiors and who have forgotten their place in the intellectual hierarchy. The proliferation of incredibly low-information posts based solely on emotion is a large part of the cancer of liberal serf ego-narcissism.
@Ratsoy69 if by any chance you’re still keeping an eye on your thread, this is a great example of someone else doing that “leading with vinegar” thing I was cautioning you about.
If it’s hard to see it in your own posts, reading this might help you see what it looks like from the outside.
I tend to diagnose the behavior as an insecurity-driven superiority complex when I see it, but part of that is my colored view based on my own history. Highschool-age me really latched onto “smarter than others” as a core block to craft an identity around. That one thing to be proud of can be a real lifesaver when you’re in that floating in that teenage awkward space, still figuring out how to like yourself and be socially successful with your peers.
But if you go too far down that road that can really stunt you - a superiority complex makes you insufferable to others makes them reject you socially makes you cling harder to your belief they are beneath you makes you more insufferable and so on.
I was lucky enough to break out of it, which I largely credit to a band of merry loser friends helping me trying a few other things outside of my “smartness” tower. Maybe I overdiagnose it in others since I lived it myself, but I see specters of it whenever I see people flash their IQ, imply that “most people” are stupid and thus somehow lesser than them, etc.
You were obviously wrong about your intrinsic station in high school and updated towards the real value as you accumulated experience. On the other hand, others may start off more modest early on, and update towards a leader mindset as experience accumulates. Just because you wrongly thought you were a superior does not mean that there are none.
I really quite enjoyed this post.
> wants adult conversations free of natural labourers
You realise there already is a club for high-IQ people who've never done a hard day's work in their lives, right? It's called academia and you don't enjoy it - because it's full of other people like you!
> appeals to the idea of a natural hierarchy based on IQ
There certainly is a natural order of things, but it's not based on IQ. It involves the strongest men, and the men most able to command the respect and loyalty of their fellows, using you and your high-IQ ilk as furniture.
I would, ah, hesitate to bring it back if I were you.
> It's called academia and you don't enjoy it - because it's full of other people like you!
I don't enjoy academia because it's totally compromised by bioleninist mental children and associated status seekers merely pretending to be like people like me for gain.
>There certainly is a natural order of things, but it's not based on IQ. It involves the strongest men, and the men most able to command the respect and loyalty of their fellows, using you and your high-IQ ilk as furniture. I would, ah, hesitate to bring it back if I were you.
This is juvenile, Christ did not come as a steroid abusing body builder, yet He is infinitely intelligent. Man's perception of the Logos is what separates him from animals. The relation between the intelligent and unintelligent is exactly like that between child and adult ... it is self-evident and failure to see this is a willful state of defiance against God's natural law.
Who let the bioleninists in? The common man finds woke bullshit ridiculous. You need to take high IQ people and completely insulate them from the real world before you have a pack of people self-important, intellectually gifted yet pragmatically stupid enough to allow these ideas to take hold.
And I await with glee your Bible quote showing Christ saying how all us intelligent people should look down on those sheep-like natural labourers. Something about heaven through the eye of a needle, wasn't it?
Liberalism is a serious heresy and is incompatible with Christianity. As you are a liberal (and I mean this not in a restricted way, eg "Democrat." Both Republicans and Democrats are liberals. Anybody who rejects the natural hierarchy and Christian monarchy is a liberal. Liberalism is fundamentally anti-Christian), you have no right to lecture me on Scripture.
Still, the eye of the needle line had nothing to do with intelligence; rather, Christ was speaking to someone much like Lex Fridman. Lex Fridman does three things: he seeks status, money, and prestige. Though he is intelligent, has never produced any intellectual achievements outside of the official academy under his real name. He does his official, allowed research on computers, he does a podcast so he can make money and get popular, and he is also created a "start-up" (vomit inducing word) so he can get more money. A rich Jew quite like this came to Christ and asked him how to get to heaven. Christ told him if he were to be perfect he would give away all of his money and status and follow God himself to His very low status crucifixion and death. What Christian would not do this if they were in this rich man's position, in front of the Lord in the flesh? Instead, the rich Jew soy-sneered at the Lord and ignored him, going away, back to his mammon worship.
Oh god. Are you serious? I test somewhere in the final percentile but enjoy conversations with people from all parts the bell curve. Unless of course they are assholes. I avoid smart assholes as well as stupid ones.
Why not just join Mensa and only hang with them if you can’t tolerate ordinary people?
Edit
Afterthought. Is your user name meant entirely ironically?
If you're serious about your test scores, that goes to show why requiring intellectual output is better than just Mensa. Mensa might be filled with people like you! We don't have a good science of temperament but it's clear that many high IQ people have serious deficits in this regard. Some low IQ people have good temperament and are clearly burdened by their lack of g. I suspect the relevant temperamental traits all have to do with altruism, and specifically conscientiousness, disagreeableness, low status seeking, and high systematizing are probably important.
Take a breath. You are alive in this moment. Savor it. All the intelligence in the world won’t make up for a joyless life.
There is no information in your comment
I had a crack at answering OP's problem-behind-the-question and posted it above you. Not sure I got it right, but what ho.
"I don’t understand why so many people are taking this comment as a good faith argument."
There's very little to lose by doing so. Even when the op is a troll, there might be lurkers who benefit from explanations. And there's always the dream of someone posting this kind of nonsense and legitimately seeing where they're going wrong through the responses.
I don't see you posting any intellectual achievements, especially not this comment. Why should I listen to you?
One reason why I don't post anything is because people without intellectual achievement actually tend to prohibit those with it by sneering, making haughty, sub-literate objections, ignoring, and sending attention to less worthy avenues, making posting original stuff here a basically masochistic exercise. It's like Newton trying to discuss his Principia with the village peasants. They will not only not understand, they will actually forget their place, start lecturing him on Jesus, maybe report him to the local constable for heresy, will make objections based on the Bible to his theories, etc. Obviously he didn't do that and if he shared stuff at all it was with other geniuses at the Royal Society.
" start lecturing him on Jesus, maybe report him to the local constable for heresy, will make objections based on the Bible to his theories, etc."
Boy, do you have the wrong view of Newton. He would have been perfectly happy to discuss the Bible with the village peasants because he had his own, strong views on it and on belief, and yes he might well have been reported for heresy, but not because he was A Scientist, because he was A Heretic.
For a start, he was one of the kooks who thought you could extract the date of the end of the world from the Bible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newton#End_of_the_world_vs._Start_of_the_millennial_kingdom
"In his posthumously-published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, Newton expressed his belief that Bible prophecy would not be understood "until the time of the end", and that even then "none of the wicked shall understand". Referring to that as a future time ("the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching"), Newton also anticipated "the general preaching of the Gospel be approaching" and "the Gospel must first be preached in all nations before the great tribulation, and end of the world".
Over the years, a large amount of media attention and public interest has circulated regarding largely unknown and unpublished documents, evidently written by Isaac Newton, that indicate he believed the world could end in 2060. While Newton also had many other possible dates (e.g. 2034), he did not believe that the end of the world would take place specifically in 2060."
So if you were anticipating that you, ratsoy69, would have been having elevated chats about intellectual pursuit of scientific matters with Newton had you been around then, you might have been in for a surprise.
That's definitely a problem, pearls before swine, et cetera, but on the other hand are you sure you're not mistaking creative lunacy for original intellectual achievement? It can be very difficult to distinguish, almost impossible for the originator himself. That's one reason we tend to wait, give very original ideas the test of time, to see whether their reputation improves (as pretty smart people come to recognize genius) or declines (as pretty smart people come to recognize fraud or idiocy).
Also this:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/01/26
I’d suggest being kinder.
To try to illustrate – let’s say I founded a running club. That’s cool, and totally unobjectionable – I doubt anyone would mind or care.
Let’s then say I decide to go for just “elite” runners and say the club is only available for people who can do a 100M dash in less than 11 seconds. That’s a little elitist, and there are a bunch of other distances I’m leaving out, but overall it’s not likely to raise much in the way of a strident objection if I advertised the club somewhere.
But then I take a hairpin turn into crazy town. Because I myself, and some people I like and want in the club, don’t actually run very fast at all. And there are other people who are really fast, but I think they're dumb and I don’t like them. So I revise the membership rules again: my club is now only available for (a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you’re a grievance studies major and (c) if I like you, you can do your 100M on a bicycle or just write a blog post about running. Now this doesn’t really look like a running club at all – what exactly is the point?
And then the point reveals itself: I announce the club in a public forum, where I describe it as the “best club in the world” and ask the audience why anyone would even speak to people “without meaningful running achievements” like the ones who would qualify for membership. The running itself was never the point - this was all about making a seemingly-exclusive group, declaring myself eligible for it along with awesome runners like Usain Bolt and Jesse Owns, and then declaring us all to be superior to others.
People, predictably, react negatively to this. Which is only to be expected since my club is less of a running club than a club for insecure jerks, some of whom are runners. I respond in kind, and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
But honestly, was this ever going to go any other way? Front-end loaded with as much vinegar as it was, it’s hard to see how it would attract anything but backlash.
So yeah, I’d suggest being kinder.
>(a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you’re a grievance studies major and (c) if I like you, you can do your 100M on a bicycle or just write a blog post about running. Now this doesn’t really look like a running club at all – what exactly is the point?
I think you misunderstand, running isn't and analogy to intellectual achievement wrt to grievance studies. To make what you're saying work, you should have written something like "(a) anyone who runs an 11 second 100M dash, but (b) not if you're on steroids or some drug or your definition of of "11" is my definition of "120" and you think "seconds" are subjective and the legacy of colonialism (c) if you are really close and can provide receipts of hard work, or you have another elite time at another distance and want to try sprinting."
It is a running club, I'm just excluding cheaters, liars, and avoiding Goodhart's law by having a little bit of spirit-of-law flexibility.
In other words, grievance studies is not intellectual achievement.
>and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
I didn't accuse anyone in this thread of that, I was talking about how people on forums like this respond to original ideas in the aggregate, in my experience. I don't bother to share any of my intellectual contributions to places with a lot of people who don't have any (any public forum) because I have learned from sufficient repeat sampling that the expected response from a person on such a forum is in fact something on {*presses downvote*, *ignores*, "Wow, what a [slur] post", "One major problem with this is [something I address at length, they obviously stopped at the 2nd sentence]", "Actually, [something off topic or totally wrong and ignorant, possibly GPT-3 generated, does not even quote what I said, has potentially not read the post and definitely did not understand a word of it]" , ... etc }
You end up just playing teacher for the latter two people but you get no pay or respect and they are under the illusion that they are equals in the conversation and generally fail to learn or listen to anything you tell them, the former two troll you into the ground and if you hit back the 0 achievement janitor bans you. Very consistent process
This thread is practically like this and all I did was share an original forum idea, why would anybody bother to post stuff that takes actual effort to make?
>>and accuse my detractors of being “village peasants” with “sneering, haughty, sub-literate objections.”
>I didn't accuse anyone in this thread of that, I was talking about how people on forums like this respond to original ideas in the aggregate, in my experience.
You can’t honestly expect anyone to buy that.
If I post “all people but me and people like me are stupid.”
Then another guy posts “When have you ever said anything smart?”
And I reply “One reason why I don't post anything is because people without intellectual achievement actually tend to prohibit those with it by sneering, making haughty, sub-literate objections, ignoring, and sending attention to less worthy avenues, making posting original stuff here a basically masochistic exercise. It's like Newton trying to discuss his Principia with the village peasants.” The context makes it obvious to anyone with two braincells that it's a clapback.
Just like it's obvious in your reply to Yug Gnirob where you respond to him mocking your idea with a long diatribe about how “many people display serious literacy flaws on public forums” and how your writing is just so smart that lots of people aren’t smart enough to understand it.
This “I wasn’t talking about any of you I was just talking in general” nonsense doesn’t work in any social context. If some guy bumps into you in a bar and spills your beer and you go on a rant about how “the world is full of clumsy morons who don't look where they're going” and then he punches you in the face, you can say a lot about the interaction but it’s a really stupid look to try “wow he’s so dumb I wasn’t even talking about him I was talking about other clumsy people in other bars.”
You can try to obfuscate it if you want, but nobody is fooled by it, and that kind of behavior is a big part of why your attempt to “[just] share a forum idea” has yielded so much vinegar. Put spite in, get spite out.
So again. Be kinder. If you want people to take your idea for a forum seriously and not just bite your nose off when you suggest it, maybe next time don’t lead with “what's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements?”
In fact, for free, just as a demonstration - here's how you could rewrite that first post to not sound so nasty from the get-go. If you want to do an experiment, post this on another forum and see how many of the first replies you get (before you yourself reply to your repliers) are hostile. It's not hard - this took me all of 5 minutes:
I have an idea for a forum I think would be interesting. If a group restricted its membership to only people with significant intellectual achievements, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded), it would ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, which is very hard to come by as many forums, even with intelligent membership, can get off track and fall prey to just signaling at one another.
To keep membership broad, it wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for disciplines (a) lacking a strong empirical focus or (b) unrelated to the forum's topics would qualify on the basis of their thesis.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics limit their openness to new ideas. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to advancing human knowledge.
Having expertise in physics, as an example, in no way qualifies you to weigh in on Greek history. If you want a separate forums for people who have contributed to physics and those who have contributed to Greek history, that already exists aplenty. They're called journals, colloquia, seminars, university departments, and so on.
> achievement done without funding outside of an official institution
This would basically restrict it to people who are independently well off enough to support large difficult side projects. That seems probably bad.
Why is this bad? Even assuming there are geniuses out there who know the world would be better off if they weren't a wagie yet can't quite escape, they're still likely to be uneducated an unable to contribute original knowledge to an intellectual project if all of their time is spent working for some corpo. Why would you want such people in your forum?
Why? Are independently well off people Nazis by definition? I'll add them to the list.
Huh? What I was saying was that if you wanted to gatekeep people from some forum by this criteria, this would exclude people who _aren't_ independently well off. Nothing against the independently well off, I just think there are people who _aren't_ in that category who shouldn't be barred from entry.
Too late, they're on the list now.
In terms of better criteria for getting the company of people this chap is after, I think we need to sort out what it is he really wants a bit more.
What counts as an "intellectual achievement" or a "contribution to human knowledge"? Does it count if all you've done is discover a new way to explain someone else's idea, that other people find easier to grasp? Does it count if all you've done is learn a lot of disparate subjects, so that if someone has questions on a variety of topics, you can put the answers together in one place?
In any case, why does it matter if someone is "truly devoted to rational knowledge"? If they have good and new ideas, aren't those ideas worth learning about regardless of how distasteful you might find the person's motives in acquiring them?
>In any case, why does it matter if someone is "truly devoted to rational knowledge"? If they have good and new ideas, aren't those ideas worth learning about regardless of how distasteful you might find the person's motives in acquiring them?
It's unlikely someone interested in money and status will consistently produce good intellectual achievement. They tend to commit fraud, lie, play politics, and even given some achievement they will be politically intolerable.
> It's unlikely someone interested in money and status will consistently produce good intellectual achievement.
With this line I think I understand where you're coming from. Do you have a mental model where smart people are above the petty concerns of the crab bucket riff raff, who fight over money and status (low down and crass things to you) while intellectuals busy themselves with meaningful pursuits?
If so I think you're out of step with reality, but I see better what you've written and what you're going for with it.
No I hypothesize that IQ and status seeking vary independently and that genius/achievement is a function of high IQ, low status seeking, and other similar temperamental traits
lol, love your theory that geniuses like Newton don't care about status. that is so precious.
however smart you are, you aren't smart enough to see the contradictions that arise from mindlessly recursing on cynicism.
When I think of low status seekers I think of people happy to sit on Facebook all day. Creation/achievement seems far more likely to be motivated by status seeking than anything else, to me.
What drives a man to be best in his class, or to become skilled enough in a subject to invent things in its field, or even to learn guitar enough to compose a song?
It's really sad to me that you think that. It's evident to me from my own phenotype that status seeking and conscientiousness are two different things. Conscientiousness has more to do with time preference, I think, while status seeking fills in what you aim for if you do work hard. As a low status seeker I aim to accomplish things of intrinsic, altruistic worth, not to gain status. I am not happy with sitting on Facebook all day because I think about the future and I want a better one, and Facebook is meaningless.
Most intelligent people have made no significant contribution to human knowledge. They may still know important ideas created by others and be able to transmit them, hence worth talking with. Even if someone has made some small contribution to human knowledge, that is probably not the most interesting thing he knows and can talk about.
Do you assume that you have made significant contributions to human knowledge, important facts or ideas that nobody else had discovered? If so, is that the most interesting thing you could talk about?
I think intelligent people who have made no contribution either are not that intelligent or have something wrong with their temperament. They are less likely to be well-educated on important topics if they have not bothered to put that education to good use.
To make a significant original contribution takes a mixture of imagination, luck, and capacity and inclination for hard work (in various proportions, generally mostly by far the last). But some intelligent people have none of these.
Some fields are also not well-suited to producing generally-useful knowledge for the world. Engineers, doctors, programmers, and lawyers all pretty routinely work to solve a problem in a novel way, but often one that really only applies once in a specific set of circumstances.
Getting a Nobel prize takes luck, I just want something like a PhD thesis, potentially just done in spare time to filter people who only got a PhD for status reasons. Imagination and conscientiousness are part of what I mean by temperament, so you're just repeating my comment back at me.
>> What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge?
What is your goal, and why do you think a filtered group of people meeting only this extremely narrow definition of “intellectual achievements” would better achieve it? If you’re going to create some sort of exclusive group, it should ideally be tied to a goal you are trying to achieve (i.e. only including certified architects in your building-design team, or only including writers with at least 3 hit songs to their name in your songwriting feedback group). Exclusivity just for exclusivity’s sake (i.e. just to filter the people who “are worth talking to” from the people who “aren’t worth talking to”) makes a forum seem more like a self-esteem project for the people inside it than anything useful or worthwhile for society at large.
A “special people club for the very very special among us" with custom entrance requirements stringent enough in some places (‘grievance studies’ intellectuals and English Lit intellectuals don’t count) to keep out people the founders don’t like, but loose enough in others (“even a blog post” on a topic we like is enough) so that the founders can declare all people outside the club "dumb and not worth talking to" without ever feeling threatened that they themselves may not qualify for membership accomplishes fairly little outside of making its member feel more special than non-members – as an aside, this is why I’ve never been impressed with MENSA, or people who make much of MENSA membership.
Sidetrack: Another possibly legitimate reason would be limiting the size of the group to encourage social relationships among the members.
True - if one's goal is just to found a social club, then that club probably works better as a more intimate group. But if one then takes the position that one's small social club consists of all the people in the world worth talking to, and everyone else outside it is a dumb peon unworthy of the time of club members, well, it seems like a pretty distasteful club.
And besides, the club rules proffered here don't really lend themselves to keeping the group small for social reasons - it may be very exclusive insofar as it keeps out people with the wrong politics no matter how productive or brilliant they are, but its membership requirements seem quite lax if you have the right politics.
A group that dismisses the worlds foremost Hegelian philosophers and experts on English Literature as "lacking intellectual achievements" on the one hand, but lets in people who make "a blog post with a lot of data" on the other may be very effective at excluding people with certain disfavored beliefs from membership, but it probably won't be small. Or if small, it will only be so because the aforesaid distastefulness leads lots of people who would otherwise qualify to decline membership.
As far as I can tell, what you're describing is just "academia". In the sense of pick the smartest of the population and let them talk together about something that isn't this year's lettuce harvest.
Academia immediately fell prey to its own status games, and as a result its quality has decreased to the point you're now trying to create a new Academia 2.0 that excludes the undergrads and the grievance studies professors.
But if you don't want someone else to have to create Academia 3 in one epoch's time, you really ought to give more thought to the construction of the bubble you're building.
Status games will come for you whether you want them or not. If you don't understand them or plan for them properly, they'll take their most natural route.
Funnily enough, my problem with academia is not the status hierarchy (which happens everywhere). It's that they've ivory-towered themselves and their bubble has drifted so far from common sensibilities that those grievance professors are actually able to be taken seriously there.
Your approach feels to me like doubling down on that mistake rather than fixing it.
Everyone takes things personally. I presumably wouldn't qualify for that forum, and I'm truly grateful that people with official intellectual achievements talk to the public and I can see what they say. Or maybe I'd qualify with a body of sensible social media posts, but I wouldn't want the job of evaluating social media posts of all your non-academic applicants.
Little as I like Social Justice, I've learned some things from it.
If it hadn't been for your clickbait first sentence, I'd be more sympathetic to your idea of a selective forum, though if you think people with solid intellectual achievements are immune to status and politics.....
Well, in fiction there was “The League” in Herman Hesse’s “A Journey to the East”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_East
"What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge?"
In order to inspire people to achieve and contribute. If you don't inspire the unachievers, then eventually the achievers die and nobody replaces them.
Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
I'm pretty sure your suggestion already exists, and it's some kind of in-person elite international conference that only the leaders in their field get to attend. There may or may not be a digital equivalent as well.
Knowledge is one good thing but not everything. If you restrict your world to a small circle of elite intellectuals you would miss out on Also, I am convinced (with Jonathan Haidt) that academic intelligence doesn’t correlate with moral wisdom / pro-social values. If you select only for knowledge you are likely to miss on other non-correlated perspectives. For example, 1) you would lack the understanding of humanity that comes from broadening your circle beyond elite academics, and 2) you might be leaving your sense of morality and values to chance. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that moral perspectives do not correlate with intelligence and arent derived from intellectual reasoning alone.
>Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
Just let it be the admin using very clear specifications like I laid out. Not really a problem.
>I'm pretty sure your suggestion already exists, and it's some kind of in-person elite international conference that only the leaders in their field get to attend. There may or may not be a digital equivalent as well.
Doubt it, I'm imagining a political forum, not a group for discussing asymptotic behavior of generalized eigenfunctions in N-body scattering replete with uncritical, status-seeking believers in the Current Thing.
>In order to inspire people to achieve and contribute. If you don't inspire the unachievers, then eventually the achievers die and nobody replaces them.
I highly doubt access to achievers on internet forums prior to one's first achievement is a factor in achievement given internet forums didn't exist 30 years ago.
> I'm imagining a political forum
You could lock members of a policital forum, or an economic forum, in a room for twenty years, sliding food under the door, and when they were let out at the end they'd have hair down to their waists and would have barely agreed on anything (except the benefits of hygiene! :-) )
> I highly doubt access to achievers on internet forums prior to one's first achievement is a factor in achievement given internet forums didn't exist 30 years ago.
The Usenet forums have been around for over 45 years now, and their groups were largely bear pits even when their users were exclusively from academia (at all levels, students to professors). I haven't checked any Usenet groups for several years, but I imagine that by now the spammers have completely taken over and the unmoderated groups are an almost perfect verbal approximation of white noise!
>>Also when you start restricting entry, you invite status games about who gets to say who comes in. Soon the world's greatest minds are fighting with each other about how many of them should have actually been invited.
>Just let it be the admin using very clear specifications like I laid out. Not really a problem.
I suggest that if you spent more time talking to the people you consider not to have any intellectual merit, you'd understand what a funny thing this exchange was to read.
I got a wincing chuckle picturing this guy working a blue collar job
"Doubt it, I'm imagining a political forum"
...you're imagining a political forum, and you're EXCLUDING HISTORIANS. This is dead on arrival.
As Nancy pointed out, you misread the post. This is part of why I want a forum like I described, many people display serious literacy flaws on public forums. It's not surprising given the distribution of SAT/ACT/GRE reading scores and the relative ease of getting a 99th percentile one if you are functionally literate. Texts on those tests tend to be as dense or less so than my writing and getting a 99th percentile score just requires actually understanding the texts upon reading them. People with less than an 80th percentile score, if not a 90th, probably can't understand my writing well; this is probably why the NYT best seller style as well as the typical substack style is so fluffy. To be popular, they need to write at a middle school level so that >50% of the population find the writing appealing.
"People with less than an 80th percentile score, if not a 90th, probably can't understand my writing well"
Hang on a sec, haven't I read this exact argument somewhere before? If not here, then over on TheMotte? "You are all too dumb to understand my advanced intellect arguments"?
You are Joseph Bronski, and I claim my £5.
And here I thought your silence had meant you'd taken the point to heart. Alas.
This level of discourse is what I want to avoid, it's a waste of time, you're just communicating feelings with no substance. I have learned that you feel that way, and that's all. I want people who post data and who think quantitatively, not people who think a joke is a "point"
> As Nancy pointed out, you misread the post.
I think you might be the one misreading him, old chap.
I read his post as him being wry about you proposing a political project while demonstrating what looks like a startling naïvety about human nature.
Maybe he is making a joke, this is the trouble with text, I can't hear tone so I take everything literally. Nonetheless, such a joke is basically a worthless comment so all the more reason for my forum idea. "Oh haha, politics without historians, how wacky. Do you have any substance or do you just feel that way?"
He's allowing empirical historians, though somewhat cautiously.
Lol. (Can't upvote, so saying lol.)
Is Moneyball one of the worst things to happen to modern American intellectual life? It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart. It falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out- in fact, modern teams use a mix of both together. Sabermetrics certainly added a lot to baseball, but it only complements existing methodology.
In general Moneyball, plus some kind of vague Silicon Valley worship, suggests that generally smart people don't need subject matter expertise or a qualitative background to enter a particular field- they can just Use Analytics. This is very appealing to engineers, finance types, etc.- they can arrogantly ignore people who have been in the field to date, those guys weren't smart enough to Use Analytics like I am, etc. My life experience suggests the opposite, that subject matter experts are in general much better than smart outsiders. In particular quantitative methods mean little if you're asking the wrong questions or starting with the wrong assumptions- garbage in, garbage out.
Kind of reminds me of the late 19th/early 20th century, when it was in vogue to call whatever you were doing Scientific. I.e. Communism had Scientifically Proven that they had the best approach to running a society, etc.
Why is Moneyball the first example of this? Didn't the quants go into finance with no subject matter expertise and make billions before moneyball?
I disagree with you completely when it comes to baseball, but you may have a point when it comes to other domains. Give me any current front office in baseball today (the Colorado Rockies excepted), and I'll put them up against any front office from the 1980s. Baseball was inefficient, and the nerds knew it. There's a reason the game is run by quants today: the strategy is successful. Part of the reason it's successful, however, is that baseball is a closed game. The rules remain (largely) unchanged, the number of teams in the league remains static outside of carefully (and centrally) planned expansion and the objectives are clear. Whether you win or lose is immediately apparent. However, this is not true of society generally, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that some people saw the success of Moneyball and baseball and decided that it could be applied to all businesses and other walks of life. When you step outside of games, the number of variables becomes significantly higher, and in many areas it's impossible to know all of those variables, let alone capture how they interact with each other. To that extent, Moneyball may have convinced people who were very smart in one domain that their intelligence and quantitative skills translate to all other domains, despite this clearly not being the case.
Obviously not. Almost no one on earth has seen Moneyball. It made around a 100 million dollars in theaters, and at an average movie ticket (US) price of 8ish dollars, that translates to a mere 12 or so million people. Out of 7 billion on earth.
A film about baseball, much less one about "this one weird trick turned a team of losers into champs!", is not going to attract an audience outside of people who know about baseball, watch baseball, have played baseball at some level, even as kids, etc.
So that pretty much restricts it to an American audience (maybe some of the other few countries that play baseball may watch it also).
Your last paragraph goes against your argument. Marxists are the experts in field of Marxism, and it’s considered by many intellectuals to be true. Get some actual scientists or applied scientists to look at the claims of this “science” and they will find dozens of holes, no empirical evidence, dubious claims and methodologies.
This has not been my experience. In fact, Moneyball, while far from perfect, does a good job of showing how a subject matter expert like Billy Beane can take advantage of statistics and data to dramatically improve his team's performance. In general, most subject matter experts don't have the time or talent to really do data work, so teams need to bring in data people, data people who often don't have the time or talent to catch up to other specialists.
If you've ever worked in hospital administration, this is extremely common. A good hospital administrator usually has significant medical experience and (often) is a doctor. It's simply not realistic to have someone go through all the training to be a doctor, do a decade of grad school/residency/job and then go on and become a competent manager and administrator and then on top of that learn to code in R or Python and get the equivalent of a years grad school in stats. One of the nice things about being a competent professional is everyone is generally about as smart as everyone else and most of the differences are in training. In any exec meeting the data scientists are roughly as smart as the doctors who are roughly as smart as the lawyers and nobody is going back to grad school again. So, ya know, teamwork.
Moneyball is more about proving that the data guys deserve a seat at the table than that they should head the organization. Billy Beane was still running the show, after all.
Having said that, a lot of computer programmers do seem to have the "smartest guy in the room" issue but data people, in my experience, have to do so much more communicating and persuasion with senior people to have an organizational impact that its not really an issue.
In my on-the-job experience, it's often possible to go into a new domain and solve some of their problems analytically, or provide analytic tools that let them achieve better or faster results, because the domain experts don't know math or optimization theory, and have studiously avoided ever quantifying their domain, preferring to see themselves as artists who follow some mystical inner voice. Usually, they stubbornly resist the very notion of optimization, preferring to believe that they don't ever have to make trade-offs if they have the right qi or whatever.
I'm sure there are arrogant analysts who can't, in fact, improve on what the domain experts do; but it is the domain experts who hold all the power in these situations, and are usually able to squash the analyst. We need more, not less, application of optimization. So I believe Moneyball did more good than harm.
This is a really strange take....can't tell whether you're talking about the book or the film, because your description doesn't fit either very well.
"can enter a field they know nothing about" ? The hero and focal character of "Moneyball" is Billy Beane, who'd been a fulltime baseball professional since he was 18 years old. There's a reason that was the character that Brad Pitt signed on to play, and it's even more true of the book.
"falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out" -- no. "Moneyball", the book, is clear and thorough in getting across that the problem with the existing scouting practices was mostly that they were shallow and stupid. Unfortunately this comes across less well in the film, but anyway professional sports teams today do not at all use the scouting practices that were industry-standard prior to around the 1990s. (And which were very garbage in garbage out.) Sports scouting today is vastly different: less anecdotal, more systematic, far more analytical. That change has come about not entirely due to "Moneyball", it was already underway to some degree, but that book and a couple others sure did help enable it.
"In general Moneyball" kids get off my lawn etc -- both the book and film are very clear that they are about a specific industry, professional baseball, at a specific time. The idea that professional baseball was a poorly-led closed loop of assumptions and anecdotal stupidity was well documented starting long before Billy Beane decided to try something new. He was just the first high-level person in that industry to be willing to take a sledgehammer to how "real baseball guys" (such as himself) were used to operating.
>It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by Moneyball here, but the main sabermetrician in the book is Paul DePodesta who, yes, went to Harvard and studied econ, but who also played baseball at Harvard. He was no no-nothing about his subject matter. In the movie the character is played by Jonah Hill, who played up the nerdiness and didn't seem to have ever stepped inside a batter's box, but he was nevertheless a baseball nerd not an arrogant statistician disinterested in the subject.
I view Moneyball as being more generally about statistically inclined people who were also obsessed with X, so obsessed that they figured out smarter ways of doing X. They were outsiders, but outsiders in the way that a 17-year-old computer nerd is an outsider to the software industry, not in the way that Isaac Newton was an outsider to the finance industry. In the former case, the individual might naturally become an insider one day because she is focused on studying the right subject. In the latter case, math ability didn't do Newton much good in a field he knew too little about.
IOW, sabermetricians are hedgehogs not foxes. With that noted, I believe the phenomenon you are talking about has more to do with Superforecasting and Nate Silver. Superforecasting emphasizes that great forecasters don't need to be experts in the subject matter. They are foxes in the Isaiah Berlin sense.
I'm not sure that they are bad for modern intellectual life though.
I'm a computer science professor moving into a new office and I am thinking about making the decor over the top rationalist stuff, inspired by seeing this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/816709752452153374/1015712508566323320/20220903_155830.jpg
Anyone have any suggestions? Anyone have any good inspirational quotes, particularly good HPMOR fan art, or cool guides?
That link is hilarious.
Are you familiar with the concept of weirdness points?
i.e., if he uses his social capital to look weird on this he'll get in trouble elsewhere?
I kind of feel like a CS professor gets more than most. And something long and nerdy is probably not that unusual there. Just saying I've had leftist people suddenly turn very nasty after I mention this site.
Wow really?
Given the presence of stuff like Sneer Club, I kind of wonder if this might be inviting attack from the wrong sort of leftist in your department, if not a prof then support staff. Universities lean really far left, and rationalism has a bad rap with those people.
Totally possible! Thanks for the heads up, that hadn't really occurred to me. Still going to go for it, but having some possible responses pre-prepped will help.
Sure! There's a difference between knowing something is dangerous and taking a stand, and getting blindsided. Good luck and I hope it makes you some new friends!
I was thinking that on the one hand, it parses as appropriation, but on the other hand, "Occam's Razor is sufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents". undercuts a lot of pro-racist arguments. I've seen people say that racism doesn't exist because it would get competed away.
I especially like "Occam's Razor is sufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents".
Use an art breeder algorithm to produce Rococo's Basilisk
Ditto for "we have noticed the mountain of skulls"
Ditto for Peter Singer in a hagiographic portrait
Hang a mosquito net in a corner
This guide from putanumonit.com: https://putanumonit.com/2020/10/08/path-to-reason/
Don't Sell Your Soul meme: https://putanumonit.com/2021/03/11/dont-sell-your-soul/
Full-service restaurants should suffer from Baumol's cost disease, right? Have they?
Probably on some level. But there's also a large number of productivity improvements that have happened even at the fanciest restaurants. In the 1970s, when Alice Waters had the realization that people were willing to pay for quality ingredients, getting quality ingredients required getting an individual well-trained shopper out to all the different markets at the right time of day. Nowadays, with enough high-end restaurants caring about this, I believe it's become easier to source high-quality fresh ingredients (and many restaurants have developed relationships with individual farms that help with that). Similarly, it's much easier and cheaper nowadays to start an authentic Korean restaurant in some random town in the United States than it would have been forty years ago, because the supply chains for many of the distinctive vegetables and condiments and such has been built out.
