Jordan Peterson is going full retard about Ukraine. I feel quite sad about it, because I have quite enjoyed his lessons on Jungian psychology. I suppose it is inevitable that when people get famous, they become overconfident about things outside their expertise. Here is the youtube video, and the comment I wrote below it (which will likely get deleted).
Dr Peterson, I find it fascinating how you could get so many things wrong.
* You say we made a mistake by not inviting Russia to NATO. But that's exactly what we did; it was called "Partnership for Peace".
* What do we gain by stopping Russia now? For example, we avoid a future conflict with Russia that is half million square kilometers larger and has extra 40 millions of cannon fodder.
* The thing when you mention 3 perfectly logical reasons for Russian aggression... and then conclude that it actually must have been something else, is an interesting leap of logic.
* You say that Putin is better than Stalin, because Putin supports Russian Orthodox Church? First, it is the other way round, Russian Orthodox Church serves Putin. Second, did you know that Stalin started supporting Russian Orthodox Church in 1941 when he realized it might be a useful tool for his war efforts? (Please read the Wikipedia page about Patriarch Sergius of Moscow.)
* You praise Putin for being anti-woke. Yeah, but so is ISIS, and is it also deeply spiritual, so I wonder if you are going to express your support for them, too.
* I find it interesting that you consider mandatory trans pronouns use a worse crime against free speech than literally killing journalists who expose government corruption. Just because a person opposed one specific form of speech control, it doesn't make them a supporter of free speech in general.
* You see Russia, Hungary, and Poland as motivated by opposing wokeness. Have you noticed that Poland is anti-Russian, even more aggresively than USA? Assuming your perspective that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war about wokeness, that would put deeply catholic Poland on the hypothetical Team Woke, which sounds kinda weird.
* You talk about devastating consequences of ignoring Russia as a part of global economy. Can anyone here mention three things, other than oil and gas, that Russia exports? Most people would probably have a difficulty to find one. Russia is going to keep selling oil, because their entire economy completely depends on it. The only difference is that they will sell it to someone else, so the total amount of oil on global markets will remain approximately the same. Please notice that recently it is Russia talking about reopening Nord Stream 2, and Europe saying no thanks.
* You describe the politics of Ukraine as some kind of conflict between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. Have you noticed that Zelenskyy received a majority of votes from each side, and is actually a Russian speaker himself?
Most importantly, from the spiritual perspective, what happened to the advice to stand up straight with your shoulders back?
Funny thing... periodically YouTube crunches my viewing habits and decides I'm likely to be a huge Jordan Peterson fan, and puts his clips at the top of my home feed.
I hadn't known (or perhaps had forgotten) who this guy was and what was his schtick.
Finally one bored afternoon I broke down and clicked... On screen came a stereotypical (though somewhat fit-looking) middle-aged white man who was crying, as he said, tears of joy over the realization that his work had brought such great joy and comfort to so many people. For some inscrutable reason it seemed clear to me that by "people" he meant mainly middle-aged white men.
YouTube recommendations are weird (and become even weirder when your little kids start using your account, haha). That said, I do not see any problem per se with someone having "middle aged white men" as their target group, nor with providing joy and comfort for that group. It's just, you are clearly not interested in that, and YouTube is too stupid to notice, despite Google having more data about you than KGB could have ever dreamed about.
I keep getting recommendations to see "Sadhguru" who seems like some kind of wise old Indian spiritual man who expresses his opinions on all kinds of topics. I truly do not care. My guess would be that YouTube selects him as an intersection of "politics" and "India", because I have been watching some videos about cooking Indian food. But maybe I am wrong here and the reason is something else, possibly something incomprehensible to humans.
Receiving a strong feedback that you are right about something important (in case of a scientist, by academia; in case of internet celebrity, by their fans) seems to mess up human brain, making you overconfident about *everything*. Like a halo effect, applied to yourself.
And if you are a contrarian, you priors for "I am right and everyone else is wrong" were already quite high, so this probably makes you completely incapable of admitting that you might be wrong about something.
Thanks to Amazon *throwing* free trial of Prime at me (and ignoring that where previously it was all "oh sorry, you can't watch Prime videos because you're not in the correct region" but now mysteriously I can watch this show), I'm watching the finale of "The Rings of Power".
Uh, I guess I should warn for SPOILERS AHEAD, AND COPIOUSLY, if anyone hasn't seen this yet/wants to see it.
Episode eight, season finale, titled "Alloyed" (or, for its effect on me, "Annoyed").
So ten minutes in, and Halbrand *is* Sauron. Damn it.
It started well! Opening shot of rain and plants, which I liked. The white cloaked mystics have shown up with the Stranger and they think he's Sauron.
Celebrimbor finally, in the eighth and final episode, gets something to do. There is the vestige of A Plot happening! Then we get Galadriel arriving in Lindon with Halbrand. He gets Elvish healing, Elrond apologises to Galadriel.
Galadriel still only has one facial expression, whether she's angry, sad, arrogant, thoughtful, whatever.
And here's where Halbrand gets to show he's Sauron (because if he's not, who the hell is he in reality?) He's up and about and walking around after being at death's door, starts flattering Celebrimbor about his forge ("THE Celebrimbor?") and yeah, this is where the "Annatar" part is going to start, because Celebrimbor laps it up like a cat with the cream (to be fair, the poor guy has been hanging around for eight episodes ostensibly based on HIM forging The Rings Of Power with nothing to do, so of course he's going to respond to 'finally someone remembers what I'm here for').
And now he, thirty-something mortal, is giving smithing advice to thousand-year old grandson of Feanor. Yup, he's Sauron.
But heck and darnation, I did not want Halbrand to be Sauron,
Back in Númenor, Elendil's invented daughter is somehow allowed to be with the king, is sketching him, and then of course starts snooping around and is messing with the palantir. Excuse me while I roll my eyes at this terrible cack-handed shoehorning in of "we invented this character to add female energy, so we have to have her *do* something more than just stand around looking at things".
Back to "Oh no Sauron is corrupting Celebrimbor!"
So finally they have the idea of creating rings (not overtly stated but that's what is going to happen) out of the small chunk of mithril ore Elrond managed to keep after being kicked out of Khazad-dum, and Celebrimbor does some OMINOUS LINES QUOTING about "this is a power of the unseen world". Galadriel gets to have 'look of dawning comprehension and horror' (as much as her one expression will stretch to it) since "power of the unseen world" is exactly what everyone to date has been talking about Sauron searching for. Gil-galad says he can't do whatever it is, so naturally we all know he's going to go ahead and do it.
I'm skipping ahead at this point (20 minutes in) because I. DO. NOT. CARE. ABOUT. GALADRIEL. AND. HALBRAND. (Except that it's going to be a richly deserved kick in the pants when she discovers she's been cuddling up to Sauron).
The Stranger is having a time with the Mystics. They're encouraging him to use his magic so he will get his memory back. I like that one of them has a head dress shaped like bat ears, in an obvious reference to Thuringwethil, but this story line bores me, I like The Stranger as a character, and it's great that NO MORE HARFOOTS (as yet) but he's not Sauron and it's dumb to have him be Gandalf or even Radagast.
Spoke too soon: here come the Harfoots on a rescue mission. The leader of the mystics does the fire-breathing trick and sets flame to the entire forest (oh, this is meant to be Greenwood, by the way) but even this is dull because I. DON'T. CARE. ABOUT. THE. HARFOOTS.
The Stranger can now suddenly speak complete English sentences and does magic to banish the mystics. To no-one's surprise, he is not Sauron. He's Gandalf (again, damn it).
The episode finally remembers Elendil and Miriel, and we get a scene of them on the ship home to Númenor chit-chatting, which I am skipping because (once again) I. DON'T. CARE.
(Are you detecting a thread here? This show has managed to have me not caring about characters and events that I should care about, and need to care about for the purposes of the show).
They get back to Númenor and the king is dead (Pharazon standing beside the death bed saying nothing but clearly Plotting). And that's it. No, really, nothing more.
Celebrimbor is having trouble working with the mithril as it keeps blowing his forge up, but then he gets inspiration. Him and Halbrand are having a great time being forge-buddies, but Galadriel stands there glaring, because now (finally!) she has Suspicions about this King of the Southlands (remember, she is the one persuaded everyone he was the real true king and Númenor should provide an army to help him fight off the Orcs and retake his lands, when all he wanted was to stay in Númenor and work in a forge).
Cue the confrontation between Galadriel and Halbrand where (to no-one's surprise) yup he's Sauron. They have a mental tussle where he casts her back into her memories of Valinor and pretends to be her brother, trying to convince her Sauron is a good guy.
Yadda yadda yadda, he disappears and she finally knows what is going on.
Back to Nori and the Stranger, who can now speak fluently and is determined to find out who he really is. Just in case we can't tell, the show hits us over the head with it; the mystics called him 'istar' which he explains to Nori means in her tongue "wise one, or wizard". GEE THANKS I WOULD NEVER HAVE FIGURED OUT HE WAS A WIZARD IF YOU HADN'T TOLD ME, NOT WITH THE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY IN A METEOR AND DOING MAGIC AND STUFF. I really hope he turns out to be Radagast, not Gandalf, but if we can't see where this is leading then we're all blinder than Míriel.
It seems like Sadoc is dead, since Malva (who wanted to take the wheels off the Brandyfoots' cart and leave them behind to die) is now in charge. I'm sure that having a killer in charge will go well. The Harfoots go off on their migration and Nori goes off with the Stranger.
Back to Lindon, and Galadriel has to give up her/her brother's dagger to be melted down in order to mingle it with the mithril. Why? I don't know, I think I skipped that dialogue. Anyway, when they mix in the mithril, the resulting molten pool resembles a fiery eye (are you getting it? do you? is the show hitting you over the head hard enough?)
While a long scene of crafting goes on, Elrond goes looking for Galadriel but can't find her, but he does find the genealogy scroll proving the last "King of the Southlands" died without issue a thousand years ago. He hastens back (presumably to call a halt to the crafting) but the Three Rings have finally been created!
(Nothing about the Nine and the Seven, of course, because the show doesn't care about them. Sauron/Halbrand will make them, or something). We end on a shot of the Three reflected in Halbrand's eyes as he looks at Mount Doom and walks down into what is now Mordor, and then the final credits as some bint warbles the Ring song.
Thank God it's over.
Rating? Five out of ten - something finally happened, but the curse of slow pacing still haunts this episode, and it only told us what was already bleedin' obvious. As a spectacular finale, it falls flat. And I really don't care about several of the main characters that much - I like the Stranger, I like Adar, and I am kind of rooting for Pharazon because at least he knows what he is doing and how to do it.
Enough to keep people hooked for the second season? No idea, especially as the show runners said that it would be a couple of years while they made the second season (though the studio seems to have walked that back).
When I read other people's summary's of the episode, I knew that I wanted to read your reaction after I saw it.
And yeah. It was not good. Unlike Gandalf, who decidedly is good, so the dialog tells me.
Annatar should have been an entire season. This season, in fact. Instead we get half an episode. Sauron doesn't get to look like a master manipulator because no one has time to have complicated motivations to manipulate.
I think the show could have been good, even with endless departures from canon. Galadriel's arc was a good idea. Adar was a good idea. Shippinh Galadrial and Sauron was... well, it was an idea. I've encountered actual people on the internet who enjoyed it.
It feels like the show has nothing to offer but mystery boxes and references to the Peter Jackson movies. That and astounding beautiful shots, but a show shouldn't just be eye candy. It has lots of lore details right, they drop a lot of the right names, but none of the structures are there. Numenor exists and doesn't like the elves, but I think there was only one line, total, that even hinted at the actual reason being bitterness at their own mortality.
There is one thing that could get me back into it. That would be to kill Isildur for real. A permanent, irreconcilable break with the canon of both the books and movies. Then tell their own story. Force them to stand on their own feet or not at all.
I first heard this was meant to be ten episodes, which I considered very short for a season. Then they compressed it down further to only eight episodes.
Then they futzed about for six episodes with nothing happening, then had Galadriel surviving a volcano (after being directly in the path of a pyroclastic flow, this show made me dumber by at least 10 IQ points after that little stunt) and now in the finale they cram everything in.
They built up "who are these whitecloaks?" and then threw all that away in ten minutes, instead of expanding it over a couple of episodes as to what they were doing with the Stranger when they finally caught up to him. I swear, if they come back as Nazgul in season two, I will genuinely explode.
I did enjoy Halbrand and Celebrimbor being forge buddies! After seven episodes of standing around twiddling his thumbs doing sweet feck-all, finally, FINALLY Celebrimbor got to do smith crafting! Again, this was something that should have been built up over a few episodes as Galadriel gradually suspects something is wrong - though this flew in the face of all she had been doing all along. It would have been better to have Gil-galad or Elrond be suspicious, investigate, and find out the truth, so Galadriel would be forced to face the poetic justice of the consequences of her stubborn insistence.
But noooo, we have to shove everything into the last forty-five minutes, and yet *still* they managed to have it very slow-paced, due to skipping from one location to another. The Númenor scenes didn't even get developed! What was it Elendil's imaginary daughter saw in the palantir, if she looked in the palantir? We don't know, tune in for the second season to find out!
Again, they've managed to drop in hints (like the Thuringwethil ears) which show that *somebody* involved with this has read the other volumes like "The Silmarillion" and "Unfinished Tales", and that Sauron did not start out wholly evil and did have a moment of genuine, if shallow and fleeting, repentance after Morgoth's defeat, but all this is wasted by them cramming in their own stupid made-up characters and made-up lore and retooling of the time line.
So that's why I can only give it five out of ten. After all the build-up, they wasted the reveal of Halbrand being Sauron, and now (very funny and ironic) it's all Galadriel's fault that he has decided to go on the path of evil (the conversation he had inside her mind on the raft memories was all true - she did say and do all those things) and it's *her* idea to create three Rings 'for balance'.
Oh, and the ripping-off of the movies was *blatant*, what with the lines about the sun and the Sea and the foundations of the Earth. They have no shame, but then again neither do they have imagination, talent, or originality, so they have to steal.
It's infuriating. I have very mixed feelings about the second season, if I want to watch it or not; I do want to see more of Adar, and at this point I'm rooting for Pharazon and even flipping Sauron, because they at least have their shit together. What a triumph, show, to make the villains more appealing than the heroes!
Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets in his hand and he told the Israelites, ‘Okay, I managed to talk him down to ten, but I’m afraid adultery is still in there’
Today, I found the most hilarious and bizarre place to shoehorn Diversity and Inclusion statements : the commandline outputs of a hardware simulator.
Synopsys VCS is an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool to simulate HDL (Hardware Description Language) code. In plain English : it is a program that runs textual descriptions of digital circuits on simulated inputs and obtain their simulated outputs, to aid the engineers who are designing\studying them.
Which raises the question, why the hell would Synopsys VCS (version 2021) print :
>Inclusivity & Diversity - Visit SolvNetPlus to read the "Synopsys Statement on
Inclusivity and Diversity" (Refer to article 000036315 at
Every time you start it ? Like, I kinda get the copyright spam that programs like these always print in the beginning, But... why the fuck would I care about how many women are in your HR departments, Synopsys ? I just want to run a Wallace Adder bro.
Things like these always come to mind when people want to interpret woke bullshit charitably. If you forget about all the bad and cynical explanations, that these performances are just the pathetic throes of the HR-Managerial class as they status-compete the shit out of each other and other people (especially the engineers and future-engineers who are the primary users of these tools), what would be your reasons for why someone sane will make a circuit simulation tool rattle off DIE catechisms seemingly for no reason, at the startup of the program ? for female hardware students\engineers ? who are apparently all so fragile and insecure that they need constant reminding that Synopsys is there for them every single time they start a simulation tool ?
Hypothesis : Every attempt to explain woke performance without appealing to status or power is either (1) Occam-dull, meaning it multiplies entities and reasons out of proportion to the phenomena it's trying to explain (2) More slanderous\insulting to the groups they claim they want to help (3) Doesn't make any sense.
He's very much a contrarian and sometimes interviews interesting people.
I think he's wrong that the US and NATO should just let Russia have Ukraine-- his arguments seem to be that the war seriously bad (true), but also, implausibly, that Russia isn't all that bad and its ambitions are reasonable and limited.
His Unregistered University is classes (some in person) with various of the the people he finds interesting/plausible, and might actually be making money. I suppose it's in the same category in some sense as Khan Academy. Any other non-standard education that's interesting?
OK, I don't want to get involved in polemics: the relative lack of polemic is one thing that has attracted me to this site and its predecessor over the years. I don't intend to make any more posts on Ukraine.
But for those who may be interested, I'd suggest a few sources, all western, which I have used and which help to explain what's going on.
One is the communiqués of what's known as the Ramstein Group, which coordinates western arms deliveries , and from which you can see what is being sent to Ukraine. A meeting is scheduled for the next few days. A second is the regular background press briefings from the Pentagon, published online, which have on the whole been quite realistic.
In the last 4-6 weeks, a number of western newspapers, including (in English) the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian have published substantial stories from the front lines in Ukraine, including interviews with soldiers and commanders, giving a very sober view of how things are going.
The semi-official Ukrainian site liveuamaps.com is obviously biased to some degree, but you can follow the progress of the war from day to day if you can read military symbology. The picture it gives seems to be broadly realistic.
Finally, for those who like to follow detail, the best source is probably the Military Summary Channel on Youtube, hosted by a Belarusian who makes great attempts to present things fairly. He's very good on tactical level stuff (yesterday's video explained how Russian missile strikes were partly aimed at key railroad junctions for example) but not so good when he gets on to strategic/political issues. He also tends to swerve around quite violently in his estimate of how the war is going.
Probably a stupid question, but why wouldn't evolution select for high-intelligence? I understand head size and birth canal are the bottleneck everyone points to, but brain size appears to be weakly correlated with intelligence in humans, and what about calories? It seems to be the case that more intelligent brains have better efficiency in terms of energy expenditure, so, given that calories have been hard to come by for much of our history, why not select for the kind of energy efficiency that come with intelligence?