I don't know what other sorts of productivity improvements there have been behind the scenes at restaurants, but if there's enough of these, then that might help keep costs down even as labor costs rise.
There is some savings on the production side, (We get fully cooked roast beef and brisket shipped in.) You are supposed to tip ~20% now, which is up from 15% ~20 years ago.
Yes. Full service ones, especially with chef prepared food, have been getting more and more expensive.
How do you know whether a restaurant is selling chef-prepared food rather than thawed-and-plated food?
It's not a solid division. Most restaurants have some combination of both with the degree of how much one or the other is present putting it anywhere from fine dining to fast food. But market research firms can nonetheless get at least a sense of it over large scale.
If you're asking if I can walk into a restaurant and know then I'm afraid I have no special trick.
I wonder how much less chef-prepared (not necessarily indicating a loss in quality) mid-range restaurant food has become in response to this.
Depending how you define "mid-range" it's as much as possible without guests noticing.
I'm not aware of any really good indices measuring this, but here's an interesting data point I just found by Googling:
https://bestlifeonline.com/cost-of-a-big-date/
"Today, if you took your date to Keens Steakhouse—one of the most famous steak joints in New York City—a sirloin would set you back $56 per person. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, that same dish at the same restaurant would cost you just $2.25."
$2.25 in 1955 is $24.87 today, so the cost of a steak at Keens Steakhouse in NYC has risen 125% in real terms since 1955.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
A few points:
I have never heard of "famous steak joint" Keens Steakhouse, despite working and living in NYC for a while in my youth.
I don't understand "per person." A steak is a steak. It has one price. And $56 sounds low to me. I wish I could take a field trip to Peter Luger's tomorrow night and report back....
The largest concern for restaurants in Manhattan is RENT. NYC real estate has surely gone up at 2x inflation since 1995, so the comparison is not shocking.
It was known for most of its existence as Keens Chophouse and it was not famous. One of those really good secret places.
Steakhouses often sell large cuts to be shared and list the price per person.
It is a bit shocking if you buy the argument that we put up with the annoying bits of capitalism because they are offset by the increased prosperity of most of the people who take part in it.
How do progressives reconcile the huge error term between their self-image of oppressed minorities and how corporations treat them ?
Yesterday, I was banned from HackerNews, probably the only social media I truly loved, because of my participation in the KiwiFarms vs. CloudFlare discussion. (Long Story Short : Forum makes fun of <bad people>, <bad people> organize a mob outrage campaign against CloudFlare which is a corporation which provides very vital protection to websites against a low-effort form of cyberattacks called DDoS, corporation first says no and yay free speech then capitulates.)
This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, <threat>, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?
Now, I'm aware of the famous general purpose reply here :
GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there).
GPR2- In the context of ingroup vs. outgroup confrontations, the above translates to deliberate sensory and memory bias for ingroup and against outgroup, such that ingroup always appears to be in danger and on the brink of annihilation and the outgroup always appears tyranical and unstoppable. In one memorable example from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/), Scott cites an example of what's called the " hostile media effect ", where Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel both perceived the same documentary to be heavily biased against them and for the outgroup, despite that being apriori impossible.
This seems to explain my question, people in a literal war for survival can't agree on who's more oppressed, so of course the progressives can't see they're not oppressed, the literal opposite in fact. Neither is most of us and our ingroups for that matter.
But, general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations, my reptile brain is still not satisfied with this perfectly good answer.
1- Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely today's morning by it's *Russian* DDoS protection company, probably because it was more trouble than the company could handle (but of course, the company didn't forget to virtue signal in its announcement.). KF is now accessible only via tor (a convoluted technology that - in a nutshell and very loosely speaking - circumvents censorship via repeated re-routing.)
2- An Australian company that allocate IP addresses is being pressured to revoke allocation for KF, which - according to the forum's founder who is very law-savvy and internet-savvy in general - is "unprecedented in the history of the Internet".
How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ? Anyone who had dealt with this group extensively enough to know their thinking can illuminate me ?
Addendum : This comment and its username was edited because it contained insults that others found too insulting to merit a serious reply to the rest of my points, as well as a threat made out of hopeless anger and despair rather than any real malice. The edited section are between <> angular brackets and do not exceed a sentence in length. The heretical words used are linked to in interest of accountability and responsibility for words said.
1- Insult in user name : shorturl.at/bzDEX
2- Insult in place of <bad people> : shorturl.at/QU159
Several minor Updates and Addendums.
>Long Story Short
Here's a good\balanced telling of the Long Story Long, told by one who counts themselve among the aggressor group itself : https://defaultfriend.substack.com/p/suicide-by-kiwi-farms
>general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations
It seems like we can't do any better than the general purpose explanation. Most responses answering my question here boils down to explaining that the World or the Media is big enough that you can always find evidence of anyone being oppressed, and from there the relevant brain circuits engage and it's smooth sailing to ♫♫ I'm The World's Most Oppressed Victim ♫♫. It's not a bad explanation, but I was hoping for something specific to progressivism or the type of people attracted to it.
>heretical words used are linked
Links dead. Here's another https://pastebin.com/BHWJBFq9
>across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude
This is actually a false assertion, because USA, Russian Federation and Australia don't encompass all habitable timezones or habitable latitudes. Anger really does cloud your knowledge of geography.
That said, now I do have an idea of a crowdsourced global geographical map of Woke influence (people fired or deplatformed, laws passed, corporations acting on their crybullying,...) across Earth, as a helpful resource for the weary traveller and the freedom defender everywhere.
> Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely
More updates regarding the astonishing power of the Woke trash to censor and gay-ify the Internet :
- Iceland (!) took down KF's new domain.
- The Internet Archive (!!!), a non-profit institution whose supposed mission is snapshotting the Internet to act as a historical record for posteriority and prevent authoritarians from rewriting history, has deleted the forum's snapshots. <sad sigh>, Okay Internet Archive, you want to stand up to Putin or Xi Jinping but you're afraid of hurting the feelies of she/her majesty.
- "We are receiving hundreds of login attempts a second from automated traffic" ; "hCaptcha, the tool we used to help mitigate bot traffic on the login page, received enough complaints from the mob that they dropped us, making it significantly more difficult to deal with this threat."
Source : KF's telegram page (https://t.me/s/kiwifarms).
I'm impressed, honestly. The Internet Archive stunt in particular, *that* got me. I had heard rumors about them deleting things before because of copyright and whatnot, but that's the first time I saw a non-profit that I previously respected and thought was a force for good succumb to deletionist censorship-loving scum. No profit motive, no bad press, no credible legal threats, just pure spineless cowardice. Fascinating.
I'm opposed to slurs in general-- I try to avoid using them myself, and pretty much succeed.
I believe they distract people from talking about anything important.
Ethically speaking, I don't use them because of a concern that people might believe me if I present them as fundamentally inferior.
I appreciate ACX as a forum with an anti-slur policy.
I'm not sure where this belongs in this long thread, so I'm putting it at the top.
I'm can't remember from the earlier version of your post whether the situation that got you banned from HackerNews was mockery of trans people, or whether trans people were just an example that came up somewhere. But let's say for the sake of argument that the incident concerned mockery of trans people, and perhaps also arguments against various arrangements that many trans people prefer, such as being called by the pronoun that matches the gender they identify with & being able to use public bathrooms designated for use by the gender they identify with. So the trans group is relatively powerful in the sense that many organizations would be pretty willing to stick up for them -- way more willing to stick up for them than they would be to stick up for, say, anti-abortionists who were being mocked and attacked. On the other hand, trans people are in many ways more vulnerable than other outgroups. Transexual teens are 7 times as likely to attempt suicide as other teens, for instance. Clearly, whatever "wokeness" there is that weighs in favor of trans people is not neutralizing the difficulties they face and putting them at some sort of advantage. Being sexually non-conforming is illegal in many parts of the world, and is despised in many parts of countries like ours where it is legal. I'm not saying that because of this trans people have more right to be defended than other groups -- though I don't think that's an absurd position. I'm saying that even if trans people are more powerful than your group in a setting like HackerNews, and can get your group cancelled, in many other ways they are far less powerful than gender-conforming people. It is not absurd for them to think of themselves as oppressed, even though in some dimensions they are powerful.
As always, I feel compelled to point out that (unless there's new data I missed) Trans teens are about 7 times more likely to REPORT suicide attempts than other teens. This matters, because reported suicidality is basically uncorrelated at a group level with suicide rates, even sometimes seeming to have a protective effect. Good starting point for reading about that here: (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide).
This doesn't mean trans people's lives are without trouble, but I'm going to grind this until people notice: Suicidality has basically nothing to do with suicide rates at a group level.
Anyone who uses suicidality in an argument as if it has to do with "probability to commit suicide" as opposed to "differences in communication styles" but doesn't begin by explaining why there's a negative association between suicidality and age (or suicidality and gender) is right to suspect as someone either uncurious or motivated towards a preferred conclusion.
One theory I've heard (from Sister Y's now-defunct blog) for why women are more likely to attempt suicide but less likely to successfully commit it is the gender difference in preferred methods:
Gunshots are much more lethal than drug overdoses, and men are much more likely to prefer the former--possibly due to greater access to and comfort around firearms, less visceral discomfort with violence, and even less concern about leaving a disfigured corpse behind.
The best piece of evidence that women's preference for poison over more violent methods *isn't* due to lesser desire to die is that in countries with much less access to firearms and much greater access to highly-lethal agricultural pesticides, gender differences in suicide rates are much smaller than they are in the US. Most notably, in China, women are significantly *more* likely to commit suicide than men.
So this is a common counterpoint. But not only is it not true most places (more on this later) it's doesn't even make sense *here*. That's because of two relevant facts:
1. Men commit suicide four times as much as women.
2. 42.1% of all male suicides are not by guns.
In a world where there were 100 female suicides per year in the US and you were able to completely stop every male US suicide-by-gun, you'd have 100 female suicides (with guns included, we didn't stop theirs) and 168 male suicides. We don't even need an experiment to know it - we are already doing the "what if men used less certain suicide methods overall than women" experiment as a subset of our current suicide rates, and men still commit suicide 168% more.
Just as telling is *how far from home, how different a culture* sister Y had to go to to find something that fit with what they wanted to believe. Like, look at Europe - they have fewer guns than the americas, by far. Their gender/suicide ratio has EVEN MORE men killing themselves than the Americas. If the pesticide thing is true, and pesticides are about equally dangerous between the regions, you'd expect for suicide rates to be closer in europe when judged by gender, because guns are taken mostly out of the picture. But our 4:1 ratio is dwarfed by, say, Poland's 6.7:1.
However, I'm not sure what plausible explanations there are for the paradox that adolescents have the highest rate of suicide attempts but older adults the highest rate of completed suicides.
I wonder if there any countries where the age distribution of completed suicides is different.
Wouldn't you expect adults to be generally more competent? They've had more decades of dealing with the physical world.
How much more? 18-25 reports 1.9% attempted suicide rate. 50+ reports 0.1%. 15-24 age group has 28.2 suicides per 100k; 45-64 has 35.2 per 100k.
Do you expect that children are >20x worse at it? These numbers aren't super exact, but that's the magnitude we are talking about here.
One of the biggest problems with discussions about which groups are powerful is that the answer is different in different context, and more importantly it is usually individuals rather than groups that are powerful. Highly educated middle-class whites are as a group surely more powerful than working class blacks, but if I get pulled over by a black cop who decides to rough me up and put me in jail for the night because he's in a bad mood, he's got nearly all the power in that situation, and looking at the group global power balance tells us almost nothing about the individual situation.
I may be wrong, but I have the feeling you basically want to pick a fight about this topic. I'm not interested in having that kind of conversation, and am going to decline to engage.
> How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ?
I think you’re asking the wrong questions. The answer is pretty simple. Power, oppression and underdog status can align on different dimensions, and so there’s no logical in-consistency to resolve. I know this is the answer for groups that behave this way and make me angry, and so I doubt an answer to this question would be helpful to you.
I *think* you’re saying: I’m angry because I’m seeing an example where there are people who are clearly not without power, yet they claim to be oppressed. Further, they are using this claim itself to wield power, and that claim is socially accepted.
Is it this idea, in abstract that makes you angry, or the specifics around the the groups in question?
Speaking for myself, this idea doesn’t make me angry. I don’t even think it’s an immoral or even non-rational way for a group to behave. I *do* get angry when some groups do it, but I think it’s sometimes acceptable, or even virtuous.
Edit: fwiw, Jack seems to be engaging you in good faith, and imho is giving good advice. Your responses seem far from rational: you seem to have positive engagement with an online community as a goal, but you’re not positively engaging. What gives?
>Speaking for myself, this idea doesn’t make me angry.
But it's dishonesty. How is it sometimes acceptable and virtuous? I do hate some specifics about the group I used slurs against, but it's not enough to explain how much I hate how they use obvious crybullying tactics to get what they want, and how most people are too spineless to stand up to them. It's very plausible the tactic itself is what gets me.
>Your responses seem far from rational
In what way? My response to Jack is, in a nutshell, that his advice is too quokka-optimized. My aggression towards progressive values is not (just) a spontaneous emotional reaction from losing an HN account, that was just a trigger, the deeper realization is that I can't have a free and fair Internet while the progressive religion is still respected and its wrath feared.
Jack is giving superb advice but for the wrong person, it would be like telling early 2000s Dawkins that he can simply just build relationships with Muslims and bit by bit nudge them towards his values, Dawkins doesn't really want that necessarily, he just wants to establish that it's okay to shit on the Muslims' religion, and he did that by, what else?, publicly shitting on the religion himself and publicly supporting those who do. Was he an asshole? Yes. Did he build meaningful relationships with Muslims? Probably never. But did he stand up to an authoritarian religion and bravely ridiculed it in a manner extremely few people were willing to even go nearby? Also yes.
I'm not as smart or as influential as Dawkins of course, but he inspires me. The central lesson is that religions only impose their prestige by fear, they exploit people's natural social intelligence and reluctance to rock the boat, and that's why a public asshole very conspicuously shitting on them in the most gruesome manner is so effective, it breaks the spell.
Would you mind expanding on this comment you made elsewhere in the thread?
>The slurs are the result of a deliberate vow to attempt to retaliate against a group towards which I had nothing but a desire to protect and live in peace, and towards me they had nothing but contempt and mockery.
Were you conveying a desire to protect and live in peace with them in the discussion? Just trying to understand what would have prompted a ban.
The original HN discussion weren't about them, they were about CloudFlare and how much private companies can get away with silencing things said on their infrastructure and how much right does a lobby have to make companies do this. My comments were increasingly angry remarks about they have no right to this without courts on their side (and even it would be unfair, at least then we would have a discussion with the bare minimum of legitimateness.)
I would link my HN account, but the comment I was banned for is flagged, that means it's hidden from view to anyone but the person who made it. I reproduce the exchange below :
>>HN User : [Something to the effect that this obviously correct and anyone "screaming" (exact quotation) about free speech doesn't understand it and is not interested in education]
> Me : I hope you still have this view when your turn comes soon enough, but then again I would very much love to see your tears when the corporate dicks you suck realize they would lose money by allowing your kind.
Saudi Arabia and China exist, the world can't live a minute without them, and they're going to teach people like you, by example, what "Muh PrIvATe CoMPaNy CaN dO AnYtHing" means.
(Is this extremly angry and against HN guidelines ? yes it is. Is the thing I'm angry about worth it and progressives are bad faith actors willing to let corporations trample over a free internet to vindicate their sick pet religion ? I percieve the answer to be yes.)
I think your problem is that you are projecting 4 groups into 2. Namely, you are neglecting the clout/power/influence/whatever-you-want-to-call-it axis. The everyday, average progressive is a secular poor city-dwelling minority member. The POWERFUL progressive is a rich, wannabe do-gooder with too much time on their hands and massive social capital/influence over the progressive base. The average conservative is a religious small- business-owning rural white person. The POWERFUL conservative is a wealthy, wannabe do-gooder with too much time on their hands and massive religious capital/influence over the conservative base.
In other words, you're assuming that every member of the group has the same capabilities, when that couldn't be further from the truth. The total force multiplier of a group is a function of its most powerful members, while the oppression of a group is a function of its average members.
If there is a contradiction within a grouping, maybe you aren't being granular enough with your boundaries?
Isn't the average hard-core progressive "an upper-middle class city-dwelling white woman"
Damned if I know. My social circle seems to turn up a lot of Jewish men.
It depends on how you define "progressive", but if you define it as "someone who always votes for Democrats" then it's surely a slightly above middle-class suburb-dwelling white woman, just as the average "person who always votes for Republicans" is surely a slightly above middle-class suburb-dwelling white man, just because the average *voter* is slightly above middle-class, and the average American is a suburb-dwelling white person.
If you're defining the term restrictively enough to get to "upper-middle-class city-dwelling", then I think it's not at all clear that the group you're singling out is majority female or majority white (because there are several groups in here, some of which have very different demographics from each other).
Note that a lot of black people want better policing, not no policing.
I read your original piece, including your user name, and actually had a hard time figuring out whether you personally despise members of of certain groups, or were mostly angry at the power these groups had to cancel the group that was mocking them. I actually came back here to make the case that there is no rule here against the use of slurs. As I understand it the guidelines for acceptable communication here are that it must meet 2 or all 3 of the following:
-It is kind
-It is right.
-It's a point worth making (Scott's version of this one is "is it necessary." That doesn't make much sense to me -- when is it every *necessary* to write a certain paragraph? So I have modified it to say what I *think* Scott really has in mind, but in any case the only version of his statement that makes sense to me.
So are/were you flunking the "kind" criteria? I personally wouldn't consider all cases of using the word "faggot" to be unkind -- for instance, it's not unkind to use it in discussions of the derivation of the term. I can't really tell what your attitude is about this stuff. If I were to announce that I am a trans man who lives as a woman, would you have a particular dislike of me and the way I live? Or is your point that you object to having mockery of trans people or other sexual minorities be censored in online forums? As for that being a point worth making, criterion 3, I'd say it definitely is.
"This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, taking a vow to forever refer to their most cherished groups by the most vile slurs they hate, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?"
Well to the overwhelming majority of people who had absolutely nothing to do with your banning, their experience is meeting someone who hates them enough to use "the most vile slurs they hate" before meeting them. When people have traditionally used hateful language against people for involuntary associations (race, sexuality, etc.), it's often been associated with the threat of force or violence.
"GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there)."
This is working from a false premise. There is no a priori optimal way to balance false positive and false negatives. In ML, you have to calibrate your classifiers on a case-by-case basis. One technique for this is using an ROC curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic
In terms of "practical utility", it isn't very rewarding to treat hostile people with respect. If someone signals, "For every tiny bit of utility you give me, I will use it to hurt you and everyone like you," there isn't much utilitarian loss for saying, "I will calibrate my epistemic norms to assume bad faith in all these people."
The best way to sway the tiny minority of people willing to apply impartial reason is to reward people who do so, which is the opposite of exercising high degrees of prejudice and bigotry. (What I'm trying to do with my comment, btw).
I honestly hope you consider some of these points and have a nice day.
That was great! Thanks.
I just reported you for your name, and i imagine you will get banned for it at some point.
I'm not reporting you because I am personally offended. I am reporting you because you are a) not respecting the norms of this community, b) literally announcing that you are going to call people slurs, and c) very angry and combative in a way that doesn't add to any discussion, at all.
Communities will continue to ban you until you learn how to communicate better. I don't agree with some of your views, but we could have a civil discussion on those things. Instead, I'm hoping that you get kicked out because everything about you is a red flag.
This will keep happening to you, over and over and over again. You will either learn and improve the way that you speak to people, or you will stay the course and get more angry and bitter. Up to you, man. I wish you the best and hope you find some peace of mind.
>I'm not reporting you because I am personally offended. I am reporting you because you are a) not respecting the norms of this community
It sounds like you are personally offended that he violated your norms? Why do rationalists engage in so much double speak?
> b) literally announcing that you are going to call people slurs,
What's wrong with calling people slurs other than that it violates the progressive religion? Sometimes a "slur" is the best word for what one wants to express, how are you "rational" if you can't handle slurs? I can handle them just fine, if you post a long data driven argument and happen to call white people honkies and crackers in the same post, I can still be rational about your comment. People who can't be tend to not add anything to the discussion.
>very angry and combative in a way that doesn't add to any discussion, at all.
Anger is normal and good! People should be angry at eunuch cyber felons who don't get held accountable for their behavior because the ruling class wants to destroy Western civilization.
Because slurs are not just a way to virtue signal or show off that you're an edgelord (depending on which side of the fence one falls), they are genuinely offensive and genuinely means of discrimination, racism, and bias against minorities or 'that lot are not like us'.
It's not about the progressive religion, and I don't give a tuppenny damn if "oh noes gypsy is a slur", it's about using terms that really were meant to be derogatory and indicate the inferiority of the people you were referring to with those terms.
"Eunuch cyber felon" is a dumb insult, by the way, because it's lacking bite and wit enough to sting without falling into vulgar coarseness. What does "eunuch" mean here - impotence? There's enough of that in modern men to enable Viagra and its knock-offs to be profitable. Can't get it up? Ditto. Hasn't fathered children? All the men who use, or take advantage of their partner using, contraception in order to avoid paternity are eunuchs by this measure.
Weak, limp, not a real man? Okay, so what is a real man? Muscles and aggression?
The avoidance of slurs on here is to keep things civil, but I also appreciate it because it's a change from other places where you can just keep calling each other "you effin' so-and-so" back and forth, and nothing fruitful comes of it. If I want to listen to drunks swearing at each other, I can just open my window on Friday nights when the pubs let out.
There is a difference between anger as wrath, and righteous anger. Sometimes I too want to shout and yell insults and kick the cat. That gets nothing done, in the end. Righteous anger produces results.
And the kind of anger you are talking about is precisely the kind of anger in that post by a medical examiner I was talking about - in the end, it was nothing but a means of showing off how *good* she was, how *virtuous*: she was angry, dammit! she wants her readers to be angry! but what did she do with that anger, did she even attend the funeral service for the girl she was angry about?
No, what she did was write a piece about "look how *angry* I am, give me head-pats and notes of approbation about what a superior specimen of humanity I am". Performative anger of the slur-yelling sort is meaningless.
>What does "eunuch" mean here
I'm surprised you didn't think of the literal meaning of the word.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch):
>A eunuch ... is a man who has been castrated.
Which does uniquely define the group I used one of the slurs against. It also alludes to the hidden power they have, as eunuchs were historically used in royal or imperial palaces and thus had tons of influence.
As for why cutting a specific organ in your body is supposed to be an insulting thing, well, why is any word an insult at all? A canine bitch is on average a better person than most humans, and a "cunt" is a life-giving organ crucial in reproduction, which most people value and view as positive, as well as a sexually desirable body part. Insults and slurs aren't supposed to be literal signals, they are more like money, what's so valuable about a dollar ? it's literally just a green colored piece of paper with weird pictures and slogans on both sides.
>give me head-pats
I don't know if this was supposed to model me or just the woman you're talking about, but I do not desire head-pats for my anger with progressives, at least not more than the usual human baseline of my demand for head-pats for anything I say or do.
My anger has a purpose, which is to signal contempt for a lying, deceitful, bunch of humans. It's also a practical demonstration of how you, a spine-ful human who loves mutual respect and uniform standards, ought to treat people who are not fans of these things, in fact explicitly arguing for the opposite (e.g. 'punching up' and 'punching down').
To the extent that I pussied out my earlier use of slurs, it was 100% just special-purpose respect for Scott and (by extension) his audience, it doesn't apply anywhere or for anyone else.
Nope. Wrong on all counts.
Wasn't offended at all - had a good and productive discussion with OP, you can see it downthread.
There are perfectly rational reasons to have a community norm of intolerance for slurs. Also, I would add that this is Scott's personal Substack, and this community is here because we enjoy the environment he has built. Part of which involves being kind to each other and conforming to basic social norms.
Last, anger is not good. Anger is. And misdirected, purposeless anger is almost always bad.
>Wasn't offended at all
You said "I'm hoping that you get kicked out". The state of "hoping that you get kicked out" is the state of being offended. You are double speaking and it's bizarre.
I guess Robin Hanson the pre-eminent expert in the psychology of rationalists would say you're trying to signal something? "offended" has a bad connotation, so you're just "hoping he gets kicked out", just like I'm not "weird", I'm "eccentric" etc
>Also, I would add that this is Scott's personal Substack, and this community is here because we enjoy the environment he has built. Part of which involves being kind to each other and conforming to basic social norms.
compromise fallacy, when your argument against a theoretical ideal is that the current point is a local optimum, hard to change, suitable enough, etc. Can't have a reasonable conversation if people can't think abstractly enough to get past fallacies like this. Destiny's fallacy is another one related to this, that's when you reject an ideal because bad interests might not understand its theoretical properties or desire an ideal etc. The basic flaw is resorting to statements of consensus/authority in lieu of discussing the topic itself. The topic here is what norms are ideal, not whether you find this specific forum currently enjoyable or rather this specific forum's owner thinks something, as if he can't be mistaken.
>Last, anger is not good. Anger is. And misdirected, purposeless anger is almost always bad.
Typo?
Being offended is an emotional reaction. Hoping someone gets kicked out can occur completely in the absence of emotional reactions, perhaps because the person's behavior is making the space less usable. I wouldn't be *offended* by someone who posted hundreds of top-level single-word comments in every post, but I would hope they get kicked out. Similarly, someone who really wants to argue about some 17th century social issue, complete with the use of 17th-century slurs against the people who disagree with them.
There are many things that might not offend me but I would still hope get removed. Unless you tautologically define offense as anything I wish removed, which is weird. If someone tried to inject malicious JS into a comment, I would laugh, but still report it as spam.
> Typo?
I don't think so. Anger is. It doesn't have a goal. It merely exists.
But I am pretty sure we do not have a community norm of no slurs. Well, I guess we have a norm -- I can't recall seeing any slurs used here. But I'm pretty sure there isn't a no-slurs rule. The rule we have that comes closest to applying is "be kind". But unkindness can be balanced off by having a great point to make and making it well -- you then meet 2 of the 3 criteria, which is the minimum standard. Hey Scott? Am I allowed to say faggot or cunt if I do it in the course of making valid points about a matter worth discussing?
I think it would be rare to use those words in the course of making valid points about a matter worth discussing other than the very use of those words themselves.
I mostly agree, but think it would be possible to talk about these terms in a somewhat more real way than the current one, where we are just talking about using the words faggot and cunt, rather than actually using them. For instance, as someone who has occasionally been called a cunt, I could unroll quite a few reflections about that word, and what it means to me. Ten years or so elapsed between my adding "cunt" to my vocabulary and my learning that it was a derogatory term for woman. So I have always had a sneaky fondness for "cunt" because I associate it with frankness and awakening sexuality. Maybe because of that association I have been irritated but never deeply distressed when I've been called a cunt, and have sometimes come back at strangers hooting the word at me with "what's the problem, you don't like cunts?" And then I feel like I've won, because I show I'm not embarrassed by the word, and not terribly upset, plus I'm zapping them back by implying that they're gay and guys who holler cunt at you from across the street are generally pretty into being macho. But then again I think about how cunt is hardly the smartest part of me, and only looks attractive in sexual contexts -- and I don't like the idea of having that part of me taken as the whole. As for calling somebody else a cunt -- yep, I've done that. How bad does that make me? I have one Reddit alt that's male -- in fact the username itself incorporates one of the other slang terms for female genitals -- and as him I've occasionally gotten into verbal duels with other (presumed) guys, and hauled out both "cunt" and "cocksucker," while the guy raved on about banging my mother, etc. I wasn't even fully angry in those duels -- I was more role-playing being an angry guy, and enjoying what it felt like. Also I occasionally call one of my friends, both male and female, a cunt, but always as part of kidding around, and nobody has minded. (When my friends mind things, believe me they tell you.). Anyhow, I guess my overall feeling about these words is a wish that everybody could just unpack with some other people, what the words mean to them, and desensitize a bit, so that using one of them loses its poisonous bite. It seems like a much better solution to me than forbidding their use. You wanna talk about "faggot," Kenny, or is this kind of unpacking not your cup of tea?
I imagine the way you just used it is fine. I'm pretty sure the way he used it is not fine. Up to Scott, of course.
I think OP has walked back his comments enough that - with a name change - I'd personally give him a half ban. Seems like a decent guy having a tough day.
Using a slur isn't enough to get banned, according to the latest guidelines I've seen, but it is definitely unkind. To avoid a ban, what you have to say has to pass the other 2 tests, in order to score the required minimum of 2 out of 3: Are you right? Is your point worth making?
I suppose maximal charity would interpret the username as meaning "against bundles of sticks (or perhaps pork meatballs https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626), against a particular folk dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyoqiMB25-4" but uh, maybe not.
Banned for this comment (I was on the fence about banning for the original)
Hey there. I am a progressive, and when I have time in my day I enjoying talking about these sorts of things. I won't be doing that here. When you lead with calling me pathetic and brain-dead, you mark yourself as someone I'm not super interested in conversing with. Life's too short to hang out with people who hold you in contempt.
Anyhow, just so you know, I'm reporting this one. This sort of invective-filled free-for-all is not really the atmosphere our host generally likes to cultivate, even though he himself is also pretty anti-woke.
Eh, fair. Especially the point about my insults being too personal and unprovoked, and unlike the thread opener this has no other points besides insulting. I guess even war has principles and protocols, and firing in a place as peaceful as ACX is going too far.
I would apologize, but I hate progressivism so much I'm not sure I would be sincere, and I know nothing else about you to arouse sympathy. Sorry I insulted your brain, I have nothing against it besides how I fucking hate what it thinks. Here's a photo of a small kitten[1], and another one of a large kitten[2]. You're a progressive eh? You would probably like this photo of a lesbian couple[3]. Dogs, you like dogs? Of course you do, who hates dogs, here's a small dog[4], and here's a large dog[5].
[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQLBeycz49ZouGd_PhzVYu6GWqAx9xsG9Hnlg&usqp=CAU
[2] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR1WL-4CdgmTK6W9qrfAAVNKs2vRI9n3CKOAQ&usqp=CAU
[3] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSHO5C5_0yrqDpvK3SzqIYXTqiOUlDNhSWc8A&usqp=CAU
[4] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0fG0zZRANdPB3Nh1PYltFdB34yPv_1NhW9A&usqp=CAU
[5] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQseJp_Rr0I6GMdimKa8t-DfgdSekVzDFZAqg&usqp=CAU
>Sorry I insulted your brain, I have nothing against it besides how I fucking hate what it thinks.<
Heh heh heh. I'll probably use that at some point.
In truth, I sometimes find myself thinking, involuntarily, something along the lines of "you've got to have some sort of honest-to-God emotional problem or a fairly low IQ to be a modern progressive" — like, as soon as I started questioning my political positions, I immediately found clear and obvious (as it seemed to me, at least) evidence that they were completely wrong about everything; there's just no way to be "woke" and actually be able to think...
...but then I think about some progressives I know who are able to manage better spelling and grammar than a good 95% of the population (although mine are, of course, even gooder), and even seem to be basically well-meaning people. It's truly a mystery to me.
I think maybe there's some sort of mental-trait axis, somewhat orthogonal to g, along which one could plot people by something like "precision of thought". I find that a sort of general lack of precision is usually my main objection, in arguments with the Left; and not any lack of elaboration in thought — quite the opposite, sometimes!
Rather, e.g., it is often — perhaps *usually* — very hard to get my opponent to stay on topic, and separate assumptions from arguments, and disentangle correlation and causation (and not always in the direction you'd think), and stop setting up weak- or straw-men, and stop switching from one principle to another nearly its opposite depending on convenience, etc. etc.
This also explains how some (hard science!) PhDs I've known seem kind of... dumb. One fellow was not at all a bad physicist — indeed, perhaps even above-average — but he *lost an eye* because he refused to get it checked out... while relying entirely on homeopathic remedies.
I ask you: *what the hell?*
Eh. I don't hate dogs but I'm not a fan. They like to lick, and I'm persnickety.
Anyhow, you might try over at DSL. I don't think they're really anymore slur positive than here, but they're more concentratedly rightwing, and, IMO, more sharp elbowed.
Okay, fair enough.
The reason I took the time to type something out instead of just reporting you is that I’m trying to convey a lesson that it to me a long time to learn.
I am not a progressive, not even close. I am anti-PC, anti-woke, anti all the things that you appear to hate. I know that every Karen says “I’m for free speech, but…”, so I might sound like that to you. I’m not. I was an infantry Marine - just trust me when I say that I love inappropriate and transgressive humor. I’m anti Canceling, pretty much across the board.
Point being, I’m as close to a receptive audience as you will find in this community. And I still think you should be banned.
You will become a better person when you start to respect peoples boundaries. You are writing people off because they respond negatively - without taking responsibility for the fact that you threw the first punch.
Sorry for writing you off as a progressive. I didn't mean any of the insults even as I used them. I really loved HN, my anger from losing my 2-year account is probably clouding my judgement and noising my responses heavily. I'm probably violating every norm Scott argued for on old SSC.
>You will become a better person when you start to respect peoples boundaries.
Is there a reason why respecting people for ~10-15 years is not enough for them to respect my boundaries and the things I value (freedom, anti-censorship, the internet as a sacred "edgy" place far from the hands of corporations and nation states), in fact gloating about how those things are irrelevant to them, but respecting them some more after their latest transgression against me will for some reason make them rethink ? Why is my defection unfair but every single defection to them is tolerated and encouraged ?
It's cool man. Thanks for apologizing.
As for your question... there's nothing fair about it. You absolutely don't have to respect people. Particularly people who you perceive as disrespecting you or your values. But what does that accomplish? You're going to continue getting banned, and continue pissing people off who you might have a good conversation with if you took a different approach.
I recognize the anger that you have, and the hurt that it stems from. It's super cliche, but at some point I realized that the anger was only hurting me. The people I was angry at felt justified by my reaction. And everybody else supported the other side because of my response.
Your anger won't change anyone's mind. It won't do anything, at all. You'll just sit in your room, brooding about injustice and filling your veins with poison. What's the point?
The world is a lonely, hateful place if you reject people because you disagree with them about something important. But you can have cool relationships with those exact same people if you focus on the big things that you agree on.
I know that this all sounds like platitudes and empty talk. I just know that I personally felt the way that you feel for a lot of years. I let the hate go, and life is a lot better. People like me more. People respect me more. People listen to me more.
I'm much more effective at changing people's minds, too. You don't shift opinions by calling people out and challenging them directly. You meet them where they're at and gently nudge them in the right direction. Over time, they'll completely change their views - often without realizing it, or giving you any credit or admitting that they were wrong. But what's more important - being acknowledged as right, or building quality relationships with the people around you?
I sincerely wish you the best, and hope things work out well for you.
(The new name got a chuckle, but you still gotta cut that shit bro lol)
I wouldn't like to overstay our conversation, but I want to respectfully call bullshit on your call to tend to our own gardens only.
The advice about not dwelling on our anger is, as far as my experience goes, 100% correct. I brushed with suicide once because I dwelt too hard on an injustice, so I learned the hard lesson the hard way. I'm not in danger of that anymore, not by a long shot, not because of HN at any rate. My anger is more "favorite team lost the finals" calibre than "life is not worth living" calibre.
However, this doesn't translate to us being quokka pushovers, there are predators in this world, and they won't be won by your friendly gestures and chocolate gifts. If you counter by the fact that *some* of their species can be won, I would say that's irrelevant, both predators has the same phenotype, while you're distracted building relationships and institutional power for your friendly tiger, the bad tiger will use them to eat you, and your friend won't shed a single tear. We wouldn't be having this conversation if this wasn't true.
My hands are weary from extending olive branches. I will try aggression for size. This doesn't need to translate to my personal life, my close circle is very far away from all of this shit and is thankfully not inhabited by a single one of the predator groups, so the change in my internet behaviour is largerly transparent without my usernames and passwords. All what needs to be done is finding some efficient method to spread some poison back to those spreading it to the internet, and that can still be done.
You will recall that when Voltaire encouraged us to tend to our gardens and forget everything else, that was a cynical last advice to live your remaining years in old age, after you had toured the world and tried everything else you can. I'm not an aggressive person, but I really fucking hate unfairness and disrespect. Punishing the people who built themselves the capability to unfairly censor people and disrespect my values (partly on the back of the niceness and goodwill of people building relationships like you advocate) strikes me as very fair. Unfortunate, but very fair.
I find it hard to square your claim of "respecting people" with the slurs in your username and your posts.
The slurs are the result of a deliberate vow to attempt to retaliate against a group towards which I had nothing but a desire to protect and live in peace, and towards me they had nothing but contempt and mockery. They had been edited out to not insult the dominant religion of 2022 anymore.
It might seem pathetic and fragile to reverse a life-long policy because I was banned from 1 obscure pile of 0s and 1s, and it is. A straw is also a very pathetic and fragile thing, yet it can break an overloaded Camel's back. We humans are small things, small things make us happy, small things make us sad.
Also, more to your point - things are bad, ngl. But if you are still looking at this as progressives vs everybody else, left vs right, or whatever else, you are totally missing the boat. We are living through the downslope of a declining empire. This is not a new pattern, and there probably isn't a way to fix it. It won't get fixed even if the people you like and support are the ones that win. Stop blaming the other side, start considering things from the perspective of your family/friends/personal life instead of macro politics. It's not a single ideology or group of people that is the problem - things are breaking, and they will continue to break no matter who you vote for or what ideology wins out.
Yeah all that. I've also stopped consuming 'the news'. Media sites are not out to inform you. They want you back tomorrow, and one way to do that is to outrage you. Fear and hate are strong emotions.
Indeed. I consciously make an effort NOT to follow current events, and end up hearing about most of them anyway through osmosis.
I better jump on this to reply before this comment gets deleted for self-avowed hate speech.
Anyone who thinks this is unprecedented in the history of the internet has literally not been paying attention -- the same thing happened years and years ago to a variety of far-right extremist sites. alas I cannot recall what any of them were named, but if you poke around you may be able to find some record of the conflict. And, in poking around, you'll find the answer to your question -- it's preemptive. Sure, internet neo-nazis, TERFs, or whoever else don't have any actual political power to hurt people, but they say they would if they did. They're oppressors per se in themselves, but don't have the opportunity. This is the same argument as when someone with a knife is approaching someone who has a gun, shouting "I'm gonna kill you!". At 50 feet he doesn't have the power, at 30 feet he doesn't have the power, but at some point between 30 and 0 feet he will and he's already said he plans to use it.
Sure, kiwifarms by this analogy is about 10,000 miles away from knife range, but also nobody is shooting them, just shutting them down.
"At 50 feet he doesn't have the power, at 30 feet he doesn't have the power, but at some point between 30 and 0 feet he will and he's already said he plans to use it."
21 feet is the conventional distance at which a knife outguns a holstered gun, as famously asserted by the Philippine police.
Kiwifarms doesn't say it would hurt people if it had power, or even imply it. That's ridiculous crybullying.
Also that, uh, doesn't answer his question at all even if true.
Kiwifarms has, afaik, run campaigns of harassment that have resulted in more than one suicide.
Sure, they are not capable of physically breaking down trans peoples' doors and murdering them, but it's also not correct to say "they don't want to hurt people." They want to inflict as much pain as is possible via an anonymous internet connection.
(And if all you care about is physical harm, well, Cloudflare hasn't done any physical harm either.)
> Kiwifarms has, afaik, run campaigns of harassment that have resulted in more than one suicide
I have heard this said, but no names named.
Given the incredibly high baseline rate of suicide among transsexuals, are we sure that Kiwifarms has anything to do with it?
Doesn't it? He asked how they justified it, and I presented their argument as best I could.
Ask any transwoman who has been told to kill herself (which is one of the most common negative things to say, along with "you will never be a woman") if she feels that the person who is expressing a desire for her to be dead is likely to have her euthanized if given total state control. I'll bet she'll say 'yes'.
Is that what the antagonist is actually saying? Presumably not, but if that's how it feels, that's how they justify it. And I thought that was the question.
No, not AFAICS: although that question is probably implied, he *explicitly* asked only three or so versions of "how does this group think they're oppressed when they clearly have the power" — not "how do they justify banning KiwiFarms", necessarily; though I just sort of skimmed the post and maybe missed this question made explicit.
I interpreted your comment as saying not "this is what they *feel* is happening ", but rather "this *is* what is happening" — e.g.: not "they feel right-wing groups want to oppress people", but "they want to oppress people"; and the analogy of the knife-wielding attacker seems to place the pre-emptive banner in the right, with no mention of agnosticism as to whether it is or isn't really analogous — but if I've misinterpreted, I apologize for the error.
Fair enough, thanks for the clarification. I interpreted his "How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog?" and the part about if anyone knows how they think as looking for the kind of response I gave. Nobody else at all did in the many replies so he may have been speaking rhetorically.
Also, just for the good of the Overton Window, I sure hope that at least a few 'rightwingers' in the first world really do still want to oppress and possibly execute anyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. If not it would be like finding out the desert wolf is extinct -- sure it's close to identical to the timberwolf but still a distinct sub-species.
I'm not in any position to ban anyone from anything, so I haven't bothered to form an opinion about whether or not it is 'right' to do so. People with power do what they can convince themselves is right.
You may want to revisit the comments in question.
A: "How can anyone justify this feeling?"
B: "Here's their exact arguments justifying their feelings, hope this helps."
C: "Ohmigod, B, how can you say such things?"
Try harder.
Is it just my morning dumbness or does the bank robbery example pre-supposes that slurs are indeed inherently morally bad? Because from my pov it's more like """If somebody falsely accuses you of not caring about Allah and you say "you know what? Fuck Allah, you will end up in jail for heresy""". But recall that I can say Fuck Allah on the Internet with relative impunity, and the net result would be me publicly disrespecting an authoritarian religion and therefore decreasing its grasp on public speech by a little bit.
But I did learn a lesson from the responses to my original comment, it just wasn't "don't ever use slurs".
We will just have to agree to disagree on the relevance of slurs. You view them as irrelevant as a clown custom worn during a speech on inflation, I view them as relevant as the insults a militant atheist might use while decrying religion. (i.e. Not strictly necessary, but they support and underscore the sentiments expressed, and are a deliberate expression of disrespect and irreverence.)
I do think that using slurs in my post was a mistake, but that has more to do with ACX's atmosphere and character, not a general purpose case against slurs like yours.
Does anyone here have any experience with remote.com, both in general and from the perspective of a US employee looking to keep his US job but live/work outside the US?
What are you looking to use it for specifically?
My current company allows completely remote work inside the US but not internationally because of legal complications. I've been looking around at options for setting up 100% internationally remote work while keeping a US salary, which is harder than expected. I'd like to broach this HR and my manager as potentially adding this as part of my benefits package. I'm hoping it's basically just a simple legal solution to this problem, my company can just pay remote.com the $300-$350/month to handle all the legal complexity and I can start working out of Italy or Thailand on a six figure salary.
At this point I'm just exploring options and I'm hoping someone else has used remote.com before and can share some experience, good or bad.
I work for a Canadian company in Europe I earn local wages. To pay taxes efficiently I am part of an umbrella company which then contracts to the Canadian company. They can’t set up here without paying some corporate tax. What you are asking for is unlikely, but not impossible.
Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful.
My job has nothing to do with sales, but it feels like one of those versatile human traits that has really high returns if you can learn to do it well.
It's an interesting topic, even if one is only in "sales" tangentially (like "selling" stuff via retail jobs). I think a lot of the in-field stuff is pretty myopic though...a common failure mode of academic sub-genres. "There's no such thing as consumer psychology, just psychology"
Andrew Carnegie's classic "How to Make Friends and Influence People" holds up pretty well. Productive interpersonal relations are just sales opportunities in disguise. (The whole "personal brand" bullshit of yesteryear vaguely gestured in this direction, but of course got high on its own woo. Remember when straight-faced government-backed career navigation centers dispensed such august advice as astroturfing your LinkedIn?)
If you wanted something shorter, the concept of "weirdness points/budget" is relatively quick and easy to add to one's repertoire. If you can't compete on being the best (and you probably can't, not sustainably anyway), then it's better to compete on being different or interesting. Everyone's a sucker for novelty.
There is a company called close.io that (in the past at least) released a lot of good resources on this. I have also been somewhat impressed by Alex Hormozi and his content on social media, but i am not in sales so not an expert.
"The mom test" is a great short book about sales in tech. Or rather it is about how to ask do that people tell you what they really think/need/want
The best book I've read about the subject (admittedly, not many) is Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got by Jay Abraham. I'm not in sales, but it really helped me to understand how those people are able to be so successful at something that seems totally foreign to the way my mind works.
Tony Robbins is good
"Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful."
I'm not answering your question, but I am answering an adjacent question.
I recommend "Getting to Yes" by Fisher and Ury.
I'm tempted to point out that your immediate recognition of Tony Robbins proves that he is really really good at sales, but that would be flippant.
How about Cialdini's now-classic (and only somewhat degraded by failures of replication) book "Influence"?
lol. Cialdini is good. Tim Ferriss always recommends the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and he's an all-time self-promoter so he probably knows what's what.
I hear Getting to Yes and Getting Past No are both good.
Any feline psychologists out there? The Warrior Princess is an indoor/outdoor cat that I raised from a kitten and is now eleven years old. Suddenly last week she decided that being inside makes her absolutely crazy—I mean yowling at the doors, scratching the window screens crazy!
The routine up to two weeks ago, was I would get up in the morning, feed her and her brother breakfast, then an hour or so later, let them out for the day. Between 5 and 6 pm, I'd clap my hands and call them in for dinner. They'd both come running, and they'd be indoors for the night.
Maybe a month ago, Princess started being a bit tardy for the dinner call, but she'd show up 15 or 20 minutes late and meow at the front door or the kitchen door to let me know she was there. This may be because she had been wandering further from my yard, but I'm not sure. Starting last week, she'd show up at my door but was reluctant to come in, so I'd grab her and bring her in for her dinner. After dinner, she'd be restless and she'd meow and then yowl to go back outside. Then she became rmotr and more reluctant to let me snag her, and the evenings became such restless high-drama of yowling and scratching at doors and screens (I couldn't get to sleep), that I gave in and let her out.
For the next several days, she'd stay 50 or so feet away from the door, and the only way I could snag her was by luring her close to me with Temptation cat treats. Now we've come to a compromise. When I step out to greet her, she'll come up to me to let me pet her. She allows me to snuggle with her a bit and carry her inside. She'll eat about half her food and then she'll make it quite clear to me that she wants to go back outside NOW!
Yesterday evening after I had let her out after her brief dinner, I was sitting outside on my back patio as the twilight settled in and she came by me to say hello and head butt me. She hopped up on my lap and we had a session of snuggling. I didn't try to bring her inside. She hopped down and trotted off into the shadows. This morning she allowed me to snag her without objecting, but after eating half her breakfast she made it clear that she wanted to get back outside.
BTW: breakfast & dinner are high-protein/low-carb cat foods(Blue Buffalo) for middle-age weight control. More for her brother (who was porking up) than for her. Also, over the past month, she was only eating half her normal food—even while she was still staying inside at night. But she hasn't been losing weight, so I assumed she was eating food that my neighbor puts out for the ferals in the neighborhood. My mom also has been coming by to put out food for a couple of ferals who she's bonded with, but I put that Purina Meow Mix away when I let my two cats out every morning—so they wouldn't get at the cheaper food with grain in it.
I was told by a vet that cat food with grain in it can cause kidney issues and one of the signs is that the cat gets moody. My current vet has told me that that's crap. But I'm wondering if my former vet wasn't on to something. Is my Warrior Princess eating grain-based kibble at the neighbor's house, and she's going psycho because of the food that she may be scarfing up around the neighborhood?
I have a cat-sitter who looks after my cats when I travel, but both of them would stay in the house while I was traveling so that my cat-sitter wouldn't have to look for them. I'll be going on a trip at some point in the next month, I can't deal with a semi-feral cat tearing my house apart while I'm away. The only alternative is to leave the Warrior Princess out to fend for herself for a week. There's plenty of food and water in the neighborhood (my street is like a Club Med for cats). But I don't like that idea.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks for all your comments. Here's an update on The Warrior Princess — evidently she got into a cat fight and her paw got slashed and infected. I found her under my car. She came to me when I called her, but she was limping badly. I took her to the veterinary ER. They cleaned and drained her wound and dosed her with antibiotics. I explained the situation to the vet — i.e. that Princess didn't want to be inside at all. I said that one of my regular vets had suggested cat food with grain filler could be affecting her kidneys and making her crazy. The ER vet said that was possible, but she said usually that affects their coats and skin — and The Warrior Princess has a healthy coat of fur.
Anyway, because I have to keep her in the house while her wound heals, I asked for some kitty downers to calm her down. The vet prescribed gabapentin — which totally knocked Princess out. I halved the dosage because I thought she was too out of it. The halved dosage kept her calm until it began to wear off at the 12-hour mark. For the first two days, she'd yowl at the door until I gave her some drugged tuna fish. On the third day, after the gabapentin wore off she got up, used the litter box, drank some water, and she went back to the nest she had created in the spare bedroom. On day four, I stopped giving her any gabapentin. For the past couple of days, she's made short excursions from her nest to use the litter box, but she doesn't want to leave her room for very long. It's as if she's transitioned from being claustrophobic into being agoraphobic!
I've been trying to lure her out into the rest of the house, but she's pretty adamant that she's happy where she is. Her wound seems to have healed, but she's still limping a bit. She likes to snuggle with me, but I have to be in HER room to snuggle. Otherwise, if I carry her out to snuggle in other parts of the house, she quickly gets restless and heads back to her room. Not sure if the gabapentin has changed her neural wiring or if the high-protein diet has calmed her down. Weird stuff!
I had cats in my crib, and pet cats my whole life. I know them well. Here's my theory: The gabapentin gave her a sense that an unidentifiable something is different and wrong. What's kicking in is the same thing that does when they are gravely ill: They crave sameness, safety and privacy. If they are sick enough, they'll start looking for hidey-holes, places like deep in the corner of the closet. Fortunately she's not gravely ill, but she may think she is. Probably her caution will wear off naturally over time, but it would be a good idea to try to nudge her in the direction of using the whole house. Maybe try things like feed her wet cat food in small dabs all day long, rather than as one meal, & someplace else but the room she's in. Also, that page I linked of cat puzzles looked promising to me. I have not had much luck getting cats to play with puzzles to get kibble or treats, but most of the puzzles on that page say they can be used with wet food too, & that virtually guarantees enthusiasm on cat's part. (Probably also guarantees puzzles will get messy & smelly & be a nuisance to keep clean.). Anyhow, a wet-food puzzle would keep her out of her spare bedroom longer, and might also give her some entertainment. Plus of course lots of petting, but I'm sure you do that anyhow.
Also, have you tried catnip? A good stimulant and euphoric for most cats.
Sometimes I wonder if animals' dreams can have an effect on their behaviour, even changing it semi-permanently if they remember them after waking. After all, I don't see how they could clearly understand that dreams are not real, even if they are wildly inconsistent in themselves and with the animal's waking reality.
My cat seems out of sorts and distant sometimes after waking, and clingier than usual at other times, although this doesn't last, and I wonder whether that isn't the result of a remembered dream that she is confusing with reality.
So if there was no obvious physical/medical reason for your cat's sudden compulsion to be outdoors, maybe she was remembering some ghastly nightmare involving being stalked round the house.
I mostly agree with you — except for your statement that dreams are not real. I have a rather self-consistent dream reality that I have an alternative existence in. Dream reality has different rules from waking reality, but consider them to be equally significant. If I were for some medical reason never to wake again, but could continue in my dreaming existence, I'd be perfectly happy.
My cats are exclusively indoors. But I've always had the guilty feeling that if they could have the choice most cats would live outdoors and fend for themselves, leading shorter but more exciting lives. I had one indoor cat who was very docile, and once during heavy snow I carried him outside and let him feel & smell and taste the fat snowflakes. We were outside for maybe 3 minutes, but that cat remembered the experience for the rest of his life, and frequently stood at the door we'd gone through and cried to be let out.
PS, Just noticed who posted this. Hi beowulf! On Twitter you know me as Pat W.
Anyhow, I think your Warrior Princess has gone partly feral, and is telling you she wants to go the rest of the way. I don't think there's much you can do about it. She'll probably keep dropping by for friendly visits for the rest of her life.
You can certainly do something about it! I've recovered one cat of my own who was going in that direction, like Warrior Princess, and many other half- or mostly- feral cats.
(In general, you need to keep them inside without letting them out for a long time, along with some behavior encouragement/discouragement; they'll be upset for a while — but stay strong. It also helps if they have a full life indoors, with catgrass to nibble, playtime with their humans, occasional treats, a window or balcony to sun in and look out of, etc.
And, just to note, it's also the case that lots of my cats have been obviously much happier indoors! My Peanut wants nothing more than to chill with me and get cuddles. If I may brag for a second... he is truly the sweetest creature I have ever encountered; literally won't even hurt a fly! Never scratches or bites, never damages anything at all, never fights the other cats, will bunt and purr and curl up on your lap at the slightest opportunity... I have even seen him *chilling with birds on the balcony*. I don't know how he managed to survive at all, on the streets, but I'm so glad I found 'im.)
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I commend you on keeping your cats inside. I think many people have too rosy a view of what life is like for a feral cat; more "exciting", yes, perhaps — but one reason they don't live as long as indoor cats isn't just accidents, but because once they get a little ill or weak, that's often it: a miserable death of starvation or thirst or predation, unable to handle the athletics required of a wild cat.
In the beginning of their career outdoors, or if they've been lucky, they can seem in good shape and pretty happy.
But cats are stoic: we found a sweet female kitty that seemed in good spirits, and would come eat the food we put out and hang out a bit if we didn't try to approach her.
Over time, we were able to finally tame her enough to pet her, and eventually grab her and take her to the vet. (We thought she wasn't that hungry, despite being sort of thin, because she wouldn't eat dry food, only wet; but mainly took her just to get checked out.)
Turned out she was seriously ill — and her teeth were all messed up; the vet said it must have been awful pain all the time, and especially when trying to eat.
This story has a happy ending — we got her fixed up and she was just the sweetest, most grateful kitty — but most cats we've rescued that have been on the streets a long time are in similarly bad shape (although not usually to that extent).
It's a hard life. Don't let your cats go feral, please.
I thought it over, and I think you're right. I have no illusions about the downside of being a feral cat -- just thought that it would be awfully hard to bring Warrior Princess back to where she had been, a housecat who roamed outdoors part of the time. But maybe it would be possible either to convert her to a permanently indoor cat, or to get here back to where she was before by keeping her indoors for 6 months or so.
So OK, beowulf, here are some ideas for making her happier with indoor life. I've been researching ways to entertain cats indoors because I just got 2 Devon Rex kittens. Devons are a *very* active, smart, muscular breed, sort of like a cross between a cat and a monkey, and if you don't keep them entertained they turn into house-dismantling maniacs. So here are things that look promising to me:
-cat exercise wheels
-cat puzzles. The ones on this page look decent: http://foodpuzzlesforcats.com/stationary-puzzles
-cat climbing structures. There are all kids of cat trees and cat walks you can buy. Some are quite handsome, though pricey. I think what I'm going to do is build something in a spare room using cardboard tubes designed for making cement pillars (you pour the cement in, then peel off the cardboard after it drives). I built something like this for cats before out of these things, and it works well. The tubes are very thick and strong, maybe 10" in diameter and at least 4' long -- maybe there are longer ones available too. You can cut them down the middle lengthwise and get 2 half-tubes, too, each strong enough to support a couple cats' weight. So there are lots of ways to suspend and connect these, and it's not much trouble to rearrange them and make a new structure. The only real downside is that they are too slick for cats to get a grip on. You have to hot-glue chunks of carpet to the parts of them cats will be walking on.
You are a good person, and I hope you and those kittens bring each other lots of happiness! o7
("Sort of like a cross between a cat and a monkey" — haha, oh jeez... I found a kitten about half a year ago, and she wasn't even a monkeycat, but holy Jesus I had forgotten how much energy some of those little suckers can have!
After growing up and getting spayed and making friends with the other cats for extra playtime, she's become a lot easier to handle. Still super silly and cute when she gets "ferociously" into chasing a toy, though!)
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Just to say: I don't think you're wrong about WP, either, btw — she definitely seems to *want* to be an outdoor kitty, and it won't be easy "re-civilizing" her — but I do one-hundred-percent think it's worth trying, at least. I can only think of one failure in attempting this out of the dozen or so cats I've tried it with... but there *was* that one. I hope Beowulf reads your excellent suggestions, and plays and socializes with Warrior Princess until she's back indoors!
https://i.imgur.com/1Uv2pYG.png
(Their fur comes in when they mature at age about 1 year. It's curly!)
If you have windows that open vertically, getting an in-window pet door (like the one at https://www.amazon.com/Products-Aluminum-Window-Adjustable-Widths/dp/B005TMD3O4/) is an option. Those are pretty affordable and simple to install, can be removed if you only need it temporarily.
Right a cat door sounds like a solution. The only down side is that my cat will sometimes bring in whatever she's caught to show us. Which is not a big deal unless it is still alive.
If it's a mouse, try this: use blankets to block off anywhere in the room that looks like a good hiding place, then put a large box on its side with something covering most of the opening so that it looks like a safe, dark place for the mouse to run to. Move whatever furniture it's hiding under so that flees into the box, then just take the box outside and let it out.
In my experience, this only takes a few minutes to set up and works pretty reliably.
Oh dear, I set up a mouse trap to kill it. There are plenty more mice around here... and other vermin. (mice love peanut butter.)
1.) Kidney problems are common in cats as they age like this, because they don't tend to drink enough. Unless they have had clean, flowing water constantly available (flowing because that encourages them to drink — standing water, even if clean, doesn't tempt as much) and/or have been fed lots of extra-juicy meals rather than dry food, kidney problems are not at all unlikely.
I've definitely had cats start eating the food neighbors put out, btw!
2.) Place her at reputable kennel for the week, perhaps...?
Leaving her out for the week sounds like a recipe for losing your cat, to me. At best, she'll recognize you even less and return to your house even less. At worst...
I had a sort-of similar problem. I do not let my cats out without me watching, so they were never used to being outside all day or anything, but for a bit one of them started being mad when I'd take her in and asking to go out *all the time*. I fixed it by ignoring all demands to go out except for at the designated time and taking her in regardless of complaint, and she got over it.
Kinda broke my heart to do so, but a) she didn't tear the house up or nothin', and b) "an indoor cat is a happy cat" my vet always said — which may not always technically be true, but an indoor cat is a *safe* cat.
Your neighborhood may be safer than mine, but I only mean: I'd rather angry kitty than dead kitty; they get used to it and stop being angry kitty anyway; and... I can fix damage to an object, or replace it, but you cannot always fix damage to — or replace — a living thing.
Im no expert in cats but from a rationalist perspective i see two options:
A: She doesn't like it insight anymore
B: She has another place (insight or outside) where she prefers to spend the night.
Since the sister post already talks about reasons why she might not like it at your place anymore i'll focus on B.
Have you considered that she stays at another house?
Maybe try to use a tracking device (e.g. Apple AirTag) to see where she spends the night. Or as a low-tech alternative, but a capsule on a necklace and but a message in there with your contact info.
11 years is quite old for a cat. So could it be she is losing her sense of smell and the house doesn't smell as familiar and thus welcoming as before? https://betterpet.com/how-do-cats-smell/ That seems to me FWIW the most likely explanation, although I don't claim to be Jackson Galaxy the cat guy!
Loss or suppression of a sense of smell is apparently quite common with elderly cats. It can be either temporary (due to viral infections, even Covid!) or permanent, generally caused by nasal cancer.
Also, have there been any recent changes in the house, such as redecorating, or new equipment or pipework that might make a repellent smell or threatening noise?
Damn, talking of cats, mine has jumped up on the table. So I'll quickly post this before she treads on the keyboard and trashes the post! :-)
I want to plug this hilarious review of the game "Tom Clancy's The Division."
https://youtu.be/byoCgCrd_dI
Ross is a treasure.
I've been playing Fallout 4, there are a ton of side quests (including recurring missions to defend town from attack, to rescue abducted townspeople from other locations, and to kill groups of people who have been harassing the towns), and it got me thinking about how realistic they were. A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today. Here's a source I found: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/police_dispatch_stats
With that in mind, I think a post-apocalyptic, open-world game would generate these types of side quests for the player, in this order of frequency:
1) Deal with transportation accidents. Either someone alerts you to an accident that just happened around the corner (e.g. - mule-driven cart flips over, motorcycle hits a kid, etc.), or you see it happen in front of you, and you decide whether to help. You would also have your own personal vehicle accidents. Maybe you give the victims medical help, fix their vehicles, or stop a fight between the involved parties.
2) Deal with heated arguments and fist fights between people. Such confrontations would auto-generate between NPCs in your vicinity at random intervals. This includes domestic violence. Some NPCs would also start arguments with you.
3) Deal with thefts. Maybe a store owner complains to you and you have to decide whether to track down the thief and retrieve the items (and punish them however you please). NPCs would also steal from you, and your perception / awareness level would determine whether you noticed before they fled.
4) Deal with trespassers, loiterers, etc. NPCs would ask you to help remove obstinate drunks from bars, homeless people from sidewalks, nonpaying tenants, etc. If you owned a house in the game, you would also periodically deal with these problems directly.
5) Deal with noise complaints. The lack of electronic music devices would make this a less common problem, though people would still complain about the loud bar next door, or noise from a machine shop or something.
6) OK, I'm tired of writing this. Just look at the list in the link.
Note: I omitted "Parking violations" because, in a post-apocalyptic world it probably wouldn't be an issue since there would be so few vehicles left.
"A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today."
Given the state of the Commonwealth in Fallout 4, I think a better comparison would be an active warzone with a myriad of different militia and insurgent groups all fighting each other. I know the Raider factions are referred to as "gangs," but they're less like modern street gangs and more like pillaging warbands. They're not petty thieves or even the Mafia, they're literal barbarians with automatic firearms and high-tech slave collars. So the right comparison would probably be something like battles, skirmishes, and terrorist attacks in Iraq during the immediate aftermath of the American invasion, rather than police incidents in New Haven.
I do like your ideas though! A "softer" post-apocalyptic game with an emphasis on resolving minor disputes sounds fun, immersive, and unique. I just don't think it would be Fallout anymore, unless you set it someplace like NCR territory where things are more peaceful and people are further along in the rebuilding process.
You forgot 0) Do the paperwork.
In Fallout 4, when you complete a side quest, you usually have to go back to the person who assigned it to you and tell them it is done, so that covers that base.
Reading this made me think of a Fallout/otherwise post-apocalypse version of 911 and 112 Operator: https://store.steampowered.com/app/503560/911_Operator/ & https://store.steampowered.com/app/793460/112_Operator/?curator_clanid=33074184. That'd be interesting, and Bethesda seems willing to do spin-off games judging by the likes of Fallout Shelter: https://bethesda.net/en/game/falloutshelter. Though it might be even more interesting to play a dispatch operator *during* the apocalypse, when everything is going to hell around you and you're completely overwhelmed...
"and it got me thinking about how realistic they were"
For this part you'd probably want to go back to colonial times, when hostile outsiders were actively trying to stop towns from growing.
Long time reader, first time poster feeling a bit weird that my first comment is basically an ad.
I’ve started a Substack where I plan to tackle some topics that I think ACX readers will likely be interested in. I’ve planned out one post every two weeks for the next few months. Today’s post is “All Poverty is Energy Poverty” (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-poverty). Would really appreciate any feedback you all can give- I’m aiming for something that is interesting to ACX types but also intelligible to normies.
Very minor and surface-level critique, but defining the joule seems to be too basic. I'm not saying don't define very basic terms, just do it in a way that deosn't sound like a school lesson. Maybe do it in a footnote or a side remark or a small caption on a relevant photo.
I don't even know why the reader needs to know about the joule, all industrial and real-life users of energy describe their usage in <Power_Unit>-<Time_Unit> terms as far as I know. So I think the only memorable thing a reader would get out of that section is that sentence about how much energy a kilowatt-hour is in an intuitive terms, but running is not that intuitive to people who don't run. You can pick a more mundane and universal activity, like cooking a common food or showering for X amounts of minutes.
Great post, thanks!
Overall, I agree with your main argument: High enough energy consumption is necessary / sufficient for significant reduction in national poverty, and we should treat economic indicators as trailing, not leading. I also appreciate the reminders of the scale of the energy consumption gap between the first and third world, and the life impacts implied (only ~1000 refrigerated trucks in Nigeria is eye-opening; your link for this is broken by the way).
Feedback:
However, your title is a bit… clickbaity… as is. Especially if you’re going for a non EA-aligned-type audience, “poverty” means a lot more than just national poverty. It means what’s happening in your community, it means the homeless on American streets, it means crippling medical debt. That poverty, imho (and I don’t think you’d disagree), *isn’t* energy poverty.
Also, the overall tone of the post felt optimistic (which I appreciated). But ending the piece with “and renewables aren’t sufficient / impact less either” left me a bit confused what the emotional takeaway should have been.
Anyways, great post!
>only ~1000 refrigerated trucks in Nigeria is eye-opening
Last week's New Yorker has an interesting article about refrigeration and the developing world: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/africas-cold-rush-and-the-promise-of-refrigeration
EDIT: Doh! I just clicked on the blog post to discover that this article is mentioned in the first sentence! I won't delete the below since maybe the excerpt will be useful to someone else reading this thread.
Apparently without a seamless cold chain the benefits of some refrigeration, like on a truck, is not as useful, so you end up with some chicken/egg problems in putting the whole cold chain together from farm to table.
From the article:
"In 2018, Rwanda announced a National Cooling Strategy, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, and, in 2020, it launched a program known as the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or aces. A collaboration between the Rwandan and U.K. governments and the U.N. Environment Programme, aces is designed to harness expertise from within Africa and beyond it. Several British universities are involved, as is the University of Rwanda, in Kigali, where the new institution has its campus. aces’ mission is wide-ranging and encompasses research, training, and business incubation, and also the design and certification of cooling systems; once construction is complete, early next year, its campus will have the country’s first advanced laboratory for studying food preservation and a hall to demonstrate the latest refrigeration technology."
I still don't entirely understand why it isn't just a lack of energy problem, since refrigeration technology has been around a while, but it seems to be more complicated than that.
Thank you! All of the feedback you mention is something that I think nagged at me as I was writing but but that I didn't sufficiently address in editing. Really good points, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. I was unhappy with my ending. What do you think would have been a better parting thought?
Hm.
Maybe you could have helped the reader quantity the investments we’re making in renewables + near-future energy technologies today, and how we can re-frame or think of those investments as global anti-poverty investments.
We spend a lot on various anti-poverty measures today. How do those expenditures compare to our investments in near-future energy technology? Should we use the framing your proposed to encourage more investment? Etc.
Nuclear fission is the only short term answer. But of course everyone is terrified of fission and radiation.
Not everyone! https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/creating-the-pro-nuclear-movement
Hht BRetty who shared below.