Are smarter brains a lot more energetically expensive to create or something?
Not a full answer. But Joseph Henriech (The Secret of our Success) points to the brain size arms race as less about intelligence and more about storage space for cultural evolution. Basically, humans didn't get significantly smarter than apes in general. Rather they gained an amazing ability at copying from one another and culturally evolving leading to a feedback loop of "amount of cultural information that can be stored in an individual.
I'm just guessing but maybe raw processing power doesn't require bigger brains but storage space (via cranium folding and large heads) does.
This doesn't answer your question of why evolution doesn't select for higher intelligence at the same time. My guess would be that much higher levels of intelligence didn't actually help much in the context of environment in which we evolved. It's not like the cavemen were solving maths problems on the cave walls. It's simply far more advantageous to select for people who can learn tips and tricks from other apes.
In other words, the things you can *learn* are a greater advantage than the things you can *invent*, because you can invent a thing or two, but you can learn a thousand things.
Inventing things can also give you some respect etc., but the greatest selection pressure is about whether you can efficiently use things that everyone else is using. Inventing is an inherently risky business; you could spend a lot of time and calories without actually figuring out anything useful.
Why do you think that smarter brains are more energetically efficient? I was under the impression that human brains are roughly at the energy optimal speed, and while you could engineer much smarter humans given modern calorie abundance, we're getting pretty much the most "thoughts per calorie" possible in our current form, which matter in times of caloric scarcity
Neuronal efficiency hypothesis: basically, more intelligent human brains use less energy for thinking generally.
To give an example, if we're both given a moderately hard problem to solve and you're significantly smarter than me your brain will (probably) use less energy than mine for that task.
So far this worked for 3 relatives of mine : back and knees pain for one, neck and back pain for the second, back pain for the last one. Once a student in biology, I still can't believe this works... But no more complaining from people nearly crying on a daily basis is the perfect evidence for me, I will continue convincing people around to at least give it a try. But what an incredible brain process...
sorry, this worked. I hadn't posted before and sent the wrong link to Karine to reply- as she said it's been successful for 3 of her relatives. My original post is below
Helen Gibbons & Stuart Wiffin
Writes The Sheep that thinks it's a Wo…
Oct 10
I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free.
I'm trying to find a post from about 2 months ago. In it, someone was asking whether anyone could suggest a diagnosis of his symptoms, which were -- let's see -- attacks in which he had pain at the base of his skull, felt disoriented and exhausted, and become sort of incoherent or inarticulate. Certain things brought an attack on immediately, but I forget now what they were. Anyhow, I'm asking now because I just randomly ran across info about a condition that might conceivably be what he has. I'd like to get in touch with him, but just do not have time to page back through all these threads, especially since I can't think of any words in his post that are rare, and unlikely to be in many other posts, so I can't even do CMD-F in each open thread. ( By any chance does the Substack app allow you to search a whole blog + comments at once?)
'Skull' is a rare word. Highest open-thread ping for it so far is 3.
Saw one post in 239 that might have been referring to the one you're talking about, didn't see anything in 238 to 235. Would it be in the hidden threads?
Thanks, you're right, it is a real word. I think it's most likely not in the hidden threads because I did not recognize person's username at the time. I'll go hunt right now.
Yes, but there's a limit to the amount and kind of structural problems that can be present without causing pain. Bulging discs heal on their own with time, and even when they look godawful their presence or absence does not correlate with amount of pain the person is having. That doesn't mean that there's *nothing* that could be going on in a back that would cause pain. For example, let's say you lay down on the floor with your back on a hard wooden ball the size of a tennis ball right under your spine-- or a bunch of forks with their tines curving up towards your back -- or did a back really extreme backbend, the kind limber young gymnasts do where their hands are actually touching the backs of their heels -- those are just going to hurt, right? Or how about if somebody stuck a thick spinal tap needle into your spine? Or hit your back with a mallet? Think you could make that pain go away? If you doubt it, how about trying the hard wooden ball experiment, or try lying on some forks. So the point is, some kinds of back problems -- not bulging disks, but other things -- are very much like the hard wooden ball, the backbend, the needle, the mallet: Things are being pierced, pressed on, and squeezed in ways they were not meant to be. It fucking hurts. And I do not agree the pain is useless and pointless, at least not in the case of situations like mine. My back pain is a stream of information about things that are pressing on things they should not. If I pay attention to the info, my back stays in decent shape.
If you investigate ways herniated disks can cause back pain, what you find is that whether they cause pain depends on a bunch of stuff: For example, If the annulus fibrous tears the liquid that oozes out irritates spinal nerves and causes inflammation — however, the AF doesn’t always tear, and when it does the AF doesn’t always ooze onto spinal nerves. Because not all herniated disks cause nerve inflammation, the correlation between the presence of a herniated disk and the experience of back pain is positive but low.
So now do a thought experiment: Imagine somebody doing various things to your back: Forcing it to arch way more sharply than you ever arch it. Inserting objects the size of a ping pong ball that compress flesh or press on nerves, or force tissue to stretch far more than it normally does. Piercing parts of your back. Injecting irritating substances into muscles.. Some of that is just going to hurt, right? So while it’s true that things like bulging disks are not well-correlated with back pain, it’s not true that there isn’t anything that you can do to a back that will reliably make it hurt.
So there are some conditions that are more like the back tortures I described than they are like herniated disks.They do stuff that’s just gonna hurt. They compress the facet joints and the nerves inside them. They stretch or compress nerves and muscles that are not meant to be stretched. They compress organs inside the torso. I have one of those conditions: scoliosis, an s-curve in my spine as it is viewed from the front or back. And my curve is getting more extreme as I age.
Here's info from a quick google. It's from a random source, but fits well with what I have learned from high-quality sources and my doctors:
"What does scoliosis pain feel like? Children or teens who have scoliosis don't generally experience pain. However, degenerative adult scoliosis can cause symptoms such as achiness or stiffness in the mid to low back or numbness and weakness in your leg."
"What triggers scoliosis pain?
What causes scoliosis pain? Typically, the pain you experience with scoliosis is the result of pressure on your spinal disks, pressure on facet joints, and muscle pain. But scoliosis can cause pain for other reasons. The curvature of the spine can stretch or irritate nerves."
Well, you may be right and the Russian General Staff and experts on Russia may be wrong, but that is what the Russians said they were doing, that is what they appear to be doing, and that's what Soviet/Russian doctrine says they should do. As I understand it, the point is that if you destroy an enemy's military capability, you dominate the country. If you just capture terrain, especially when it has no military value, you have to tie up forces guarding it and you extend yourself and open yourself to counter-attacks. That's why Russian doctrine has historically been about destroying the enemy's forces.
The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. As we've discussed, NATO has only dribs and drabs to send them, and the Russians can target any attempt to recreate a defence capability. On the other hand, if you've ever been to Ukraine, or just looked at a map, you'll know that it's an enormous country by European standards: the current line of contact extends a thousand kilometres from north to south. There was never any prospect of the Russians taking physical control of the whole of the country, and I doubt if anyone except a few fanatical nationalists in Moscow ever thought they should. They don't need to anyway. This doesn't exclude, of course, attempts to take the capital by a coup de main and finish the war quickly, as seems to have been tried at the start of the war. Nor does it exclude massing troops near Kiev to force the Ukrainians to keep troops to defend it. There are rumours that th Russians might try this trick again, by massing troops in Belarus, such that the Ukrainians have to remove some of their forces from the Donbas to cover the capital. But all of these manoeuvres, feints etc. are routine in wars of this kind. It's just that the West hasn't fought a war like this for so long, that we've forgotten.
What Soviet doctrine says they should do, and what the Russian army actually can do, are two entirely different things. Soviet doctrine never said "land paratroops and Spetsnaz behind enemy lines, then have them unceremoniously wiped off the map an hour later". Soviet doctrine never said, "Drive through repeated ambush and barrage until you reach the outskirts of the enemy's capital, then run away". Soviet doctrine never said, "watch your artillery supremacy go bye-bye because your ammunition dumps keep exploding". Soviet doctrine never said, "give your enemy a free tank in good working order for every one of his you destroy".
Soviet doctrine, is a thing that was only ever successfully implemented by the Soviet Army, and then only when its logistical tail stretched to Detroit. Yes, the Russian Army has spent the past thirty years pretending it was the badass continuation of the Soviet Army, but now we know better.
If you try to understand this war by assuming the Russian Army is successfully implementing Soviet doctrines, and conjure up some strained explanation as to why all of this must be part of some clever plan out of the old Soviet playbook, you're going to be led laughably astray.
They have also said that the whole of Ukraine is theirs by right, and that they are just trying ot denazify.
"that is what they appear to be doing,"
That is what they are appear to be having done to them.
"The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. "
So the Russians are going to destroy their military, then withdraw ... then NATO/EU/west does nothing whatever?
Kiev has been the standard English name of the city for more than a century. Now we're supposed to change it just because the etymology of the word is Russian? There's a difference between disapproving of the actions of the Russian government in 2022, and hating Russian language and culture overall. Your comment gives off the vibes of the latter.
Not How Language Works. Language is a distributed inter-subjective fiction, trying to force changes on it through many impressive-sounding authoritative-claiming institutions won't work, never has, and never will. Even if the organizations are neutral linguistic authorities, not a bunch of nakedly biased news outlets and the odd volunteer encyclopedia. The [Words] Were Made for Man, Not Man For The [Words].
I'm with Thor and Dionysus on this. The names our own culture has evolved are almost always preferable and the replacements are normally done for stupid, pious reasons. I'd never use "Beijing" or "Mumbai" except in this exact type of sentence, so I'd be a hypocrite to complain about somebody saying e.g. "the Russian bombing of Kiev is a filthy atrocity".
To be honest, I have switched over with regard to Peking and Bombay because the new names are better understood these days. The transition was successful. And I'm happy enough to say Kyiv for political reasons.
City names are the least of my concerns with regard to the ever-expanding NewSpeak Dictionary.
Eh, that really isn't the only reason. I tend to use older names for lots of places, because I am generally just reluctant to have to relearn any names I learned as a kid. I wholeheartedly support Ukraine in its war against Russia and am appalled that the nuclear powers didn't come to its aid back in 2014, to honour the treaty they'd signed when Ukraine gave up his nuclear weapons.
Or I have a strong preference for speaking the language I grew up with, and strong objections to changing the language for political purposes, especially at the behest of a foreign government. (Kiev, as far as I can tell, did not become the English name because Russia told us to call it that.). I have *especially* strong objections to the media policing my language, and that is in no way due to my stance on the current war, on which I'm as pro-Ukrainian as it gets.
I'm not Dionysus, obviously, but as already noted, I do say Peking. I actually think Chinese is a particularly bizarre case of this renaming vogue, because pinyin is a romanization created for the use of native Chinese speakers, while Wade-Giles is far superior for the use of Westerners in understanding what Chinese words actually sound like and so on. ("Peking" specifically predates Wade and Giles as well, of course; I think they render it Pei-Ching. Still...)
The obvious analogue is Kunreishiki vs. the modified Hepburn system, and there I've genuinely never seen anyone advocate the adoption of Kunreishiki for cultural sensitivity reasons or whatever; when was the last time you saw a map that said Toukyou or Hirosima on it, or called the system Kunreisiki rômazi for that matter?
I wrote a brief writeup on the practical considerations of unilateral gene drive release for the purpose of eradicating malaria-carrying mosquitos. Could you guys give me your thoughts? I would love input from those familiar with gene drives, those connected with EA, and people interested in working on such a project.
Some of us are getting together to read The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker. We are optimizing for time zones in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Africa (UTC+0 to UTC+12) and will meet weekly for at least four weeks, starting Saturday, October 15th.
The reading group is aimed at meetup organizers, potential meetup organizers, and any ACX/Rationality readers interested in organizing ACX or adjacent events, meetups, etc. Everyone's welcome.
I've been thinking about trying to make a star constellation Halloween costume (specifically Aquila), and thought about buying something like this (https://www.amazon.com/idyllight-Submersible-Waterproof-Wedding-Decorations/dp/B09987M2S5/) and wearing a black hat and jacket and tying or fixing the lights in the appropriate places somehow, and then I guess cutting out construction paper stars to stick around the lights so that people realize they are actually supposed to be stars.
Does anyone know if this would actually work? Are there any better ways to do this? Also, what would be the best way to fix the lights in place?
I tried a DIY LED constellation for a “Close Encounters of Third Kind” TShirt using TTL back in the dark ages. It was pretty easy to gin up a sequencer to flash the LEDs one after another but the wiring and battery required at the time made for ‘nice blinking’ but ugly flippin shirt. Never wore it in public.
Technology has improved a bit in the last 40 years tho. Good luck and have fun!
If they're not perfect, I know where there are others.
To fix them in place: you could use safety pins. Start from inside the piece of clothing star's going to be attached to, bring the point out to the outside, over the piece of wire right below the star, then back to the underside of the garment. To prevent slippage, put one right above each star too. If you don't want to worry about the safety pins popping loose and sticking you, use a needle and black thread, and sew the stars in place, looping over the wire both above and below the star. You could also use hot glue, but I think the hot glue might damage the electronics of the light string. If the hat is really stiff, you can still sew through it -- but you might need a bigger, fatter needle to pierce it.
So I just looked up Aquila in google image, and there are some very attractive images with the actual constellation superimposed on a stylized drawing of an eagle. You could copy one of the drawings onto your black clothes, too, with luminous paint, then pin the starts on top. (Can you tell I like making costumes?)
In this layman's eyes, it seems that a few branches of supposedly-scientific study stand out as routinely *worse* (from a 'seems to be on a firm foundation empirically') than others. I'm not even talking about theoretical underpinnings, just studies that are
* low power
* non-replicable
* prone to methodological wtfs (and generally don't have stable, well-developed methodological traditions, with everyone seeming to go their own way)
* make HUGE claims that aren't backed up in any significant way
* constantly overturned/ignored by the next fad that sweeps through
Specifically, I'm thinking of *education*, *sociology* (in its less grounded forms), and *nutrition*. I can understand sociology (especially the psychological aspects) and, to a lesser degree, education. People are hard. And those things end up relying heavily on self-reports. Diagnosing things based on the self-report of a system that is suspected to be broken is...fraught with difficulty.
But nutrition seems to me to be the outlier. Nutrition studies are like froth--they come, they go, they form fad diets, but seem to have enormous variance for something much closer (in principle at least) to chemistry than psychology. There are a lot more empirically-measurable elements there, it seems to me.
Am I just out to lunch/misinformed? Or is there some reason nutrition studies are particularly bad?
Part of the problem is that it's hard and expensive to be sure of what people are eating, especially over long periods.
I looked into whether "organic" food is better for people. I wasn't expecting the lack of information and confusion.
Organic has a legal meaning.... the pesticides and herbicides are derived from a biological source. In other words, they might be chemically the same as what you get from a conventional source. Or they might be riskier.
How can you tell whether what you're eating is organic or not? There's mislabeling in both directions.
What diseases might be expected from pesticides eaten in plausible quantities? Damned if I know.
I've seen the problem with nutrition studies being put as this: your study can be controlled, long, or on humans, pick any two. You can't make humans to consistently follow your diet for years - which is kind of necessary to prove long-term health effects - so you're stuck with either using animal models, or short studies, or observational studies. The problem with the first two is pretty obvious, the problem with the latter is that 1) people are extremely bad at reporting what they eat 2) good luck correcting for all possible confounders. In fact even in a controlled study good luck correcting for them! Say your team found that red meat consumption doesn't affect LDL levels, but another team found that it totally does, you both did controlled experiments, but yours was in France where everybody eats a lot of olive oil which turns out to be protective from this effect (completely pulling this out of my ass, to be clear).
Add to this small effect sizes and strong biases, and it's not surprising dietology looks a bit of a mess.
Also, people vary genetically, so what it good for one person might be neutral or bad for another. There may be non-genetic effects, too.. There's people becoming allergic to meat from the Lone Star tick. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more subtle random effects from people's life histories.
I think Melvin hits the heart of the matter. You're looking for tiny, tiny effects. Eating cabbage for 50 years reduces your chance of having a heart attack at age 65 by 8%, that kind of thing. The sound empirical studies with sufficient statistical power -- duration, numbers, quality of control -- to thoroughly test anything in nutrition are exceedingly scarce. Theyr'e scarce even in medicine, where $100 billion in drug sales can ride on them, and there's no such potential reward in nutrition.
I think these chain of comments (Carl Pham, Melvin, and yours) explain a lot about why nutrition studies tend to not produce very good results. Thanks.
And maybe the key to the "ok then, why do they overhype things to the max" question is the money--starting a fad diet and cashing in is the only way to make serious money on nutrition.
One other consideration I've thought about is that maybe there are a few different "groups" of basic biochemistry as far as diet goes--sure, we all need the various macros and micros. But exactly the "right" mix is much more individual. Maybe there are people for whom the keto/Atkins/whatever (low carb, etc) diets are the summum bonum of diets. And others for whom that's *horrible*, and for whom the whole-foods, low-fat diets (and similarly for all the other big variants) are the best.
Contrary to popular belief, we know a lot about human nutrition. We know that humans can't digest rocks or sand. We know that humans can't digest grass or most leaves. We know that humans require ~2000 kCal/day of easily-digestible foods, and that we also require small amounts of dozens of important vitamins and minerals. This is all important stuff, and we've known it all for a while.
The problem is going beyond that. It turns out that as long as you satisfy all of the above requirements and don't eat too little or too much then pretty much any reasonably varied diet of reasonably human-compatible foods is pretty nutritionally similar to any other. Some are probably better than others but the effect size is small and the studies are long, expensive and difficult so you don't get as much value as you'd hope out of them.