Apropos of the "how much do billionaires deserve" thread (which I was way too late to comment on)--
Isn't all of that just what the 10th commandment was warning about? "Thou shalt not covet" and all of that? "I don't like how much money you have and want you to have less." That's the root of punitive taxation. And it's an awful, destructive tool, one that corrodes the body politic.
My answer is "as much as they earned while obeying the laws that existed at the time it was earned, minus the minimum amount of tax, as flat as possible, necessary to maintain the obligatory functions of the state, just like everyone else." If you want to penalize them, make new laws for money earned going forward. Subject to the normal democratic procedure, ideally without demagoguing about what they "deserve" or not.
Tax law should not be used to enforce social policy, because tax law *stinks* at doing so, and that makes it worse at its actual function, which is providing funding for the (necessary) operations of government. If you want to subsidize something, do so openly. If you want to penalize (civilly or criminally), something, make a law regarding that. Don't build loopholes and curlicues into the tax law. In part because those inevitably hit people you *didn't* intend to hit worse than those "big bad rich people"--rich people can structure their income (et al) to minimize the tax burden. Regular employees can't. So it mostly hurts people who *want to become* rich, not those who *already are rich*. And is just pure envy and spite.
I'll also note that this sort of flaw comes up with any attempt to centrally plan the economy. The society *most* captured by its elites I've ever seen[1] was the old Soviet Union. Once you put some people in charge of deciding how much everyone else deserves...well...the ones making that decision deserve the most for their hard work, of course.
[1] even a lot of feudal countries were less captured in practice, because of the complex web of obligations and the general poverty of the situation. Although often the Church was heavily corrupt and acted like a fully-captured elite. But I'm focusing on ones in relatively modern times.
The problem is that concepts like 'earned' start to fall apart as soon as you start digging into the details. _What_, exactly, is being earned?
Here's a thought experiment. Let's say that someone amasses a huge fortune through business. Over time they come to dominate the economy, with serious distortionary effect - liquidity problems, unpredictable inflation or deflation, etc. So the rest of the populace gets together and rewrites their constitution to establish a new government, new central bank, and new currency. Everyone wakes up tomorrow, and suddenly the wealthy hoarder is cut out of the economy. But they haven't lost anything physically - they could show up with their money anywhere and proffer to buy anything, theoretically.
Would that be 'stealing' from them? Absolutely! But why? They haven't lost any of their wealth, have they? Of course they have, because what they were really amassing, with their money, was not physical currency but rather a _claim on future resources_. Their money was a contract with society at large. Imagine our hypothetical mogul going into hiding for 30 year, then re-emerging. Upon returning to civilization, they could walk to the nearest farm and proffer money to buy an apple that didn't exist 30 years ago, from a farm that may not have existed 30 years ago, from a _farmer_ who may not have been existed 30 years ago. And that farmer would be perfectly happy to trade an apple for some dollars that were earned before they were born.
And lots of things could have happened since then. Inflation will have cut into the purchasing power of those dollars. Apples might be subject to punitive sales taxes for some reason. Lots of things could have happened in the intervening time period to change the way that society fulfills their side of the contract, in a way that nobody would describe in that way even though that's exactly what's happening.
This does not invalidate what you're saying, by the way ... but it does complicate it, when you acknowledge that both sides (society & mogul) are signing up for a trade that will be consumated some time in the future, under possibly different circumstances than exist today. It would be folly for society to abrogate its obligations to those who hold wealth, but it's a great over-simplification to say that what the wealthy have 'earned' is set in stone.
The 10th commandments are not a treaty on political and economic organisation.
And the Bible on the whole is not kind with the rich. See Zachaeus, the rich young man, the parabol of Lazarus, and so on. Read the book of Amos to see what the Old Testament thought about rich people too...
The economy is a complicated mix of positive sum games that create value on net and negative sum games that destroy value and unevenly distribute the remainder. We ought to try and encourage the former and discourage the latter- not because of envy, but because winning a negative sum game, by definition, involves taking things from people without giving anything in return.
Obvious examples of negative-sum rent-seeking includes things like monopolies and regulatory capture. Less obvious are things like advertising competition, speculative bubbles, situations with a lot of information asymmetry, very subtle anti-competitive behaviors, etc. The mix of positive and negative-sum games is also fractal- you can find examples at the level of industry, company, department and individual.
The wealthiest people in a country will have won a ton of both positive-sum and negative-sum competitions. The poorest will have benefited from plenty of positive-sum competitions and also suffered from losing a lot of negative-sum competitions. It doesn't matter that the benefit of the former tends to outweigh the harm of the latter- people being unjustly harmed is still a problem.
We unfortunately can't just regulate away all harmful economic rent- except in very obvious cases, it's far too hard to disentangle from beneficial profit-seeking- but we can recognize that it exists and ask the clear winners to compensate the clear losers.
If done to excess, this kind of thing will also penalize winning positive-sum competitions in a way that discourages finding them in the first place. In moderation, however, we can see from historical and international examples that progressive taxation doesn't reverse the incentives of entrepreneurialism- arguably the most innovative period in US history, for example, had more progressive taxation than we see today. And when you don't model every economic activity as positive-sum, there also seems to be a pretty clear moral need for it.
The US is heading towards feudalism if the present rate of growth of capital is to continue.
Or maybe something more like Roman client-patron relationships, in which rich dudes are so insanely rich that they just straight up pay normies to come see them every day and "be loyal."
We could speculate about signals of loyalty in a high tech society. Possibly checking in at a kiosk will be enough. It would certainly be too time-consuming for the rich person to check on all their retainers personally.
Maybe living in a trademarked city will be enough.
It happened historically and rich people generally use their money to enhance their status. Having lots of people who literally owe their livelihood to your generosity is a huge status enhancer.
Sure, they do, I just don't see why buying loyalty couldn't make a comeback. I'm sure it wouldn't look exactly the same as Roman patronage by any means, but something strikingly similar could easily come about.
Feudalism requires more than income inequality, it also requires that the serfs be poor.
Poor with very limited options for advancement. But poor is a relative measure.
How do you propose we facillitate advancement for people with an IQ less than 100?
Look, I really don't want to be rude or make this overly personal, but why do you always insist on bringing everything back to this particular topic? Because I really don't feel like this line of thinking is contributing a whole lot to the discussion here.
It's not that I'm offended. It's not even that I disagree (and for the record, I *do* disagree, but that's besides the point here). It's just tiresome to see you bring up the same point in nearly every discussion you participate in, even when the topic is only tangentially related. And worse still, it tends to derail those discussions and make everyone start talking about your pet issue instead of whatever the original topic was. There's a reason Scott banned Steve Sailer on the old SSC forums for bringing up this exact issue all the damn time (the final straw was when he brought it up, apropos of nothing, in response to a discussion on Bush-era housing policy).
Just because you're carrying a hammer doesn't mean that every object you see must be a nail.
the bottom 50% grew their income and wages significantly in the past.
Marriage?
But my point is that you don’t need an underclass living in mud huts to have feudalism. You need a fairly fixed series of strata with wealth and power gaps between them. We are almost self organizing into that.
Moguls associate primarily with other moguls. And I can barely think of an acquaintance of mine without a graduate degree, and they mostly have professional degrees.
Didn’t mention Gini.
The nature of economic systems is to concentrate wealth amongst the wealthy as times goes on: r > g. If you want a slight correction here, lets say Neo-feudalism.
I disagree, I think "oughts" should be considered separately from policy discussions.
Suppose Alice and Bob live happily in a regulation-free world where Alice makes $26/hour and Bob makes $24/hour for exactly the same work. The overhead of regulating this unfairness doesn't come for free: we need to raise taxes by $1/hour for both Alice and Bob to pay the people regulating their pay. The end result of regulations is that Alice makes $24/hour and Bob makes $24/hour. Nobody wins.
I think it's appropriate to say that it's unfair that Alice makes more money than Bob, but that nothing should be done about it, because the cure is worse than the disease. These are two separate points!
Similarly, you may argue that taxing billionaires more is bad and we shouldn't do it, but we should separately discuss what the fair outcome would be. Since nobody on this blog is a dictator in charge of centrally planning the economy, I think we're safe from the terrible outcomes of having that discussion.
That’s less a question of fairness and more a question of market inefficiency.
Or maybe not. Maybe Alice has a better understanding of the value of her labor to the business and was able to exact better terms than Bob, and society is promoting Alice’s skill at allocating scarce resources as broadly desirable.
Or maybe Alice is attractive and friendly and Bob is slovenly and sour. Maybe it’s worth an extra $2/hr to hang out with Alice most of the day, every work day instead of Bob. Certainly studies back the notion that attractive people out earn ugly people. I bet funny, gregarious people do better too.
Is it really ‘fair’ to limit the measure of an employee’s value to the work being accomplished independent of everything else in the human experience?
I didn't want to go into that much detail in a very simple example. But of course if there are some kind of differences between Alice and Bob that explain the difference in pay, then we can argue that it's fair for Alice to get paid more. On the other hand, maybe Bob gets paid less because someone doing data entry made a typo. Then it's probably not fair.
There are good and bad reasons and we can debate what is a "fair" or "unfair" reason to pay someone more - but you seem to agree with me that at the very least fairness is a meaningful concept.
You’ve used all of the detail a bureaucrat meting out ‘fairness’ could be reasonably expected to consider. Which I think is my point.
Maybe we should just presume that 300 million people negotiating with each other in their own self interest will come to more ‘fair’ and efficient arrangements than if we shackle them with a bunch of arbitrary restraints based on cursory optics.
"Fair" is a shibboleth for "what I like". It has no other meaning.
My point is that when anyone looks at someone else and says "they shouldn't have that much", the person making that judgement is committing the theological sin of envy and unjust judgement. And envy is corrosive to societies. So I disagree that it's appropriate to say that it's "unfair that Alice makes more money than Bob." Now it may be appropriate to try to inculcate in society an attitude of generosity, an attitude that Alice should, *voluntarily* redistribute resources to others. But the attitude that says "darn, if only we could make it worth it to take Alice's resources and give them to Bob" is poison. It's (metaphorical) bucket of crabs thinking.
And I'm against any kind of thinking that assumes that such a discussion has a point. Because that's where it leads--to societies thinking that industrialized envy is a good thing.
Fair isn’t a synonym for “what I like”. The concept of a “fair wage” for instance means workers should be paid, at the least, a living wage. If you think the term can never be employed except as a form of envy then slavery couldn’t be condemned as not being fair, since by your account fairness is just an attitude. In fact the slaves could be condemned as being envious.
Aren’t the billionaires making the theological sin of being rich? Most Christian churches believe in some form of redistribution.
Think that "fairness" has no objective meaning. Goes on saying that something is objectively a sin. I think your moral theology is confused at best.
"Fair" may be used as a shibboleth for "what I like" but every toddler who learns to say "that's not fair!" knows it means more than that.
It's the common intuition at the heart of Big Important Ideas like "theory of mind", "strategic coordination", and "rule of law". Not to mention the Golden Rule and its corollary "don't dish it out if you can't take it."
Actually, IME toddlers go through a long stage where they way overuse "that's not fair." As soon as they learn it has power in some cases they will try it in every situation where they don't get what they want.
And as a teacher, I see plenty of high schoolers who haven't grown out of it yet.
Oh yeah - I think that kind of massive overuse is why some folks get the impression it's really just "what I like." I'd argue it's a developmental milestone, like the "asking 'why?'" phase. They're figuring out where the lines are, trying to use it anywhere they think it might work and, eventually (for some this might be after high school), mastering the logic of where it applies and where it doesn't. Some less empathetic folks might never master it. Other people, more gifted with high social/emotional acumen, often understand it much earlier.
If you attach no meaning to fairness, that's one thing.
I promise you that there exist people in the world that care about fairness, independently of what's good or bad for them.
> "Fair" is a shibboleth for "what I like". It has no other meaning.
Yeah, this is a great point.
But… the “sin of envy” doesn’t seem impactful to this conversation. I think those far wealthier than I should have higher taxes, at the benefit of the poor. I think *I* should have higher taxes, at the benefit of the poor. How is envy involved in my reasoning?
You're right about the first part, but why presume that anyone in the discussion cares at all about sins and virtues? With all possible charity and compassion on my own part, here, I'm tempted to answer my own question by saying "because you're very young, and possibly a recent convert to religion". Your calling envy a "theological sin" (to the extent that's a real category it refers to sins against the 'theological virtues' of faith, hope, and charity; i.e. doubt, despair, and hatred) in a discussion that has nothing to do with theology strengthens this assumption.
There's nothing wrong with being young, of course. If you are young and are tempted to cry 'ad hominem' or 'bulverism' at me right now, have at it. I'll return to this point in a minute.
As to the point itself, consider that envy didn't even make it onto the list of seven deadly sins for a very long time in the history of Christianity. When it did, it was (rightly) identified as downstream from vainglory. One sin that always has been on the list, however, is Greed. If you hear someone criticize a wealthy individual and you do not have the ability to read this critic's mind, and you assume that his only motivation is actually sinful and is envy in particular, he very well could cry "bulverism! ad hominem!" at you as well. In fact, there are a wealth of other possible motivations for such a criticism. One, in fact, is the theological virtue of charity -- I see someone like Bezos in an occasion of sin (note that I do not assume he is himself actively sinful -- only that his situation is in relation to Greed what living full time in the world's most luxurious whorehouse is to Lust) and would advise the monarch (whom God has been given the power to punish sin for the saving of souls and the building up of the society) to tax him.
Envy (ie covetousness) has been part of the roster of significant sins since, well, the 10 Commandments. If not sooner. For good reason--it's one of the more destructive social maladies. It kills society quicker than random murders do because it tears at the societal fabric itself.
And why should anyone care? Because envy is entirely destructive in all its forms. And it's *addictive*--destruction is always easier than creation, so given a normalized choice between *tearing someone down who has more* and *building yourself and others up*, the first will win. And society as a whole is worse off for it. Envy is negative-sum--*no one* is better off as a result. Not physically, not mentally, not spiritually.
And, for the record, I reject your ad homs. I am neither rich, nor young, nor a new convert.
Charity is an individual matter. Given willingly, it enlarges the giver and *possibly* helps the receiver (that's up to them). Taken forcefully, it *embitters* the victim and promotes dependency on the part of the receiver, thus harming all of them. The only one helped is the grifter who stands in the middle and now has a new client.
It is given to a few to be judges, but the judges must live the law as well. Which they do not--they fan the flames of hatred for each other for their own benefit. And, for the record, there are no monarchs "whom God has given the power to punish sin for the saving of souls" except One--that is flat blasphemy in my mind. All things belong to God. Society taking it upon itself to judge whether someone deserves things is putting society and man in the place of God.
Good job missing the point -- you have no evidence whatsoever that anyone you accuse of envy is engaging in it. If you were interested in self-reflection you might ask yourself why you're projecting so hard.
Small business owners of ACX, would you please share your best advice about customer acquisition?
Haven't been in that employment situation for a long time, but: be wary of "we handle the logistics of marketing for you!"-type services. I'm pretty confident we got burned bigly by Constant Contact and similar. You know your buiness better than anyone else, and also your median customers (ideally).
Word-of-mouth is highly efficient for how much it "costs"...so many of our customers were friends or family of existing clients. They'd end up doing "free advertising" by posting about our services on social media or whatever. Conversely, of course, a sufficiently motivated pissed-off customer was a big liability. Some such cases were, uh, not handled effectively...big businesses can routinely shrug off these sorts of problems, due to scale and Lizardman's Constant. But a little one, especially in fungible industries like consulting? Uh oh. Better a big quiet fuck-up than a small loudly-broadcast one.
(It really is a different mindset...sometimes I think it's distorted my expectations of what chain stores "can't get away with". Turns out that even really vocally unhappy customers often matter very little...not without being centered by friendly media, anyway. Which just means they become a pawn in someone else's axe-grinding.)
This varies so widely by product and industry that without further context it's unanswerable. Small technical consulting firms and restaurants attract customers in completely different ways.
It could still be worth having a collection of answers.
I suppose. But without either arbitrarily picking "here's how X does it" the minimum answer to such a broad question would hit the character limit. At least for me, perhaps other people are less verbose.
Absolutely this.
Under-promise, over-deliver.
I used to own a circus gym. I tried various online search ads and social media ads. Targeted search ads worked well for things like summer camp. Social media ads were pretty worthless. Word of mouth was the biggest contributor to growth overall. Groupon was a money loss but generated enough word of mouth to be mostly neutral.
So I have not seen anyone say this, but this seems like as good a place as any to bring it up.
We're told a lithium shortage is slowing the adoption of electric cars. If there's a scramble for lithium, how is that going to affect availability of lithium (carbonate) for treating bipolar disorder? I know the quantities are much smaller, but you can't make the element outside of a reactor, and then it would be radioactive if you get the wrong isotope, right? Do psychiatrists need to advocate for a strategic lithium reserve?
Availability isn't the problem, price is. As price rises, previously uneconomic mineral deposits become economic and production increases (and also more exploration is incentivized). It's like those projection saying that we've only got X number of years worth of Y metal left that never materialize because the price increases which leads to more production. I would imagine the cost of lithium medication would not vary enormously based on the price given the very small quantities used, but even still, shortages won't be an issue.
Ashland, Oregon has lithe water in its town drinking fountains.
I wonder if driving a lithium-battery pickup truck will make people more libertarian.
I meant lithia water of course, but Stasi autocorrect had other plans.
'No' is the simple answer to your question.
People are being slightly disingenuous when they say there's a shortage of Lithium. It's just that the price has gone up - anybody who wants to buy some Lithium can do so. It might cost you 50 dollars for a kilo, but bear in mind that that much raw material will provide enough Lithium carbonate for many patient lifetimes.
Edited to be less confusing
Scott's review of Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer is one of my favorite book reviews of his of all time. I finally got around to reading the book myself, and reviewed it on my blog: https://nicholasbruner.com/2022/09/05/what-im-reading-albions-seed/ If anybody were interested in reading it and wanted to leave a comment about what you think here, I would appreciate it. I am considering entering the next book review contest, and so would especially like to hear what changes or improvements I could make to a review like this to increase its chances of getting picked.
Fischer mentioned working on the challenging topic of the regional backgrounds of Americans from other countries. Has there been any word?
I read Albion’s Seed 30-something years ago, and it made a strong impression. Awarding it a “Shortcut to Smartness” designation sounds right. My kid’s AP U.S. history class used a more recent book which acknowledges and builds on the separate founding cultures approach, extending it to discuss the French influence on Louisiana and Canada, the Spanish influence on the Caribbean and the Southwest, and the various Native American cultures for good measure. So it does seem to be regarded as an influential modern classic of history writing. I enjoyed reading your take on it - your writing is clear and engaging and moves along at a good clip. Regarding the book review contest, I’d say the average ACX voter tends to favor discursive, longish reviews where the reviewer’s opinions and ideas are prominent. And if you see an opportunity to sprinkle in some humor - little joking asides or maybe unexpected use of irreverent tone - that usually helps. This crowd generally enjoys talking about Big Ideas with people who don’t take themselves too seriously
Thank you so much, McClain. This was helpful! Yes, the house style does tend to be a somewhat jokey vibe. I will keep all this in mind.
Any Kabbalistic significance to the word 'capital', having originally come from describing 'heads of cattle' and transmuting, in modern parlance, into a kind of 'economic control plane', where capital describes 'a system which makes choices as to the allocation of energy' - as the word 'capital' went from 'an organic reproductive force of nature' to 'a cerebral control mechanism' ?
This isn't true. Capital doesn't come from head of cattle. The expression "head of cattle" is an English thing. The Romans would have only said "caput pecua" to mean the literal head of a cow.
The term capital entered English in the 17th century where it originally meant the assets necessary to carry on a business. Literally a Latinization of the idea of "the chief things" meaning the most important things. It referred to tools and the like. Then in the 18th century the economists extended it to mean "the surplus which a business or farm produces which allow the production of new businesses/farms." And then Marx came along and wrote his famous Das Kapital. So it has an association with "head" as in "important, the thing which you can't live without."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
You've got it backwards; "cattle" meaning livestock comes from "capital" meaning property. I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence that the phrase "head of cattle" contains two different head-related words. (But of course it's not really a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.)
We can conclude that anarchists, with their "A" symbol are secretly working for capital, especially anarchists who have knowledge of Hebrew.
IIRC, the "A" comes from Babylonian via Greek, not from Hebrew.
And logicians with their upside down "A"s, who knows what they're doing. They could secretly be the real anarchists.
Actually ∀ kind of looks like a cows head. We've come full circle.
freedom for all :)
Shit... SHIT. You got me paranoid now. Could this be related to cattle mutilation cases?
Here's some interesting data based thoughts on automation: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots-and-lots?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
So, what are your thoughts on the recent developments in the Ukraine war ? Will the Ukrainian offensive amount to something significant ?
No.
Ukraine cannot execute any kind of co-ordinated combined-arms military operaton, at this point. There is no possibility of driving Russian forces from any city or territory the Russians want to keep. And there is nothing I can imagine, short of a nuclear or other mass-casualty atrocity, that will cow or scare Putin, or the sentiment of the Russian people.
Ukraine is out of materiel except what is trickling from the WEST. they still have manpower, desperate mnpower, but Russia is content to bombard Ukr troops wherever they gather.
Ukr's best option is to sue for peace concededing most of its former Eastern territory to Ru.
I have no idea what the US or NATO or any EU govt is doing or thinking, or what they expected to achieve, other than some expensive show of "look! we are helping the underdog!" Any diplomatic halt to this must and should have gone straight to Putin, this proxy war BS is just wasting $ and time and lives, and also the Economy of Europe.
I'm not optimistic.
"Ukraine cannot execute any kind of co-ordinated combined-arms military operation, at this point"
I think you might have picked the worst possible day to post that one...
I think that is the one of the big dangers the Ukrainian offensive poses to Russia. It isn't likely to fundamentally alter the course of the war on the ground, but the way official Russian media immediately responded by declaring the offensive a complete failure, and the more they insist that it cannot possibly succeed, the more they open themselves up to accidentally discrediting themselves to their own population if the offensive *does* see success to even some marginal degree.
And that credibility, tenuous as it is, is key to keeping their population on-board with the war. The more you say "it isn't raining and people who say it is will be imprisoned for inadequate patriotism" when people can look out the window and see the rain falling, the more they will doubt things like "this war was a necessary defensive response to NATO encroachment," "there is an ongoing genocide in Ukraine against ethnic Russians," "Ukraine is run by nazis who are molding it into an anti-Russia," "we withdrew from Snake Island as a good will gesture," "Kyiv was never the objective we always were only focused on the Donbas," and the other various official lines necessary to keep the population behind the war and trusting that those executing it are doing so competently.
(Just for clarity sake, this post is about official Russian media and not the BRetty specifically. I doubt anyone would make that inference, but considering I just posted a big soliloquy about "being kinder" elsewhere in this thread I want to be clear that there isn't some soft-accusation that BRetty is somehow "official Russian media").
Is Russia capable of executing co-ordinated combined-arms military operations, at this point?
They seem to have stopped using large numbers of tanks for offensives after their staggering casualties in the early months of the war, and their airforce is flying an anemic 100-200 sorties a day, which show scant signs of being co-ordinated with their ground forces.
The last vestiges of Russian "co-ordinated combined-arms military operations" appear to be "lots of artillery bombardment in the Donbas, with slow infantry advance once an area has been sufficiently damaged". Ukraine appears to be using a similar playbook to advance on Kherson, but with quality (HIMARS) substituting for quantity (Soviet-era shells).
If the Ukrainians have more men capable of fighting than the Russians do, and their HIMARS systems can destroy Russian artillery in the region of Kherson, they will probably be able to retake the city. Note that these are both big ifs since we don't have a clear count of combat-capable Ukrainian infantry, nor do we know if the Ukrainians can continue to knock out Russian artillery systems.
I wonder what the long-term result will be.
- If Ukraine doesn't recapture all their territory, including the Crimea, will the rest of the world be OK with that? Are the US and Europe holding back certain weapons because they don't want Ukraine to recapture all that territory?
-If Ukraine does recapture their territory, what will they do with all the Russian immigrants who moved there and then prepared the way for the Russian invasion? Won't they NEED to do ethnic cleansing to hold onto it?
- If Russia manages to repopulate the Ukranian cities they depopulated with Russians, what would the world do when Ukraine then tries to kill or expel those Russians?
Why would Ukraine need to do ethnic cleansing? They are not Russians and not thinking that way. Property of the "new population" gets officially confiscated in favor of previous owners or the state, if people disagree, they get evicted, if they make trouble they go to jail. Active collaborators could suffer extra-judiciously in the first weeks after liberation but after that will be just tried in courts, which are not known to be harsh in these matters either.
If Ukrainians actually capture Crimea, there is zero chance of the active anti-Ukrainian partisan warfare which I think you imagine, first because the majority of population there is pre-2014 and they just accept the power change like in 2014, second because actual Crimean aboriginals are rather pro-Ukrainian, and third because Russian culture is the culture of submission to power.
Evicting them would be one form of ethnic cleansing.
No it would not, removal on citizenship/visa grounds is not an ethnic cleansing. Thousands of ethnic Russians who lived in Crimea pre-2014 would remain there if they so choose, and non-ethnic Russians relocated to Crimea would lose the right to live there they had under Russian authorities. Russia is a multi-national country and I personally know non-ethnic Russian but Russian citizen who acquired property in Crimea post-2014. All these "new arrivals" are simply illegal immigrants from the Ukrainian pov and so can be deported to the country of their passport, and that does not constitute any "ethnic cleansing".
That makes sense to me. Thanks.
Here are the 4 biggest "known unknowns" for the conflict as it presently stands, in my opinion:
(1) How much military equipment will the US keep feeding Ukraine [the US has given Ukraine a lot of new systems like HIMARS that are proving to be quite effective; this current offensive appeared to be stalled until the Ukrainian government got a commitment of a regular resupply of HIMARS missiles from the US]
(2) How many new fit-for-offensive-combat soldiers can the Ukrainians train out of their massive pool of volunteer+conscript labor and when will they be ready [training in the UK link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/world/europe/ukraine-recruits-england-russia.html]
(3) Will Russia announce conscription of its own, and will Putin survive announcing a general conscription [my read is that he's reluctant to announce a general conscription because he thinks that doing so would threaten the stability of his regime]
(4) Will Europe run out of gas this winter and bargain with Russia in a gas-for-pressure-on-Ukraine deal [Europe appears to be trying to inflict present-pain to avoid running out entirely over the winter, avoiding getting zero'ed out would substantially strengthen the European/Ukrainian position]
All 4 of these are, IMO, more important than:
(5) "How will the offensive in Kherson go for the next month" -- possibly well, probably not catastrophically, and the Ukrainians are bringing in lots of troops capable of defense if not offense
(6) "How will the Russian pressure in the Donbas develop" -- Stalling out due to lack of military capability to advance at anything faster than a crawl, especially when being disrupted by HIMARS fire
(7) "What will happen to Russian's industrial economy" -- Seems capable of keeping the population fed and the military resupplied, but mainly out of outdated Soviet stocks of weapons that can't be used for a breakthrough
Basically, we're in a war of attrition at the moment, and in wars of attrition one side can win by:
(A) developing new manpool sources -- [see (2) and (3) above]
(B) changing the game with new advanced weapons [see (1) above]
(C) changing the strategic situation [see (4) above]
None of (5),(6),(7) can produce an (A),(B),or (C)
That's a great overview but I think Ukraine getting concrete wins on the ground would help tremendously for both 1) and 4). European countries will be more motivated to eat out the price of the sanctions if they think it will actually turns into a victory for Ukraine and the US will also be more motivated to keep sending weapons if they seem to make an impact.
That's a reasonable analysis, but I'm not sure I totally agree with it.
Ukraine has been loudly asking for more heavy offensive combat gear (planes, tanks, etc) for months and so far hasn't gotten it. These systems are very expensive, so it's possible that America/the EU are waiting to see if Ukraine can be trusted to not fall apart, but I think there's a better explanation (given that America blocked Poland from transferring planes to Ukraine [https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-reject-polands-plan-give-ukraine-soviet-era-fighter-jets-rcna19396]):
American and European decision makers aren't sure what they want a Ukrainian victory to look like, and are weighing possible paths to victory against risk of Russian escalation [to full war status & conscription and/or to tactical nuclear weapon use]
America has been extracting promises from Ukraine to not use American tech to attack Russian soil [https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-has-promised-us-not-fire-new-50-mile-range-rockets-russia-1711887]. My best guess is that American decision makers want to feed Ukraine enough hardware that Ukraine can "win", but in a way that is slow enough that Russia can choose to withdraw in good order instead of collapsing on the battlefield*, since a full battlefield collapse would be a chaotic crisis that could prompt Putin to escalate to trying to use a tactical nuclear weapon.
With that in mind, I think the impact of a concrete battlefield success on (1) and (4) becomes weaker/less clear. But, I do think that a concrete battlefield success could help with Ukrainian morale and therefore increase the number of soldier-recruits enthusiastic about getting through the training to become new combat units (2)
*Whether or not you think there is a risk of Russia's army collapsing comes down to what you think morale + command & control + reserves are like on the Russia side. The conventional read [that I agree with] is that the Russia army was much more deeply flawed & rotted than anyone thought, but there are hot takes that are claiming that this is still all going according to plan or back-up plan and Russia is withholding huge fractions of its combat capabilities.
All this talk of slow, methodical advances is making me think I should read up on interwar French doctrine.
The fog of war is thick but the Ukrainians seem to be advancing steadily and the Russians retreating for the first time in months. Overall, it's pretty bad news for the Russians. You can't win a war on the retreat and it seems unlikely that the Russian forces have the ability to go on the offensive force any time soon. After all, that's what they've been trying to do for the last three months and it's gotten them basically nowhere. If something major changes like they get a new source of military equipment and troops or Ukraine loses access to the same then it'll be an open question again, but right now it looks like the beginning of the end of Russian ambitions.
Unlikely before the rains come.
At the risk of sounding rather callous about it, it seems to be more akin to a proof-of-concept demonstration for the benefit of Western donors.
My non-expert opinion is that we'll see slow but steady progress towards Kherson. Ukraine can't spend its army too aggressively, so I don't think we'll see huge breakthroughs or armies getting pocketed, just slowly taking Russian defenses apart (with the help of their new Western weapons) until their position becomes unsustainable.
Well, Ukraine has gone and made a fool of me by just straight-up blitzing to Izium while everyone was looking at the offensive in Kherson. Happy to be wrong about this one.
I am trying to signin to remind everyone thatis putting away a boat,trailer, or RV today to please checkit THOROUGHLY for hitchhikers such as cats, squirrels, raccoons, etc. Look in cupboards/cabinets, drawers, j\luggage, appliances even if you don't remember them being open when youc leaned/aired out. Check stuffed furniture, big vases and buckets, tool/instrument cases, luggage....
Thank goodness all I've got is a Ford Focus. I'll just pick up a half-dozen or so Rastifarian hitchhikers and get them to generate enough smoke to run the critters out -- monkey disease and all.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Covid lockdowns implemented in most countries have produced an almighty log jam and muddle in trading networks that had been built up over decades and were enormously complicated and very delicate (in the "just in time" sense). If that is so then what is the best way to untangle the mess, if the best solution is not to leave it to untangle itself over time?
I don't know about "best", but I dream of a counterfactual world where I never hear complaints about """price gouging""" ever again. See the other top-level comment about lithium shortages. Turns out that being able to set prices at market-clearing levels is really important, especially under high volatility: https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2021/MaloneLuskfoodprices.html
(I like food as an example better than gas, since the latter carries a lot more...political baggage...)
Small point of optimism: despite constant product delays and capricious deliveries, customers have adjusted with remarkably little complaint. I think it's finally trickled down to the median consumer that "supply chain issues" really is a valid Fully General Excuse, not some BS we spout to avoid responsibility. A far cry from the early days of covid, when people were having absolute literal meltdowns over a lack of frozen imported macarons (customer threatened to kill herself, I am not making this up). The necessities of life, indeed...I think it'll be a better normative expectation if people get more used to non-infinite-always choice. JIT is great in many ways, but it sure does help enable customers to be insufferable picky brats.
I've had non stop supply shortages in my industry. In almost every case it is related to raw ingredient shortages 2 or 3 suppliers down the chain, whether we're talking equipment, building supplies, food etc,so.my guess will be things settle down as this gets worked out in the next 12 months, except for more specialized industries like auto manufacturing.
Interestingly, all sorts of things we might assume would cause shortages, such as government regulations, labour shortages, coordination problems, shipping capacity, etc. are all proving to be a big pain in the ass but are not stopping products from getting on shelves for the most part.
The biggest sources of friction appear to be ports that are prevented from clearing the tangle due to government regulations and/or union agreements, I think?
Apart from the still-backed-up-ports, the rest of the supply chain appears to be correcting itself, based on the combination of "which things have I seen missing from the store" and "what are the architects in my industry saying about lead times for materials"
On covid nowadays :
1. What precautions do you take to avoid it now?
2. Which places are doing great research on longcovid?
3. It seems to me that data is murky but covid still seems to increase risk of serious and chronic problems long term. Would you agree?
1) basically nothing whatsoever. I'm unlikely to get the new "Too Little Too Late" booster, unless workplace decides to pay me for it...Original Antigenic Sin, some small worries about myocarditis, possibility of even-better updated vaccines later on, currently ~zero news of concern in Covidland to make me exert special effort. More likely to get annual flu shot than Omicron booster - actually did catch the flu earlier this summer, and it was pretty painful. But more bearable in warm weather than during the dead of winter.
Of possible concerns, I worry more about vaccination mandates locking me out of things, than any actual prophylactic value versus covid. The college next to where I work has triple-vaxx requirements for the kids, *and* requires them to wear paper masks in the dorms...so such silliness still abounds locally, and I'd rather pre-empt that than show up for work one day and arbitrarily be turned away. But I'd like to think they'd give some advance notice.