Expanding on Unsigned Integer's ideas (that are mostly money-focused): moral and philosophical biases. If you're overweight, the studies show it isn't your fault because <importance of genetics/XYZ food is bad but unavoidable>. If you're vegetarian or vegan, then meat-based products are that much worse for you and plant-based foods are that much better. If you're really into naturalism then the paleo diet is the best and you should avoid processed foods. If you're short on time or can't cook, then fast food isn't as bad for you as it's made out to be. If you worship the Roman warrior way of life, then you're a failure at life if your diet is any less than 80% red meat.
These are all bad examples and/or strawmen, but the basic idea is confirmation bias.
That doesn't explain why the *studies* are objectively (as far as I can tell, and I may be wrong) poor quality. It may explain why individuals seek out ones that tell them what they wanted to hear. But not why the research itself seems sub-par *even compared to other soft sciences*. But it feels like nutrition should be closer to a hard science, as it has much firmer and closer physical grounding.
Which raises a question. Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest? I mean, I'd expect a substantial amount of funding coming from government agencies (<sarc>which never cause conflicts for anyone else, after all</sarc>), interested NGOs, insurance companies, etc.
And much of the research is done at universities, where the professors have the same underlying conflicts in any area of study. They're all getting paid by *someone*, and *no one* has clean hands. Yet this area is particularly (as far as I can tell) bad.
"Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest?"
All of those agencies, universities and companies are full of fat people, none of whom want to hear an outcome on nutrition where it's their own fault. Doesn't matter how smart you are, this is apparently endemic, maybe the mental blind spot that *causes* people to become fat in the first place. Just look at that classic/notorious Yud screencap from Facebook about weight loss.
I think it's mostly no worse than medicine generally, or fields with political implications. the key here is that the main rewards for most actors come from *convincing people that you're right* rather than *finding out how reality truly works*
'Why don't people think cryptocurrency is the greatest thing ever and all adopt it?'
Possibly because of crap like this - yet another attempted blackmail spam message, about the fifth one that got through an old work email address. This one is slightly different in the body of the text from the usual run of them, but it's the same old same old:
"My modest consulting fee is 1700 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.
You need to send that amount to this wallet: 15QaVNGaQsQfgPH8mL3TM1S7YBESTVfwQC"
Probably there are people who can be taken in by this, but I'm tired of these messages by now, is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down? Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it?
This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.
While we’re on the subject of crypto, is the practice of putting a Bitcoin purchase machine next to the ATM at the corner Kwiki-Mart now common?
The place around the corner from my house has one and it seems like a grift of some sort to put in a place that does major trade in lotto tickets sold to mostly low-income folks who are unfazed by the fact the the state lotto is about as bad a bet as you can make. IIRC they pay back only half of the money they take in prizes.
I'm not a crypto maniac (it's sad that I have to say this in 2022, but the crypto situation has become extremly religious on both sides in recent years), but I really love the elegance of the idea purely from the Computer Science perspective and I believe there are good things underneath all the trash and ash.
>Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it
If its fraud or scam, believe me, it's not Bitcoin that is making it go round. There is an entire Youtube genre of "Scammer-Scamming", where anti-scammers scam scammers on the phone. The sheer size of this genre alone and the number of scammers should tell you all what you need to know about how easy it is to scam people by phone, by email, by whatsapp, by facebook. Humans just suck, Bitcoin is just a tool that allows them to suck more efficiently, if we remove it most of them will find another tool and continue to suck.
The case of blackmail and extortion is more subtle, I believe Bitcoin greatly enabled a specific type of blackmailing called ransomware (fuckers encrypt your data and ask for money to give you the encryption key), empirical data seems to support that the rise of Bitcoin made it incredibly easy to do this shit. But again, fuckers always find a way, I'm a big believer in humans' ability to suck and fuck, it's really not Bitcoin's fault, they will find another way if you ban it. Ransomware existed before Bitcoin, the growth the data shows could just as easily be because of the general growth of internet and internet-connected people and money.
>is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down
Technically ? No, that's the entire point of Bitcoin. Essentially, there is an entire distributed fleet of machines that is always "listening" on the internet to anybody who says they want to transfer money, and if that someone manages to prove (in a very fancy computer-sciency\cryptographic way) that they *do* have the money to pay, the machines are very glad to take the money and pay it to any ID that the someone says. As long as this fleet of machines is alive, Bitcoin is alive, and with it the Bitcoin protocol and all its IDs and wallets and numbers.
Of course, humans are always the weakest link in the security chain. The fallible humans who made Bitcoin couldn't anticipate a number of fuckups :
1- Bitcoin "mining" (the process whereby 1 of the listening machines aggregates a bunch of pay requests together and tries to convince the entire network that it's valid to finalize them with fancy math) is massively computationally intensive. By 2012-2013, ordinary CPUs were no longer cutting it, and miners began using GPUs. By 2013-2014 (these dates are rough because I wasn't there when it was happening), even GPUs weren't cutting it, and miners began using even more specialized circuits called FPGAs. Then, finally, by about 2014-2015, FPGAs gave up, and miners began literally custom-ordering their own chips, called ASICs. Every step along the way incurred a massive loss of accessibility and decentralization : Everybody have a CPU but only gamers and machine learning researchers have powerful GPUs, FPGAs are even more specialized and scarce, ASICs are literally ordered from a special vendor. So the overall result is that Bitcoin mining is extremly centralized and high-barrier-to-entry today at its bottom-most layers, and you can probably shut it down by banning or otherwise disrupting the sales or even the manufacturing of certain hardware to certain individuals.
2- Even without the hardware debacle above, Bitcoin miners began merging themselves in "mining pools" of their own for greater profitability and risk-mitigation. A mining pool is when a goup of miners come together to share the wins (every time one of them manages to convince the network that their pay requests list is valid) and withstand the losses (when all the other miners fail) together. This is really bad for Bitcoin. Very Very Very. The original Bitcoin paper assumed this won't happen, but it happened. Now only 2 or 3 mining pools control more than 51% percent of the total computing power the Bitcoin fleet has, this means those pools literally decide how much everybody owes everybody.
3- Bitcoin mining is scandalously power-intensive (a consequence of point #1), people estimate it at the country-level, and I'm not talking developing countries, I'm talking Argentina and the Netherlands. Due to this astonishing cost, mining pools and miners generally tend to concentrate in areas with cheap electricity, famously in China where Coal is legal. You can disrupt those locations pretty easily, and you can always detect any new locations by the sheer amount of electricity going in and not out of a Bitcoin "farm" (i.e. a datacenter full of ASIC computers mastuarbating their brains away).
4- Bitcoin is essentially a program, specifically written in C++. You can disrupt it by, say, disrupting their github hosting or targeting the most active members of their development team or intercepting every communication involving Bitcoin on social media and technical discussion sites and etc. etc. etc...
5- Bitcoin is a network program, you can trivially disrupt it if you cut off the internet.
6- Bitcoin is used a lot from non-decentralized interfaces, like mobile apps uploaded on centralized app stores, and centralized web servers, and centralized institutions called "Exchanges" (which trade Bitcoin against meat currency). You can always disrupt\ban those interfaces and institutions, and although that won't affect the "actual" Bitcoin (which is just a distributed fleet of machines running a single C++ program), it will greatly deny access and convenience to those who use it.
And so on and so on. Basically, Bitcoin, aside from being a piece of Computer Science genius, is an experiment. It asked "What if we used computers to say a big 'fuck you' to the state in one of its most intimate and exclusive activites, money-printing?", and it hypothesized that the answer will be "The state will go pound sand and leave us alone". The experiment failed, the state turned out to be much stronger than expected, the Internet weaker and more centralized than expected, and humans turned out to be more shitty than expected (not me though, I always expect that humans will be as shitty as they turn out to be). It's still a good experiment.
But Bitcoin exists today entirely by grace from any number of extremly un-de-centralized and evil institutions, and if enough of them get mad at Bitcoin, yes, they can shut it down.
>This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.
Bitcoin is part of an ideal, a Utopia if you will, and that ideal is that social structure is entirely individual-focued. Like : look at the Sun, it doesn't refuse to shine on criminals, even the worst rapists and pedophiles enjoy the Sun on their skin, the Air in their lungs, Water inside their stomachs. We *can* still make those people suffer for their crimes, but we don't do it by making the Sun and the Air and the Water has machines in them that can make them refuse to do their functions, we do it by getting *the criminals* into a place where they can't enjoy them.
This is a somewhat subtle distinction. The first perspective implicitly says that every human is "leasing" the Sun from the party that controls the shutdown machines, any time this party wants to deny you the Sun, they can turn on the machines and deny it. The second perspective is saying that every human deserves the Sun, merely by the fact of being human, justice is enforced elsewhere, at another level of interactions.
I'm not saying one of those perspectives is unqualifiedly better than the other, I can imagine lots and lots of Utopias and Dystopias in both, I can imagine any number of situations where I would thank the heavens that one perspective is in control and absolutely rage if the other was. But it's important to realize that those who support one or the other do so because they imagine more Utopias in one than the other, and (intelligent, good-faith) Bitcoin advocates support the second one. Finanical transactions are like the Sun, it shines equally on the rapist and the raped, the devil and the saint. Justice is still (hopefully) enforced, but elsewhere, not at the level of denying and allowing financial transactions. I'm not against this perpective but I'm also not supporting it to the end, but life is complicated and this comment is very very long already.
Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible?
At this point, I think of cryptocurrency as an effort to make a trustworthy system which includes a lot of untrustworthy people, and people are too clever to make that work.
>Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible
For a mind-blowing and Inception-like further exploration, see Brian Kernighan's Reflections On Trusting Trust[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].
It basically argues that, until you audit every single line of code in your entire software system (the compiler, the OS, the bootloader that loads the OS, the hardware ROM memory that contains the bootloader, the firmware\drivers in your keyboard and screen, even the editor you use to write program text, or the commandline shell that you invoke the compiler from), you're not truly secure. Who knows, maybe the completely innocuous g++ compiler that translates tens of thousands of C++ programs daily around the globe actually contains special-case logic for detecting the Bitcoin program and inserting maleware. The maleware is completely invisible in the source, because it isn't there, the compiler inserts it in when it's translating to machine code. The speech itself is just about Compilers, but you can easily argue that any piece of code in any of the software that I mentioned can easily and trivially violate your security. Hell, Anti-Virus software is given a free pass to open up binaries and play with them, how can we be sure that it's not *them* that are injecting malicious code in the secure binaries ?
This is why some people have tried (http://bootstrappable.org/) (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/) to decrease the amount of magic binary that people depend on without auditing. But you're still depending the extremly opaque and magic processor and associated hardware, did you know that Intel runs a tiny computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine) inside every single computer you buy from them ? It's always on as long as there is power in the motherboard, runs its own operating system, and is connected to the network.
One unexpected impact of having a child is an internal shift with regards to what I consider 'long term'. Whilst I was previously certainly a long-term person than most, and cared about what happened in the future, the year 2100 still seemed very far off. Recently, looking down at my daughter sleeping in my arms, I realised she's very likely to be alive in 2100.
One could perhaps argue that this is simply a semantic rejigging, or that one should care about people in 2100 regardless, but for me, at least, it matched an emotional resonance to the logical conclusion I had already reached. It has also made me slightly less sceptical of efforts to impact the year 2100 than I was before (other than through direct ways which also impact the near-term, e.g. pollution/environment) - if there are people alive now who will be alive then, then maybe it's not so crazy trying to improve norms/governance/culture for the next century.
It looks like an old human city in Southern Europe, right next to a megastructure built by the Machines. Given that the humans exiled all the Machines to the Arabian desert years before, why would the megastructure be there? The Machines would have needed time to build it, and it looks like they just invaded the area and are still fighting to take the region over.
My computer has a problem, and I could use help from anyone who knows about them. About a month ago, my computer suddenly got REALLY slow. Chrome takes forever to load pages, and even if I close all browsers, running other programs is also very taxing because they open so slowly and often freeze.
Weirdly, the problem seems to disappear about 10% of the time before resuming, so I have these unpredictable windows of time when the computer runs fine.
Clearing my browser cache and/or installing any browser updates will make the computer run faster for only a few hours before it spontaneously reverts to its slow speed. I closed all but eight or nine browser tabs, but the problem persisted.
Even Windows Task Manager is no help. It is also very slow to open, and it will also freeze up and close most of the time. It will show that 90-100% of my "CPU" is being utilized, but then when I scroll down that column to see which program(s) are chiefly responsible, they are all shown as consuming 0% of processing resources. "Memory" is 49%.
5) I deleted a ton of files from my hard drive, defragmented the hard drive, and restarted the computer. The problem is less bad now, but my computer's performance is still unacceptable, and much worse than it was 1.5 months ago.
3) Per the advice I received here, I checked for Windows Updates I needed to do. There was one, I did it and restarted my computer, and it didn't fix the problem.
This sort of matches an issue I had once, where I was getting 100% cpu usage despite no active applications. The solution was to reset the power plan settings - go from "balanced" to "power saver" and back to "balanced". This issue was specific to Windows. It worked fine with Ubuntu.
1) I restarted my computer. It had no effect on the problem. Right after restarting, before trying to open any programs, I opened Task Manager. Already, my computer was utilizing 100% of "CPU." Task Manager itself had problems running, and would spontaneously close before I could look around inside of it much.
2) I downloaded and paid for McAfee Anti-virus and used it to scan my computer for viruses, malware and trackers. It found nothing. The problem persisted.
I would install something like SysInternals Process Explorer because it is superior to Task Manager IMO. Then I'd sort by memory usage and by CPU usage. See if you can't dig up the actual issue.
This does seem like it could be a CPU issue as some people suggested but you can verify this by making sure you aren't sucking up CPU or RAM somehow. Task Manager is really not meant for any serious non-normie use.
This is kind of a shot in the dark, but I understand that a possible cause for this is a failing CPU temperature sensor. When the sensor stops sending back temperature data, the system automatically slows the CPU down to avoid overheating and damaging it. Sometimes (I know mac does this, not sure about windows), this will show up as "phantom" CPU usage, which actually represents the fraction of the time that the machine is forcing the CPU to sleep, in order to cool it down.
The other classic handwaving explanation for behavior like this would be "malware" -- something running that is deliberately hiding itself from you. But I would think it would be unusual for it to run so hard that it slows your computer to a crawl at some times, and then nothing at other times.
Like Medieval Cat says, it's a good thing to train yourself to stop caring about knowing the problem. Modern software is shit, that's all what I can say. Knowing the problem over text is hard, you need interaction, likely physical.
Make sure everything you need to see again is backed up and kill Windows entirely, reinstalling it. If it doesn't help, I would go further than Medieval Cat and say install Linux, if you're just using browsers and the office, you won't feel a single thing.
If you click where it says CPU in task manager it will sort by CPU and you will be able to see the processes that are using a lot (you may need to do something else to get it to show you background processes, but I can't remember what). That amount of CPU usage usually means you have an overzealous anti-virus, or a virus.
Well I won't let not knowing about computers stop me from giving advice. Anything notable happen a month ago? New downloads, trouble in meatspace that would mess with the internet providers? If you disconnect it from the internet, does it run any better?
Try killing everything in the Task Manager that doesn't clearly need to be running regardless of supposed CPU usage. There's some weird relationships sometimes. And you can add more Task Manager tabs by right-clicking up in the CPU/Memory section; Power usage is a nice one to keep track of.
Best guess is updates or background stuff. You may need to run task manager as an admin to see some hidden/system processes.
Easy ways to check is to start it in Safe Mode (with networking) or just unplug/disable your internet connections.
Some other basic troubleshoots - check to see if any disks are near full, run chkdsk (assuming windows) to see if there's any harddisk issues, disable startup programs.
You say Alexandros offered 25k to a charity if you can get the big trials to release their data. Here were your exact words: "offers to donate $25,000 to a charity of my choice if I can get them to do so."
But this isn't want Alexandros said. Here were his exact words: "To put some of my own skin in the game, if Scott helps, by public advocacy or otherwise, to get the raw data for the ivermectin, metformin, and fluvoxamine studies available in a way that I—or someone I trust—can access it without undue limitation on sharing any findings, I commit to making a $25,000 donation to Scott’s ACX grants. Happy to discuss reasonable alterations of this offer."
In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping.
Seems to me Marinos has a very easy way out of donating$25000 if Scott assists in getting the raw data released to him. Marinos is saying that it must be released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings." How much chance do you think there is of the data being released with absolutely no limitation on sharing findings? And can you think of anyone more likely than Marinos to claim that whatever limitations there are are undue? I can imagine him rejecting data that was entered into the computer, saying that he must see the handwritten pages some of it was originally recorded on, because he suspects that whoever entered the data tampered with it. Then if they won't give him their hand-written notes, that's an undue limitation. Seems like his whole game is to claim that people studying Ivermectin treatment of Covid withheld information, lied, made mistakes, massaged the data, etc. Handing him the results of a big Ivermectin study is going to give him enough material to keep the game going for a couple more years --and in the process thoroughly wrecking any clarification the new research brought to the matter. If I had been in charge of the final leg of one of the big Ivermectin trials I wouldn't want to release data in a way this guy can access it, even if I was absolutely sure there were no errors in it and that the conclusion we had drawn was rock solid. By the time he had run our Ivermectin research through his digestive track and aimed the result at a fan, the entire topic would be irremediably trashed.
"In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping."
Isn't the outcome "get the data released"? If Scott helps to ask for the data to be released, but it's not released or not released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings", then the outcome is not what Alexandros wants and he's not making any donations.
Otherwise Scott could just say "Well I emailed them, they said no, here's where you can send the $25k".
That definitely reads as tied to the outcome. "Helps to get the data available in a way that I can access it." Scott shouldn't have to prove cause and effect, but if by the end there's no access, the actions taken didn't help.
To be clear - I made the 10k donation as I had promised. As we discussed the venue, Heathers had some ideas that made it hard to find a way to make the conversation happen. I also lost faith in the neutrality of the moderator I had selected. As such, I lost momentum in making the whole thing happen. It's not the Heathers or anyone else pushed for it and I backed out. And I want to make extremely clear that I stayed true to my word and made the 10k donation to the charity of Heathers' choice, and have the receipt to prove it.
I don't think "backing out" is a good description of the situation, given that nobody pushed for it. If Heathers actually helped organize the thing I would have done it. Hell, I'd still do it.
I do not think Heathers in any way reasonably engaged or did any effort to make this discussion happen, did he? At least I can't see it. It seemed to have withered on the vine but I find the suspicion of fraud you cast so offhandedly on Alexandros a tad unwarranted. I did not follow that discussion but if I was challenged for that money I'd shout it from the rooftops if somebody backed out.
In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.
I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.
As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I'm fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don't turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.
So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life.
As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.
There've been at least two journalists who did the "try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life" thing, and wrote about it for major publications. (I think WaPo and The Atlantic?) Although iirc they were both the other way round, female reporters experimenting with testosterone. Sort of adorable, as a trans reader, but I do agree it's a mechanically unique experience not available via e.g. psychedelics. An interesting experience for sure. Remain somewhat saddened/annoyed that in USA at least, all the good stuff remains officially prescription-locked. I'm sure that protects....someone, somewhere.
Thanks for editing your original comment, I was feeling mildly annoyed because you and I specifically have conversed on this topic several times before...and I thought I'd made it clear that we're broadly in agreement. The DIE enemy of my friend is also my enemy, and all that. I take the same position as Scott in "Against Against Autism Cures", and extend that to transgenderism as well. And feel confident doing so, since having both disorders is plenty enough skin in the game to dissent from orthodoxy...it's a strange and sad life, and I guess I'm happier to live it than being dead, but it sure woulda been nice to roll a nat20 and turn out Normal instead. There's no magic in being Neurodiverse(tm), it's not some superpower. That's just cope, and I wish activists could be more honest about the real suffering involved...for the individual, and oftentimes friends, family, etc. too. To the extent certain conditions like transgenderism are voluntary - and yeah, there absolutely are some fraction like me who didn't *have to* end up this way, sunk costs are a bitch - it's a tragedy not to frankly discuss the opportunity costs of choosing differently.
Advocating: a niche aspect of FDA Delenda Est along right-to-try lines, though I can understand how it might be interpreted in a fringe-activist way. To make it explicit, I think it's a damned lie to call HRT "safe and essentially no risk" drugs...the major mood swings I get every couple weeks sure are suspiciously correlated to hormone injections, surely that's not a coincidence! And there's a number of other potentially-major contraindications which I'm only flippant about here cause I've been dosing for a decade or whatever, so seem to have doged those bullets. But there's __a good reason__ new patients are supposed to get a bloodwork panel and regular lab assessments, for the first several months/years. Some things like liver damage, you wouldn't necessarily notice during everyday experience until it's already A Big Problem. Things like that all argue strongly against a DIY approach.
So, no, it shouldn't just be some OTC pillmill giveaway, and it makes me uncomfortable every time I'm assured there's Careful Medical Supervision(tm), cause that absolutely was not my experience. Out of all the trans people I've known, the only ones who had notable gatekeeping difficulty accessing HRT had a bunch of __unrelated__ issues[1] which bounced them from the medical system more generally...doctors are understandably skeptical of people who don't show up to appointments, can't pay, have a ton of comorbidities which ought to be addressed first, etc, etc.
That being said, for the two specific use cases under discussion here, I think rules and regs could be loosened for some potential delta.
Case 1: nootropics fans who want to try a crazy new brain hack. As OP describes, and as those (admittedly sensationalist, but hey, they got clicks) journalists chronicled, this is a mind-bending experience you can't get from ~any other class of drugs. There really are lots of fascinating insights into human nature and the arbitrary lines of sex and gender which are tough to explore any other way. Not going all-in on some woke bullshit "Other Ways Of Knowing", either: as far as I know, this actually is the only route to collecting such empirical data. Since the other source, unfortunates like David Reimer, are so statistically rare that it's just bad science to extrapolate such results more generally. As far as I'm aware on dosing research, OP is also correct that short-term, *low* doses have ~negligible external effects and risks, while still being strong enough to shake up mental models. It should be entirely possible in theory for endocrinologists to devise some sort of HRT-lite regimen. Put it in a two-weeks-course blister pack, slap a new patent on old generic drugs, and profit. (Though I'm unsure what the market would be, psychonauts aren't exactly a huge or legible crowd.)
To the extent there's some danger of "switch flipping": I agree there's probably non-zero risk, yet would would argue one ought to do a clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis vs other psychoactives which sometimes get advocated for looser treatment too. Like, if there's potential in making LSD, ketamine, whatever more widely available/less criminalized, and we know those can also sometimes fuck people up in super-harmful lifelong ways...then it'd sure seem like HRT-lite isn't some weird outlier, and CW is influencing sober assessment. Consider how often[2] normal people take cross-sex HRT or analogous-effect meds (e.g. men taking antiandrogens) for the __usual__ reasons...if this was a huge pipeline for making accidental trans people, I'm sure it woulda been documented by now. But I've not heard of such through media or whisper network from either side, so...that's absence of evidence, at minimum, and I suspect evidence of actual absence as well. It'd be too salacious to pass up reporting on, if it did happen with any regularity. The utility cost of a single accidental trans person isn't so great that I think it merits cutting off an entire branch from the tree of knowledge, is basically my position here.
Case 2, narrower claim: for those who already jumped through all the hoops, Definitely Absolutely Trans, have been on meds long-term with minimal issue, etc, etc...it genuinely is annoying that I gotta keep going through Big Medical for my monthly dosages of banal-for-me meds. Sometimes doctors fuck up, prescriptions get lost, I'm travelling and don't have extras to tide me over, whatever. There have definitely been times where The Process has annoyed me so much that I've been tempted to buy black-market. Compare to injection equipment: for reasons I don't understand (but probably rhyme with Moral Hazard), it's not possible for lay consumers to buy medical-grade OTC needles in the USA. Can get hobbyist stuff or tattoo needles, but anything for like intramuscular...nope, need a "prescription" for needles. This is really annoying, because unlike medication which has a cash cost of dozens/hundreds $ without insurance, needles are just...you know...cheap mass-manufactured goods. So I can, and do, just find "illegal" listings of needles from China or whatever. I like having my own comfortable margin of supplies, to be used at a pace I deem fit, and wish the same could happen with pills. Call that a libertarian free-market impulse, I guess: I just don't like the idea of being yoked to Official 30 Day Cycles, at the whims of paper-pushers who have no particular interest in ensuring timely service, and can freely revoke a prescription for arbitrary reasons. (This isn't a specific-to-HRT sentiment, to be clear, but it was the example under discussion, so that's how I framed it. In general I'm skeptical of Moral Hazard arguments that conveniently restrict medical access[3].)
[1] weasel word, I guess, since transgenderism is comorbid with a laundry list of Bad Life Outcomes just generally...so a little of column A, a little of column B, probably.
[2] yes, still relatively small sample size, but larger than the acutally-trans population
Agreed that it's not something I'd generalize to infinity...the "delenda est" part of FDA Delenda Est is, to me, really more like how the "defund" in Defund the Police doesn't actually mean that (usually). Catchy slogan not meant to be taken exactly literally. There's a time and place for gatekeeping, and I'd feel pretty uncomfortable with a true libertarian's wet dream of no form of drug oversight whatsoever...at the same time, Scott, Zvi, and others have pretty firmly convinced me by now that the current institutions are generally overly conservative. I'd be quite happy if there were a dozen more Aduhelms, in exchange for not dithering on other shit that actually matters (while the window to capture majority of benefits is still open) + actually works...whether that's infant formula, updated covid boosters, or inspecting foreign shipments of monkeypox vaccines. Just to pick a few random recent examples. I'd even be willing to cook my steaks to well-done if that's the sort of Sacrifices to the Gods it'd take.
Hard drugs specifically: yeah, whatever fantasies I once had about the wonders of broad decriminalization/legalization (blah blah Netherlands blah) and the Evils of the War On Drugs have gotten completely crushed by witnessing SF's homelessness crisis. Surely there's any number of cheaper (not to mention more humane) solutions that don't involve people ODing on the street, to the general approval of local government and activists...I don't know, just feels fucked up? Not all drugs are created equal. We can't put the Prohibition-repeal genie back in the bottle, that toothpaste has been squeezed. But I think it'd be a better world overall, some alternate timeline where the net-negative stuff stayed illegal __and__ socially disapproved of. Plenty of ways people can go to hell which don't cause so much collatoral damage to the rest of society. (Even relatively-harmless cannabis I've been less than pleased with the consequences of that tradeoff...the one thing I miss about mask mandates was not having to constantly smell high-as-a-kite people in public.)
Have you considered taking something else, maybe testosterone, to see how that makes you feel? Maybe then you will feel even more embodied. How can you be sure that the current path is the right path, until you have experimented with every single possible path?
> So what’s left for the people who believe transgender is a “social contagion” or about “special snowflakeness”? If I had to steelman their position it would be something like: there’s some switch that can be flipped by social pressure and wanting to look cool. Once the switch is flipped, you’re transgender in some pretty real way: you’re not faking it, and you’ll be miserable until you’re allowed to gender transition. Still, being transgender makes people worse off on net, so society should try to avoid flipping that switch.
Or trans is an invented phenomenon that's used as a catch-all diagnoses for people who want to escape their identity for other reasons. The most popular version of wanting to escape your identity is called 'being a teenager', which is why normalizing this route for adolescents is probably a terrible and dangerous idea.
A) I already had a testosterone based endocrine system
B) I started estrogen to deal with top dysphoria (which it has dun) all the stuff about embodiment and knowing I'm definitely trans for sure are unexpected benefits hence me trying to tell people about them
Why? thay could majorly improve your quality of life and on the time scale it takes to figure out whether or not they work for you there's no long term risk
The "careful medical supervision" part isn't so great either. Know of 2 cases where somebody in their late teens/early 20's wondered whether they were trans, had one appointment with a trans-obsessed medical professional, was told "yes, my dear, you absolutely *are* trans," and promptly went on hormones.
Dunno where you're located, but even a decade ago in the benighted 2010s, it was trivially easy to get such a prescription in a friendly locale like SF. Supposedly the gatekeepers are wiser now, supposedly it's not just a standardized checklist of stereotyped hoops that both the client and therapist are fully aware of and jump through...and yet. It honestly has bothered me, how little empirical evidence I had to put forth to get a prescription. Once upon a time, there was at least the safety-hassle of regular bloodwork involved...but ever since covid, clinics here are basically perfectly happy to auto-renew HRT prescriptions sight unseen. Or at least mine is. Haven't so much as contacted the office for 2.5 years or whatever now, yet the pills show up in the mail again and again anyway.
That's not what I'd call "careful medical supervision", even by a really generous definition. And I doubt things have gotten *harder* in the intervening years for fresh starts.
"I have been repeatedly assured that nobody is going on hormones without careful medical supervision to ensure it is the right thing for them to do"
You didn't actually believe them, did you?!
The guy who got Kiwifarms shut down infamously did so because they revealed that he was involved in sending twelve-year-olds bootleg estrogen made by a Brazilian in his bathtub from impure Chinese precursors (I swear I'm not making this up).
That is absolutely true, but I'm going to be honest with you: in the sentence "Transsexual peddles contaminated third-world bootleg drugs to children in secret", the "transsexual" element is the one I have the *least* problem with. I'm not saying none! But a damn sight less than all the rest.
It's not just screwing with your hormones it's doing it in a way that significantly improved the quality of life for a notable percentage of the population and is basically risk-free
Also why would you ever want Justin anti-androgen that sounds terrible
I've got a strange technical question, for the more computer-savvy out there.
So there's an old arcade game I have installed, one of those classics that helpfully displays the framerate for troubleshooting purposes...it's a fighter, and thus very difficult to play effectively at anything less than ~60fps. (You know, back when that was top-of-the-line...lol...) There's only so much "adjusting my timing" to compensate for 20-50fps, since obviously opponents don't have the same handicap. This game used to run just fine on older versions of Wandows, but like so many yesteryear programs, at some point it got lost in the compatability shuffle...I'd thought it was a lost cause for years, something I'd need to intentionally set up an outdated machine to enjoy again.
But I stumbled on an illogical solution by accident: for whatever reason, having a media player open at the same time (say, VLC) fixes the framerate back up to good-as-new 60fps. Doesn't even require playing any media, the other program just has to be open at all.
Why would this do anything? My tentative guess is that the media player loads a bunch of additional AV codecs or something, but then I'm not sure how <whatever key game component> went missing from default-Wandows in the first place, such that it could be backdoor-substituted this way.
I don't have a solution for you, but wouldn't a fighting game slow down the frame rate for both players? So if your frame rate drops, your opponent's does as well. They might be annoyed, tell you to get off the wifi, etc., but I do not think that it puts you at a disadvantage. Obviously you want to get it fixed though.
The p2p is legendarily shitty, so (as far as I understand it) lag on one end doesn't actually cause lag on the other. Part of why it's only ever played competitively via LAN, no one even tries to do it over actual external connections. Supposedly the re-released version that came out on Steam years later fixed this, but that version lacks many of the fan-coded patches that helped make the game more playable in the first place.
The AI also doesn't care if I'm slow in meatspace, heh...
I did driver dev for a living and I don't even want to start thinking about it. Somewhere in the unholy abomination of the Windows/compositing WM/GPU driver stack things happen and your game is fast again.
Someone could be actually paid to investigate it for a better part of a month, unearth a really weird reason then patch it into the newest OS/driver update. Nobody will bother, so make an offering to the Machine God and be happy you got blessed with a solution.
Not worth my money, at least to pay a competent person's Cheerful Price, but it'd definitely be a fascinating deep-dive subject if I ever had the opportunity to let someone dig under the hood. I'm just happy it works, mysterious kludge or not. The more years go by, the more games-I-grew-up-with that become functionally impossible to ever replay...and that's pretty sad. Games that only live on in memories: $ERROR_404
...oh, I was gonna link to the article about Killswitch on invisiblegames.net, but that site doesn't seem to exist anymore. Nevermind, sometimes even the memories get lost too :( Corruption is a terrible thing.
Interesting - I wonder why other programs which ought to do the same prompting don't work? Like MPHC doesn't do diddly to up the framerate, despite being a mostly-superiour media player, at least for video.
I have tried clocking the CPU higher...running the game on all threads, maxing priority, uncapping RAM allotment, whatever. This would sometimes offer small improvements, but nothing consistent, and of course it meant computer was sweating bullets just to try and halfheartedly run an old game. Perhaps there's some other deeper-level route to try; I'm out of my technical depth though, been ages since I did the "build your own gaming PC" rite-of-passage.
Emulator-wise, sadly most of the relevant documentation is in Japanese, and it's largely fan-patched anyway :(
I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free. Do you know someone you could try this on? If so, please comment, so this can get taken seriously. It worked for me- my back pain was completely cured. https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/pain-and-what-to-do-about-it
Dr Hanscom did a talk at google so has external validation but there's a lot of fake stuff around so it's hard to get heard. https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=130
The idea builds on Dr John Sarno and James Pennebaker but is quite amazing (maybe too amazing). If I can get some anecdotal responses here, maybe we can get a formal trial approved.
Hi, my first impression when I heard about this method was : I think this is a bullshit. My wife insisted and I did it thinking what a crap. A week ago I couldn’t walk because of the pain in my left knee. Today I can walk for hours with my two beautiful Husky. I tried also this method for my back and the result was awesome. I can't explain but I just can say it works. Just give it a try and thank you Stuart. I am a PhD in Biology and I don't believe in mystical care but this method works.
I'm delighted to hear it worked for you! I don't believe in mystical care or mystical cures either- I'm sure there will be a suitable neuroscience explanation one day- I favour a miswiring of the competing sub-routine version of the brain described by David Eagleman but I think more important than why it works at this stage is how many people will it work on, and to do that we need a trial.
How about if you two and Dr. Hanscom be the first subjects: cause yourselves some chronic pain. You'll need to figure out a safe way to cause a bit of painful tissue damage that will later heal up with no permanent injury -- maybe the sterile equivalent of a thumbtack in the heel, well covered with sterile bandages? Walk around on it for long enough for the pain to count as chronic. For pain to count as chronic it has to go on for weeks or months, so I'm not sure how long you'd need to carry on with the thumbtack phase, but I'd say at least a week. Then do the paper trick & let us know how well it worked.
Um, yes. that's what I'm trying to do here. I had back pain for 5 months- here's the list of exercises I did to try to heal it
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/fascia-and-lower-back . Then I read an article by Isobel Whitcomb in Slate https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/chronic-pain-identity-spoonies-support-recovery.html and read Dr Hascom's book. 10 minutes later I was dancing. Now, it could be placebo, it could be coincidence but isn't it worth finding out? Dr Hanscom was the first person he cured, he cured his own back problems. There's another patient here https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=426. By posting here, I'm hoping I can get enough anecdotal evidence to get a trial arranged. As Isobel Whitcomb says in her article, one of the problems is that people can resent it, thinking it's saying their pain isn't real, especially if the pain has lasted a long time. That's not the idea, it's just accepting that neuron paths don't always work in your best interests. see here by Lorimer Moseley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwd-wLdIHjs
Yeah, OK, but what I’m suggesting is that given how simple and effective the procedure, and how rapid, and how inexpensive the required materials, it would be feasible for the you early adopters to accumulate a body of evidence by performing some experiments on yourselves. And making videos of the climactic tearing of the paper and the astonished relief of the sufferer would really make those anecdotal results pop. With that material in hand you’ll soon have legions of chronic pain sufferers sprinting — well, OK, hobbling —to your clinical trial.