I do still avoid certain activities, like mall window-shopping or eating out...but that has __way more__ to do with social discomfort under covid hawkery norms, than any actual fear of the disease itself. As an autist, I don't do well with judgey capriciousness and informal rules, so when I don't know what to do with my face...well. I'd rather just stay home instead. After having done sweaty blue-collar work for almost a year under mask mandate, it's just a total nope for me. Never again, if I don't absolutely have to...but it's *also* not something I feel like fighting people over (irl). So necessary trips like to the bank mean masking up, to avoid unpleasantness. But all those formerly-fun voluntary activities remain on hold, until the madness subsides. Frustrating.
I also notice that actually-sick people (sniffling and blowing nose, sneezing, coughing repeatedly, etc.) attract my attention a lot faster than they used to. I suppose I do try to give them a wider berth than I would have, pre-covid. But, once again, this isn't due to caring about covid itself...it's more that being incapacitated by illness is extremely inconvenient. I don't like being kept from my job, especially now that covid sick pay isn't on offer. So it becomes that classic poor worker's dilemma: go to work sick ("I'm fine, really!"), or stay home without pay, possibly attempting to pick up a replacement shift on a different day off? I do not like being in this situation. Given the poor cost-benefit ratio of most reasonable NPIs, "avoid obviously sick people" is one of the few that passes muster.
3) Sure, in a "the dose makes the poison" way. It's better to not get sick versus get sick, but with my demographics and the way things have progressed, longvid danger is no longer even on my Top 10 Tail Risks To Keep Me Up At Night listicle. I'd need to see *a lot* more robust research to change my mind. Bias note: as far as I know, am still a "novid"...can't prove I ever got it. Most of my friends and acquaintances never got it either. I'm likely over-discounting because of this.
The stronger/broader argument that "long-term risks from viral infections of all types are poorly understood and underpriced" I'd actually agree much more wholeheartedly with. Longvid makes me cagey cause of how hard The Narrative's been railroaded.
About mask-hawkery and masking in public places and eating out: Are you in a place where most people mask in those settings? I live in a very blue state with a high vax rate, and see a number of people on my state reddit sub are in favor of school masking, but in malls and stores I'd say only 10% at most of people wear mask these days. I'm curious what it's like in other parts of the country.
Hmm, well...I live in San Francisco. Quite a number of businesses and institutions here still have mask and/or vaxx requirements, which actually do get enforced to some degree. Other places you won't be kicked out exactly, but people will absolutely give funny looks, and you just know you're showing up on their Twitter later or whatever. At the very least, it's fairly easy to tell when People Are Uncomfortable. Easily over 50% mask in grocery stores, malls, public transit...outside while wearing gloves, even. Iirc we have one of the highest vaxx rates in the country, and possibly the whole world. Hand sanitizer and wiping down handles, etc. continues to be a common ritualistic ablution, including for those wearing gloves.
It does seem kinda arbitraryy for some people that I see regularly, though...they'll mask for some time, then they won't, then they will again. People have their own reasons...I know many like not having to show their faces, for example, and the covid part is mostly irrelevant. (This more for the paper maskers, I'd suppose.) Highly doubt they're tracking the case loads, hospital admissions, deaths, etc. and making a daily micro-covid decision based on ongoing metrics. And of course, for all that masking, it's still very common to see the nose-out phenomenon. Are they practicing circular breathing? (I've even seen nose-out with N95/KN94, which...*shrugs*) A few people still pull up their shirt collars or whatever, but that's thankfully mostly gone away. No shortage of disposable masks anymore, many places hand them out like free condoms.
I don't mean to come across as judgey in these statements, incidentally...but it's sorta like the arguments you had elsewhere in thread: some amount of spillover frustration leaks through, no matter how diplomatic I try to be. This isn't because of being strawmanned, but mostly that as an autistic extrovert, other people wearing masks makes both my job duties (customer service) and socializing much more difficult. I'm really shite at interpreting ambiguous vocal cues and body language...without being able to read someone's face (decent at this), effort goes way up and efficacy goes way down. Especially when I literally can't hear what someone is saying - I'm mildly hearing-impaired as well. So, yeah, libertarian principles: they do them, I do me, everyone's cool and should try not to Fundamental Attribution Error. And yet...life really is harder and less rewarding now, versus 2019, even without factoring in any disease-related stuff. Makes me sad and more unlikely to Make An Effort to surmount these challenges. So I just stay home and browse ACX Open Threads instead of having A Life...
(To a lesser degree, there's also lingering after-effects of "social distancing", where people command a lot more personal space now. This I don't mind so much - really didn't miss those days of packing onto sardine-crammed trains, trying to fight for a seat while wearing heels. It's great having an entire bus/train car to yourself.)
Well, thanks for writing. Even though you think of yourself as a bit disabled when it comes to reading people, etc., I certainly feel like you are seeing me much more clearly than the people who came down on me like a ton of bricks. And, for what it's worth, I want you to know that if I saw you
in the mall or wherever without a mask, I would not be secretly judging you at all. It's really hard to know how worried to be about long term damage about covid -- that is mainly what I'm worried about, and it may turn out that long term damage from covid is no more likely than long term damage from lots of stuff, and my wearing a mask in public places has been pointless. Anyhow, even if it isn't pointless, so many people go without masks these days that it's senseless to feel resentment of any one maskless person. Even if you have covid right this minute, the amount of covid you're putting into the air will make basically no difference in how much is in the air in the mall, because lots of other covid-positive people are walking around without masks too.
About life being less rewarding now than in 2019 -- yeah, I feel that too. For me, it has little to do with covid precautions -- mine really don't change my life much. It's more the feeling that things are a mess, and the knowledge that there's even more rage and misunderstanding between people than usual. Of course people always bicker on forums, but there's a whole added element now, of people being in different camps when it comes to covid, and being so full of anger and misconceptions that they can't even communicate. I identified myself as a precaution-taker, and that led some people to assume all kinds of infuriating things about my attitudes that just are not true -- and to hit me with the anger they have at government officials and private citizens who have been major assholes about covid restrictions. Anyhow, thanks for not doing that shit yourself. I hope things work out well for you in San Francisco.
For sure, I'm sorry you've been strawmanned as one of the Permanent Midnighters when it seems you're being really quite reasonable. Every Contentious Issue does this, and it's sad to see people in the crossfire.
> It's really hard to know how worried to be about long term damage about covid
Yeah, I'm more skeptical than most regarding Longvid due to Base Rate Fallacy (and all covid research in general being rushed/politicized, it'll take years to sort out for good). But it'd take not that much evidence to update in favour of Precautionary Principle instead. As you also note, the huge prevalence, intentional or not (undercounting by millions or maybe billions of cases!) means both: Situation Less Bad Than Seems, since everyday life largely carries on; and also if longvid does turn out Kind Of A Big Deal, then, uh, whoops? Still, for those without risk factors and such, Longvid far outweighs dire illness and literal mortality, and the reverse for those less health-advantaged. (I always find it interesting how it's possible to get these sorts of roundabout admissions out of people who are otherwise very opposed to QALY-style thinking. Generalizing is hard!)
>there's even more rage and misunderstanding between people than usual
Not just you, it's showing up in aggregate data as well[1]. These trendlines from January haven't really abated yet...it genuinely is a more dicey world in all kinds of subtle ways, and I'm a lot less inclined to be confrontational with random strangers as a result. Forget covid lurking in the background, all it takes is pissing off the wrong guy who decides to get physical...it's game over, man, game over. Not worth it, even moreso than in the Before Times. Principle of Charity: good practice even outside ACX.
Thanks in return for a nice reply.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/all-kinds-of-bad-behavior-is-on-the
1. I wear masks when in airports, and try to eat/drink outside whenever possible at restaurants and bars (which is already a preference I had, but now I have it more significantly). Probably in the winter, if there's another wave that looks comparable to delta, original omicron, or the May/June wave, I'll be a bit more cautious about some activities too. I'll get an updated booster probably in a few weeks, when I'm close to 6 months out from my infection but still a few weeks before peak winter.
2. I don't know what great research there is.
3. I think covid seems to increase these risks more than flu but less than Epstein-Barr. It's hard to tell how much it increases those risks, and whether it increases risks a little in most people, or just by directly causing long covid in a small fraction of people and nothing in others.
1. Absolutely none and ignored as much precautions as possible prior and in retrospect wish I would have avoided even more.
2. Who cares? Maybe the same people as Fibromyalgia?
3. Not unless you are old, fat, or already sick
1. The vaccinations and boosters. Also, my wife and I tend to stay at home a lot, so we aren't at a lot of risk of contagion on any given day anyway.
2. I don't know. One article that I read mentioned that the NIH has a long covid study underway.
3. As you said, the data seem murky (in the absence of a RCT, digging out confounders always has ambiguities...). Also, the pandemic is only 2.7 years old. It is just too soon to know what will happen after 5 or 10 or 20 years.
1. I stopped taking any precautions six months ago. The juice no longer seems worthy of the squeeze, as they say.
2. Don't know.
3. I think "long covid" is overblown but there are obviously potential long term effects. What I do not find terribly plausible is the idea that you can have an extremely mild case of covid that you recover from quickly only to have some awful complications six months or a year later. Much more likely would be someone who has a particularly nasty case of covid that permanently harms their health in some way that would have been mysterious to no one in 2019.
I also do not find it terribly plausible that someone who had a mild case could have significant complications months later. But sometimes unintuitive things are true, you know?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02000-0
I'm keeping up with the research on this stuff, trying to figure out how much to trust my intuitions, which say that I'm in good health & fully vaxed, so really do not need to to worry about all that long-term shit.
1. I have not had covid yet, and do not want to get it. I go to indoor public places whenever I want, but invariably wear an n95 or kn94. At work, where I meet with 1 or 2 clients at a time, we do not mask but I have an enormous air purifier running all day that gives 11 air changes per hour, and we sit 8 or so feet apart with the air purifier . Before indoor get-togethers with friends we all do rapid tests.
2. I don't know. The upshot of what I've read seems to be that Long Covid is not a discrete, distinctive illness -- different body systems are malfunctioning in different sufferers. If that's the case, there would be multiple lines of useful clinical research, each devoting to understanding and treating one of the malfunctions. The best way to keep up on this stuff is to following the virologists and epidemiologists on medical Twitter.
3. I agree, but also agree it's murky. One of the major studies offered in support of the idea that covid raises the risk of heart attacks, neurological problems, etc. is a study of VA patients that was heavily criticized for methodological problems. However, there are other studies finding changes in the heart, brain & elsewhere visible in autopsy, and post-covid brain changes visible via imaging in live subjects, also decline in cognitive test scores post covid, and studies besides the VA one finding increased rates of cardiovascular and neurological disorders in people post-covid. None of these are "Long Covid" studies, just studies of people who had covid, most of whom now feel fine. Most of the changes they are finding seem fairly small to me, and as someone not medically trained I don't feel able to judge how worried to be by them. How do they compare to what you find in people who have had flu or some other virus? Also, do they compound? If you have covid multiple times, does the amount of damage and the chance of neurological and cardiovascular problems increase with each episode of illness?
Your description of what it's really like isn't accurate. I do about one nasal swab a week. It is mildly unpleasant, about as unpleasant as flossing, which I do most nights and which takes about 10 times as long. My air purifier does not roar, and I'm in fact pretty picky about noisy machines in my office. Choose my window air conditioner with a lot of care because I can't stand noisy ones. You can definitely hear my air purifier but it more swishes than roars, and in my conversations in the office I and the other person do not have trouble hearing each other with it on high. In fact its sound bothers me so little that I sometimes forget and leave it on for a couple hours when the last person has left and I am doing paperwork. Ditto the mask -- occasionally I forget I'm wearing it, and wear it through my whole bike ride home, even though I feel no need to mask outdoors. In the few years prior to covid I have made 2 other lifestyle adjustments for the sake of health: I stopped eating sweets and refined carbs, and I started working out 5 days a week. I do not miss the sweets at all, but giving them up was quite hard, far harder than giving up eating indoors in restaurants. (You can still have lovely special meals if you give up eating indoors in restaurants, but you can't have cookies without eating cookies.) The working out was quite hard to get myself to do at the outset, and sometimes still is. But I stick with it because I know it's good for me, and I like the stronger, more energetic feeling I have these days as a result. But the working out is WAY harder on me than masking indoors and nose-swabbing, and on the days I do it I lose 90 mins of time I could be using for other things. In contrast, my covid precautions are not difficult at all to get myself to do, and in total they take about 15 mins a week out of my life, counting popping the mask on and off a bunch of time, swabbing once a week, and clicking m air purifier on at the beginning of the day and off at the end. Honestly, your idea of what a lousy life people lead who take my level of covid precautions is just not very accurate. I can't tell you how many people have offered me their mental snapshots of what it's like, and they all sound hellish and quite unlike my actual life: Shut up indoors almost all the time, never seeing people in person, and when I do go out I'm all scared and quivery, clutching at my mask to make sure its on right, thinking every moment about choking on my own mucus in the ICU . . . It's not remotely like that. I'm not even exactly scared of covid -- more just determined to try my best not to get it. A couple of times I thought I had it, & my reaction was "damn, this is the end of my winning streak. OK, well I'll settle in and ride it out. Shit."
Anyhow, I am aiming to skip carbs and sweets and do regular workouts for the rest of my life. I'm fine with doing the covid precautions for the rest of my life too. Presently I'm keeping it up because I'm worried about sequelae and I can't yet decide based on my reading how worried to be about that stuff. If the sequelae turn out to be nothing much, I'll probablu drop the covid precautions.
Thanks for sharing that.
When I see people taking precautions, such as wearing a mask, I instantly think they are very mentally ill and suffering greatly internally.
But your reply has given me another perspective.
I exercise and workout most days a week. Partly for health, part for fun, part to look better.
I can imagine some people look at me doing that and think I'm nuts. "What the point?"
So it's really just about what we're happy doing and whether we feel the effort is worth the rewards (covid or non covid related).
I guess if the masks hadn't been made into such a moral issue and mask wearers weren't trying to be so hard to be virtuous (not saying you are, mask twitter people I guess), I probably wouldn't be so quick to assume mask wearers were only doing it due to personal difficulties rather than they just enjoy it.
It's hard when things get politicized or moralized.
No, I would have seen that as a big loss. But prior to giving up sweets and committing to working out, 2 other lifestyle changes I've made in the last decade, I would not have volunteered happily for either of them either. They would have looked like big losses. Now I am used to the last 2, and glad I made the change. So if I had to cover my face for the rest of my life in order to enjoy equivalent benefits, I think I might have adjusted. But I do not. I probably cover it for an average of an hour a day. You know Trebuchet, it happens to me over and over that I describe the precautions I've adopted pretty clearly, and then I get questions like yours, and StoryGirl"s: "Don't you hate wearing a mask all the time?" "is that any kind of life, shut up in the house all the time alone?" It's as though no matter what I say people cannot stop having this vision of a lonely hypochondriacs staring out the window at a world they cannot be part of, thinking of nothing but covid covid covid and pissing themselves in terror every time they think it. Don't you people *listen*? I wrote in the original 1 - 2 - 3 question that I mask in indoor public settings, but I do not mask in the office, relying instead on an air purifier, and I do not mask when visiting friends -- instead, we test prior to getting together. (An of course I do not mask at home.) Having heard that, how can you possibly think I am wearing my mask anything like all the time? And if you grasp that I am not logging a lot of time in a mask, wutz the point of your thought experiment?. In 2019 how would I have about covering my face for the rest of my life? I dunno, Trebuchet, how would you have felt in 2019 if somebody told you that in a couple months you would begin spending 18 hours a day having online exchanges like this one, and that you would continue doing so for the rest of your life?
1. None, beyond avoiding known infected individuals (much like I would for other infections) and getting boosters as they come available.
2. Don't know.
3. To some limited extent, yes.
1. Avoiding in-person gatherings as far as possible, n95 when it's not. No-contact delivery. Improving ventilation (air purifiers and/or cracking windows) in spaces I control. New boosters as available.
(Hoped there'd be a summer lull as in 2021 that would allow more activity. But nominal cases never got better than 15x last summer's low and ascertainment is down, so real cases are even higher.)
2. There are some larger studies getting started, but so far the data quality isn't great and better data are clearly going to take some time. That said, the dearth of studies that give low percentages for long Covid, reasonably convinces me that it's a substantial problem when combined with steady pandemic-level prevalence. If it weren't, I'd expect more of a spread in the results of the studies we have.
3. Per the above, yes, I would agree.
"But nominal cases never got better than 15x last summer's low"
That is true, of course. But one could argue that the important number is the number of hospitalizations, and that number has improved.
The NYT site gives last year's hospitalization low for the US as a bit under 17,000, vs about 37,000 today. It is way down from the peaks.
That said, while my risk of hospitalization and death isn't quite as low as I'd prefer, that's something vaccination and boosters seem to help quite a bit with.
My primary personal concern at this point is long Covid, which so far seems to be helped less. While I hope for data that shows otherwise, so far I'm still waiting to see it.
Not if Long Covid also happens to mild cases at an appreciable rate.
I'd be much happier if we were actually funding at least an Operation Full Impulse for the potential improved vaccines that might help with transmission (nasal for improved mucosal immunity, pan-coronavirus vaccines so we don't have to keep chasing variants). But even without that, I still retain some hope that over time prevention and treatment will both get better gradually over time.
(Not as soon as I'd like. But with neither party very interested in funding priority Covid research anymore there's not much to be done about that.)
At the current rate that may take some years. But the alternative appears to be rolling the dice with long Covid a few times a year (that seems to be the expectation with current transmission and immunity decay). For now that strikes me as unacceptable odds of putting me in a worse situation than I'm in now.
There are lots of things that could change that. Some good, like solid evidence long Covid isn't as common or as serious as most current studies indicate it is. Or that vaccines reduce its incidence by orders of magnitude instead of maybe 15%. Or those new vaccines arrive and turn out to help more against transmission. Or better treatments. Some unlooked for random luck. Cases have certainly been much lower before (e.g., in the middle of summer 2021 they got two orders of magnitude lower than they've ever been during summer 2022), maybe they will be again for a bit someday. Maybe the horse will learn to sing.
Some bad: Social or economic pressure makes it untenable to continue avoiding it. One truly obligatory gathering or another catches up with me. The trend of new variants becoming ever more transmissible overcomes any practical infection control on the individual level. Some other life or health crisis takes priority.
Eventually some such change for good or bad will happen. Or my assessment of the costs and benefits will change.
Till then, I'll take it day by day and month by month, and make choices based on case levels and what the latest research seems to be showing.
My sense is that more people than not are in fact undercounting risk. (Which of course varies. If I were 20, I'd doubtless see things differently.) But even with a realistic estimate, it's certainly possible to decide that a 70-95% chance of avoiding long Covid each bout, multiplied by 2-3 infections per year, is an acceptable risk.
For myself, I don't like how those chances multiply out in the long run. So I'll keep kicking the can down the road for a bit, and see how much better or worse things get over time.
(I'm told predictions are hard, especially about the future.)
1. None at all, we have vaccines and paxlovid, the situation is stable and won't get better - time to live like a normal person
2. Zvi on lesswrong
3. Zvi covered that and convinced me I shouldn't care
1. I'm an extreme introvert, and already avoided large groups of people.
2. No idea.
3. Yes. The increase seems to be variable, and alter with age. "long term" so far means "after 2 years" for the longest report I've seen. The percentage increase seems to be around 2%. For some reason the reports of epilepsy and seizures seems to be restricted to children.
(Note that wasn't an increase of 2%, it was an increase in rate of problems compared with what would be expected of something like flu, so the actual increase is a lot less.)
1. None whatsoever
2. I don't care
3. True of a lot of infectious diseases. It's not the biggest issue with Covid and Covid itself is not even on my radar.
1. Nothing.
2. No idea, I'm not paying any attention to it.
3. It doesn't matter if it does, COVID will eventually come for everyone, vaxed or not, masked or not, so there's no sense in thinking about it.
Regarding (3): I think there's a flaw in the logic of this statement. Two, actually, one minor and one major. The minor one is that covid almost certainly will *not* come for everyone. There's almost *nothing* that happens to everyone, except death of course. I am positive that even if covid continues at its present level for another 30 years there will be a few outliers on the planet who do not catch it even once. Currently I am in the 5% or so of people who have not had covid yet, but I do see that if covid continues for years to be as prevalent as it is now, it's extremely likely that sooner or later I will end up in a situation where my precautions are not a match for the amount of virus in the air and I will catch covid.
The major flaw in the logic, though, is the unexpressed idea that the only difference that matters is the one between having covid zero times and having it one or more times. It then follows that there's not much point in avoiding catching covid, because it's going to be almost impossible to stay in the zero times group. But covid isn't a one and done, and there are excellent reasons to try quite hard to have it as few times as possible. Each time you have it, there's a tiny chance you will die, maybe so tiny it's worth discounting, depending on your risk factors. But there's also a small (my best guess is 5%) chance of developing Long Covid, and a small increased risk of cardiovascular and neurological illness in the aftermath. Why roll those dice any oftener than necessary? And then there's the evidence of lingering damage in the body after even a mild case of covid. Seems plausible, though not a sure thing, that this damage would accumulate with each additional episode of infection.
The vast majority of people who try hard not to contract covid will still catch it at some point. But if they continue to try hard after that first case, they're going to have a lot fewer cases of covid than those who do not take precautions.
Dude, I was using a variation of the phrase "comes for us all" in its colloquial sense to communicate a kind of indifferent fatalism about struggling against a force much greater than myself. You might have also pointed out that COVID isn't an entity that can "come for" anyone in the sense that "come for" indicates forethought and intentional pursuit.
I haven't had antibody testing to be certain, but I also appear to be amongst those who haven't had COVID yet, despite working with the traveling public throughout the pandemic, working near infected coworkers, going out to restaurants, movie theaters, stadium sports events, and doctor's offices literally the day those things reopened in my area, went unmasked whenever I could and started flying to other states as they also opened. I also dated a guy throughout the pandemic who had kids who went back to in-person school. I elected for the less effective J&J vaccine because I was wary of the speed with which mRNA was brought to market.
I should have been tagged by COVID at some point - but it appears I haven't been, despite taking far more risks than many folk I know who got triple vaxed and continue to isolate and mask up to this very moment and long to eat a fried dish that hasn't steamed soggy in transit from a restaurant but still got COVID from...somewhere.
I prioritized the certainty of happiness that would come from enhancing my quality of life over the uncertainty of a very minor risk of severe COVID, and so far that calculated risk has worked out *great* for me. If I contract COVID or suffer long COVID tomorrow, I can at least take comfort in knowing that I lived a better life for two years than the folks who lowered their quality of life trying to avoid it and then suffered it anyway.
Well, I think it was reasonable to take what you said the way I did. I have heard that exact line at least a dozen times on Reddit, and it generally clear in context that the person literally means that since there's almost no chance of having covid zero times, you might as well drop precautions. Look at FskaFitzgerald, below, who is clearly believes they are speaking in support of your point of view, and who actually spells it out: once you have it once, successive cases make no difference. I have gotten pretty sick of the covid-will-come-for-everyone line, which doesn't make much logical sense.
I have also gotten pretty sick of the assumption, which you also seem to be making, that I am choosing a lowered quality of life over taking a chance on covid. I really do not think my life is much different from the way it was pre-covid. I do not work from home, and I do not avoid public places -- I just wear a high qualify mask when I am in stores & other public places, and take it off the minute I'm outdoors. I go to movies. I take trains. The next time I want to fly somewhere I will board a plane. I just do all those things masked. The mask does not bother me. I am so used to the mask at this point that I occasionally forget to take it off after shopping, and bike all the way home with it still on, never feeling oppressed by it or even noticing it. Where I live I am able to eat outdoors for about half the year. The rest of the year fancy meals happen at friends' houses.
As for your never having had covid -- well, congratulations on your immune system. It must be an extraordinarily good one, or perhaps you have some quirk in your respiratory track or blood chemistry that makes you highly resistant to covid. Your experience is very unusual though. Every person I know who dropped precautions when "covid is over" was announced has since had covid. Most of the people I know who take precautions about like mine have still not had it.
How much longer do you intend to keep up your precautions?
Do you intend to wear a properly fitted N95 mask (presuming you were trained by a professional to use one), social distance, and take rapid tests before seeing friends for the next...year?
Five years?
Twenty years?
The rest of your life?
If not the rest of your life...why not?
I do not think I am social distancing -- if you mean by social distancing not going to events I normally would so as to avoid crowds, etc. And, as I said, I do not work from home -- I go in and see people in person. My life is not very different from the way it was before. The change covid precautions have made in my life is much smaller than some other changes I have made for health reasons in the last 10 years pre-covid: I stopped eating sweets & refined carbs, and found that I lost weight, felt better, and stopped craving sugar. All that was a big adjustment, though, and involved changes that were much more difficult and depriving than the change to mask-wearing in indoor public settings and testing before I see friends. I also started doing pretty heavy workouts about 5 days a week. That cost me a fair amount of money for the equipment, and was quite difficult to get myself to do at first. And it uses up about 8 hours a week of my time. That too was a more costly change than adopting the set of covid precautions I take. I really think you have the wrong idea of how much of a bite basic precautions take out of many people's lives. Anyhow, in my case, I hope to maintain my improved eating and exercise habits for the rest of my life, and am quite willing to also maintain my covid precautions for the rest of my life too, if covid continues to be as prevalent as it is now. I think I would drop the covid precautions if continuing research indicated that "Long Covid" lasting longer than 3 months only happens to 1% or so of people, or that it's curable, and if the findings about damage to the heart & brains even of those who did not have severe cases turn out to be mistaken. As a matter of fact I think it is likely that I will be taking precautions of this kind for most of the rest of my life. Seems to me we are entering the Age of Pandemics, set off by climate change and encroachment by the ever-growing human population on animal habitats. I hope I'm wrong, about that, though.
And why on earth is there this continuing note of irritation at me & my covid take in your posts? You don't even know me. Why do you even give a shit about my covid precautions? And don't say something like you're just saddened to see somebody limiting their life, etc etc, because you don't sound a bit saddened, you sound pissy.
If you get through Covid once, the successive cases will be of less to no consequences unless you are extremely unlucky or have systematically bad health. How many cases exist of someone dying solely from a Covid reinfection? Like some probably but also I’ve never heard of even one case
Moreover, this concern does not factor in the quality of life lost or opportunity cost from continuing to avoid other human beings indefinitely.
Isn't the point rather that I don't like being sick, and I don't really care whether it's my third or fourth covid or my 70th cold or my 10th flu or whatever? I don't want to have three days with an awful fever, and so if there's a simple thing I can do that appreciably risks my chances of that (wearing a mask while waiting in airports, only going to concerts or bars when I'm enthusiastic about it) it seems to be the same sort of cost/benefit tradeoff that makes people wash their hands before eating or after getting off the subway.
It seems to depend a lot on the individual. After doing the entire gamut of vaccines, I finally got an omicron variant. I felt wonky the first 8-12 hours, sore throat, maybe a hint of fever, but the next day that was gone, and then I had a mild cough that took like 4-5 days to resolve, and that was it. An ordinary sinus cold is much worse. But others I've known have had significantly rougher experiences.
If you don't care about the difference between your 3rd Covid, your 10th flu, or your 70th cold, then it would seem reasonable that your precautions against getting Covid this year should be about the same as your precautions against catching a cold three years ago. Is this the case? If not, why?
Seems like you didn't read what I said carefully. I made clear that I am not very worried at all about dying of covid. I am vaxed & in good health, and my chances of dying of covid are very low. Even if I got it 10 times in the next year, my chances of dying from it during that year would still be very low. I am worried about developing a post-viral syndrome, i.e. "Long Covid." I had what I'm pretty sure was a post-viral syndrome after a mildish case of the flu 20 years ago, and it lasted for 3 years. 3 years of feeling like *absolute shit* -- exhausted, achey, no appetite, exercise-intolerant, low fever that came and went. I never want to go through that again. I also am concerned about post-covid findings in people who do not have long covid, and in fact feel fine afterwards: Weird changes in their brain scans, small reduction in cognitive test scores, doubled (though still small) chance of strokes, psychosis, deep vein thrombosis, myocarditis . . .
As for "avoiding other humans indefinitely" I do not. I mask in public places but go into them as often as I like. In my office I use a powerful air purifier but do not mask. For indoor get-togethers I test first. I would say that my total time spent on precautions is max. about 15 mins a week: occasional mask-ordering, stopping for 20 secs to put on a mask before intering stores, sticking a swab up my nose once a week or so. Oh, and clicking on my office air purifier when I arrive, and clicking it off when I leave -- add 20 secs/week for that.
"Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection exhibited an increased risk of all-cause mortality (Hazard Ratio (HR) 2.14; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.97, 2.33) and excess burden of all-cause mortality estimated at 23.8 (95% CI: 18.9, 29.2) per 1000 persons at 6 months; all burden estimates represent excess burden and are given per 1,000 persons at 6 months "
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
Many Thanks for the data and the link!
Obvious confounders. I would expect those in worse health to be reinfected more and have worse outcomes.
Possibly. But the perfect study probably isn't out there. (Certainly the study that's fully controlled for every imaginable confounder isn't.)
Pending a better one, I'm inclined to conditionally rely on what's available over argument from incredulity. But if there's something more rigorous that can be linked, great.
Well said!
So true.
1. Nothing
2. France
3. Not seen any data to back that up.
"and neither should anyone else" WTF????
a) People differ drastically in what level of risk they find acceptable, and what precautions they find worthwhile
b) The risk of Covid is sharply age dependent. An 80-year-old has good reason to be much more cautious than a 10-year-old.
As Kenny Easwaran pointed out, there most certainly are useful precautions:
"we understand that avoiding people who are currently sick, and washing your hands before eating, are simple and helpful things that somewhat reduce the probability of infection"
Did we though? I'm a tabletop gamer, and in the beforetimes it was typical in my group that if you were a little sneezy but otherwise ok, you'd show for a game. That's definitely changed.
Ok - some of this is a matter of degree. As it happens, both I and my wife tend to prefer being at home most of the time, so most of our risk comes from grocery shopping. If we were regularly at potential superspreader situations, we'd need to consider our exposure more carefully, but we aren't in such situations anyway.
This comment assumes that it is impossible to even change the probability or frequency of a common event. We have all known for our entire lives that this is false - we understand that avoiding people who are currently sick, and washing your hands before eating, are simple and helpful things that somewhat reduce the probability of infection. We know a few more tricks now too.
Michael Shellenberger --former CA Gubernatorial candidate, whose book "Sanfransicko" Scott reviewed recently -- lobbied hard to keep CA's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant from being shut down. Thank God it paid off. He celebrates a bit here:
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/creating-the-pro-nuclear-movement
This is a big win for common sense.
Thanks for sharing!
Yay!
Is anyone aware of a study that compares increased surveillance camera coverage in cities with levels of crime?
This seems like an obvious and inexpensive way to deter crime and catch criminals.
Are there objections to doing so based on privacy or efficacy or cost?
Yes, CCTV reduces crime. Not all types of crimes, though. It hardly affects violent crimes, but strongly reduces property crime like car theft. Cameras in car parks are highly efficient.
Don't expect wonders. A typical reduction may be 10-15%. In crime hotspots or car parks, the reduction can be stronger.
If they are *not* monitored by security staff, then they are also very cheap and definitely cost-efficient. The monitored version is much more expensive and a bit more effective. This may or may not be efficient, depending on the situation. In the UK, there was a movement to bring bobbies back on the street, because people assumed that they would be more effective there than watching screens. (I don't know whether it's actually more efficient or not, but this was the sentiment.)
https://www.calipsa.io/blog/cctv-statistics-in-the-uk-your-questions-answered
Thanks for both the helpful reply and the link.
I suppose that violent crime might be reduced indirectly if the cameras enable a higher % of successfully identifying and catching the culprit.
And obviously, there are costs in terms of privacy. Whether you want to trade privacy for security depends on your values. Many countries try to hit a compromise. For example, if you privately want to install a camera at your front door, then it is not allowed to capture the ground of your neighbor, or the public pavement in front of your house.
Regarding privacy, I would think the same laws apply as organic vision and audio recording. If a person can see public spaces from their private property, and record an event using their phone, why would a non-sentient camera not be permitted to? I think of these things as prosthetic devices.
Similarly, the authorities are not permitted to enter a private residence or wiretap private audio devices without a warrant, so they should not be able to install cameras without a warrant.
Businesses do not enjoy the same privacy from entry by authorities. Code inspectors are allowed to enter and inspect businesses so this would be the gray area. Some businesses are open to the public, some not.
Uhm, I can only speak for Germany (actually for EU, I think), but here you are not allowed to just make a recording of another person, public or not. The German name of this is "Recht am eigenen Bild" ("right to your own images").
There are some exception to this. If you blend into an anonymous background mass in my photo of a public building or event, then you have to tolerate it. If you act in a public role (e.g. at demonstrations), then you have to tolerate it. But if you just walk alone in the street, then I am not allowed to make a picture or record you. That's the reason why every car in Russia has a dashcam, but not in the EU. They are simply illegal here.
Now, if your camera only transmits without any recordings, then that's probably fine. Doorbell cameras are often like that. But the typical surveillance camera records at least for some hours, and then it is not allowed to record the pavement (let alone the neighbor's ground).
Thanks for sharing this different approach to images of oneself. On social media, I wish others respected privacy enough to not post photos they take of me without asking first. This is legal here in the U.S., and is just addressed through social convention. I believe the person who takes the photo even has the ability to copyright it and own it.
Someone should start a prediction market on how the German lawsuit against Tesla will go.
Cars and homes being covered with cameras is -- fortunately or unfortunately -- the future. I genuinely wish the citizens of Germany well in this fight, but as far as the war on privacy is concerned it's a desperate rear-guard action.
Great suggestion about a study. Anecdotally there are so many news examples of public surveillance permitting the identification of criminals, the car they used to abduct someone, etc.