In addition to the sterile-thumbtack-in-the-heel experiment, I think you should try some variations on the original procedure. For instance, if you scotch tape the ripped up pieces of paper back together, does the pain return? If you write your feelings about the pain in vanishing ink but then do not tear up the paper, will the pain fade slowly as the ink does? Next you might explore whether the procedure works on things other than pain. For instance, what about unsightly abdominal fat? If I were to write “blubbergut, I freakin hate you so so much,” is it possible that I would slim down at the moment I tore up the paper? And if so, what about this variant? A chubby guy writes, “195 pounds, you’re bringing me down, I wish every one of you was gone” — when he tears up the paper might he become weightless? And if so, then what if instead he had written “205 pounds, I wish every one of you was gone” might he end up actually buoyant, like a helium balloon? But then — MY GOD, COULD WE USE THIS TECHNIQUE TO LAUNCH ROCKETS & SHIT?
Hmmm, I have my doubts whether those would work... but the first idea is a great one- getting people to film themselves doing it- the only problem is scepticism. I have got a video of myself struggling to do one of the many back exercises I tried but who's to say I'm not just acting the pain? I did this 3 months ago and since then I've found 6 people to try it on and it's worked every time. I emailed the sceptic's sceptic, Michael Shermer, to see if he's ever come across anything like this, but he hasn't replied. I'm trying the rationalist community because the mantra is they'll look at the facts- surely everyone knows one person with pain- is it worth 5 minutes of their time to try it? You can say to them, « I’ve got this crazy guy emailing me- he says like Jesus he can heal your pain- it’s probably rubbish but could you just write your thoughts/emotions/feelings out for 5 minutes on a piece of paper, rip it up and throw it away. He (this Jesus guy) says that will work and your pain will go- please just do it so I can tell the Jesus character he’s full of shit and is wasting my valuable time ».
OK, I just did it. I have had chronic lower back pain for at least 20 years. My back always hurts a little bit, even when I'm lying in bed. If I walk it starts cramping on the lower left, & I'd call that moderate pain. If I lift something the wrong way, I get a zinger of somewhat more severe pain, and then for a few days my whole back is worse. Today it is about average. This morning, sitting down, I have an ache in my lower hip that I can tell is coming from my back.
So I spent 6 minutes writing a description of my pain and my thoughts and feelings about it. Then I tore it up and threw it away. My back feels exactly the same. Same ache in left lower hip. If I stand it, whole back hurts a bit more. Trying to arch it even a little bit hurts a lot, like it always does. Bending forward hurts moderately, like it always does.
Hi again- can you just confirm for me that there has been no change in your pain levels. If so, you're my first failure of 8 people- while it's a small sample size, I'm having a lot of trouble convincing people to try it so I would like to be certain that it failed for you.
I haven't read the book but have heard some positive stuff about it. To me it always sounded like CBT for pain. Since starting lexapro again i have found that my anxieties don't produce anxious thoughts anymore but do cause me to clench my jaw which produces pain in my face and jaw. (Its not a medication side effect as it happens only at times of high stress and not all the time). So, to me, the idea that stress and mental anguish can manifest as physical pain isn't too crazy and therefor physical pain can be treated with mental work.
Yes, i think CBT is a good analogy- and I think we're edging towards a world where we accept that physical pain has a mental component- but I don't think we're there yet. My question really is how to move the process along a bit faster?
It's a time-tested psychological trick; give your concerns a physical form, then punch them in their stupid physical face. As stated, it's free, fast, and surprisingly effective; a lot of problems are more psychological than people assume, and a lot of burdens get less burdensome when you give yourself a physical outlet for your frustrations.
Yes, that's exactly the problem- it sounds too good to be true and "you get what you pay for"- give it 2 minutes and see what happens. In my substack I link to 2 articles in slate where Isabel Whitcomb describes her experiences.
The idea of romantic love has been one of the major values of Western Civilization since the Rennaissance when legends such as Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, Romeo and Juliet, and the Provencial poetry of Courtly Love were popularized. Though occurring within Christendom, this particular notion of love existed outside of and often in tension with religious belief.
Still today popular culture is suffused with this notion of love in which two people choose, often against practical considerations, to get together because they hold romantic love as a higher value.
Yet we seem to be at the end of the romantic era. Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love". That your souls had recognized each other as their immortal other-halfs. The concept has no place in our official lives. The corporate world of the 21st century has less patience for romantic love than did the 12th century Church.
>Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love".
I am married to someone I met at work. HR didn't care at all because: 1) we followed the established policies in the employee handbook, 2) told them about the relationship, and 3) neither of us managed the other person or worked with them directly.
Based on the HR training I had in b-school and my work experience, HR policies at large companies won't treat inter office relationships as anathema, they will have established procedure to deal with such a thing.
The HR department could not give two figs about your soulmates, you could have a string of them as far as they're concerned - UNTIL you doodle your co-worker, then you break up with them and it turns sour and co-worker decides they were harassed or you are a pest and anyway Somebody Should Do Something and it's all the company's fault for letting it happen, so they'll sue the company.
Since the company is in the business of selling apps for something or other, but not in the business of helping you get your ashes hauled, this is a pain in the backside for them, which is why HR makes rules about "no doodling on company time". If your co-worker couldn't sue them and had to restrict themselves to giving you dirty looks during the tea break, you could doodle every person on the same floor of the building and they wouldn't care.
It has nothing to do with rationality, it has all to do with $$$$$$$$$$.
I don't blame HR departments or corporate culture for caring most about the dollar bill. I blame this culture that now allows so many frivolous lawsuits for sexual harassment to win those dollars. (They aren't all frivolous, of course, but many are.)
It is progressive* culture that has devalued romantic love, I think.
*I'm distinguishing progressive culture: feminism, DEI stuff, "words are violence" believers, from the longer tradition of liberal Western values: basically the 18th through 20th centuries, which mostly angled for more freedom of individual behavior than the popular Left of today.
The DEI people are perhaps the most passionless and sexless individuals one can find in the wild.
It's weird when it's the faux-Christian alt right RETVRN types that actually talk about passionate love they feel for their tradwife, while the vanguard of the sexual revolution is afraid to touch another human being.
Wait, was there a time when this sort of love was *accepted*?! As far as I can tell, Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, and Romeo and Juliet were all written as *tragedies*, where the people in romantic love faced only opposition from their communities and ended up dying for it. We seem to have progressed if HR just fires you instead of literally having you killed.
These aren't morality plays in which the message is "Don't be like them!" Rather, the audience tends to view them as heroes. The trickle-down message over centuries has been to believe that one should find their "true love". Such notion is in diametric opposition to cultures which believe in arranged marriage or that marriage should only take place within the clan and approved of by authorities.
Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love.
"Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love."
I... don't think so? I was with you right up until here, but my experience is that liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is the Italian community must be reformed to be less violent and crazy so teenagers stop killing each other and themselves. Practically everybody I know, especially on the liberal side of the divider, views the love affair per se as discomfiting at best.
Seriously. If the Montagues and Capulets don’t keep stabbing each other and bystanders for slights, it really doesn’t matter if the teens are forced apart by their mean parents or married to one another to end the feud.
Which last is pretty likely, though probably not conducive to R&J’s adult happiness, if Tybalt could just keep it in his scabbard.
(But the Nurse and Friar Laurence are still irresponsible idiots who are old enough to know better.)
Speaking of someone who has a strong romantic love for their wife and also as someone who's old enough to scoff at younger people claiming to be in love -
Lots of people don't know the difference between love and lust, especially when they're younger. Two people at a job having sex is a nightmare for potential sexual harassment claims, and a big deal for the other employees who are likely aware that something is happening (especially if it's happening at work!). To be on the same side, companies are highly incentivized to just assume that it's not really love.
I met my wife at work, and I still say that most people who date at work are going to cause more problems than they solve. That said, I'm not a fan of broad corporate policy against it, and prefer the more neutral "here are some guidelines to follow and a way to report harassment" that gives most employers a solid out. A pox on courts who wouldn't accept that as a fair compromise.
Eh, I know I always trot this one out, but my go-to example of why doodling on company time is a no-no is the former married manager in a former workplace of mine who doodled one of his subordinates, got her pregnant with twins, then got a better job elsewhere and left, in succession, the job, his wife, the town, and his mistress and babies. He's probably hooked up now with a third soulmate/love of my life now, wherever he is.
"Broad corporate policy" probably will do nothing for the romantic featherheads who are convinced "but we're in love and any day now he's gonna leave his wife for me!", but it will at least be a big warning sign in the middle of the road about these kinds of messes.
My experience is that such policies actually don't work, and those interested in pursuing such a relationship will find a way to do so anyway. What it gives an employer is some legal protection, but at the cost of sometimes having to fire employees (or worse/weirder, tell people to stop dating) regardless of the merits of the relationship. If my former employer had told my (then future) wife and I to stop dating, there would have been no good outcome - either one or both of us quit, or it breaks up a good relationship.
If companies felt they had decent legal protection without having to meddle in the affairs of their employees, that would solve most of these issues.
I will say, I'm strongly against a supervisor dating a lower level employee, *especially* if the lower level employee is a direct subordinate. That's just asking for all kinds of problems, often directly related to work benefits, promotions, etc.
The last sentence lost me: modern HR is not something I'd consider remotely rational, in either the small- or big-R sense.
Otherwise I'd agree in general that legibility and safetyism are having an outsize chilling effect on all kinds of mushy human relations, romantic and otherwise. Was just thinking about it on the commute home: my workplace recently foisted an HR-nightmare sexual harassment case boss to another <s>diocese</s> store branch. Everyone's glad that he's gone, but the lingering bad vibes and heightened sense of threat make every potentially-misinterpreted reaction between sexes a helluva lot more fraught. Who knows how long until that'll settle down... (Maybe it'd be different if the asshole actually got fired, or disciplined in any meaningful way, but blah blah Official Investigation mumble fair trial cough lack of HR-admissible evidence. It's like some weird alt-reality where #MeToo never happened.)
Not only has that *never* been an acceptable excuse (whereas for example "I like pussy and mind your own business" often has), it's the mainspring of the romantic conception of love that it isn't. Acceptance would smother the whole thing to death. You need zealous opposition to get the sturm und drang, the heightened emotional states which make romanticism appealing to histrionics; if you pat the lovers on the head and say "well isn't that nice" you ruin it for them and they'll probably break up, no longer united by the world's opposition.
"If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, “noble”, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides."
From "The Allegory of Love":
"Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described.1 With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often ‘aureate’ or deliberately enigmatic, we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life. It is possible only to those who are, in the old sense of the word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous. Yet this love, though neither playful nor licentious in its expression, is always what the nineteenth century called ‘dishonourable’ love. The poet normally addresses another man’s wife, and the situation is so carelessly accepted that he seldom concerns himself much with her husband: his real enemy is the rival. But if he is ethically careless, he is no light-hearted gallant: his love is represented as a despairing and tragical emotion—or almost despairing, for he is saved from complete wanhope by his faith in the God of Love who never betrays his faithful worshippers and who can subjugate the cruellest beauties.
...There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming — to wipe out of our minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food both of modern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of ‘happiness ’— a happiness grounded on successful romantic love — which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction. In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them. At the other end of the scale we find the comfort and utility of a good wife acknowledged: Odysseus loves Penelope as he loves the rest of his home and possessions, and Aristotle rather grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may now and then rise to the same level as the virtuous friendship between good men. But this has plainly very little to do with ‘love’ in the modern or medieval sense; and if we turn to ancient love-poetry proper, we shall be even more disappointed."
Related to the Lewis passage, I read this interesting bit recently in Octavio Paz's The Double Flame (which is about the history of love in literature):
"The majority of specialists in this field agree that the Provencal poets adopted two popular Arabic-Andalusian poetic forms: the zajal and the jarcha. Another borrowing that had a great influence not only on the poetry but also on the customs and beliefs: the reversal of the positions of the lover and his lady. The main axis of power in feudal society was the vertical link, both juridical and sacred, between lord and vassal. In Muslim Spain the emirs and the great lords had declared themselves to be the servants, the slaves of their beloveds. The Provencal poet adopted this Arab custom, reversed the traditional relationship of the sexes, called his lady his mistress and himself her servant. In a society much more open than the Hispano-Muslim one--a society in which women enjoyed liberties unthinkable under Islamic rule--this change was a real revolution. It upset the images of man and woman hallowed by tradition, affected mores, left its mark on vocabulary, and through language influenced the vision of the world."
What I find interesting is that romantic love isn't a given but a cultural convention which had to be invented at some point. According to Paz, romantic love is a subset of eroticism which is a subset of sex. Sex is animal, eroticism involves symbolism such as the kiss, romantic love the paradox of the captured soul mixed with the freewill to choose its ongoing enslavement.
I wonder if modern society isn't now uninventing romantic love.
"In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them."
This remark of Lewis' reminds me of the following footnote to the Thousand Nights and a Night, by Burton (a man who was himself inclined to the ancients' attitudes toward the matter): http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_1/v1notes.htm#124
Sounds like Lewis disapproves of courtly love while acknowledging that the notion of love prior to it was no better. My point is that courtly love has been distilled over the centuries by a liberal culture which now views romantic love as one of the important ingredients to a marriage. When the Troubadours exalted adultery, it was the only form of romantic love at the time and place, since the nobles of the court married for social and political reasons.
No joke, getting married is one of the biggest issues in life, one of the biggest determinants of happiness. It seems to have become much harder, judging by percentage of adults married. I'll reverse your formula and say that if they don't bring back arranged marriages, the least they can do is let people date at work. Maybe there is love there.
Unfortunately, I think the only thing left to do for now is enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing them also suffer from their destructive behavior while simultaneously refusing insistently to fix it. Maybe when we're like 80, the rising generation will have had enough of this shit and want to go back to one of the manifold forms of sanity.
Physics question. You often hear baseball announcers say how a fastball can never really rise because that would violate the laws of physics, it only appears to rise to the hitter because the brain expects it to drop sooner than it does.
Can a baseball really not rise given enough speed and backspin? My intuition is that it could, but maybe I've played too much wiffleball.
Bonus: If it can rise, what would the velocity and backspin rate (and air-pressure?) need to be? Assume a spherical cowhide.
...then we need the baseball to be spinning at about 5700 rpm for a 90 MPH fastball to generate 1g of vertical acceleration to compensate for the force of gravity. That gives us a surface velocity of about 23 m/s which isn't fast enough to make any of our assumptions questionable.
Yes, I wouldn't think this would be possible for a human pitcher, or someone would have done it already for lulz and to freak out a batter. But we could readily build a machine to do it, it would've been a great proposal for "Mythbusters" when that show was on.
If the announcers do indeed say that, they are wrong. It might be a bit beyond a human's ability to pitch a baseball fast enough for it to rise, but there are no laws of physics standing in its way.
As I mentioned to Yug below, you can do it yourself with a table tennis bat and ball. Strike the ball in a horizontal direction with even a moderate amount of backspin, and it will swerve in a more vertical trajectory i.e. upwards. No laws of physics being violated, just the Magnus effect in action.
Ignoring-link top-of-head answer; gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand would require it to start spinning faster in midair, while gravity is instead working to make it stop spinning. Short of freak weather conditions like a tornado, it will never go higher than its original trajectory.
I don't think either of your contentions are true. If it is spinning fast enough to gain altitude when it leaves the pitcher's hand, it doesn't need to spin faster. And gravity is not working to make it stop spinning.
Consider a table tennis ball. It can be made to spin fast enough to change it"s trajectory from horizontal to vertical after it leaves a player's bat. The same is theoretically true for a baseball,, though I don't know what combination of speed and spin would achieve this, and whether or not it is practically possible.
I assume we're talking about the baseball rising when it gets to the batter at home plate, a distance of 60 feet. You can't make a table tennis ball fly a straight line for ten feet and then start climbing, you'd have to get it climbing out the gate.
A baseball is 5 ounces on the light end; I didn't find the equation for how fast you have to spin it to get it rising, but it's a lot heavier than ping pong balls or paper airplanes.
You assume incorrectly - I was responding to your 'gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand', and 'it will never go higher than its original trajectory'. You didn't mention anything about a delayed reaction.
A table tennis ball can gain altitude after leaving a player's bat, and with sufficient spin and speed, a baseball will do the same after leaving a pitcher's hand.
I guess we're in agreement in that neither of us knows the speed and degree of spin for this to happen, nor how far from it are real baseball pitchers.
For the next really slow response, here is my current "gotcha" on most "rules" regarding independence.
They basically have everything that might be considered part of one's definition/rules, but they aren't recognized by basically any power (even Google doesn't bother).
Own government, military, currency, and no dependence from its parent nation Somalia. It even had a civil war and was its own nation for a while.
In the end, the ability to self govern is granted by the power to assert self governance. But recognition for it, or for its "right" is mostly getting other individuals/powers to go along with it or in other words, politics.
By almost any definition, then yes - but there's a corollary, which is "does Somaliland benefit from the advantages of being an independent nation state?" and the answer to that is no, because for a poor country, a lot of these (in terms of financing the national debt, military assistance from other states, international aid, etc.) rely on being recognised as an independent nation state. As Haiti shows, some of these advantages are a decidedly mixed blessing, but on balance they're still worth having.
Given the potential for an increased risk of genocide and ethnic cleansing if African ethnic/linguistic "nations" within existing multi-ethnic states were to have a realistic path to the international community granting them recognition as independent states, I was really surprised when South Sudan was recognised. Not a bad thing in itself, but seemed to demonstrate that the taboo against granting recognition was less powerful than I had thought.
South Sudan being recognized seems to be mostly due to an US effort lead by... George Clooney?
My point is that, it's mostly a tautology - you are independent by being independent but even that isn't enough. To actually act like a nation, you have to get others to treat you as one. Arguably that's even more important, as even for wealthy nations, trade and treaties and such are at best legally grey otherwise. And for that, all the rules and definitions doesn't matter. It's literally politics and influence/power at that point.
In my eyes, if you're able to perform the core function of a sovereign state, taxing your subjects, then you're a sovereign state, and Somaliland is indeed performing that function. The idea that states need recognition from other states to become states seems crazy to me, as that would mean that e.g. some isolated Polynesian island couldn't have become a state before European contact.