Surveillance does not seem to be deterring crime. In the current Seattle and Portland crime waves, perpetrators are using Covid masking, hoodies and sunglasses to evade identification.
I see no reasonable objection to cameras in public locations, which could as easily but more expensively be occupied by a human law enforcement officer with eyes. Private surveillance is another story. Someone just won a court challenge to their school's policy of recording their room during take-home tests ... don't recall the source.
I wonder if there's technology that could penetrate or get around the masking, hoodies and sunglasses for people who are already in the system. Is there some data that law enforcement could collect that they are not collecting now when they arrest someone?
As cameras on everything become standard and machine learning becomes more involved, directly circumventing masks/hoods will become as unnecessary as breaking the encryption on specific text messages. Why? As a former NSA guy once said "You don't need data if you have enough metadata". I.e. if you can track someone back five or ten or fifty cameras until he goes into his house or takes off his mask, you don't need to defeat the mask itself. If you know exactly who he messages at all times you don't need to know what's in a message he sends to a suspected drug dealer at 2 am.
Iirc there are ML algorithms that can identify people by their gait.
Thanks/
What does lirc and ML mean?
“If I recall correctly,” and “machine learning”
High school student here. I plan to get a CS degree but it occured to me that CS may be attracting too much talent. No doubt it's a field with a bright future, but supply and demand.
I find most STEM subjects interesting (although CS is my favorite), and I consider myself good enough at math to handle any of them if I had to. So what major(or field of study) would you recommmend?
I don't have any advice, having bounced off of STEM myself, but you might enjoy this blog post: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-everyone-learns-to-code-the-value
One word. Plastics.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtLdE5Zq-8
From personal experience recommend double majoring as a good way to gain both option value and synergy. CS works very well for this because it is both viable as a standalone and for becoming the person in the lab who can program for other fields.
I'm skeptical that anyone who hadn't a double\triple education in several STEM fields and an intimate knowledge of your psychology and circumstances can give you a good recommendation.
My first and foremost advice to you is to not listen to your passions, filter the most obviously unviable degrees depending on your local economy and the best guess of the future (e.g. "X degree is mostly useless and all of its majors are doing something else with it, don't bother"), and listen to elders in the all the fields you're considering (preferably ones you know personally, but take everything you can get). If your college allows you some time to safely switch specizializations after starting study, milk it for all its worth.
CS's problem, in my very partial and biased and almost-certainly-not-from-your-country view, is not too much talent, it's too little talent-worthy work. The vast vast majority of work an average dev does can be taught to an intelligent and logic-loving adult in 2 years with a leasurly schedule. If you allow me to pontificate a little, this is a general problem with all-people-must-work civilizations, too much education and so many heads to receive it, but too little fusion reactors and cutting-edge blue-sky skunk-works problems and research to work. Academia is *infamously* competitive, and it's not even "interesting" most of the time - there is still a whole lot of paperwork and dumb meetings -, and even there the amount of "interestingness" is differential, some areas has super stars and some areas are relative backwaters.
There's a lot of talent, but its not a winner take all industry the way many other things are. You can have a great career without being an _exceptionally_ good computer scientist.
Usually applied math or statistics are pretty reliable STEM fields (statisticians are probably still going to be relevant for a while, and unlike CS, far less people seem interested in going into the field)
Do you have specific career goals? If not CS is a good generic degree.
What degree? It makes a difference. If you're going for an advanced degree, one of the biological sciences may by very hot in a few years. (And many of them are already rather hot.) But when I checked (admittedly decades ago) the entry level positions were either undesirable or required an advanced degree.
Software eats the world, but most of it is just plumbing.
Ideally find something that allows both research and a comfortable salary, so you can mess around depending on your priorities. I'm pivoting from programming to bioinformatics because the first bored me to death, and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
Despite the fact that everyone I know went into/is going into CS, there's actually going to be a shortage of programmers/developers in the coming decades and the supply won't meet the demand.
"In 2019, there were 389,000 computing job openings but fewer than 72,000 computer science graduates to fill them"
https://www.wsaw.com/2020/12/10/demand-for-computer-science-graduates-continues-to-outpace-supply/#:~:text=Computer%20science%20education%20is%20more,science%20graduates%20to%20fill%20them.
This is true for STEM in general since only 18% of students who graduate have a STEM degree.
So definitely don't let the fact that its a popular field discourage you, its not nearly popular.
It is unclear if that is 389000 entry level openings or total openings and is worded like the later which is a huge issue.
If you're actually interested in CS go for it. The reality that I've seen is that maybe 1 out of 10 people have the combination of intelligence and patience it takes to make it. I see the stats of how many people are going into it, but most will flame out pretty fast. If you're one of the survivors, great. If not, you can always switch majors and still have benefit from what you learned since you're going to need CS-like skills no matter what you end up doing.
I think one consideration would be your future job. E.g. if you wanted to work in a lab, math or CS would probably not be ideal.
The software industry feels like the biggest consumer of STEM graduates. In my experience, an adept programmer can likely find a job there, not matter if they did their thesis on software design or string theory. Within academia (or research in general), employment prospects are much more uncertain. While getting a PhD grant is mostly possible, getting long term employment as a postdoc is difficult. If you want to do research, it might be worth to think about which fields are less crowded or might benefit most from your specific skill set.
Biology, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit if you're quantitatively skilled. But maybe do a CS or physics major in college and also take some bio classes, then move more into biology after you graduate.
(I did chemistry as an undergrad and am now a stem cell biologist.)
Biology. Anti-aging research will be the big value add in the decades to come.
Even if you were going to get into biological research, a CS background can be very useful
Computer science is probably by far the field with the best opportunities for employment. You just need to find a good niche inside CS.
Hugo Awards are out. Any Thoughts or recommendations?
https://www.tor.com/2022/09/04/2022-hugo-award-winners/
I forgot to publish my predictions for this year, but no surprises here. The winners tick all the right boxes on the social justice scorecard, and that's still the way to bet for the Hugos.
I had liked Arkady Martine's first novel, "A Memory Called Empire". But the sequel had way too much idiot plotting for me to tolerate. Of the ones I had read, I'd have given the nod to "Project Hail Mary" on the basis of the exact opposite of idiot plotting. But concern for logical plotting is very much *not* the way to bet for the Hugos these days.
Of the best novel nominees, I've read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, both of which were excellent.
Andy Weir is great at writing satisfying competence porn- The Martian consisted almost entirely of that, while Project Hail Mary maintains that appeal while pretty successfully combining it with more traditional character writing. Strong recommendation for just about anyone.
Becky Chambers has an incredibly unique writing style focused on cozy slice-of-life stories about very compassionate people being kind to eachother- often without any sort of adversary or significant conflict. A lot of people assume that a story like that must necessarily be bland and slow, but I think Chambers proves that wrong- I've found all of her novels to be engaging page-turners, able to evoke a lot of very strong emotions. Though her world-building is pretty generic, I think that's forgivable in light of how original her plot and character work is.
Her novella that won this year is one of her weaker works in my opinion, but I'd recommend her novels to anyone who finds themselves in the mood for something unusually light and cozy.
I liked The Galaxy and the Ground Within quite a bit, right up until it seemed to go all in for an ethic of space settlement that seems like the interstellar equivalent of Breathairianism.
Drivel as usual. I can't remember the last time the Hugos seemed relevant, but it certainly wasn't in this century.
I'm a huge fan of Arkady Martine's work, so I'm thrilled that A Desolation Called Peace won! Both it and the previous book in the series (A Memory Called Empire) are a tiny bit rough around the edges, but I think they're quite innovative and really good.
Hell yeah, great book, maybe not quite as polished as memory but even more entertaining. 20 cicada is an all time favorite character
> “Tangles” by Seanan McGuire (Magicthegathering.com: Magic Story, Sep 2021)
If they're nominating MtG short fiction drivel, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. These are consistently unreadable, on a level embarrassing even to an AO3 author.
No, once they hit the bottom they went on through the wood to the ground beneath. One of the nominees was a tweetfic:
“Unknown Number” by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, Jul 2021)
https://twitter.com/azure_husky/status/1420177932518137862
That's right, an epistolary story in the form of tweets. Well it is the Century of the Anchovy, we need to keep up with the times!
(I'm not going to comment on the topic of the story, which should indicate what I think of it).
The story might have been interesting if the author had noticed the comfort vs. greatness element embedded in it. One character may have found a happier and mentally healthier life, but the other made a Nobel-worthy advance in physics following a path their counterpart abandoned early.
A story that looked at whether it's better to be well-adjusted or Isaac Newton might or might not have been Hugo-worthy (though I wouldn't necessarily dock it points for the medium), but I'd have found it more interesting.
Revealed preferences indicate I'm more a length of days than glory person myself. But there are literal millennia worth of art showing the question is worth examination. The story as it is feels much narrower, more didactic, and much more conclusory.
It's the trans angle that has me rolling my eyes (and before anyone gets up on their high horse, I would equally be rolling my eyes at a story where Person was using this McGuffin to contact their alternate universe selves to persuade them to marry Carli, because that was the maximum happiest outcome and it's impeccably cis-het).
It's the same as the one about the magic rain, which at least was better written: LGBT++++ issues happily resolved via wishful thinking, with the SF element only being there as a thin veneer. Trans Person calling up on the magic phone across the universe to contact their other selves who did/didn't transition and nag the ones who didn't into "yeah, you're me, so you're really trans, so go get that treatment gurl!" is "that's nice, dear" but what has it got to do with SF as such?
It really is slipstream fic, and that's a term I first thought rather pretentious but it honestly is the best descriptor for current Hugo bait.
(The bad writing is just another element for me disliking it; if it's well-written, I can appreciate that at least. But this is bad writing on top of it all).
I don't really disagree. I found the story annoyingly didactic. (Though while that sort of thing has a big constituency among current Hugo voters, it's worth noting that it didn't win.)
But there's an SF story available for exploration in the premise. Especially if it's possible to bring more people into the group text. Sure, some of it overlaps with, e.g., Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", and there's at least one recent story involving the ability to communicate but not travel between branching timelines that I can't quite remember. (I recall lots of angst over seeing dead loved ones who survived on the other side of the glass.)
But while it hasn't been a new idea since at least "Sidewise in Time" in 1934, I think there's room for more exploration. Especially around what knowing about the roads not taken does to someone.
(Or for someone. But I suspect that transworld texting as useful therapy would be an outlier in practice.)
In a way, Marvel's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is *also* about that, but I can't say it was handled much better there.
I have to revoke my claim of drivel as usual. This is an unusual level of shit even for the Hugos.
"Bi Dyke Energy" as username, nevermind the bio, does not inspire confidence.
...okay the stylistic experiment is intriguing but the content is irredeemable hot garbage (and not even because of its politics).
Can we somehow solve the energy crisis by mutual annihilation of this and Zero HP Lovecraft's equally terrible anti-trans story?
Mmmm. Anything I might comment on would be snarky, at best, and culture-warring at worst, so I'll keep my trap shut.
I recognise some of the names, but I haven't much, if any, of their work. What I have read by some I didn't like enough to become a regular reader of that author.
I am a little surprised that the winner of "Best Dramatic Presentation, Longform" was the most recent movie adaptation of "Dune", over works like "Encanto" and "WandaVision" - it's old SF, it has a literal White Saviour figure lead, it could be looked at as colonialist, etc.
Maybe the voters just all really really like Timothée Chalamet?
Or Elmo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHK5fBm1YWk
Thank you for referring me to that masterpiece
I mean, the story is critical, Herbert wanted Dune Messiah to be a part of Dune (which apparently will be realized in the movie adaptation, as a trilogy). The cut at the peak white savior moment was the publisher's idea.
I'm not sympathetic at all to the leftie critics but I prefer a more nuanced take, instead of "noble savage good, noble savage with white overman even better" - so I have high hopes for the movies to frame this well.
I was not aware of that, and certainly you can read it that way - Paul fails as the Messiah because he is not able to control the jihad launched by his fanatical followers, and he is not willing to go the route that his son is in order to assure humanity's future.
But nevertheless, the native Fremen don't/can't rule themselves, they are 'corrupted' by the environmental engineering which is terraforming Arrakis into a fertile world and which is making them 'soft' and the Atreides line is cemented in power with Leto's ascension to a type of god-hood. The outside saviours are there to make sure the Fremen continue on their assigned path of being Big Tough Hardy, and that humanity in total will be just Too Darn Cantankerous for an AI or any charismatic leader to take over and control.
So there still are a lot of colonialist/saviour/messiah tropes going on throughout the books. The value of Arrakis is the spice, and the value of the Fremen is to be totally loyal to the Atreides line as well as examples of tough primitive-living humanity.
This has nothing to do with the movie, as I don't watch movies.
In "God Emperor" someone (Leto?) explains that the Fremen followed Paul because they saw that as a path for them to grab power. So following Paul *is* ruling themselves.
In "Dune Messiah" Paul walks into the desert (to presumably die, though apparently not) to cement the loyalty of the Fremen, by following their customs to his death.
Any reading of this as "white savior" is exogenously imposed. It's not inherent in the story. (Admittedly, its also not contradicted.) To me the Fremen were clearly Arab-mimics and Paul was a constructed after the pattern of "Laurence of Arabia", though with LOTS of differences, and in a different context. But "race" as such is not what it being talked about. There is talk about genetic lines (NOT race) and culture.
It is really weird to have the Atreides line be so eulogized, if you look up the history of the children of Atreus. (The surviving Atreides have to be the descendants of Orestes after he went mad and fled to Athens. Or, of course, some totally different group who are just called Atreides.)
I remember the good old days when movies and games were mostly an escape from all that bs. Now it seems a lot of them try to embrace it as hard as they can.
I can watch the news on repeat when I want to jack up my cortisol levels thank you very much.
Hell I don't like cancel culture, but when I watched 'Dragged Across Concrete' I remember the constant whining about cancel culture ruining the movie for me (and the pacing that was too slow didn't help either).
No up until about 2010 or so. It got very noticably worse starting between 2010-2015.
São Paulo on Saturday too!
Scott, you really should read Alexandro's last article and correct your piece on ivermectin, it is starting to look embarrassing : https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-potemkin-argument-part-14-achilles
On top of what dysic desek daysick wow voice input just isn't going to cut it
On top of what Deiseach said, Scott's got his Mistake entry on Alexandro, I think that already satisfies his burden of responsibility to truth
The only embarrassment in this whole debate are the frothing-at-the-mouth zealotry for "Ivermectin is a miracle cure!!!!"
Probably it works in areas where parasite infestations are more common, and it works in conjunction with other treatments. Unless you're regularly in contact with cattle, I think that a Westerner living in good conditions doesn't need to bother with it. Certainly not "Dad contracted Covid and is really ill, we are desperate for a miracle cure" cases, sad as they may be - it won't do anything in the nature of "Well I had Covid and I took this and now I'm 100% with no lingering effects!" as some people are claiming.
Mostly I'm fed-up of the calls for Scott to re-enact Canossa, with Alexandro in the role of Pope Gregory VII: just admit you were completely and utterly wrong and Alexandro was totally correct in every detail all along and write an article retracting all you ever said on the topic, that's all we're asking, not much!
>>>Unless you're regularly in contact with cattle,
Dogs, not cattle.
Hookworms, roundworms and the cat parasite toxoplasmosis are probably the most prevalent zoonotic parasites for the West.
According to MR (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/that-was-then-this-is-now-37.htmlccc) , Poland now seeks 1.3 Trillion USD from Germany for reparations for WWII.
It doesn't sound like Central Europe is getting along well these days. I assume Poland is angry about Germany's pussyfooting regarding Ukraine.
I'm a bit angry at Germany too. Sorry, but they seem like a culture of conformists who goose-step to Nazis or liberal politics or Russians or whatever the fashion of the day is. That this overly conformist, fashion-sensitive culture is the most powerful polity in Europe concerns me.
Germany shouldn't pay reparations for something 70 years ago of course, but they should grow up and show they are a serious country. I'm a moron and don't know much about Germany and have no right to say that, so do educate me: In what way is Germany a serious country now? I characterize them above as a bunch of conformists. How is that characterization wrong?
I think historically speaking, we are still getting along pretty much okay in Central Europe.
With regard to German conformity, I think that your description is a bit of a catch-22: At the moment, we have a complicated political system with federalism and lots of internal squabbling, which mostly gets moderate, pragmatic policies enacted. Granted, such a system is not great on taking a firm principled stand no matter the cost. Some time in the past, we had a different political system much more given to extreme responses, but a lot of internal conformism. It was horrible, so we don't do that any more. (As an aside, while Kanzlerin Merkel was certainly not exciting, I will take the system that produced her over the system which sometimes produces Obama and sometimes produces Trump any day of the week.)
Seriousness is under-defined. Who is serious? Nazi Germany, with Mr. Mustache as a parody of Chaplin? Colorless Merkel? Twitter-obsessed Trump? Winnie-the-Pooh? Boris Johnson? NATO in Afghanistan? Obama, the Nobel laureate with most drone strikes to their name? Putin with his clique of yes-men who thought he could take Kiev in a week?
The amount of sanctions appropriate is up for debate. I can't help but notice that even hawkish Poland will only get rid of Russian oil imports at the end of the year. While I personally do not feel the increased price levels for energy beyond my pain tolerance, I can also understand politicians who are wary of a looming recession.
The reparations thing is a PR stunt. Granted, what the Germans did to Poland was horrible, and I generally support reparations payed to individual victims of German atrocities as well as the return of any looted objects of art, but reparations on a country level generations after a war seem like an excessive demand. Unlike with colonial reparations, I think it would be hard to argue that German's economy advanced itself at the cost to Poland's economy to a degree that is still felt today. From my understanding, both economies were pretty much kaputt at the end of the war, but while West Germany got the Marshall plan, Poland got some 40 years of communism. Speaking of which, was there not also another state which attacked Poland in WWII? I wonder if the Polish officials have yet identified a successor state to that attacker, and if they tried sending a bill to them yet.
Germany didn't advance itself at cost to Poland's economy, Germany destroyed Polish economy at no long-term benefit to itself. It doesn't make us any less salty about it.
And yeah, I suppose once the whole Ukraine thing blows up into WWIII we'll go 100% Versailles on the successor state's collective ass. In the meantime we just shake sabers at people who need things from us.
The reparations demand is a PR stunt. Mind you, it is perhaps fair - the subsequent marginalization of Poland under USSR until 1989 was a direct consequence of the German aggression, though strangely nobody is trying to get half of the reparations from Putin. We don't really expect them to pay up.
As TM mentioned, polarization is welcome by the ruling party. They also need to turn the attention away from their gross mismanagement blowing up in their faces, as the energy crisis is showing how helpless all governmental agencies really are - and nobody is fooled by the claims that everything will be okay, anymore. We've seen how they handled covid, we're not impressed, we'll be relying on ourselves and the govt should be happy if they ride this out just ejected from power, not imprisoned or worse.
Problem is that the governments will have to face their public opinion, and that public opinion will not remain the same in the US and in Europe (if it was the same before the crisis). Within Europe it will start to diverge more and more too. The consequences of the conflict and the prefered end state are just not the same, at all. It seemed so because there clearly was an invader/invaded moral narrative to tell and it was played well by both US and Ukraine. And because EU can not really present any convincing military force outside Nato. But politically, especially after covid years, the moral narrative will not be enough if the energy/economic crisis last more than one winter. European governments will start to fall one after the other, and who knows what their replacement will be (I guess technical temporary technocratic ones will be pushed, but it will work only if social trouble is moderate. Which may not be the case)
As someone who is familiar with both Poland and Germany, and traditionally has been rather soft on the first one and critical on the second one, my understanding is this:
The current Polish government doesn't aim to appeal to the bigger part of the population, but invests heavily in a strategy of getting 50%+1, and polarizing is a welcome measure here. They were heavily under pressure from the EU (and member states) when they started to dismantle the judiciary system, and decided that 'Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung' (offense is the best defense). Being angry at Germany fits the ideology & convictions of the supporters, and also Germany was seen as a perfect 'foe' to rally supporters behind the governement. This all happened long before this year's Russian invasion in Ukraine. Whether you agree with my interpretation or not, a future potential demand of reparations was voiced by the Polish government already in the past years, and there was a publicly announced process of calculating them which predated this year.
Now as for the ah, so soft stance of (only) Germany against Russia, honestly, my reading is, that this is a made-up story. One which gets repeated astonishingly often both by serious media and by serious public personalities. If you have a closer look, I think you'll find that in most instances currently the countries that are closest to Russia and for historical and cultural reasons most fearful of Russia, play the hawks within EU (especially Poland and the baltic states). And that many of the more western countries are more hesitant (which includes Germany or France but is in no way limited to those). So there is a difference between the Polish and the German approach, but not: Germany as a single country is so different in its policies from other EU states.
I think apart from Germany playing a great role as a scapegoat here, this is also a result of Germany being taking quite seriously in this context. Everybody seems aware that by putting pressure on Germany they have the most effective leverage on a broader coalition of countries and voices within EU. (Please note that I'm explitely not talking about UK, which is not EU any more and also traditionally has a specific role.)
So yes, I think Germany is rather behaving as a serious country now (not sure we mean the same here though). Which is far from saying they are perfect. I don't know about conformism, maybe as Eugene Norman said, you can specify this a bit. As for democracy, my taking is that Germany is doing comparatively well. I'm talking about the past decades! Which in my unterstanding is due in parts to mechanisms for safeguarding democracy installed in West Germany by the US after WWII. Ironically, mechanisms, which I doubt the US would currently be willing to come even close to themselves.
Seconded. This is pretty much to the point.
There are a few specific points about Germany:
- that the "promise" to Russia that NATO will not be extended to the east is directly related to the German reunification. (It is totally up to interpretations whether those were promises; but if you take this interpretation, then it was made by German politicians.)
- that it has a shorter history of wars after WWII than France or UK. The first one was 1999 in Kosovo, and back then Germany considered itself not a "normal" country. But that self-attributed special role has been much debated and basically abandoned since then, except for the relations to Israel.
- that it is the biggest EU country in terms of population and economy, and is often playing a central role for forming coalitions and negotiating compromises in the EU.
Perhaps these things make some people in Germany a bit more hesitant to be on the hawk side. But I agree with TM that those are minor differences. The positions and actions of Germany and France and Netherlands and Italy are not fundamentally different.
By conformists what do you mean exactly? You haven’t exactly said what it is except that they aren’t as hostile to Russia as you would like? But Germany might well destroy their country over sanctions, what more do want?
I can't speak to what the previous poster meant, but the extreme energy policy, which included shutting down nuclear reactors at the same time they were trying to push down CO2 emissions, struck me as ideological conformism. The ideology was modern environmentalism, including its anti-nuclear weirdness. It felt like "we are doing what is good and holy whatever the cost."
I'm not exactly sure how this is "conformism" unless you think that other countries are doing this so much that Germany is following. It's usually not "conformism" to be the leader on something new (whether bad or good).
Under this rubric any politicl action whatsover could be characterised as conformist, as long as it conforms to one ideology or another. You may argue their decision was unwise (And I'd agree!) but stupidityy is not conformism. Conformism would require that people voting for this policy out of peer pressure, and I don't see any evidence that this happens more in Germany than anywhere else. If anything I would acciate that with highly polarised societies such as the current United States.
Stupidity is not conformism, but conformism is one explanation of why a large number of people would support the same stupid policy, and I was conjecturing that in this case it was.
The trade policy of almost every country is stupid, at least from the standpoint of an economist who wants to maximize the welfare of the country's inhabitants. But there are explanations for it — the difficulty of understanding comparative advantage and the public choice reasons that make tariffs politically profitable — that don't depend on conformism. I don't see similar explanations for Germany's energy policy, although perhaps I am missing them.
I think it is simply a radical misestimation of the safety and enviromental risks of nuclear power plants. Nuclear waste seems really scary to a lote of people, and culture has always portrayed it as such. Nuclear power plants hardly kill anyone, but when they did (Chernobyl) they did so in a way that is deeply ingrained in the clllective conciousness. Add to that the association between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the image of nuclear looks rather scary indead. Of course when you look into the actual number all of these concerns are nowhere near as bad as they seem, but few people do as much as that.
Where was this established?
Caring about emissions and supporting the continued operation of nuclear plants strikes me as categorically less ideological than caring about emissions but shuttering nuclear plants
Maybe in part, but they strike me as primarily ultra-earnest, in that anything they do, whether good or bad, they go at it hammer and tongs! An American might drink five pints of beer at a party and stagger off to bed at 2am, whereas a German would be more likely to drink ten, and tickle their throats half way through so they can honk up and carry on until morning! Where a Frenchman might write a three volume treatise, a German academic would write six volumes! In the UK and US, the motorway speed limit is 70 MPH, but in Germany you can be haring along the fast lane at 170 MPH, when suddenly you find there is a manic German driving a foot behind you, flashing their lights for you to get out of the way. And so on, you get the idea - They never do anything by halves!
Since WW2 they have been on their best behavior, and maybe in striving to be ultra-virtuous, their former leader Angela Merkel was perhaps a bit too trusting and accommodating towards Russia in making Germany reliant on Russian gas. But it may have been partly a hard-nosed assessment that Russia would thereby become equally dependent on Europe paying for it.
So the general consensus of this blog is that MAOIs are pretty safe/underrated and that tyramine isn't that much of a concern.
But the first observation of serotonin syndrome was in patients on MAOIs (phenylpropanolamine 25 mg) given only 20 mg/kg of tryptophan [1]. That doesn't sound like that much. That's like a quart of milk[2] and half pound of chicken[3] which seems like not that unusual of a meal.
Am I missing something regarding absorption rates or just bad a math? Maybe this is less of a problem with selective MAO A/B inhibitors? This seems like a much more problematic thing than the tyramine reaction right?
I'm pretty sure I triggered this with a simple salmon dinner and drinking a bunch of milk.
[1] https://n.neurology.org/content/10/12/1076
[2] https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/tryptophan-in-milk.php
[3] http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/tryptophan-in-chicken-breast.php
The concern over tyramine interactions was to do with hypertensive crisis - shooting up your blood pressure.
This paper discusses MAOIs and dietary restrictions, and they are more concerned with tyramine, but there is a small reference to tryptophan also:
https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/depression/dietary-restrictions-drug-interactions-monoamine-oxidase-update-maoi/
"Tryptophan. Tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the brain by tryptophan hydroxylase and decarboxylase. As a dietary supplement, tryptophan (6 to 18 mg/d) is contraindicated with MAOIs because it is a sympathomimetic compound."
I don't know if one dinner of salmon and milk would trigger seretonin syndrome by itself; were you taking any other prescribed or over-the-counter medicines? had you been drinking a lot of milk over a long period? And excuse the question, but are you sure it was seretonin syndrome and not something else - some of the symptoms sound similar to food poisoning:
"Serotonin syndrome is characterized by autonomic, neuromotor, and cognitive-behavioral symptoms. The most frequently reported symptoms are changes in mental status such as confusion and hypomania, restlessness, myoclonus, hyperreflexia, diaphoresis, shivering, and tremor. Diarrhea, incoordination, and fever can also occur. Severe hyperthermia with complications such as disseminated intravascular coagulation, rhabdomyolysis, and renal failure can sometimes precede death. Clinicians should be aware that serotonin syndrome has overlapping signs and symptoms with several other hyperthermic states or syndromes such as lethal catatonia, anticholinergic toxicity, malignant hyperthermia, and neuroleptic malignant syndrome."
Yeah I'm aware of the tyramine interaction but I was contrasting it with the lack of documentation about tryptophan. Not sure why a 6-18 mg supplement is problematic when food easily gives an order of magnitude more or why it isn't listed as a cause of serotonin syndrome.
I tend to drink a lot of milke (~2 liters a day) though lately it's more like 1 L a day.. It's possible that it's just anxiety or something else but I'd also be interested in that too as it triggered 2 nights in a row so I can avoid it. I had really bad Akathisia (restlessness) and hypomania but my pulse was only potentially 15 bpm elevated, I didn't get a significant blood pressure reading, and I don't think I was hyperthermic so it probably doesn't technically meet the criteria for serotonin syndrome. It's set in after dinner and resolved by morning both times which fits with serotonin syndrome.
I'm only taking fexofenadine which shouldn't have any interactions with a MAOI.
We *may* be getting somewhere with the difference between tryptophan found in food and tryptophan as a supplement:
https://www.healthline.com/health/tryptophan#health-risks
"While tryptophan consumed through food is typically safe, some people experience adverse effects from the supplement form.
While tryptophan supplements are available, they may have side effects for some people. Because of this, it may be safer to obtain tryptophan through the foods that naturally contain it, like meat, fish, and cheese."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan
"There is evidence that blood tryptophan levels are unlikely to be altered by changing the diet, but consuming purified tryptophan increases the serotonin level in the brain, whereas eating foods containing tryptophan does not.
Tryptophan taken as a dietary supplement (such as in tablet form) has the potential to cause serotonin syndrome when combined with antidepressants of the MAOI or SSRI class or other strongly serotonergic drugs".
So it *may* have something to do with bioavailability of tryptophan; dietary sources may be more quickly converted into niacin, whereas taking a supplement is a purified form and has a stronger effect, which is why the warnings about taking supplements but not dietary sources.
It might be that you bumped up enough consumption of dietary tryptophan to have side-effects rather than full-blown serotonin syndrome, but I am not a doctor:
"Potential side effects of tryptophan supplementation include nausea, diarrhea, drowsiness, lightheadedness, headache, dry mouth, blurred vision, sedation, euphoria, and nystagmus (involuntary eye movements)".
And this guy here got off luckily, all things considered, even though he did knock himself into mania:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253963/
"L-tryptophan, an essential amino acid, has been used as an OTC supplement to treat a myriad of conditions: insomnia, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia; etc. However in 1989, an epidemic of eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome from contaminants in tryptophan supplements involved 1,531 cases and 27 deaths. For a period afterward, the sale of tryptophan was prohibited. Tryptophan supplementation became risky and was replaced by 5-HTP as the preferred supplement.
5-HTP, metabolized from tryptophan via hydroxylation, freely crosses the blood brain barrier and gets converted to serotonin by aromatic L-amino-acid decarboxylase. This patient took 5-HTP for several reasons: 1) He remained symptomatic with depression. 2) 5-HTP was not on his list of foods to avoid in a tyramine-free diet. 3) 5-HTP, unlike tryptophan, was not produced by fermentation, a process he knew might contain tyramine contraindicated for someone taking an MAOI. 4) The lay literature suggested 5-HTP was not associated with the serotonin syndrome.
The differential diagnosis included serotonin syndrome and drug-induced mania (MAOI vs. steroid vs. 5-HTP). The combination of tryptophan or 5-HTP with MAOIs can cause a serotonin syndrome/neurotoxicity. Furthermore, the combination of 5-HTP with MAOIs or SSRIs in rat models can produce a malignant serotonin syndrome. Although this patient had hyper-reflexia, he had no other signs or symptoms of serotonin syndrome. Therefore, his provisional diagnosis was drug-induced mania."
From this study on pigs, we get this information:
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/142/12/2231S/4630852#151505581
"A dose of 3 g/d tryptophan is ∼12 times the requirement of an adult human. Therefore, it appears that tryptophan doses of at least 10 times the daily requirement are necessary to elicit pharmacological responses."
So that seems like 0.2 g per day of tryptophan is the human requirement. Another source says "The US Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) is 250-425 milligrams per day."
Great, now I have to try converting quarts to litres, thanks US measures!
"Whole Milk is one of the largest sources of tryptophan, including 732 milligrams per quart. 2% reduced fat milk is also a good source, coming in at 551 milligrams per quart."
Okay, if a US quart = 0.95 litres, that's close enough for 1 litre per day of whole milk = 732 mg of tryptophan. If you were drinking 2 litres a day, that's 1,464 mg/day which is, if we take the upper limit of 425 mg/day recommended, about 3 times what you should be consuming. That's a little on the high side, but nowhere near the 10 times figure.
You possibly did have a build-up of dietary tryptophan which triggered some side-effects, but it doesn't sound like full-blown serotonin syndrome. Once again, however, I Am Not A Doctor.
Which hormones are billionaires taking and should I take them too? Recent pictures of Elon Musk showed that he seemingly took growth hormones (?) and if you look at before/after pictures of Jeff Bezos, it's clear he also took something, probably testosterone? It seems that growth hormones have an anti-aging effect? And testosterone gives you more energy as you're getting older? (And studies seem to show that testosterone doesn't actually make you more aggressive?)
I'm currently in my early thirties so I probably don't need to take anything, but should I in 10 years or so?
I would NOT take growth hormone. I did, many years ago, and it made my intestines and internal organs grow. Any muscle growth evaporated when I stopped bodybuilding, because muscles are constantly torn down; the gut's still there. That's why I'll never have nice abs again, and why pro bodybuilders today have disgusting barrel bellies instead of sleek Arnold abs. Also, growth hormone can cause the heart to grow, which is dangerous for several reasons.
Taking some kind of testosterone can have good effects on your mood (if you're depressed) and on your energy level (if you're tired all the time), and on your sexual arousal and endurance.
You should never take natural testosterone. The testosterone esters were designed to be released slowly, rather than all at once. All of the synthetic injectable anabolic steroids other than the testosterone esters were designed to improve on natural testosterone by having a higher myogenic / androgenic ratio. That means they all give more muscle with fewer side-effects. Ideally, you should take a mix of synthetics and testosterone esters (for complicated reasons), but good luck finding a doctor to help you with that.
High testosterone can cause blood clots. No one has yet tested whether this is true of high testosterone without supplementation; I suspect it is.
You should never take testosterone or synthetics continuously, even though your doctor will tell you to. It will shut down your own testosterone production, likely permanently. AFAIK only bodybuilders know how to use testosterones "safely". But they don't, because they use way too much.