Nationhood I consider something almost entirely separate from statehood; e.g. the Kurds seem to me closer to being a nation than do the Belgians.
Plenty of local governments have taxes. Independence is being able to enforce laws (typically including a tax code) while preventing outsider powers from doing the same.
Huh, looks like the coast guard gets some support but not the army (wiki states they can't get imported weapons due to the embargo on Somalia, which you think would also affect the navy...). Getting there I guess!
Yeah I don't guess the army does much about pirates. I wonder if at some point the west will give up on the idea of a functioning united Somalia and just open relations with Somaliland. Would be good
Does anyone have an update on what happened to all those neuroscientific tests that university researchers were supposed to be carrying out on Daniel Ingram and others like Delson Armstrong (strapping all sorts of equipment to them and measuring this or that)? Even a preprint doesn't seem to be out after all this while? Is this because the research takes really long, or does anyone have any inside information on what may be delaying?
Thanks for asking! As Scott was kind enough to signal boost, we are still seeking all the funding we need for that and other studies and projects. In this case, we were able to find the money to collect the data (which, as fMRI and EEG with travel expenses, is moderately expensive), but we haven't yet secured all the funding we need to analyze the datasets, which are very large and complicated. So, currently trying to raise $95K for a post-doc to do that analysis, which I am very excited about seeing the results of, as I personally spent about 40 hours in the 7T fMRI and 40 hours of high-density EEG as the pilot subject doing insight stages and jhanas with phenomenological markings and reports. So, if anyone is interested in helping to fund that study, please contact me/Emergence Benefactors, https://ebenefactors.org/ and I will forward you to the correct people at MGH/Harvard.
As Julian says, the experiment was about measuring various parameters, including breathing (both in nose and abdominal), temperature, blood oxygen level, "brain wave states" etc., in different states of being (awake without particular thoughts, focused attention, sleep, "cessation" or nirodha,...), involving some number of sensors and several scores of electrodes. But the video doesn't seem to say a lot about the results: he (Delson Armstrong) does say that the researchers were surprised to see a "waking" kind of awareness in his deep sleep but I don't remember hearing anything on whether his breathing stopped during "cessation" or about how his "brain wave states" during nirodha differed from other humans etc.
>Delson Armstrong explains some research he was personally involved with at two Netherlands Universities in which he was hooked up to a number of machines which measured his response to various stimuli. The researchers were looking very closely at the unique state of Cessation which was achieved in deep states of meditation.
basically looks like some buddhism/meditation stuff
Someone below posted how Tyler Cowen suggests that those who believe in AGI should be long volatility. Today on MR he adds to that and suggests EA should have a mutual fund:
"why isn’t there an EA mutual fund, reflecting EA views of the world, whatever those may be? Maybe the fund would instead load up on semiconductor chips, in any case they could aggregate the debates from all those EA forums to make the better decisions...
Alternatively, you might argue that EA has only moral insight, and no predictive superiority about what will happen at larger levels. That too is a plausible view, especially among non-EAers.
But it seems to me one of these should be true, either that there should be an EA mutual fund, or that EA has only moral insight, not predictive insight. Which is it going to be?"
I think his point is that EA has unusual views about the direction AI is likely to take, and, if correct, it (EA) should be able to clean up in the market by putting money on that position, resulting in more money to use for EA.
Most of the scenarios I've read for a superintelligent AI taking over the world involve an intermediary stage in which the AI controls a large share of the economy. Those scenarios should be investable. Even if EA wants to prevent that scenario, it seems better that it should invest in it and profit from the extraordinary gains in order to live to fight AI another day.
Why would investing money into a bad outcome your are fighting against, be a good idea? It's literally creating market incentive to change your own preferences.
These money are going to be either lost or useless, so the only reason for these mutual fond to exist is to appease such market-minded people as Tyler, essentially and quite ironically, it would be pointless virtue signalling.
Any money that you're investing into a money-making instrument is money that you aren't spending to alleviate problems right now. In order to argue that the investment strategy is *morally* superior, you'd presumably need to have some sort of *quantitative* argument that the ongoing bad stuff that you failed to alleviate today is outweighed by the larger quantity of bad stuff that you could alleviate in the future with a larger budget.
(Obviously, any such argument must be sensitive to the current world situation such that there exists some circumstance under which you'll switch strategies and start actually spending money, since otherwise you can never realize the gains.)
It's not clear if Tyler meant that EA should invest its own money in the mutual fund. If EA has an outsized talent in prediction, they should be able to make plenty of money simply charging fees to manage other people's money. In that case there would be no trade-off of current vs. future money spent on altruistic causes.
The most obvious is "a lot of the scenarios where rat/EA predictions differ from general society are ones in which money is meaningless".
For instance, even granting that AI doom goes through "AI controls much of economy" (see e.g. "It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World" for the alternative "killing all humans is pretty easy if you're not trying to discriminate" hypothesis), if the "AI controls much of economy" stage is already past the point of no return (or at least the marginal amount of money required to avert doom is much higher), then profiting from predicting it doesn't increase the total probability of avoiding doom.
Has Scott come to any conclusions about "Long Covid"? It was something that never caused me much concern. Bit for others, it seems to be a driving motivation for continued carefuleness.
> Increased risk for PASC was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder.
and:
> Abnormal findings on physical examination and diagnostic testing were uncommon.
The "conclusion":
> A high burden of persistent symptoms was observed in persons after COVID-19. Extensive diagnostic evaluation revealed no specific cause of reported symptoms in most cases. Antibody levels were highly variable after COVID-19.
“We estimated that the hazard ratio of any neurologic sequela was 1.42 (95% confidence intervals 1.38, 1.47) and burden 70.69 (95% confidence intervals 63.54, 78.01) per 1,000 persons at 12 months. The risks and burdens were elevated even in people who did not require hospitalization during acute COVID-19.”
“But even people who had not been hospitalized had increased risks of many conditions, ranging from an 8% increase in the rate of heart attacks to a 247% increase in the rate of heart inflammation.”
Latest CDC info on long Covid, based on survey data:
About 30% of adults who have had Covid report ever having long Covid.
About 15% of adults who have had Covid report currently experiencing long Covid.
80% of those experiencing long Covid report any activity limitation. (So 12% of these who ever had Covid, around one in eight.)
25% of those experiencing long Covid report significant activity limitation. (So a bit under 4%, or around 1 in every 25 adults who have ever had Covid.)
The large preponderance of studies continue to show long Covid as being quite common, and some of the mechanisms do seem to be starting to emerge.
That’s evidently not going to have any effect on public policy for whatever reason. That war is over, we lost, there’s no large constituency for reconsideration. But individually I’ll still do what I can to put off my own reckoning a little longer, while hoping the horse learns to sing.
(And after all, even at Russian roulette odds, *most* people walk away winners. I just don’t much like the idea of playing twice a year.)
There will for many years be people who are motivated to continue the fight against COVID, I suspect in most cases because they don't have anything better to do with their time. "Long COVID" is as good an excuse as they're going to find, so they'll use it.
Why did the US Libertarian Party, or at least its verified Twitter account(s), become a hardcore pro-Putin propaganda vehicle, not even in the Elon Musk style "fan of Ukraine, but here is what Putin says about it and I believe him, great guy" but in the grotesque tankie way.
I get the position of "everything outside of the US is not our problem", cause even if it's flawed, it's appealing to the naive types, but specifically working on harming Ukraine is not that position, they do very much care about things outside of the US – they want Putin to win. But why? What could be remotely related to the libertarian policies in the Putinist Russia?
It might be blind contrarianism. Personally, I think it's just inconvenient. If Russia's really doing something wrong and we can prevent it then it's hard for them to make the case their principled non-interventionism is the right choice. It's much easier if there's no moral valence to the conflict so memes that support that point of view have an advantage within the culture.
It's one thing to try to improve a country by conquest (generally not feasible, though Japan and Germany worked out fairly well) and another to protect a country from conquest.
Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria should have all been perfect examples of why the US is absolutely god awful at judging whether a country is "really doing something wrong" and interfering. But nope, amazingly the anti-"isolationists" are more confident in their beliefs and judgements about fighting wars with foreign countries than at any other point in history!
Do you think the Vietnamese Communist Party or Taliban or Assad regime or Gaddafi were doing nothing wrong? Usually the argument is they were awful but the US shouldn't intervene for some reason or another.
Also, what's going on in Ukraine is not the US fighting a war. Part of the enthusiasm is that.
Depending on which Green Party you're talking about you should drop the "try to." At least some definitely have been. Russia's pretty equal opportunity about this: it supports whoever it thinks will destabilize other countries and radical minority parties on both sides qualify. Also, they specifically like Greens because they think it'll keep the west buying more gas/oil from Russia.
They're opposing US involvement because libertarians hate it when the government does almost anything, especially anything that spends tax dollars. Their goal is US isolationism and that's where the anti-Ukraine angle comes from, they don't actually like Putin. If you're playing politics for a wide audience, it's a lot of work to make someone a principled isolationist, easier to convince them that Ukraine does too many war crimes to support.
Also, the most extreme stuff is coming out of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire which recently got taken over by the Mises caucus. They thought the LP was too woke, and they're trying to shitpost hard enough to drive the wokes out (driving out plenty of principled libertarians in the process).
Probably because when it comes to war, for at least the last 30 years and probably longer, the position which at the time got you denounced as "treasonous dictator-apologist who doesn't care about global democracy" wound up pretty unambiguously being the correct one in hindsight. Remember when opposing the invasion of Iraq meant you were trafficking in pro-Saddam propaganda? Libertarians in general are EXTREMELY sensitive to "If you don't go all in on our side of this latest war, you're a treasonous enemy of democracy and general goodness", and frankly for damn good reason. I'll freely admit that "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" is an awfully crude action plan, but I totally get where it comes from.
I would also observe that another thing libertarians are very sensitive to is overnight changes in media opinion that are seamlessly absorbed by the political class. Prior to the invasion, the government of Ukraine was being pretty widely denounced (primarily by the left) as Nazi-adjacent if not outright white supremacist, while the right broadly was trying to downplay any such connections. When the invasion happened that flipped 180 degrees literally overnight, and I think that put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths from the outset.
First Ukraine/Iraq difference that comes to my mind is that if Ukraine wins the war it could plausibly restore a fairly normal western-liberal-style regime, whereas we were tilting at windmills trying to do that in Iraq.
Iraq and Afghanistan would have made a lot more sense if our mission had been "find two dictators who are considerably less terrible than Saddam and Mullah Omar."
Incredible to look at the invasion of Iraq and take away the lesson "Take whatever position gets you denounced as treasonous in the USA specifically" rather than "unprovoked invasion bad".
> I'll freely admit that "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" is an awfully crude action plan, but I totally get where it comes from
I think you're confusing "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" with just being rational, which is something that does not apply in this case.
For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, you were treated as a lunatic if you even mentioned the lab hypothesis, but now it is a widely accepted possibility. But in this case the lab hypothesis was in fact a reasonable argument from the start, so if you just applied some rational thinking you would eventually get to the lab hypothesis as an option.
However, in this case, if we think about things rationally, we have a clear aggressor who attacks a smaller country and drives Europe into chaos all because of... ego? So, in other words, you cant rationalize your way into a pro-Russia stance, therefore the "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" plan falls off from the start.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be that a lot of libertarians could be replaced with a rock that has "DO THE OPPOSITE OF WHATEVER JOHN BOLTON SAYS" written on it.
I remember some people saying we shouldn't have gone to war against Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't remember anyone saying that Saddam and the Taliban were actually the good guys.
And, if you're actually non-interventionist in principle, shouldn't you denounce Putin himself on that ground, even if you don't think we shouldn't do anything about it?
>And, if you're actually non-interventionist in principle, shouldn't you denounce Putin himself on that ground, even if you don't think we shouldn't do anything about it?
No, because freaking out over Putin is driving the support for helping Ukraine. If you convince people this isn't the one-sided good vs bad conflict they think it is, they don't support intervention as much.
Government of Ukraine being "Nazi-adjacent" is a Russian propaganda trope though plus something that was driving clicks at the time for the less scrupulous journos like C. Miller. Again, question is not why the LP denounces foreign policy but why it denounces the foreign policy exclusively through the crude Russian state propaganda lens.
You mean in WW2 where we spent over half a trillion dollars propping up a regime we then spent the next 40 something years considering an existential threat?
I mean, that's one way to put it. You could also say WW2, where we got the people we didn't like to do most of the bleeding, then spent the next 40 something years out-competing our dupes to become the world hegemon.
Wrecked what exactly? A party that has abjectly failed to accomplish anything and was starting to adopt woke ideology in a desperate and almost certainly self-destructive attempt at relevance?
I was scrolling down waiting to see if someone already said this, as it is correct. It seems many of their posts now are just edge lording.
I would add, though, that even non-Mises libertarians are biased to accept positions that preclude government actions. For instance, one can oppose COVID restrictions on principled grounds - "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." But one can avoid the issue entirely, by pretending that there are no competing interests, since "COVID is a hoax" or some variation thereof. I have seen numerous libertarians going that easy route.
In a similar vein, given that the US will absolutely not be be supporting Russia in their war on Ukraine, any US intervention would be in support for Ukraine. Therefore, a libertarian can conveniently ignore the tension between general opposition to US foreign intervention, and the plight of Ukraine, with Russian narratives that would preclude any support for Ukraine.
Conceivably, in an alternative timeline in which Russia's invasion garnered widespread support in the US, and any involvement by the US would be on behalf of Russia, perhaps some of these same libertarians would find themselves defending Ukraine's position, highlighting routine Russian atrocities, etc.
Reaction of American political fringes to this war is wild, Ukraine is simultaneously "woke" and "Nazi" like a Schrodinger's cat. Hard to disagree with Fukuyama that there are no serious ideologies except liberalism anymore.
Lots of good replies below on the shortcomings of contrarianism, the frequent need for anti-interventionists to want something more than "yes, A is the victim and B is the badguy but I prefer not to intervene."
I'd also add that there is a strain with in the libertarian movement in the US which is primarily motivated by social justice issues, and within that strain there are people who hate the idea of the university policy to enforce use of preferred pronouns so much that they libertarian their way full circle into endorsing an autocrat because he opposes preferred pronouns, gay marriage, etc.
Contrarians are in general quite gullible. Tell them that some opinion is contrarian, and they will automatically support it.
"You are not one of those sheeple who believe that 2+2=4, right? Let me tell you what the truly independent thinkers say on this topic: <insert Kremlin propaganda>." Five minutes later, the guy will repeat it on all social networks as his own opinion, to signal what an independent thinker he is.
It is much easier to signal independent thought when someone provides you a script. The only requirement is that the script disagrees with your mainstream media.
As opposed to whom? The people who accept every hegemonic narrative every single time?
>Tell them that some opinion is contrarian, and they will automatically support it.
Not true at all, but as long as we're playing this stupid game: "Tell a non-contrarian that some opinion comes from the certified EXPERTS at Harvard University and the NYT and they will automatically support it"
>It is much easier to signal independent thought when someone provides you a script. The only requirement is that the script disagrees with your mainstream media.
Even in your dumb strawman of contrarianism, this is a far superior form of uncovering truth than just accepting the EXPERT narratives every single time and expecting that these EXPERTS will of course acknowledge and promote anything which is true but uncomfortable or contradicts mainstream narratives. They essentially do not do that.
> As opposed to whom? The people who accept every hegemonic narrative every single time?
Statistically, yes. The experts from Harvard are correct more frequently than whatever source today contrarians get their alternative facts from.
To find truth, it is not enough to doubt all mainstream information. You also have to admit that 90% of it ultimately turns out to be correct. That is the painful part, especially when the alternative was way more cool.
Oh give me a break. "People I agree with are smart and rational and other people are dumb and don't think independently"
>You don't have to be a contrarian to reject mainstream narratives.
And yet almost nobody except contrarians do! Because while contrarianism will often lead you astray, it does give you the push to actually be skeptical and critical of most things and not just those for which it is politically convenient for you to do.
I think it's a few of the state Libertarian parties, New Hampshire in particular, that have gone hardcore pro-Putin. The national party is still treading fairly softly on that one, but they're leaning disturbingly in that direction - and being libertarians, they aren't going to override the messaging of their more zealous state affiliates.
The reason seems to be a combination of reflexive isolationism and reflexive anti-whatever-either-major-party-doesism. Both of which have been exaggerated since the Von Mises caucus's ascension within the LP leadership. "Intervention" in Ukraine, even to the extent of conspicuously providing free weapons, is something one and a half of the major parties are strongly in favor of, and it's the opposite of isolationism, so they are opposed to it out of principle. And that's an uncomfortable position to hold, unless you can convince yourself to be in favor of the inevitable outcome should they get what they want in Washington. So, they've been highly motivated to find excuses to be OK with Ukraine being at least partially conquered.
It was bad enough when we started getting right-wing tankies crawling out of the woodwork. Libertarian tankies is just sickeningly wrong, but here we are.
This is just a guess, but it seems to have more to do with their stance towards the US government than any real opinion on foreign affairs. It seems that many libertarians just have a knee-jerk opposition to any governmental policies which seem to have wide bipartisan consensus, as they seem to think such policies have greater potential for abuse due to the lack of critical examination of their possible effects.
Back when the Patriot Act passed with large bipartisan margins, many libertarians were (rightly) critical about the expansion of govt. authority. Now, when Ukraine has broad bipartisan support away from the political fringes, the same skepticism kicks in. It's hard to admit that you're opposing a policy mainly because you don't like consensus, so people invent reasons to support Russia, instead, to justify their contrarianism.
>They need a moral reason to not get involved, and will invent one as needed.
I like how you think this applies only to your enemies. If I have to hear one more time some about this is a conflict between "democracy and autocracy" or "freedom and dictatorship" or "justice vs hatred" I think I'm going to be sick.
Ukraine is by all accounts even more corrupt than Russia, and a majority of Ukrainians hold extremely illiberal views on social issues - only 14% say homosexuality should be accepted by society....the same as for Russia!
It should be enough to say invading countries is bad (when countries other than America do it...), but instead it has to be wrapped in all these goofy narratives too.
Not part of a formal alliance structure, but we're the Good Guys, the Ukrainians are the Good Guys, and the Russians are the Bad Guys. Sometimes, maybe once in a generation or two, it really is that simple.
It helps that the Ukrainians are really, really capable Good Guys, so our concern can be adequately applied from a safe distance and at little marginal cost.
Ha, I'd like to know that too. Not that I think they shouldn't be. I have my hypotheses, but I'd be happy to get more insight. Especially since many publicly doubt how long the Europeans will continue to support Ukraine, while there seems to be less doubt with the US.
Yeah right but they do not "do nothing", they accuse Zelensky of killing civilians, ruminate how blowing up a Crimean bridge is a terrorism, meanwhile zilch about all Russian atrocities. That's a charged anti-Ukrainian position, not a "Do Nothing" or "Anti-War" position.
A lot of Americans wanted to Do Nothing in 1939; they didn't need to argue that the Poles were Literally Worse than Hitler to argue their case.
And they were at least somewhat successful, whereas the Libertarians arguing for plan Do Nothing in 2022 have been and will continue to be completely unsuccessful.
The media had a less negative view of Hitler in 1939 than it does of Putin today. There certainly wasn't the sense of overwhelming moral outrage the way there is today.
I don't think you recall correctly. In 1940, first-, second-, and third-generation German-Americans made up maybe 4% of the US population, many of whom were living in America because they or their parents were conspicuously *anti*-German or at least anti-Hitler. And German-American political identity had faded significantly among the rest after World War I.
Isolationism was an American thing, not a German-American thing.
It's a dual-use infrastructure, very notoriously so. Regardless, it's just the most recent tweets I saw on the topic but there is no shortage of pro-Putin propaganda takes predating this particular bridge incident there.
Yeah. That’s what I am trying to say except that I think they decide that doing nothing is the right choice first and then look for reasons to make themselves feel better about it. Sort of the reverse of sour grapes or that psychology thing where if you do a small favor for someone you start liking them more.
>Doing Nothing is something that does not need to be justified because one side or the other or both are bad guys. Doing Nothing is justified because it's right for _your_ nation.
This can be said of any number of things, but in reality, this isn't a moral philosophy journal where the goal is to simply make a logically consistent argument for a moral position, it's political activism which involves persuading people against things they have been conditioned to believe.
Devil's advocate: given that there are a plethora of Somethings to be done but only one Nothing, shouldn't the burden of proof be on advocates of any particular Something with Nothing as the null hypothesis?
Do infohazards really exist? I originally thought so, but then eventually I came across the idea (unfortunately, I can't remember where) that the only real infohazard is the (mistaken) idea that infohazards exist, which causes people to develop paranoia and stop thinking logically. I'm also curious about how rationalists, who might be the community most dedicated to finding truth, also came up with and seem to mostly endorse the infohazard concept, which incentivizes avoidance of learning or thinking certain things.
(Please do not mention concrete examples of potential infohazards if you choose to reply to this comment; thanks).
Computers can receive pieces of information structured in such a way that upon interacting as normal with the information (through whatever input channels they normally use), they stop functioning. These are known as computer viruses, analogically to biological viruses which are also just really basic info packets combined with injection tech.
Humans are a kind of computer.
So I think there is no theoretical barrier to some (potentially long and complex) chain of information that damages humans that receive it.
But in practice I don't think anyone has invented any infohazards that work on humans yet. Cases where this seems to have happened are more like cases where a glitchy computer crashes when given say, an input of 001 instead of 1 in a certain field: the information received is not the hazard but the fragile nature of the underlying processes.
I think partial infohazards exist - memes that are dangerous to come in contact with, if you don't know the antidote.
Consider being a deeply religious person in 1930s, who believes God has a plan for everything, and then the Holocaust happens. Even learning about it is an infohazard - it can collapse your entire belief structure while leaving nothing in its place. The structure was load bearing, and now you're confused and distressed for an undefined amount of time until you figure things out again - and you may never come out on the other side and just die a cynical husk of a person. You need to either get a psychologically supporting atheist worldview or some kind of solution to theodicy that'll be satisfying for you.
A nonexhaustive list of other examples, now in the water supply: AGI risk doomerism, doomerism in general, modern neuroscience, Scott's bottomless pits of suffering (of all kinds, there's no shortage), EA, red pill ideology, black pill ideology, alt-right, identity politics.
There seems to be disagreement on what "infohazard" means, so you should perhaps be more specific.
In fiction, "infohazard" mostly seems to refer to information where you can be harmed merely by knowing the information. (This may have been popularized by the SCP Foundation?) A theoretical ideal agent shouldn't ever be directly harmed by knowing something, but humans are not ideal agents and can definitely be harmed by knowing things under certain circumstances. For example, knowing that Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet might harm you by causing you to stay up late and waste a lot of time fruitlessly arguing with them.
Nick Bostrom defined "infohazard" as info that can harm you if it *spreads*, not just from you knowing it. (I personally think this is a poor term for that concept; I can't think of any other "hazards" where exposing someone to the hazard is safe for the person being exposed but harmful to people who weren't exposed.) This arguably includes everything from the version in the previous paragraph, plus a bunch of additional stuff like weapon designs and security vulnerabilities and anything that you could be blackmailed with.
Infohazards in this sense (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R7szBR5H487XutfKy/what-are-information-hazards) definitely exist. It is exceedingly obvious, for instance, that if you discover a way for a small group of people to kill all humans, telling the world about it will lead to Aum Shinrikyo or ISIL or someone killing all humans.
Note that it's only incentivised to avoid learning an infohazard if doing so will make it easier for others to learn it (e.g. if you're doing it with a research grant that requires you to publish your findings) - the infohazard doesn't change your goals, it merely allows evil goals to be achieved more than it allows good goals to be achieved.
If you're talking instead about memetic hazards/harmful sensations, it's less obvious.
At one level, sure, obviously, because otherwise we would not have the important defense mechanism of denial. There's a ton of true information that, if fully grokked at a conscious level, apparently deranges our ability to be functional, or to serve functional roles in our tribe.
Examples that come to mind would be knowledge of our ultimate mortality, knowledge of imminent mortality when that happens, an accurate evaluation of certain areas of our physical and mental capacity where we fall signfiicantly below average, an accurate evaluation of tghe ordinariness of most of our career and marriage prospects, the genuine unflattering basis for many of our friendships and love affairs, and the accurate evaluation of the ordinary qualities and unimpressive prospects of our children.
We engage in manifold forms of denial, both individually and collectively, to avoid gaining complete conscious knowledge of any of these, and it is so ubiquitous and instinctive a practice that one would have to conclude it has over most of our history as a species served some powerfully protective function -- that without these forms of denial we would put our survival (or that of our tribe) at significantly higher risk.
Perhaps learning the truth about things too fast in life is psychologically dangerous to the learner. Even before the age of helicopter parenting, it was generally believed that kids shouldn't be exposed to some adult truths too quickly. So maybe infohazards exists in some mild form.
There are certainly beliefs/statements that can influence one negatively, even irrationally.
For example, spoilers.
For something more/less arguable, news of an airplane crash while one is making a decision on vacationing overseas. Many will weigh in that news more than is rational and cause them stress and possibly make a worse decision due to it.
Whether those can be called infohazards depend on how you define it, but often by the time you do that, you've already forced your answer to it.
> It would be surprising if there were exactly one infohazard in the world.
100% this. If the idea that "infohazards exist" can really cause humans mental harm, it would be very unlikely that it is the only idea capable of that.
I think that the level of danger of an idea depends on the listener. The ideas do not act in vacuum, but in the ecosystem of other things we already believe. Even using the example of spoilers -- they are only harmful if you actually intended to watch the movie.
To sort of build out the other side of this, I think anyone who is *legit* broken up by an infohazard is probably, for lack of a better term, a lock that will accept any key in terms of being mentally harmed. i.e. the quickest way to mentally damage someone with an infohazard is to have them start out mentally damaged and to convince them to blame Rocco.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. What do ACX readers think is the best source of information about preventing heart disease short of directly reading all the research papers, which would take a kind of lot of time?
A long-term relationship with a good physician. Even reading all the papers and understanding them would only tell you what is true on average, in research settings. What you really want to know is advice that is relevant to your own personal situation, and that means you need someone who can evaluate you objectively, learn about you, and fold that into the theoretical academic knowledge he gains from reading the papers and his clinical experience with other patients.
Declarations by the American Heart association should be treated as the opposite of strong evidence. I mean, ffs, they don't even cite any sources. Is that it? You're just making a base level appeal to a perceived authority?
Then link to the research itself! Link to a single metastudy or SOMETHING.
Declarations by the American Heart Association is NOT how science works. The American heart association can literally say anything they want. They are not bound to whatever the scientific consensus is on a topic and they can make these declarations in the absence of any consensus at all. Stop with these BS appeals to authority, especially when there is significant opposition to the validity of the heart association's claims.
I think this is wrong (and I'm not a keto guy); most nutrition research is rubbish and some of that rubbish has shaped "expert" opinion far too much. There is a persuasive case to be made that omega-6 polyunsaturated fats cause heart disease, though I don't necessarily buy this either:
What's clear is that heart disease was exceedingly rare before hyperprocessed foods (even for those that ate high saturated fat diets) so my strategy is to simply not eat hyperprocessed foods and not worry much beyond that.
I'm not trying to start a debate on this topic here, since I've been down a number of these roads already and reached the point of satiation reading nutrition studies.
> What's clear is that heart disease was exceedingly rare before hyperprocessed foods
Actually, do you have any source for good information on the history of heart disease? I thought that the concept of heart attack and stroke were relatively old ones. I had thought that cancer and heart disease are more common than they used to be mainly because they have been more resistant to elimination than infectious diseases over the past century and a half. But if you know of any efforts to estimate prevalence of heart disease for (say) 50+ year olds in past decades and centuries, and detected an increase in it, that would be good to know!
From what I've read, the quality of argument in favor of omega-6 as a contributing risk factor is comparable to that of saturated fat, but like I said before, I don't necessarily buy either explanation. Also, I don't expect the explanation to be a single cause. I'm sure that the reduction in smoking rates has contributed to the decline in CHD since the mid-20th century.
I'm not someone who believes heterodox views just for fun either--nutrition science is especially bad, however, which is why I'm more skeptical here. For example, the advice against consuming high levels of dietary cholesterol has been obviously wrong for decades, and only recently has the inertia of prior dietary guidelines been overcome.
There’s an argument for theism that has been making waves in philosophy of religion lately based on psychophysical harmony which I found interesting and that I think lots of people here would find interesting too. Good paper if you are just interested in theories of consciousness:
Probably dumb to talk about this when I'm only a third of the way through it, but it seems pretty clear that they're not really backing up their harmony claims, so, let's do this.
This argument bases itself on two claims; that sensory experience follows physical experience, and that people understand those experiences accurately. I don't believe either of those are actually true, so the entire argument falls flat.
The first assumption is that a physical experience triggers a useful cognitive response, i.e. being cut triggers running away. But if you expand that to more complex stimuli, it doesn't hold up. People avoid pain, until it's part of a competition; then they don't back down even when they start bleeding. I distinctly remember resting my hand on an electric fence, specifically because I'd found a part of my hand that didn't feel pain from the shock. And there's no universal direction; if an unknown person gives themselves a goal and runs into trouble with it, we can't accurately predict whether they'll press on or give up, even if we know exactly what the goal and trouble is. Sometimes it's flat counterintuitive; exercise causes pain, but makes you stronger. Plus, reactions to physical stimulus change with exhaustion or other mind-altering experiences. If the matchup is the argument for theism, and the matchup stops matching up when we're tired, does that mean God gets weaker when we stay up late?
The second, that a person accurately assesses the phenomena happening to them, is more flawed. They talk about seeing a red and round thing and trusting there's a red and round thing to be seen, but that ignores optical illusions. I see a piece of cloth out of the corner of my eye, and my brain tells me it's a human. Fifty times it tells me that, when I've already proven it's just a piece of cloth. Then the more complex emotional states defy proper description. My stomach starts rumbling and making noise, and I have NO IDEA what it wants; it could be multiple contradictory causes. I remember asking a girl out once, only to instantly realize that wasn't the right emotion once I heard myself put the thought to words. Twenty years later, I STILL don't know what emotion that actually was, just that it wasn't romantic.
They spend a lot of time talking about how their theory survives integration with other theories, but they don't spend nearly enough time defending their inital assumptions.
Semi-tangentially, arguments like this one, trying to argue that certain facts prove the existence of God, will never be more than academic exercises. If a deity is subservient to logic and human comprehension, then the deity has no function; the controlling logic and human comprehension survive just as easily without them. The value of science is its predictive power; what's the predictive power here?
One of the most influential Bible verses to me is 1 Corinthians 2:4-5. "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power." If you want to convince people to believe in God, you first have to convince them that God is not redundant. Not that he fits into a logical framework, but that he exceeds one. If you want to convince people to actually believe in God, you've got to show them divine intervention, and the less logically predictable the better.
Wow, that was incredibly dense. They assume a particular form of dualism, and derive their argument from there. I think their assumptions face the same challenge as winding up with a /0 in your equation: you can basically derive anything at that point.
Later, they claim this reliance on dualism isn’t actually needed. As far as I can tell, this is the point where *that* claim falls off the rails:
“At best, functionalism implies that being in pain = F only when taken in conjunction with a posteriori facts about psycho-functional correlations. Now, if we treated this information as part of background knowledge, then P(harmony|atheism & functionalism) would be equal to 1. But, again, it is crucial to the original argument that information about psycho-functional correlations is not treated as part of our background knowledge.”
I think this is basically saying: if we ignored that evolution built bio-mechanisms for fitness reasons, it’s you should accept it’s surprising that getting cut causes pain! Thus, even if you’re non-dualist you should expect God did the fine tuning to make those two phenomena align!
I feel…. 40% confident I had any idea what they were saying.
I think I'm on the same page as you. Physicalism argues, basically, that there's nothing that needs explaining about the harmony between mind and body, because "mind" isn't a separate thing. If you feel pain and go "aieee!", that's not a surprising correlation, because all the word "pain" means is "that thing where you go 'aieee!'"
Their reply is that physicalism doesn't necessarily explain harmony because, without prior knowledge of what the universe is like, all it really asserts is "a qualia is identical to *some* sort of physical event." "Pain" could be "the thing where you go 'aiee!'", or it could be "the thing where you sing the national anthem," but we live in a universe where it's the first one, and that seems much more harmonious than the alternatives.
And to me that seems to be circular - we *defined* the word "pain" based on our observations of the universe. If painful events didn't lead to aversive actions like going "aiee!" and flinching, we wouldn't have a word for it, or the word wouldn't mean what it does today. Their argument only works if "pain" is some sort of fundamental thing that exists independently of physical correlates, but that's exactly the sort of assumption physicalism doesn't let you make.
As far as I can tell, this is just a version of the cosmological argument ("the universe is like this, theism is the best explanation for the universe being like this, therefore theism"), combined with an account of cosmology ("psychophysical harmony") that many philosophers would reject. So it is open both to standard critiques of the cosmological argument (roughly speaking, that you can't legitimately claim to have an explanation inside a black box, even if you call the black box "God"), and also to further critiques based on its contestable theory of mind. So I can't see why this should be "making waves." Is there something I'm missing?
It's not a version of a cosmological argument, but rather a fine-tuning argument. Cosmological arguments generally have to do with the facts of the universe existing at all. Fine-tuning arguments have more to do with the nature of the universe as it exists.
I tend think there are some fine-tuning arguments which, if their premises truly hold up, would be fairly resistant to 'black-box' critiques, but obviously this is a contentious subject.
Oh, I was thinking those were two halves of the paper. I guess the first one's an old deleted version or something. So, second link works and that explains it.
I lost three pregnancies and found it frustrating that secular perspectives on fetal/infant loss are largely missing from the conversation. A lot of support uses alienating language like ‘angel babies.’ This compounds the isolation of what is already a lonely grief.
It is miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss awareness week. In the latest episode of Bart Campolo’s Humanize Me podcast (https://anchor.fm/humanizeme/episodes/715-A-listeners-abortion-story-e1olric), he has a conversation with a couple who suffered a miscarriage and a medically needed abortion. I wanted to share this in case anyone else needs to know that they aren’t alone. And please share the podcast. It has a compassionate and nuanced discussion on abortion that is also very timely.
That is a very hard thing, and for what it's worth I don't think it's uncommon at all, although people tend not to talk about it -- I don't really know why. I have 4 children but my wife was pregnant 6 times, although in both cases the child was lost early, in one case with a very heavy period, in the other with a D&C because she was a 3 months along when he died. We still remember on the original birthdates, but we don't talk about it with anyone else.
There are a lot of women friends and family here who have miscarried, most of whom went on to have healthy children later on. Medical advancements make them less dangerous than in the olden days but it's still not rare. They're also not prohibitive; it's not a sign it's going to keep happening or anything.
I’m the sequences, Yudkowsky’s argument against zombies (as I understood it) is that a universe “talk about consciousness” without actual consciousness to explain it, would be astronomically unlikely.
It occurs to me that something similar can be said about free will. “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely. Any thoughts?
There's a position on consciousness called illusionism, whose proponents claim to be able to explain and predict why people talk about phenomenal consciousness despite its non existence.
Why not accept both? One problem is that illusionist/sceptical arguments can be made about anything, but something must exist.
Free will is an incorrect generalization from "I cannot predict my decisions" (true) to "it is impossible *in principle* to predict my decisions, even if you perfectly knew the positions of all particles in the universe" (false).