Taking steroids for physique without lifting weights would be dumb, and you'd get more benefit from the lifting than from the steroids. Lifting weights gives the greatest return per hour invested when you do just a little lifting; steroids give the greatest return when you do a lot of lifting. So using steroids to build muscle isn't really worth it IMHO unless you're testosterone-deficient, or you want to be a freak.
Also, you'd probably get more health benefits from taking the time it would take to lift weights, and using it to get more sleep instead. Likewise, more health benefits from eliminating sugar, reducing wheat, rice, and maybe caffeine, and getting down to 15% body fat. Don't risk your health with drugs or waste your time with lifting until you've fixed the easy things (except for losing fat, bcoz muscles burn fat 24 hours a day, even if you're not using them. If you are fat, just walking around a lot is lifting weights.)
If you want to lift weights, here are some tips:
- You cannot learn how to do an exercise from watching someone do it. Exercises for different muscles can look identical to an observer. You have to feel which part of which muscle you're using.
- For each major muscle, do one set each of many different exercises, not many sets of one exercise. The first set of any exercise provides more benefits than all subsequent sets combined. All bodybuilders deny this; all good recent research supports it.
- Recent research agrees that what counts is weight "volume". To a first approximation, 30 reps of 10 pounds is as good as 10 reps of 30 pounds. All bodybuilders deny this.
- Don't drop the weight after the lift. Lowering the weight (the eccentric phase) is at least as important as lifting it.
- Never compare how much weight you're lifting to how much someone else is lifting. For one thing, different bodies have different comparative advantages. More importantly, how much weight you lift isn't important; how you lift is important. You can always lift more weight by using a sloppier form that's less effective.
- Never measure your 1-rep max on any exercise, especially bench press. 1-rep max bench press will injure you. The only reason to do a 1-rep max is to compare it to other people's 1-rep max, which is dumb.
- Never lift so much weight that you can feel or hear your joints grind against each other. Especially watch out for this on bench press. That will eventually wear your cartilage away, and you won't be able to do that exercise anymore, ever. Also you'll be in pain every second for the rest of your life.
(If you do grind your cartilage away, the only proven way to grow it back is by taking Adequan for the rest of your life. It builds cartilage, but low-quality cartilage that wears away again. Unfortunately, Adequan will never be approved for humans anywhere in the Western world, because the patent has expired. The US government has been insanely zealous over the past few years about preventing humans from getting veterinary drugs. Getting Adequan is now harder than getting any kind of dangerous and addictive drug you could mention. Google and Ebay have cooperated in purging listings of people selling Adequan without a veterinary prescription from their results. It's been used for 30 years with a good safety record, and until just a few years ago you could buy it over the counter everywhere in the Western world.)
If you DO want to be a freak, read this:
Anabolics won't have much effect on your physique unless you also work out a lot. And it's gonna have bad consequences if you don't learn a LOT before starting. As in, spend a year studying first.
The most common problem a guy has when he jumps into anabolics without studying is that he goes on a steroid cycle, gains muscle, then stops the cycle and loses the muscle. This is because a lot of that excess testosterone is converted to estrogen, so your body has a big estrogen load and a high estrogen/test ratio just after you stop taking steroids, and aggressively destroys muscle. There are approaches to dealing with this, but to do it well you'd have to constantly measure your hormone levels, which would be expensive, and also impossible unless you know a place where you can get blood tests (not just the saliva tests) without a doctor's prescription.
Even if you lift, anabolics still won't be very helpful unless you've already done enough bodybuilding (years, not months), and read enough journal articles, to understand how to lift weights effectively. You have to learn about a hundred exercises and practice each one.
Even if you take anabolics, and read journal articles, and know how to lift, and get your nutrition and sleep right, and do all the right things, you still won't look like a bodybuilder. Genetics are the most-important factor. If you don't already look like a bodybuilder before lifting weights, nothing you do will ever make you look like that guy in the magazine.
Anabolic steroids aren't nearly as dangerous as the drugs bodybuilders take to prevent side-effects from steroids. (And as all the other drugs they take as well, like diuretics, fat-burners, and HGH.)
Muscle itself shortens lifespan. The reasons aren't fully understood. Certainly having more muscles wears your heart out faster.
Unless you're genetically gifted with not being able to get acne, you're gonna get acne that may cancel out any cosmetic improvements. Pro bodybuilders are all genetically gifted to not get acne. Almost no one can take the huge doses of steroids that they do, and have the perfect skin they do.
The hardest part of bodybuilding isn't lifting weights; it's starving yourself so that your muscles show. I believe that successful bodybuilders are also genetically or environmentally gifted to not feel hunger as much as others. I say this because they never talk about cutting down weight as being especially difficult, while for normal people who try bodybuilding, it's impossible.
The second-hardest part of bodybuilding is doing it FAST. If you look at the exercise programs touted by pros, you'll find they often claim they're doing over 30 sets a day, but spend just an hour a day in the gym. Try to do 30 set at a gym in an hour. I certainly can't. I think this is where steroids are useful--they help people do very heavy sets (which are faster), with short recovery times. When you're over 40, your joints aren't going to let you do that.
It's more about time management than about metal. If you add in time studying, recording progress, going to the gym, changing, showering, tracking what you eat, etc., we're talking upwards of 3 hours a day for people who are serious.
Never take oral anabolic steroids. They're bad for your liver.
All this advice is for men. Women shouldn't take testosterone if they like being women. They can lift weights, but IMHO it's a waste of time for most of them, and they'd be better off pursuing fitness than muscle. Boys who are still growing also shouldn't take testosterone or lift weights.
At least one study concludes that, at the right dose, it anabolics have a significant effect on body composition even in the absence of stimulus from weight lifting.
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.2001.281.6.E1172?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org
I'm not sure how long you'd want to keep up 600mg/week, however.
By themselves, they have a statistically significant effect, but not as dramatic an effect as most people think.
Gleep. Did you take a calculated risk with HGH, or did you have no idea about what might happen?
Do you have any idea about possible health effects of larger internal organs?
I knew it might happen, but at the time, the muscle gain obscured the gut growth. I don't know about health effects of larger organs other than the heart, which is a special case. I think it's more likely to do harm than good.
Infant blood platelet transfusions
In seriousness, I would be very careful about any of this stuff. Definitely find a knowledgable doctor (not just your local family physician), maybe even an endocrinologist, before taking anything. Testosterone supplementation can cause your body to stop making it, meaning you'll need to stay on it for life.
This guy is very good to listen to on the topic of supplementation. Don't let the goofy name put you off, he's the real deal: https://moreplatesmoredates.com/
Jebus, that guy has overinflated his deltoids.
I'm sure he knows how to shred, but hugeness in muscles that are easy to inject (like the lateral delts), combined with smallness of those hard-to-reach (here the lats), screams "Synthol!" to me. I'll retract that if his rear delts are comparable to his lateral delts.
Not that I have any moral qualms about Synthol as "cheating". I've never used it, but only because I don't understand how people can use it without accidentally killing themselves now and then.
I'm sure billionaires are getting specific advice (hopefully from competent people) about what they take.
I second the recommendation for getting a blood panel.
Start with a really comprehensive blood panel. Because I'm a Huberman Lab listener I'm likely to go on and tell you I've heard Inside Tracker is good, and then am likely to tell you to take your results to Examine dot com and look at the research on supplements to correct whatever identified deficits your tests turn up. I'm even more likely to end by telling you to listen to the Huberman Lab in general and start lifting heavy, using a sauna, eating better, doing cold exposure, doing at least three hours of zone two cardio a week, look into NMN, etc. (Scott did a insanity-wolf 'take all the supplements live forever' post a while back that i believe was titled "pascalian health practices".)
I.e. do everything low-impact that you can and see what happens. By the time you hit 40 if you've been doing so you'll have a better idea about what harder-hitting next steps to take.
I remember a Greg Doucette video on a 72-year-old grandma suddenly getting into shape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZZrZ4k27cc
(Might be better to just look up Joan Macdonald, if you can't stand Greg.)
That's all my knowledge on the subject, but I'd say only take stuff if you have a specific problem you're solving. Worst case, you take it much later in life and it still works.
Testosterone is commonplace for old guys right now, prevents muscle loss. The trouble IIRC is that once you start taking it, you'll have to take it until you die - the endogenous production shuts down.
No; bodybuilders know how to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, doctors don't.
I'd be worried about the effects of that on prostate cancer rates.
That's a legit concern. IMHO the most-serious dangers of testosterone are prostate cancer and stroke. The effects of testosterone on stroke has only been studied in testosterone supplementation, and the studies didn't control for how much endogenous testosterone the subjects had. I suspect that in both stroke and prostate cancer, it doesn't matter whether you're getting a supplement or just have high natural testosterone.
I volunteered for a clinical trial of testosterone supplementation to prevent muscle loss and indeed my PSA levels shot way up and they made me see a urologist. Had other negative side effects too - I do not recommend.
Yeah, Bezos took something to bulk himself up and look more manly than a boiled frog, which is why he shaved his head and got some muscles during his mid-life crisis.
I do wonder why he didn't go for hair treatment instead, he can certainly afford it. I also would be dubious about trying to find out "what hormones are billionaires taking" because they have enough money for a lot of expensive cosmetic treatments, including plastic surgery, and including hiring on personal trainers, nutritionists, chefs, etc. to improve their looks.
The best advice is to eat healthily, exercise, and generally look after your health, rather than hope that when you hit forty you can just take a magic steroid pill to rewind your body back to when you were twenty. Don't take anything unless medically prescribed because you need it.
I don't think hair treatments exist. There are hair transplants, but you gotta have enough hair to transplant.
> I don't think hair treatments exist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/health/minoxidil-hair-loss-pills.html on oral minoxidil:
> Recently, a rising number of hair-loss dermatologists have been giving the low-dose pills to patients with male and female pattern hair loss, a normal occurrence with age. “It is just starting to see a surge in popularity,” said Dr. Crystal Aguh, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “More and more at conferences, we are sharing our success stories.”... Without a rigorous trial leading to F.D.A. approval, though, the use of minoxidil pills for hair loss remains off-label.
So, what are people willing to take without seeing at least one RCT? In general, I assume that a decent nutrition/medicine heuristic is: what portion of affected specialists themselves are taking this? (Affected specialists in this case mostly being male dermatologists who saw their forefathers go bald.)
By the way, thanks for writing your long post in response to Thomas's original question. It's not too relevant to me, but I appreciated all the effort you put into reviewing your own experience and explaining how you would make decisions in the future.
I hadn't heard about that! I've used topical minoxidil, and it even worked, once, suddenly and mysteriously, for a few months. I think it's still working, very slowly; but the hairs that grow back with minoxidil are so tiny that the portion of the scalp that has them still look bald from a distance; and they've remained tiny and nearly invisible for a year.
Generally I'd expect the topical drug to work better, but minoxidil has real problems penetrating the skin, because it's so slippery, and the head is so round that you can only apply it to one small spot every 15 minutes (and then have to hold your head for like 5 minutes so that spot is uppermost).
The temptation is to keep it in the bathroom and use it in the morning when you do your bathroom stuff, but you have to NOT use it before or after you shower for it to work. Showering washes it off, and it won't even touch your scalp if your scalp is wet, it will just run off. I scrub my scalp lightly with a plastic "brush" before applying it; don't know if that helps.
Also it helps reduce hair loss to just not rub your towel over your head when you dry off after a shower. I never saw this mentioned anywhere, but I found lots of torn-out hairs in my towel after rubbing my hair dry, and don't anymore now that I pad it dry. Microfiber towels work better for this.
Finasteride is also a good "treatment", but all it usually does is stop you from losing more hair.
Re. "thanks for writing your long post" -- thanks for thanking me! I was just feeling stupid for having written it. I've too-often prioritized AC10 above the things I actually need to do.
You're not yanking hairs out of your scalp when you towel off. Those are hairs that fell out by themselves. Each hair has a cycle: it grows, then nothing happens for a while, then it falls out, then it grows back. Baldness happens when they fail to grow back.
Oh. Right. Thanks!
What, can't current-day billionaires do as the Romans and the greatness of the past did?
Roman women would have wigs made from the hair of German women (slaves or captives of war) in order to have that fashionable blonde look (although interestingly, prostitutes were required to dye their hair blonde as well so that they would be marked out).
Can't modern zillionaires find some Third World guy with bounteous tresses who would be willing to have his hair, follicles and all, extracted and transplanted onto the bonce of a baldy billionaire in return for cold hard cash? There are debates about why isn't it legal to sell your organs, surely selling your hair is less contentious? 😁
Or do as George Washington did, who replaced some of his own bad teeth with some pulled out of a slave's mouth. Oligarchs have interns. The kids can always buy new teeth. One needs to make some sacrifices if (s)he wants to get ahead. On the other hand, it could be a slippery slope: one day it's hair or teeth, and the next day the oligarch might come for their kidney or liver.
Do you still have to worry about your body rejecting the transplant if it's just skin/follicles?
I have no idea. But that's what being a multibillionaire is all about; try it out on those Third World volunteers and iron the bugs out before trying it on Bezos' bonce.
If it's good enough for IVF clinics to use people in the Third World for the benefit of rich Westerners, it's good enough for trichology clinics!
To be fair, it's the 21th century, "hope that when you hit forty you can just take a (...) pill to rewind your body back to when you were twenty" seems more and more like a viable strategy - if you're a teen right now that's kinda likely, if you're a child that's probably going to happen.
Mitchell & Webb got this covered already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6nwvGJiN8
Brilliant. And folds neatly into the discussion of envy.
I hope that Mitchell and Webb get the other kind of immortality with their "Are we the baddies?" sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
Remember that you, too, will die.
Sure thing, but I'm in no hurry to do so.
Except that was promised 20 years ago as well.
If you're starting to get carried away by the supposed efficacy of growth hormones, I'd certainly take something - a large pinch of salt.
Are you seriously worried about what drugs you should be taking in ten years time?
Take a walk, do some Tai Chi, relax.
That worrying really isn't good for your health :)
Does anyone here know anything about rituals of 'totemisation' among native peoples? Like, a sort of coming-of-age ritual where someone would have to complete one or more challenges and thereby gain a personal animal totem.
Some scouts groups in various countries have rituals like this, and many claim to have been inspired by Native American, African, or Aboriginal peoples. But while the idea of a totem is certainly derived from indigenous cultures, I haven’t been able to find an origin for the totemisation ritual from before the scouts, and am starting to suspect it was largely made up.
Any knowledge or resources would be appreciated!
Are you familiar with:
Robert Steven Grumet, Native Americans of the Northwest coast : a critical bibliography 0253303850; Hilary Stewart, Looking at Indian art of the Northwest coast 0295956453; and Franz Boas, Primitive art 0486200256?
I wasn't familiar with any of these, thank you :)
I feel like US politics is now a populist race to the bottom. Both parties want to outspend the other to buy votes from fools. I believe this will lead to a collapse of the USD over the next 30 years. (Yes, I am gradually shorting the dollar against other major currencies.)
Why should I believe otherwise?
Americans tend to severely punish parties that preside over periods of bad economic performance (Hoover 1932, Carter 1980, Bush 2008). The current bout of inflation caused by government spending + money-printing for COVID is having a large negative impact on Democratic party fortunes relative to the counterfactual where we had 2% inflation but all other factors the same.
The fact that bad economic times will hurt the party in power is the ultimate eventual constraint on bad economic behavior by the US government, and it's been a fairly effective one and appears to continue to be effective despite a $5 trillion money drop.
If you compare the US to other major currencies (I assume you mean the euro, yen, and pound, since the RMB isn't freely convertible), the euro is subject to much larger existential risk than the dollar, the pound is shackled to a very poorly performing economy, and the yen is tied to a country with abysmal demographics. Also, all of these countries are democracies with the risk of the same giveaway to fools dynamic.
It's hard to square that prediction against the reality that the dollar is at its strongest in 20 years. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/currency
That's measuring "strongest" relative to other currencies, which are also administered by governments in the buying-votes-from-fools business.
Measuring the strength of the dollar in relative to the dollar's ability to buy stuff, which is what we ultimately care about, the US dollar is about 8% weaker than it was this time last year.
My prediction is long-term. 20+ years.
Historically, it's been a really, really bad bet. Diversification is your friend.
The biggest reason is that other countries are not only not immune to this process they may be more vulnerable. Only your excess exposure to the US makes you see the problem there more acutely.
Two objections:
1) How certain are you that the race will be locked in for a long time? Sometimes frugality regains popularity.
2) Have you checked whether the US are actually an outlier, compared to other major countries/currencies? Like EU/UK/Japan/Switzerland?
I did not actually check and compare (my guess: EU and UK are similar or worse, Switzerland is better, Japan I don't know, but they were much worse in the past decades). In any case, other countries also had pretty heavy expenses to deal with the corona crisis. Right now, the EU has even higher expenses to deal with the energy crisis.
Historically, I know the situation of Germany, and I can easily think of policies that were expensive as well: the cost of 2 trillion for the German reunification after 1990; and the insane solar politics in the early 2000's, with a cost of perhaps 500 billions (did not check the actually number), stretched over the years 2010-2030. Plus the cost of the usual catastrophes like financial crisis, corona crisis, energy crisis etc...
I don't think the debt level is the issue. It comes down to your #1: is the race to the bottom locked in? (And will it be perceived as such by investors?)
Maybe I'm 50% certain, which is high considering the stakes.
Populist politics is just so easy to fall into, and social media (on the left) and Tucker Carlson (on the right0 are leading the way. I don't see a near-term path for responsible governance by either parties. The game these days is to out-populist the other side. I suspect this will last for at least a few more cycles, long enough to bankrupt the country. I expect the giveaways will grow bigger with each cycle.
What politically powerful group is for fiscal responsibility these days?
This seems like an odd level of certainty given that as recently as 2009 policy was erring in the overly austere, not-populist-enough direction. Do you think there have been changes since then that will definitely not change back?
Yes, I think the two big changes are:
1) The Republican Party went populist in 2016. This will be hard to reverse because they won the white working class (a populist class) and it will be very difficult for them to willingly give up those constituents. Just as it would be hard for Tucker Carlson to.
2) Demographic change among Democratic voters in generation, race and sex has made the Dems much more populist than before. That change has been more gradual in the making than in the above and will be even harder to ratchet back for that reason.
Austerity-minded folks are dying off like the Dixiecrats did.
I think the other relevant factor is that the U.S. has abused its status as global reserve currency to the point that half the world is chomping at the bit for an alternative. Russia is currently pivoting away from US dependence - with tacit support from China *and* India. If we keep forcing those three countries into each other's arms, then it's only a matter of time before a dollar alternative gains steam.
The problem there is the lack of any plausible alternative. Both China and Germany are committed to maintaining massive trade surpluses which would be hard to square with being a reserve currency, and what other possibility is even in the running?
I agree.
Assume starting with X immunity, get booster, then have Y immunity. Y presumably changes over time. How much time until:
a) Y > X
b) Y is maximum
c) Y = X again, immunity gone
Does anyone have a good idea?
I'd guess c probably doesn't take more than about three or four months. But maybe an annual booster cancels out a slow drop in X over years. Just guessing though.
For a rule of thumb:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.-BFigt8lPJeNsHtW0LhPYgHaFI%26pid%3DApi&f=1
It's important to differentiate antibody titer - proportional to the current immune response that's hypervigilantly scanning for a specific threat - from having the relevant antigen memorized and ready to ramp up said response when encountering it again (which lasts for years, possibly longer, depending on memory cells).
This is a low-knowledge/expertise answer.
a) Probably a few days, maybe as much as a week.
b) Perhaps 3 weeks to a month?
c) 4 months to a year?
A lot depends on how much you are willing to care about whether Y is marginally higher than X, but not *much* higher.
"Benign" cancers: still worth treating if possible? Or the risk of medical intervention is simply too high vs. potential benefit? I'm thinking of stuff like moles or prolactinoma, not "elderly guy diagnosed with colon cancer which will kill him in another 10 years, which he doesn't have, so irrelevant".
I've lost at least four family members to cancer directly now, a couple "prematurely", so...feeling slightly more paranoid about tumorous tail risks than before.
It also depends on location of the tumor. My memory is that any kind of brain surgery has about a 2% chance of death/serious injury in general, just because they're dealing with such delicate stuff. Whereas if it's just a mole that you could get cut out, probably not as bad a risk for operation
Depends on the cancer, ask your doctor. The risk of malignancy differs by orders of magnitude.
This cannot be overemphasized. There is also the matter of the efficacy of ‘salvage’ therapies if things go the bad way (recurrence or spread). In some cases, there are half decent ones.
A good doctor will know the guidelines and know how they may or may not apply to your situation. Using the internet to inform is good, but I wouldn’t advise letting the internet be your own doctor (or your lawyer)
Why don't politicians go after TicketMaster for anti-trust behavior? They are the poster boy for it, yet congress doesn't care. Why not? Wouldn't busting TicketMaster be popular with anyone who has ever bought tickets? I'd vote for any politician who wanted to destroy them.
Or does someone have a defense of TicketMaster?
They are publicly traded under the ticker "LYV"
Doing a quick check and the last 12 months, with record margins and revenue, they generated $550m of adjusted operating income on $11.6 billion in revenue. And they had to pay $270m of interest payments on their debt from that $550m.
So a meagre 4.7% operating margin. And in the end only about 2% of revenue goes to shareholders. Hardly the income statement of a price gouging monopoly?
Thanks! Next time I buy tickets I will be less angry.
The defense of TicketMaster that I've heard is that their primary business is being the fall guy for venues and artists. Some big chunk of the fees they charge actually does go to the venue, but setting up TicketMaster as the bad guy lets them put a lower list price on the tickets.
This is absolutely true and has been for a long time. I accidentally learned it firsthand in 2003 or 2004.
I had been temporarily thrust into the position (longer story being skipped) of negotiating a Ticketmaster contract renewal on behalf of a medium sized music-and-theater venue in the Chicago area. I primarily represented the largest presenting user of that venue which was a professional live-theater company that had just signed on as the primary presenter in that venue.
Literally every person who worked for the theater company at any level was certain that Ticketmaster was the devil incarnate and that we should not inflict them upon our ticketbuyers. But the owners of the venue politely insisted, and apparently decided to let me discover for myself the actual facts of how Ticketmaster (TM) worked.
During the first serious meeting with TM reps about a new venue contract they laid out the proposed terms (fees), and I literally thought I had misheard. I made them repeat it twice, slowly. "Explain it like I'm 5 years old", etc. It was completely astonishing to learn that more than half of the fees TM collected from ticketbuyers went to the venue or act that TM was contracted with. But it was true. And they candidly explained that a larger venue or act -- the Rolling Stones, or the United Center, whatever -- would be getting much higher fractions of those fees. The deal offered to our well-known but strictly regional suburban venue (about half of the fees as I recall) was towards the low end of a TM contract deal.
We took the offer, and signed the nondisclosure agreement which TM required. They were frank and clear that their whole business model depended on protecting the reputations of the Rolling Stones and etc, of "taking the public relations bullet". Indeed that was in their view their primary value proposition to the parties they contracted with.
I went home and explained it to my wife because I couldn't resist, and somewhat later explained it to a few close friends. Absolutely none of them believed me. Zero, zip, nada. They were certain that I had simply been conned by TM.
A few years later TM got a new CEO who decided that taking that bullet had gotten old, and he opened the books to some journalists, and there was a major-magazine article about this. I shared that article with the same wife and friends. They still didn't believe me.
Thanks. Makes sense.
Yes, this. Live performances have naturally limited supply: even if your venue is a stadium there are only so many seats. If you’re a superstar performer with millions of fans then the natural place where the supply and demand curves meet may be a very high price indeed: if TicketMaster didn’t arbitrage a bit then scalpers will happily do it for them.
I didn't know I had strong feelings about this until I read your comment. I agree. The wider Live Nation org is pernicious too.
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Scott has classified threads for such posts, roughly bimonthly. Please post it there.
I see. I took this literally “This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want…”
I think that's an extremely reasonable response - and reason for posting as you did. Forgive my snark below. @demost did, as it happens, give you the appropriate and diplomatic reply.
I would change the emphasis of your point - 'you can post it wherever you like including Scott's classified thread, but NOT HERE'.
But maybe you're just a more diplomatic human being than I am..
Yeah, I just reported it, giving "Spam" as reason.
Yes, your phrasing is better than mine.
Something that's been bothering me and no one's been able to adequately explain. Putin's invasion in Ukraine is called Special Operation Z or the Z Operation or whatever. Z is the symbol at any rate. It's all over Russian propaganda. Here's the thing: Z is not a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Why are they calling it that?
This is a total joke answer that I've seen in other places, but I think it's worth sharing.
They claim that Ukraine is harbouring Nazis. Hence, they are making it clearer who's a Z or a Not-Z/nazi.
Could it be that because it *is* a Latin/Western letter, that makes it recognisable to Westerners? No need to know Cyrillic alphabet or speak Russian. And this is a PR war as much as a war on the ground, it's being fought with memes as well. Counter-Western Russian meme letter that Westerners can recognise.
This contains a summary and context plus some speculations on who may have invented the Z:
https://nitter.it/kamilkazani/status/1525853138569138177
I can generally recommend the threads by Galeev. Not neutral, but very insightful and knowledgable. It's a lot of material by now:
https://nitter.it/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711
Random question as I'm new to Substack: I was notified that you liked my comment. How does one like a comment? I don't see the option, nor do I see a graphic indication that my comment was liked. Thanks.
Yup, worked, I was notified that you liked my comment. :-)
I got an email notification about your comment, and I had an option to like your comment in the email.
And yes, it is hilarious that we both tried so literally to post the same. I guess at some point twitter stopped working properly for both of us, and we found the same alternative. At least that's what happened to me.
Yes. I'm not actually a Twitter user - I just browse it. But it started throwing a message up saying that I would need to log in to content. Around the same time DuckDuckGo very briefly started showing Nitter results by default, which is how I discovered it. For some reason DDG quickly went back to showing Twitter results by default.
Unrelatedly, the Nitter.net instance is often slow for me, but Nitter.hu and Nitter.ca seem to work pretty well.
As far as liking comments, is there any way to like a comment that is not posted in response to yours?
"As far as liking comments, is there any way to like a comment that is not posted in response to yours?"
Probably not directly. When Scott switched to Substack, they personalized some functions for him. One was to remove the likes, because they scrambled up the message order too much, and produced too many emails. It's probably a bit by accident that likes from emails are still working. There was a discussion about it at the very beginning: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-157
Anyway, Pycea wrote some browser plug-ins which allow you to customize this blog. They also allow you to turn on likes again. I have never tried it out myself, but others were positive about it.
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
For other blogs on substack, it should work automatically.
Thanks for the info!
Wow! I was literally going to post this, and using Nitter just like you. The *only* difference is that I would have used a different Nitter instance.
The Z was originally a picture of a folded ribbon. Specifically, a ribbon that's been used in Russian military decorations since Catherine the Great: https://youtu.be/EqbEM600LVQ
this article more or less sums up what I've read about it so far ... https://zackzack.at/2022/03/10/russisches-kriegssymbol-das-bedeutet-der-buchstabe-z (in german)
Thanks! I'll take a read. Is there more in German generally you find?
You mean more information about the Z symbol than in English? No idea. I've seen quite some articles about it, maybe also because showing it in Germany (as a symbol of supporting Russian war) can be punishable by law.
or this https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2022-03/russland-propaganda-soldaten-symbole-krieg-solidaritaet
'Dass die russischen Kampfabzeichen mysteriös bleiben, spielte der russischen Propaganda in die Hände, denn die Spekulationen zur "tatsächlichen Bedeutung" der Buchstaben nährten das Interesse daran.'
At least initially the markings on the vehicles (necessary because UA used much of the same visually indistingushable hardware models) represented their army group - Z on the Western (Zapad) group, V for the Eastern (Vostok) and O for ... can't remember. Why they used the latin letters is hard to guess, however, as far as I remember it seems that the propaganda branding came *after* that, not before.
The Z in Zapad is З though. Why not just draw that letter? And why, if you know, was it the focus of the propaganda?
Perhaps because з cannot be distinguished from 3 (three)
З does not resemble V or O though. Or В for V. (O is the same.)
By the way, З and В, inaccurately painted on the tank, will differ minimally. It is unclear whether the vertical line has already been erased or it was not there.
My understanding is that the internet noticed it and polarised about it on its own, and then Russian propaganda went with the flow.
Sorry, can you elaborate what you mean?
Again, in my understanding:
The internet noticed (organically) that lots of Russian vehicles in the invasion had been labelled Z, and pro-Putin people started using it online to symbolise solidarity with the invasion (along with anti-Putin people talking about the war as the "Z-invasion" or similar terms) - I've seen, for instance, someone posting on a forum with a signature of "Slava Z!" ("Glory to Z!"). Then Russian propaganda noticed that people were being pro-Putin using a certain symbol and decided "hey, let's run with that".
I don't have anything to add but just wanted to clarify this is the elaboration I needed. Thanks.
TheMotte has a new home https://www.themotte.org/
The original "themotte" was a subreddit spinoff of the slatestarcodex subreddit.
So this new website is a spinoff of a spinoff.
Did you guys have difficulty moving off Reddit?
I know a lot of community moves have been difficult due to the previous host actively memory-holing any attempt to point people to the new site (wikis attempting to move off Wikia and channels attempting to move off Freenode are the cases I remember).
Themotte never got to the point where they were explicitly banned on Reddit. It's also a small community. Both of those have helped avoid attracting attention about the move.
It looks like the relevant post https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/x5t3jh/meta_the_motte_is_dead_long_live_the_motte/ has been up for 20h now without the link being banned. And the new site is the second google hit for themotte.
I think the main problem with reddit was the admins deleting comments.
Without following all the drama too much, it looks like one example of a post being removed is Veqq's post here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220823170148/https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wulqxp/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_22_2022/ilf6xyi/ -- an admin decision which seems a bit WTF to my untrained eye.
Good luck on the new server, TheMotte!
Well, it's good AEO aren't attempting to interdict the leaving attempt (though the ground had been well and truly prepared there with the new site going up in advance). Was concerned since they implemented an auto-delete upon anyone mentioning r/Drama (to the point that the leaving discussion in theMotte was calling them "llamas" to evade), which sounded like the shit the Freenode admin did.
Hello everyone,
Would you like to take a short survey about your memory and thought process?
A while back I was extremely interested in an ACX book review (one of the non-winners but a finalist!), and it made me wonder if a specific hypothesis about memory and consciousness of self was true. I made a very short survey to try to answer the question and posted it on the ACX subreddit. The responses were very interesting and suggested, upon analysis, that my hypothesis was... more or less true, but that there was something else more important going on.
I also received some great suggestions and another related hypothesis to test. With these suggestions and taking into account the results of the first survey, I have created a new version of the survey, which should take about 7 minutes to complete. Here is the link, thank you so much if you choose to participate!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfj2nV0JvmBC0hkDPaR4oP-mDoMg4tJEq4dj0RlTwFVlPf65w/viewform
PS: If you already took the previous survey on the ACX subreddit, it would be wonderful if you took this one too, as there are many new questions.
PPS I plan to publish the results of both surveys on the subreddit in a few weeks.
This is cool! I look forward to seeing the results!
I took the survey. I think the results would be more reliable if the statements were positive. Having to disagree with a negative statement takes a little extra processing, and I may have made some mistakes.
I guess I'll throw my suggestions on here too.
---
“After reading a book or seeing a movie, I can tell the story in detail to someone.”
Overly literal me wants to answer No to this because I'm bad at explaining things in detail, which is different from not remembering the details.
---
“When I remember events, I remember a lot of details.”
This one's tricky to answer; it's a thing where I often don't know what I remember until someone asks me about it.
---
“I often enjoy the use of mental pictures to reminisce.”
This one's a bit vague. I don't enjoy reminiscing often, but when I do I use mental pictures, so is that a Yes or a No?
---
“I am not interested in abstract ideas.”
I'd like an example here. Are we talking about The Invisible Hand Of The Market, or are we talking about de-scrambling an egg? Likewise “I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas” depends on what we're talking about.
Thank you!
I agree with you that the negative statements are a bit problematic. I reused validated scales that included negative statements and hesitated to rephrase them as positive statements, but ended up keeping them, so I could compare the results to previously published ones. I hope this was the right choice.
Thanks for the survey. I'll be glad to see the results as well.
Thank you! I will definitely post the results.
Taken. Look forward to learning more about your hypothesis and results.
Thank you! I will definitely post the results and the hypotheses.
Thanks a lot! I have taken the survey. When the results are out, please mention it in an open thread as well. I'm interested and do not follow the subreddit regularly.
Thank you! Noted, I will post the results both on the subreddit and an open thread.
Thank you!
I took the survey and I look forward to hearing your hypothesis and the results! I did want to take a couple sentences to describe how things works for me, because i'm not certain that'll come through in the survey results. Personally, I have an excellent memory, and I'm also am very spacey and forgetful about things. The differentiator is whether something enters my conscious attention. For example: I never forget a face. I forget names all the time, because I wasn't fully paying attention.
Likewise, I am an excellent navigator - when I am driving. On the other hand, I can go somewhere two dozen times as a passenger and still not really know how to get there, because I never focused on it.
Hope that helps!
Thank you very much for taking the survey!
I can see very well what you mean about having both an excellent memory and being forgetful, depending on you attention level, because it is the same for me. You are right, it is unfortunately the kind of thing that is not well captured in simple quantitative surveys like the one I proposed.
In my case I know a very large amount of poetry by heart, most of it learned with little effort, but I am very bad at remembering people's names and, with age, increasingly find it hard to remember a word I know or where I put something.
Strangely, I really struggle with placing long strings of text in my long term memory. I'm a verbal guy, not a math guy at all, but random dates, data, etc.. sticks in my brain for decades, whereas I have to keep looking up movie quotes and whatnot to make sure i have it exactly right.
In my case, I have a really strong visual and emotional memory. I think long stretches of text are harder for me to memorize because it's harder to visualize. When I remember a date or a number, I am literally picturing the thing that I read it on to recall it.
I do very well with memorizing text as well - had to do a lot of that in military (warrior's creed and whatnot). But it doesn't stick in my long term memory the same way. I have to keep refreshing things or they fade.
Also, I'm 31 and have noticed a slightly decline in how snappy my recall is. Not looking forward to the back nine.
And I, in contrast, have a very poor visual memory.
In the meetups thread, Scott mentioned reciprocity.io as “the rationalist friend-finder/dating site”. But if I understand it correctly, it looks like it only connects you with people you are already Facebook friends with? This seems very limited as a dating / friend-finder site. I want to find new people to meet.
Which got me thinking… why don’t we have some kind of site set up for this? I’d love to see an EA or rationalist dating site. I’ve seen a number of people sharing “date-me” docs, but surely there’s a better option than some scattered Google Drive docs. Is there no platform available that could accomplish something like that? Or if not, does anybody want to build a very simple version of it?
I know the gender ratios would be bad, but it still seems like it would be worthwhile to have and better than nothing.
There is a setting to make yourself publicly visible which makes you visible to anyone else who activated it even if you're not FB friends.
Cool, that’s good to know! I signed up, and can now see the list of users who are also public. It's still not perfect, but closer. (For one thing, everyone’s profile pic is displaying as a question mark. Is that normal? The profile pics are hidden for all non-friend users maybe?)
I do wonder sometimes that if rationalism is systematized winning then it ought to invest more in things like helping its members win in life. There's fairly basic human flourishing that seems... ah, absent in the community.
There is a reason most humans didn't evolve to be rationalists :)
At the end of Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" he says that raising other people's (especially youths') ambitions is one of the best things you can do. For those of you who have been on the giving or receiving end of an interaction/relationship where this occurred, what was it like? How can we encourage more of these interactions?
I arrived at university having no real ambition, I was just really curious. My parents weren't that wealthy or well-educated, so they didn't really have any aspirations for me other than staying out of trouble. First week of university I met a girl and we became a couple pretty quickly. Her family was very wealthy, and her father came from a similar background to me, so out of what I assume was pity they offered to let me spend summers with them.
It was these summers that raised my aspirations like nothing else. Every person in my girlfriend's family were such hardworking strivers that it felt weird not to do the same. They heavily valued achievement, excellence, and money. At some point, I guess the Girardian mimesis kicked in and they became my values too. To be clear, they raised my aspirations not by saying "you could do so much more!", but through the implicit message within the family that "you are not valuable unless you are excellent".
Consequently, I ended up getting a really competitive graduate role that paid A LOT of money. Something I would have never even considered before.
Tyler recently spoke about raising aspirations at the end of his latest Podcast concerning his new book "Talent", which is definitely worth listening to. My personal take is just telling people they can do more is not enough, you need to optimise their environment to reinforce that message. A lot of middle-class kids are born to families that do this for them somewhat. For others, you'll have to either go to an elite university if you can, or move to a somewhere like the Bay area where ambition and hard work is the norm.
It may not have been pity that got you those summer invites-- you may have looked more promising than you think.
Always think of my past self as a bit of a loser but this idea, even if I don't fully believe it, is really nice to consider. Thank you so much for saying it :)
The Mexico City ACX group is having a meetup in the context of the “ACX Meetups Everywhere”
event on Saturday 10th. See the details of the event on LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bejXvxGjQ7rYudF88/acx-cdmx-meetups-everywhere-1
Any thoughts on the social value of luxury cars? I’m interested in how the confer status signaling among peers and help form connections (romantic and otherwise). For a young single bachelor, the expected value from a luxury/expensive car might valuable? Or it might attract the wrong type of people?
Everything is a signal of the sort of person you are, and has a strong influence on the sort of person who will want to spend time with you.
Trying to over-spend on a car to appear to be the sort of person you're not is a mug's game. On the other hand, being the guy with millions in the bank and a $5000 Prius sends out a whole different set of signals, which may or may not be the signals you want.
I recommend buying the sort of car that a person like you would naturally tend to buy. And if you're unhappy with that sort of car, then become a different sort of person.
I'd like to point you to Simler and Hanson's "The Elephant in the Brain" on precisely this point. I'll try to tl;dr it for you: luxury cars sell not because anyone thinks they signal anything good, but because people think that other people are dumb enough to think that they signal something good. You asking this question in the first place is proof of the power of this type of marketing -- the target is what you imagine other people think, not what you think.
I think it probably depends on the type of luxury car at some level. If you own a Tesla X (which I'd consider a luxury car), you'll probably get a different reaction than if you own a classic Cadilac, vs a modern Mercedes Bens, as each of those "luxury" cars sends a different signal (imo)
Two ancient memories from my teenage years, as best as I recall:
1. There was a Doonesbury paperback c. 1974. The cover had a picture of a young man having pulled up in a shiny new muscle car, and his lady friend on the curb looking alarmed. The title was "Wouldn't A Gremlin Have Been More Practical?"
I would have replaced "Gremlin" with "Civic", but the message came through fine.
2. Mad Magazine from the same era - remember that gasoline rationing was happening in the US in the wake of the OPEC embargo, the result of the US backing Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Odd-even days (based on licence plate) to fill up, 10 gallon limits, public appeals to conserve, Popular Science stories about miracle carburetors, etc. ...
Dave Berg's cartoon showed a middle-aged man in a suit driving a big square shiny luxury car, likely a Lincoln, with an American flag and perhaps a VFW pennant flying from the radio antenna.
A long- haired bedraggled hippy pulls up in a VW Beetle adorned with mactac flowers and peace signs, and says to the respectable man, "Hey dude, why're ya drivin' that gas-guzzler? Are ya unpatriotic, man?"
*********
And one more - Chrysler had a clever TV ad perhaps 25 years ago.
They showed these men driving various 2-seat sports cars while a sultry-voiced woman spoke of a man needing a vehicle that displayed his virility. They then panned over to a Dodge minivan with a husband, wife, and five children.
********
All this to say, who are you trying to impress? And why are you trying to impress them with what you drive, rather than who you are?
It mostly comes down to vibe. If you come across as someone who bought a nice car to impress women, people will think you're a tool. If you come across as someone who has a nice car because you can easily afford it, then you might get some social benefit. You will definitely attract some of the wrong types though. The richer you present, the more you will get people who care about that sort of stuff.
If you're young and single, focus less on the status signaling - focus on contrast and underselling. Don't lead with all your best stuff up front - as long as you keep getting dates, you don't need to wow them right off. Let them discover you. "I didn't know you could sing!" I didn't know you could cook/dance/fight/hunt etc.... That is your money maker. Develop contrasts - if you're nerdy, cultivate non-nerd hobbies and interests. If you're organized/Type-A, do some stuff that is a little wild and chaotic. If you're distant and reserved, find something that shows your thoughtful side.
Everyone, including your dates, typecasts you in the first 30 seconds. Figure out what those assumptions are, and figure out ways to violate those assumptions. Then - slowwwwlllly, over time - let those layers unfold naturally. (Don't lead with or flaunt all the ways that you violate your type, it just makes you look self-conscious and insecure.)
Do that and you'll have as much success as you can handle. As an added benefit, if you do it for real and actually develop skills and interests that are outside your wheelhouse, you'll genuinely become a more well-rounded and interesting person.
The expected value of a luxury car is circumstantial. From what I’ve seen, a car is one of the many factors that may signal wealth. Since it’s usually ones first impression of another, sometimes a lot of value is placed on the car. But, ultimately, factors like ones current job, intelligence, education, money saving skills, are much more important than the car one has.
This question brings to mind two songs:
(1) Good Charlotte, 2002, "Girls & Boys"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FTS2tdmyYM
"Girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money"
(2) The Rubberbandits, 2011, "Horse Outside"
Very NSFW, watch video at your own peril
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8
"She says Fitzy drives a Mitzy [Mitsubishi], and he offered me a spin
Enda have a Honda, so I might just go with him
and Darren Gibney said he'd bring me in his Subaru
so what the [bleep] would make you think I'd wanna go with you
I said [Bleep] your Honda Civic, I've a horse outside
[bleep] your Subaru, I have a horse outside
and [bleep] your Mitsubishi, I've a horse outside
if you're lookin' for a ride I've got a horse outside"
In my social environment (European and high education) having a big luxury car will have you laugh at rather than admired. I suppose it's different in the US.
If you are thinking about romantic connections specifically, there are lots of ways to spend money to improve this life area. All of them are vastly cheaper than a luxury car, so I expect that a luxury car would be a very ineffective way to spend your money.
The most important of them is this: Work 1on1 with a competent dating coach (get one who focusses on honesty and authenticity and self-improvement). That would give you insights into your way of relating that would potentially improve all connections in your life, not just romantic and sexual.
You could also get a fitness coach, style advice, better clothes, travel to communication & authentic relating workshops, online dating coaching, etc...
Also keep in mind that many groups of people care very little about cars. It depends on what social circle you are in. 90% of the people I know in my European city couldn't care less, and they wouldn't even see your car because European inner cities are not very car-centric.
Tips on screening a potential coach for competence ?
The value of a real "luxury car" is not in impressing passers-by. It's the feeling of confidence and lack of worry about your transportation, that is the actual luxury.
I would recommend a used Mercedes-Benz. They can be a PITA to service, and parts cost $$$$, but you can get an AWFUL LOT of automobile for your money in the used market. This 1973 280SE sold for $25,000, but It will run forever and gets ~30-35MPG!
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1973-mercedes-benz-280se-18/
I see these cars on Craigslist for $10-15,000 all the time.
Years ago I got a slightly used BMW Z3 convertible roadster for $16,000 and have never loved a car before or since. My first and only car love.
In Seattle, the cool car is the Tesla, even though Musk is personae non grata among the woke.
Cars do matter in the U.S. As a female, I saw my prospective date's face fall when he saw my pick-up truck. It was clear I had sent a signal that I would not be acceptable date material. He went on to be a major California politician and was looking for the appropriate female accessory. My kind of male partner would probably have seen the logic of a truck.
The expected signaling value might be high if you're the kind of person who'd drive an expensive car. But you read ACX so you probably aren't, don't do it just to impress girls, they'll know.
They're generally louder and have faster acceleration, which causes more particle emissions pollution, so pretty large negative externalities. Otoh luxury sedans might help counteract the trend towards pickup trucks and SUVs which are even worse, so there is that.
As far as I can see the current trend is towards luxury SUVs and luxury pickups, which are the worst of all worlds.
Besides any benefit to the owner, there's also the positive value of keeping skilled specialised (?) car repair and maintenance mechanics in work, which is a benefit to them and to society by helping preserve mechanical skills generally.
In general, women don't care much about cars. As long as it isn't obviously cheap, old, or poorly maintained, a car is just a means of transportation to most people. Unless you are trying to impress people who are into cars, or want to conspicuously display a high income, a midrange Honda or Toyota that carries what you need is more than sufficient.
I would expect the vast majority of the value (if any) to come from your personal enjoyment of the car. Although this might also depend a lot on what "the wrong kind of people" means to you- if you're someone who is interested in luxury cars you might find the kind of people they attract less off-putting than I would.
A car with good pre-set seat settings (so my partner and I can easily switch) and better silencing of road noise, would definitely make a big improvement to my driving life! I think that luxury cars often have those features.
I'm married to a mechanic, and we own several performance sports cars. THIS is the truth. If you can't repair it yourself, you need to have the income level to pay someone else, and that gets very expensive.
What is the future outlook on quantum superweapons? For example something that could create a mini black hole that swallows the planet. Any good resources would be great.
You may find this recent ArXiv paper interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02396
"Avoiding the Great Filter: A Simulation of Important Factors for Human Survival"
http://web.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/www.cryptome.org/2014/06/wmd-4th-gen-quest.pdf is relevant, and more plausible than black holes.
I get a 403 from the link
remove everything before www.
Have a PhD in the area. Tiny black holes aren't good at swallowing planets, despite the sci-fi depictions. The reason is that they are too small for their mass, so they go right through most everything without any resistance. A Planck mass BH (10 micrograms) corresponds to 1 Planck length (10^-33 m), much smaller than anything else. Basically, everything is vacuum for an object like that. Even if you carefully place it inside matter, the cross-section is too small for it to grow at an appreciable rate. And that assumes they do not instantly evaporate to begin with. Small black holes also tend to get spun up a lot by the stuff falling in, and once close to max spin, they can't consume any more stuff. One would need something really big to start with, so that the weaponized BH is at least as massive as a planet to begin with. Or at least the Moon. And if you have the tech that can turn a planet into a black hole, something that, as far as we know, has no analogues in Nature, then you might as well use that tool as a planet killer, no need for an intermediate black hole.
Since this is your PhD area, I have a question:
When I see discussions of synthetic mini black holes, the usual proposal that I see is to create a kugelblitz with focussed lasers. To 0-th order, it looks to me as if the peak energy needed to create a black hole from light (or relativistic particles) looks like it would be independent of the black hole's mass.
Say one was trying to create a black hole of mass M. Very roughly, it seems like a pulse of light with the energy needed has to all be within the Schwarzchild radius at one time, so the pulse length has to be roughly 2GM/c^3. So the peak power needed looks like it always needs to be around Mc^2/(2GM/c^3) = c^5/2G (independent of M), roughly 1.8x10^52 watts. Is this crudely right?
This looks like an intimidating amount of power. Even a hypothetical Kardashev III civilization, with control over all the power in a galaxy, would only have 10^36 watts available.
Yes, your estimate is largely accurate, though a better calculation is probably not quite that, because of the Lorentz contraction and quantum effects. Basically, each "particle" is compressed almost to nothing in the direction of propagation, as seen in the other particle's or in the center of mass frame. There was a back-of-the envelope estimate, called the hoop conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_Conjecture, where a black hole would form if the colliding objects can fit through a "Schwarzschild-sized hoop". This was confirmed in simulations some decades later, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1780.pdf. This was strongly hinted at earlier, by considering two "infinitely boosted" colliding particles (which can also be photons, since rest mass does not matter much at these energies, hence "kugelblitz"). What you end up with is two colliding gravitational shock waves, which can form a so-called trapped surface at the moment of collision, nearly guaranteeing black hole formation. The lower limit is imposed by the de Broglie length, hc/E, which for light is equivalent to the classical wavelength.
The upshot is that the minimum combined energy one would need for black hole formation is of the order of Planck mass (some 20 micrograms) and is independent of the colliding objects' rest mass, like you said. So the energy in a single laser pulse is roughly E=sqrt(hbar*c^5/G), and the pulse duration is one wavelength at least, or h/E, resulting in average power in one pulse E/t = E^2/h = c^5/G.
However, this is average power over a single pulse, the total energy required is on the order of a MegaWatt-hour per pulse, which is high but not impossibly so. If large extra dimensions exist, then the effective G is higher, and the power requirements are lower.
Many Thanks!
I think at a fraction of the cost you could just launch a relativistic projectile and be done with the planet? Though "crushing your enemies" does get a lot more literal if you can pull off the black hole thing...
But a relativistic projectile is just as far out on the advanced technology spectrum as turning a planet into a black hole.
Isaac Arthur's series on Futuristic Weapons might be a good place to start: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LvpLdGIp4xCyCVZEEUQ1Udn
When a black hole has evaporated down to literally sub-atomic size and then finally vanishes it releases a flash of energy equal to roughly 5 million megatons of TNT. So to create a mini black hole in the first place would require at least that energy concentrated and confined in a tiny space, and that seems highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Besides bioweapons, which seem to me, FWIW, by far the greatest future risk to mankind and even to other life on Earth, when these days already one can almost literally print viruses, something else to worry about in the medium term is large asteroids deliberately nudged out of their orbit and sent on a collision course with Earth.
But I suppose we can be reassured that by the time asteroid belt dwellers are present in any numbers, some possibly with evil intent, no doubt there will be effective ways to promptly detect and prevent any errant asteroids heading our way!
If someone can nudge the asteroid to hit, another person can nudge it to miss.
Bioweapons are very host-specific, and cannot cause extinction almost by definition - they get less effective as the host population thins.
That is true for parasites, not for weapons. First infect everyone, then kill is just one very obvious way around. Replicating in e.g. soil is another.
I don't think that first method is plausible. Hiding from the immune system long enough to infect more hosts -- ideally all possible hosts -- would be such a wonderful evolutionary advantage for a virus that it would be very strongly selected for. If it were possible to do such a thing, then it's very likely natural selection would have found it sometime in the past 500 million years of virus-immune system warfare.
Even conceptually, the two goals -- high infectiousness and hiding from the immune system -- are antithetical. To spread fast, you have to subvert millions of host cells and have them crank out trillions of viral particles to spew into the environment. But of course that much abnormal extracellular activity is a giant red flag to the immune system. The only way viruses successfully hide long-term from the immune system is by reproducing slowly, if at all. They can sometimes have episodic infectiousness, where for brief periods they become much more infectious, and then subside again before the immune system wipes them out. But brief periods of infectiousness and long periods of latency leads to an overall slow spread.
Even some pathogens manage to do this just fine. Herpes, Lyme or AIDS come to mind for example, but you are thinking way too much about evolved organisms and too little about purpose build constructs.
Guns are obviously very useful for predators. Did a predator evolve a gun? If you have access to different chemical spaces than your host, immune evasion becomes a lot simpler.
But even failing that, reproduce in soil or whatever until enough resources are gathered, then have the killing fog rise at a signal.
How hard it is to prevent such attacks using the same tech is an open question imho, but the existence of immune systems suggests it is possible. However, killing off current humanity is an incredibly easy once you can really build on a molecular level. If the path from here to there favors defense or offense remains still to be seen.
No, they don't. All three of those pathogens spread very slowly. That's the point. There *are* no pathogens that both spread very fast and also persist. They all fall into the class of (1) slow spread, slow disease, or (2) fast spread, fast disease. Your combination of (1) slow spread, fast disease isn't found in nature.
I'm thinking about evolved organisms because that's the class of organisms that are known to exist. What I'm pointing out to you is that we have no reason to think organisms that differ from those organisms in major important ways are even possible. Just because you can write a sentence that is linguistically sound doesn't mean you're describing a conceivable reality. You can say "a disease that spreads fast, lies in wait, then strikes suddenly" but that doesn't mean the thing you describe is possible in reality, any more than the fact that "Star Trek" had a consistent (on-screen) theory of how warp drive worked means it could really exist.
Your statement that building on a molecular level makes it "incredibly easy" to kill of humanity is simply an assumption, and as far as I can see all the indirect empirical evidence we have, and some reasonable theoretical grounds, suggests it is more likely false than not.
Nevertheless, all I'm saying here is that you should not just assume it's possible because it seems intuitive. People made all kinds of intuitive assumptions about what electricity could do in the 1880s (cf. Captain Nemo), and about what nuclear power could do in the 1930s, too, which turned out to be ridiculous. You can't assume what is intuitive bears any relationship to reality. It rarely does. That's why science is harder than it seems.
"Hiding from the immune system long enough to infect more hosts -- ideally all possible hosts -- would be such a wonderful evolutionary advantage for a virus that it would be very strongly selected for"
Isn't this what AIDS does? It's obviously difficult-- most infections don't manage it, or not that effectively, but it's possible.
AIDS spreads very slowly, because it is doing a good job of hiding. The first known confirmed case of AIDS has been traced back to 1959, and it was first identified in the US in 1981, and had a ~100% mortality rate until the first protease inhibitors were introduced in 1995. That's 26 years from emergence to effective treatment, in which time if it spread like measles (or even COVID) it would have wiped out hundreds of millions, or even billions, instead of the hundreds of thousands it did kill.
That's not to say there aren't some gruesome optimums, like the Black Death, which hits a particularly unfortunately effective combination of speed of spread and speed of disease, but even then the best it was able to do in the past was deliver a severe (but nowhere near existentially threatening) blow to European civilization, and that in an era when knowledge of infectious disease processes was almost zero.
Why is the infectous agent killing everyone again?
Yeah, yeah, some mad scientist made it that way. But it's a living organism, and living organisms evolve. As we've recently seen, they evolve quite substantially in the course of infecting even half of everyone. And high on the list of evolutionary adaptations, is going to be jettisoning any excess baggage that doesn't contribute to survival and reproduction.
Like that "...then kill everyone" functionality that your mad scientist put in the original design, which the pathogen clearly doesn't need to survive and reproduce.
Viruses can evolve away from virulence, but that's not guaranteed. Polio doesn't seem to gain *anything* from its ability to cause paralysis (it's basically a not-very-serious stomach bug), but it still has held onto that ability.
I could see it losing the "kill everyone" capacity because it addresses rare human genetic variants, and it mostly doesn't need such a wide capacity.
Not necessarily. It is pretty easy to prevent evolution in a designed system. You just have to make mutation impossible. One way to do so is to make sure that every mutation prevents reproduction. There are e.g. cryptographic systems to do so, though discussing them in detail is beyond my crypto pay grade. Another way is to have multiple independent DNA copies that get checked against one another in each generation to fix mutations.
You (and "a real dog" and probably a lot of other people thinking about bioweapons) are thinking way too much about evolved organisms and too little about purpose build constructs. Btw. I am not saying that we can do such stuff now, just that it is certainly possible in principle.
Why would someone build such weapons? Well, I don't know, but I imagine ISIS would have plenty of motivation to name an example. "Final deterrence" could be another. It is also certainly possible to build something that does not target "everyone" but "the outgroup" for many values of "the outgroup".
Wait what? I can't think of any form of DNA in which any mutation prevents reproduction. DNA is designed to fit the protein/RNA machinery that uses it, and vice versa. As long as you are using the same machinery (which you must if you are designing an agent to infect human cells) most areas of abstractly conceivable DNA functionality are impossible to access even in principle.
We don't actually know whether it is even hypothetically possible to design a true novel viral bioweapon. It may not be, it may be that there is no conceivable set of DNA instructions that would fit with molecular machinery to execute the necessary tasks, for the same reason no conceivable software could make my computer get up and walk into the kitchen -- the hardware isn't there.
This is true for most bioweapons but not all. As magic9mushroom wrote:
"Synthetic biology is a significant X-risk via essentially organic grey goo; stuff like a nondigestible synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate (which would pull all the carbon out of the biosphere and dump it on the ocean floor)."
Although I think any life remotely related to ours will need phosphate as a building block for nucleic acids, this is still a big concern.
Peter Watts explored this idea in Behemoth, though it seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Your example sounds more like nanotech - at some point you have, at best, a design inspired by life. And as you said, such designs are subject to a lot of non-obvious constraints, and they would also have to outcompete existing microorganisms.
I'm not betting on a half-baked lab prototype vs. rapidly evolving veterans of all niches everywhere in the world, the only advantage the new guy has is not being trapped in a local fitness minimum. And local fitness minima may be illusory (in a high-dimensional space there are almost no true minima, only saddle points).
EDIT: IIRC this already happened. Cellulose-producing organisms had this property of sequestering massive amounts of carbon while being indigestible to anything else, for quite a long time.
There are places evolution can't go because of biochemical lock-in. You can't evolve to not use DNA by using errors in DNA replication - that doesn't make sense. Life 1.0 is basically stuck with nucleic acids (phosphate requirement), ribosomes (more phosphate requirement, and probably bigger than it needs to be), phospholipid membranes (phosphate requirement) and a few other things; a de novo created organism (Life 2.0, as I call it) can go outside that space and thereby access large chunks of the globe with no competition at all (phosphate-poor water - nitrogen and carbon can be taken from the air, but if there is no phosphate Life 1.0 is barred from the habitat).
There's also the somewhat-less-obvious fact that RuBisCO is probably not optimal as a carbon-fixer (it's notoriously nonspecific), but nature hasn't been able to cobble together a mechanism that works better while under competition.
The hard bit is the extraordinarily-difficult computation of how to make a full working biochemistry, and with AlphaFold and the continuing miniaturisation of computers we're actually making progress on that front.
I do agree that something would eventually evolve to eat whatever you make - possibly even *from* what you make - but "eventually" doesn't save us. It'd be tricky to get and deploy counteragents before the researchers starved to death, because it's like the rice grains on the chessboard - by the time the problem is noticeable it's most of the way to killing you.
I do agree, incidentally, that "synthetic biology" and "organic nanotechnology" are just different ways of describing the same stuff. As I said, organic Grey Goo.
> You can't evolve to not use DNA by using errors in DNA replication
You can easily bootstrap an RNA-only system starting from DNA replication, DNA is just optional long-term storage. An argument could be made that one mechanism of storage and replication existing will not let any other, better mechanism emerge, but I'm uncertain - nearly anything imaginable exists in some obscure archaea.
How sure are you that replication in a soup can be efficiently done without phosphates? Given that there exist phosphate-poor environments, you should see adaptation to low (but nonzero) concentrations all over the place.
Re: black hole world-ending:
It depends on what happens when a black hole evaporates down to the Planck mass, which AFAIK is not currently known due to lack of quantum gravity theory.
If black holes that have fully evaporated become stable (i.e. there's a block preventing the hole from disappearing, but anything that gets put in comes back out as Hawking radiation immediately) and black hole information loss is real, then a minimum-mass black hole (which potentially only requires a Planck energy to produce) is a total-conversion engine (matter goes in, mix of matter and antimatter comes out, M+AM annihilate to energy). Obviously, if one of those fell into the Earth and had a sufficient rate of conversion, the Earth would melt and/or explode.
Re: GCR/X-risk landscape:
Nuclear war is by far the largest GCR IMO, but is not an X-risk because even nuclear winter can't actually render the entire globe uninhabitable.
AI is a big X-risk.
Pandemics are a GCR, but not an X-risk. Pandemics can't kill everyone because R drops below 1 before the human population drops under the ~30,000 or so needed to sustain the species; 99% kill seems somewhat-plausible for engineered pathogens, though.
Synthetic biology is a significant X-risk via essentially organic grey goo; stuff like a nondigestible synthetic alga that doesn't need phosphate (which would pull all the carbon out of the biosphere and dump it on the ocean floor).
New physics is worth watching for X-risk potential, but probably doesn't pose as much risk as AI or bio.
Bad/terrorist geoengineering is a plausible GCR that's hard to quantify, but getting to X-risk (forcing runaway greenhouse with fluorinated gases and dropping a 100km asteroid on Earth are the ones I can see working) seems hard. Notably, solar shading is not an X-risk because people would notice that you blocked out the Sun and blow up your solar shade with missiles, and aerosols are pretty short-lived so that also seems hard to get to X-risk.
I think that, while bioweapons are an extreme threat, they are not species-ending in the same way since there will be some small (< 5%) proportion of mankind who are either isolated enough or survive and develop immunity.
Not to be a pedant but wouldn't something that created a black hole be a GR superweapon not a QM one?
Edit: Actually yes this is entirely to be a pedant
I believe our current best plan for creating black holes involves focusing immense lasers onto a single point, and lasers are quantum devices...
ZBLAN optical fiber.
There are many reasons why it would be very interesting to have optical fiber that works in the UV spectrum. Sadly, none of our normal materials really work, the attenuation is too much. There is a material that ticks all the boxes, but it has the issue that you can't manufacture it with high quality in a gravity well. The best samples have been made in orbit, and there is a company currently chasing commercialization of it.
Made in Space inc flew the demonstration mission, then they got acquired into Redwire.
There's something that might be worth the expense of *collecting* in orbit and returning to Earth, and there are definitely things that are worth building in space to use in space, but I can't think of any examples of things that both need space manufacturing and are useful dirtside.
Harvestable stuff = antimatter from the van Allen belts.
Build in space to use in space = stuff that would fall apart under its own weight dirtside because it's too big. Megametre telescopes, and the like.
Just fyi you posted this as a stand-alone comment, might wanna delete and repost in the earlier thread
Thanks Jack. Post comes across as a bit weird just sitting out here on its lonesome doesn't it? Weirdly, I posted it as a response to a post of Kenny's, which was itself a reply to an earlier post of mine. But I did it all from within my email account. Kenny's comment arrived as an email, and at the end I was given the option to reply, which I did. Guess that's another Substack bug.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/curcumin-will-waste-your-time
Wow, that's really quite amazing! Also it feels like a good source of ideas for a bug-themed D&D campaign . . .
Apparently, there was an Early Modern theological debate about whether parasitic species had been part of God's original unfallen creation.
The most widespread view that, in Eden, parasitic species *would* have existed, but would have functioned as beneficent symbiotes, helping the creatures that they infested--including Adam and Eve themselves.
The incredibly negative responses people have to your post underline the common (evolutionarily selected for) fear of parasites, I think. These things are dangerous!
I don't know what counts as negative. I was horrified, but I like horror fiction and generally think fiction writers can use science as a prompt for imagination, so I shared it on facebook.
It's not suffering, but I was abstractly horrified at the virus which has moved in on an organism so the organism recreates the virus as part of reproduction. Ultimate malware.
The human genome, IIRC, contains many thousands of Endoretroviral sequences that are leftover from viral infections of our germ line, fully integrated into our DNA. I'm not sure if any of those ever turns back into an actual virus anymore, though.
What do you call an STD?
Not the same thing-- you have to catch the micro-organism for STDs. This one is about the virus using the reproductive system of the host to reproduce itself, even without contact.
Something is tickling the back of my neck.
I think wasps might still bring home the incest prize. In many insects, males develop quicker to fight over females before they emerge - in some butterflies, the female even mates while still in the pupa. It's also common for wasps to have a smaller number of males compared to females, by purposely skewing the sex ratio (which they can control because they're haplodiploid). The downside of this arrangement is that some late-bloomer females may find that all the males have died out before them... but Melittobia wasps have a solution. A virgin female, if she has no suitable mate, will find a wasp grub and lay a tiny haploid egg in her, which will quickly become a miniature male and sire a larger brood with his mother. As a bonus, this single egg uses very little resources, so the poor grub is often alive to receive a second, fatal dose of eggs. While Sister Princess type arrangements are common in weevils, bed bugs and wasps (including Melittobia itself - the strongest male in each batch will typically kill his brothers and mate with his sisters), this type of Agata-style mama-shota scenario is (to my knowledge) unique to this wasp.
Flies have some gnarly parasite tactics too. Bombylius flies are named after bumblebees, but calling them "bomber flies" is not inaccurate either, as they launch their eggs into the cells of ground-nesting bees with startling accuracy. Snot bots have a similar strategy, but instead launch their own already-hatched maggots in a spray of sticky mucus, aiming for the noses and mouths of deer. The flesh fly Tripanurga is attuned to the smell of hatchling turtles: when the first turtles of a brood emerge, the flies will move in and lay their maggots (like snot bots and tsetses, they are live bearers) to prey on the remainder. This, alongside the snake egg specialist Nicrophorus pustulatus, makes them the only insect parasitoids of vertebrates, as far as I'm aware. Flies also have futuristic transforming robots like the hypermetamorphic Acrocera orbicula, which bites a hole in the cuticle of a spider in its "armored form", and then molts into an "ooze form" to slip in and start eating.
Moving from flies back to wasps, and from Agata to Ishimura, we have Elasmosoma wasps: They lay eggs exclusively into the anuses of ants, and since this is a relatively non-invasive place, most ants actually survive - up until the point they give anal birth to a maggot half their size! If Haiboku Otome Ecstasy plots are not to your liking, beewolves instead bring a Yuri Hime Wildrose approach to things: they're famous for catching bees mid-air, forcing them to the ground, and molesting them until they start drooling honey, which they eat (well, the truth is they just squeeze the bee like a juicebox until her honey crop explodes, and then feed her alive to their larvae, so maybe it's not a very good yuri story after all). And of course there's stuff like Reclinervellus and Polysphincta, which brainwash spiders to create webs that protect them from the rain instead of catching prey, and Allochares, which takes matters into her own hands and personally re-weaves the web of her victims.
But my personal favorite is Philanisus plebeius, a caddisfly that accomplishes the rare feat of interspecies pregnancy - they lay their eggs directly into the body chambers of a starfish, of all things, and neither the caddis nor the starfish is particularly harmed by the interaction. This is sort of similar to how the starfish (Patiriella) broods its own offspring, so here you have an animal that co-opts another's "womb" for its own use! To my knowledge, the mold Smittium is the only other organism that can do this (it replaces the eggs of blackflies with egg-shaped balls of mold, which the fly can lay without issue), unless you count stuff like sperm-jacking bivalve lineages. If I ever get good enough at drawing, and Kill Time Communication decides to publish another of these yuri pregnancy anthologies in 2056, I'm going to submit something based on 'em. They had a whiptail lizard in one of the previous volumes, it's not that far-fetched!
Anyway, my point is that bugs aren't horrific, they're erotic! You just need to see the entire world through the lens of Panda and 'booru tags.
And by the way, how'd you add hyperlinks and italics to Substack posts? Would love to add references to this stuff, and not putting binomials in italics will make me lose biologist cred.
Good god. I'm torn between wanting the two of you to do a podcast and burning you both alive along with every animal ya'll discussed
I say we take off and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. :)
Ah, that solves Darwin's puzzle: clearly, God created parasitic wasps so you guys would have something to bond over 😁
I did a stint in an entomology lab as an undergrad where they were experimenting with trichogrammas as a non chemical way of controlling European corn borers. They - the trichs - preyed on the egg masses of the corn borers.
As fascinatingly informative as it is disturbing. Excellent effortpost!
British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” Beetles (phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Coleoptera) account for a greater number of species than any other single group of living animal. Approximately one out of every four animal species on Earth is a beetle. However, in more recent times entomologists have posited that there may in fact be two species of parasitoid wasp for every species of invertebrate, one for the living creature and another that targets the eggs of that species. So it would seem God must have a great passion for wasps. Of course this only brings into question the 'beneficent' aspect of a creator not the omnipotence.
Yessir, right this way.....
https://www.reddit.com/r/thanksihateit/