The motivation behind that debate is mostly theological, not scientific. To put it simply, if your decisions are determined by the positions of the particles in the universe, and those particles were created by an omnipotent and omniscient God... then it follows logically that all your sins are a necessary consequence of how God created the universe you were born in. But some religions want to have a omnipotent and omniscient creator who is simultaneously somehow not responsible at all for anything bad that happens within the creation. (Kinda like having a mathematician who writes "2+2=" on the blackboard, and when a student adds "4", the mathematician will act surprised and say "but that is absolutely not what I had in mind" and blame the student for causing the result to be 4.) So the mistaken idea of "free will" serves as a theological excuse: yes, the God indeed has created all particles in Adam's and Eve's bodies, and was omniscient enough to know exactly what will happen as a consequence, and yet if Adam and Eve eat an apple, God definitely didn't want that to happen!
> “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely.
Nope, people making an incorrect generalization happens all the time. Also, it is quite natural to believe that something is impossible in principle, when it obviously is impossible in practice.
The introspective sense of free will could be an illusion, but so could a lot of things. If libertarian free will is false because the universe is deterministic, that would be a reason for thinking the sense of free will is actually and not just possibly an illusion. To establish that determinism is true, you need to study the universe via physics, not just use a psychological argument. Yudkowsky's argument, for physical determinism is presumably his argument for MWI, so his argument against free will stands or falls by that.
The illusionist explanation for the sense of free will is one possible explanation, but not the only one. Two other possibilities are: we believe we have free will, in the same way we have believe we have noses, because we actually do; and we believe the right thing for the wrong reason, so that our inability to predict our actions makes us think we have free will, and lack of strict causal determinism means we do!
Is there even a logically coherent definition of what a "free will" would be? Seems to me that free will requires two mutually contradictory properties:
1) It must be caused by me -- for whatever definition of "me" (including non-materialistic definitions, such as caused by my soul which exists independently of my atoms). For example, if your left hand started moved completely randomly, you probably wouldn't call it free will... or maybe it would be the hand's free will but not yours. If someone's hands start shaking because of Alzheimer, philosophers typically do not say that the person's free will has thereby increased. So the arguments by possible true randomness in quantum physics are just a red herring.
2) It must not be caused at all -- otherwise it is not free.
This is the actual reason why there is no such thing as free will. Because it is not even logically coherent.
Only after we have established this, there remains the question "so why do people insist that they have this nonsense"? Because people do, and if we couldn't answer this, then we obviously missed something. And the answer is that they sense the decisions as made by themselves, but in a way they cannot fully predict, so feels like "yeah, it is random, but the randomness is somehow me".
The answers "we say so because it is true" and "we say so for the wrong reason, but it is true nonetheless" would be possible if there was a logically coherent definition of free will. But there is none.
If A causes B, and B causes C, does it mean that "A determines C"? If B is internal but C is external, does it mean that "A is determined by external factors"?
The dichotomy between internal and external only makes sense in short term. (Which explains why it feels meaningful.) From the long-term perspective, I did not exist at some moment in the past, which means that I am caused by the "external factors" myself... and therefore, indirectly, everything that I do.
(A possible loophole is if you believe that humans have souls that have existed infinitely long in the past. In such case, there could be a causal chain that never came from outside.)
"If A causes B, and B causes C, does it mean that "A determines C"
Are you asking about transitivity, or about the causation/determination distinction?
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: "An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn't raise it to certainty". Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the "causes" in "smoking causes cancer" must mean "increased the risk of".
"From the long-term perspective, I did not exist at some moment in the past, which means that I am caused by the "external factors" myself... and therefore, indirectly, everything that I do."
>It occurs to me that something similar can be said about free will. “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely.
Not at all. Talk about free will arises from the experienced sense of having free will. Talk about consciousness in zombies would arise independently of conscious experience. That's the difference.
What you actually mean is not that talk about free will without free will is strange - you mean that having the experience of free will in the absence of free will is strange(/unlikely). I don't see why this is the case. Let's assume that everything your body does follows on from the state of your body the moment prior - why does this necessarily preclude the experience of free will?
I think the experience of free will is fairly trivially a delusion. You raise your arm shortly after you experience the intention of raising your arm, but you cannot possibly account for where this intention (or at the most, the desire to raise your hand that led to your intention to raise it) comes from. For "you" (some conscious, experiencing "self" that somehow isn't synonymous with concscious experience itself) to have "caused" the thought that led to your arm being raised would require you to have thought about a thought before you thought about it. Maybe you had some thought that itself led to the thought of raising your hand, but where did *that* thought come from? It simply yields an infinite regress.
It isn't how thought works. Thoughts simply arise in consciousness and there's no way of accounting for how they arose. Often they'll be related to the thoughts you had a moment prior, but this is what you would expect a brain capable of thinking to do. But it's not coherent to say that something experiencing a thought is able to put those thoughts into experience. The experiecning self can only experience - any thought that you believe is the cause of your actions must itself have been caused by something the experiencing self could not have "caused".
"I think the experience of free will is fairly trivially a delusion. You raise your arm shortly after you experience the intention of raising your arm, but you cannot possibly account for where this intention (or at the most, the desire to raise your hand that led to your intention to raise it) comes from. For "you" (some conscious, experiencing "self" that somehow isn't synonymous with concscious experience itself) to have "caused" the thought that led to your arm being raised would require you to have thought about a thought before you thought about it. Maybe you had some thought that itself led to the thought of raising your hand, but where did *that* thought come from? It simply yields an infinite regress. "
Sam.Harris's argument, which you are repeating here , depends on two very debatable assumptions.
One about selfhood, that the self is the conscious mind only.
And a claim about selfhood, that the self is the conscious mind only;.
And that control means deciding something in advance;.
As to selfhood,:-
Nothing in an ordinary persons subjective experience suggests that.
Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get eyes to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker or attend football matches if I am a football hater. They are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
From a neuroscientific perspective , it would be bizarre to regard the conscious mind as the beginning and end of the mind, because so much more is done by the unconscious. (Although Harris is a neuroscientist, his claim about selfhood s based on appeal to what "most people think").
I am only consciously aware of a small part of my mental content at one time. The contents of the subconscious are the potential contents of the conscious.
Of course, to say that my unconscious mind is most of my mind is not quite to say that it is part of my self. But its not as if the conscious mind has an entirely passive relationship to the subconscious. ..the conscious mind would be a useless addendum if it did. It l is not as if the unconscious is independent of the conscious mind. Habits and reflexes can be learned with conscious effort and then performed "on autopilot". That's how people drive, play sports and.musical instruments etc. The conscious mind is too slow to.perform such behaviours, and they are not instinctive either, so they are trained reflexes. There is a two way causal relationship between The unconscious and the conscious mind: the unconscious mind s prompts the conscious mind , and the conscious mind trains the unconscious.
The conscious is the rider, the unconscious, the elephant. Psychology regards most of our behaviour as stemming from the subconscious, so if "my" subconscious mind is not "me" , I'm under the control of some alien entity most of the time. But psychology doesn't deny the conscious mind any role, either.
As to control:-
Can I control my thoughts? It all depends on what "control" means. A libertarian doesn't have to agree with a determinist about that, either. I can't decide, in advance, exactly what my thoughts are going to be ...that would be somewhere between pointless and impossible. But,according to my own subjective experience, I (my conscious mind) am not compelled to act on every passing thought. Why shouldn't the inability to refrain from acting in passing impulses be a notion of control that could be the basis for a scientifically acceptable theory of free will?
The issue of conscious control over decision making is interesting and important as well, but it is only one third of the whole issue.
Who defines free will as the ability to think what you're going to think before you've thought it? That is only one notion of "compelled". Mentally healthy people are not compelled by every passing thought . Meditation might show you that thoughts arise unbidden, but if you were compelled to act on unbidden thoughts, you would not be able to stay in the cushion long enough to meditate.
Here is some neuroscience:-
"How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles."
Why couldn't control consist of refraining, vetoing, or filtering?
We do have conscious control, because deliberately think about specific things. Indeed, deliberate, and conscious thinking is what we mean by thinking as opposed to daydreaming or whatever. The fact that thoughts just pop into your head when you are sitting in meditation reflects the fact that you are not actively trying to do anything in particular. But you still make a conscious choice to meditate.
Insert the obvious joke about how the Air Force isn't really a military organization.
Which is only half true; the parts that are directly involved in operating aircraft or commanding the people who operate aircraft, are pretty solidly military. But I've spent most of my career working alongside Air Force (and now Space Force) officers on the acquisitions and R&D side, which is at least as big as the flying-airplanes side, and I can't see much difference between an Air Force officer and an Air Force civil servant in that context. Well, the more restrictive dress code, obviously.
So one important question is, what do you envision yourself doing in the Air Force?
I’d say either lean into the war fighting roles like an enlisted Ranger or 18X contract or join the Coast Guard where you’ll get a lot of operational reps with a solid mission. Outside of the JTAC/PJ community I think USAF is pretty lame and soft.
How does the Russian invasion end without, as Joe Biden called it, "armageddon"? If it's so likely that Russia are willing to use Nuclear weapons (or something equally scary), what's the path towards the war ending where nukes aren't used? Zelesnky is unwilling to make even a token effort of a concession towards Russia to end the war and has gone so far to call for a pre-emptive western strike on Russia. If Biden is correct about Russia, what possible path is there to the war ending without nukes flying?
It's like Biden and other Zelensky-apologists understand Putin isn't going to just cut his losses and accept defeat, and yet they're deathly committed to Putin feeling like he has no options other than nukes or something else drastic.
We don't know that Zelensky won't make any concessions. At the moment, his side is winning, so it is not in his interest to show a weak negotiating position. In the first few days of the war, when things looked grim for Ukraine, he sounded much more open to various concessions.
I don't know what Putin's thought process is, but for all we know, he could declare Ukraine "denazified" or even "demilitarized" and leave. After all, objectively false, and even internally contradictory messaging is a hallmark of the Putin regime.
He could point to the defeat of the Azov regiment as the "denazification," and the heavy Ukrainian casualties as the "demilitarization," even without really making anything up.
For little cost, Ukraine could also potentially agree to things relating to Russian language TV, education, etc., which could be spun as the "liberation of the oppressed Russian people of the Donbas."
Or Putin could declare Russia the victim of Russian backstabbers who betrayed him and the country, and increase repression of rivals.
>We don't know that Zelensky won't make any concessions.
He literally wants more territory than what he had before the war started and thinks the west invading Russia is better than Russia getting away with some Ukrainian territory.
I think it's correct to say that the war didn't start now, but in 2014. So if Zelensky wants (to keep) all territory that belonged to Ukraine at the time of the Budapest Memorandum, technically I'd say fair enough. Practically, it's the question whether this should be declared the only acceptable outcome. And at what price.
No, not "fair enough". He's literally telling us that Russia is going to nuke Ukraine if we don't attack Russia and give Ukraine tens of billions of dollars more worth of equipment and continue to eat the cost of these sanctions. This clown owes his existence to the west, and he wants us to risk world war 3 so he can have more power. Either he's using these lies to emotionally blackmail the west into giving Ukraine even more, or he's being truthful and is actually willing to risk WW3 so he can control more territory.
>he could declare Ukraine "denazified" or even "demilitarized" and leave.
That was the hope, maybe with some minor territorial gains, in spring. But now there has been a 'partial mobalization' and they have just formally internalized four regions and celebrated the fact, with Putin signing this. How do you think they just say, ups probably a formal mistake, they are not ours after all?
>Zelensky says he won't negotiate with Putin (and why should he?)
Because he's literally telling us that Putin is getting ready to nuke Ukraine!
Either he's a complete and total liar (and attempting to basically start world war 3 with these lies), or he thinks risking nuclear war is worth is to avoid losing some unimportant territory.
It currently looks like if Putin will have to leave office, it might well be by the hands of the hawks rather than the doves. My reading / listening of Russian sources is (very) limited, but it seems to me the biggest criticism - and currently the only criticism potentially dangerous to Putin - comes from a place of: why is our military performing so weakly, why are we not fighting more brutally, and why are we not using more of our (destructive) options?
Unfortunately I think NATO will be stupid enough to accept Ukraine. Even though its like an insurance company giving a policy to somebody about to start years of expensive cancer treatment.
The point of NATO is, taking even the naive view of the organization, to enhance the national security of NATO members. Bringing Ukraine into NATO massively jeopardizes the safety interests of NATO members in the same way taking on a seriously ill customers jeopardizes the business model of insurance companies.
They can't join NATO as long as the conflict is not settled. That's a rule, but what's more important, NATO members really don't want to directly fight Russia over Ukraine.
Also, it needs an unanimous decision. Even Sweden and Finland experienced problems with this, although their admission was much less disputed.
Strange things happen, but this one is very unlikely and building a strategy on the assumption of it happening would be hazardous.
"Ceding whatever territory we couldn't get back to Russia as a precondition to joining NATO" probably also goes down better than "ceding territory to Russia in exchange for a Russian promise to stop and hoping they don't just try again later."
That might be one of the "negotiated settlement where both sides can claim victory" offramps - Ukraine can tout it's shiny new NATO membership, Russia can point to the newly acquired territory, and Putin can leverage his media control to push a new narrative that Ukraine in NATO isn't so scary now that the Donbas +whatever is now securely in Russian hands.
Not saying that's a "will happen," or even a "likely," just a "realm of possibility" thing.
I don't quite know how this nuclear meme originated: some think it's a translation error, others that it's a repetition of the propaganda around Saddam Hussein in 2002, where Iraq was accused of having nuclear weapons as a way of mobilising public, opinion in the West. In Europe, at least, publics are becoming increasingly apathetic about the war, and may need to be revved up again. Use of nuclear weapons would be pointless and counter-productive for Russia, not least because an important part of the Russian strategic plan is to cultivate public and elite opinion in Third World countries. That's not to say that you won't find politicians or pundits in Moscow making these noises: those who follow social media and Russian TV closely report widespread anger at the slow progress of the operation, and demands for Russia to go much faster and to take the gloves off. There's a State Security Council meeting today to consider a response to the attack on the bridge in Crimea, and there's apparently widespread speculation that public opinion will eventually force the government to decide to take out the Ukrainian infrastructure, which has so far been largely left alone.
Remember that there are two distinct wars being fought here. The Russians are fighting a war of attrition, to destroy Ukrainian forces. Ukraine/The West is fighting a war for territory. Ukraine's arsenal at the beginning of the war - the most powerful in Europe - is essentially destroyed. Recent attacks have been made with new large forces (some reports say up to ten brigades) equipped with former-WP weapons from countries like Poland, and trained by NATO. Quite a lot about these attacks has appeared in the western media, some of whom have correspondents there, and it's clear from the Ukrainians themselves that these attacks were made without air cover, with little artillery preparation, and across open terrain with no cover. The Ukrainians attempted to identify areas where there were very few Russian troops, and conduct what were effectively human wave attacks to overwhelm them. The Russians certainly took casualties, but because they aren't interested in the control of terrain as such, their troops were told to retreat rather than suffer unnecessary casualties to hold ground. Ukrainian sources talking to the western media have acknowledged that casualties have been extremely heavy. There is now talk of a third and last offensive, making use of Ukraine's large numerical superiority in troops, and with such armoured vehicles as they still have left. The objective is purely political: to cause confusion and dismay in Moscow such that the current government is forced to resign and a new one, for some reason, decides to surrender and leave Ukraine. In reality, any conceivable future Russian government would be such more hawkish than the preset one.
You can follow all these manoeuvres on liveuamaps.com, a semi-official pro-ukrainian site based in the US. You'll also see that the Russians are stepping up their offensive around Bakhmut, which is the key to the last organised line of Ukrainian defences built since 2014. The Ukrainians have told the western media that the situation is very "difficult" there, which means it will soon fall.
In an attrition war (such as occurred in Europe between 1916-18) the side with the greater capacity and potential wins. The Ukrainians operated Russian equipment, and they cannot now get any more, nor spares nor ammunition. They will run out in a defined period of time. The West has sent small numbers of artillery pieces and ammunition, but western production rates are very low, and US officials have been briefing that there is little now left to send. The bottom of the barrel is now being scraped: a few dozen T-55s from Slovakia and a few dozen light armoured vehicles from Australia, for example. The Ukrainians have now asked for modern western tanks such as the M-1 and Leopard 2, but these would take years to deliver and train crews and support personnel on.
Assuming that the upcoming attack fails to produce the expected result, but leads to an intensification of the war, the Ukrainians will have little left. At that point, I would worry that Zelensky will start talking about nuclear weapons again, which I imagine the West is desperately trying to point him away from.
A huge chunk of Russia's arsenal, is now part of Ukraine's arsenal. Last time I checked, Ukraine had *more* operational main battle tanks than they did at the start of the war, and about half of that was due to the famous Ukrainian Tractor Corps.
Weren't you already making these claims about Ukraine being exhausted and out of arms three-four months ago, long before Kharkiv? I swear I remember you running this same ludicrously pessimistic line of argument ages ago.
I'm just quoting what the Ukrainians have been telling the western media. In the summer, the forces the Ukrainians had started the war with had largely been used up. As a result of a massive programme of re-equipping and retraining, they have been able to launch the latest set of attacks, but when that equipment is used up, there is very little more on offer. NATO and the US have made it clear that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel already. I have no idea when the war will end, but attrition wars all follow a similar pattern.
This is getting to be piling on now, but I meant to make this reply earlier and just forgot about it, so I'll post it anyway with the caveat that I don't want to bludgeon you:
According to Wikipedia, the Swedish air force alone has 94 operational fighter jets; they have sent zero fighter jets to Ukraine thus far. This is an arbitrary example of one part of one small nation's resources. In other words, Western countries are by no means scraping the bottom of the barrel of *what they have*, they're just reluctant to fork over any more of their defense supply in case there's a war and they need those guns themselves. But as Ukraine drags on and it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine *is* the long-awaited war, the purse strings slacken, simply and naturally.
Nobody doubts that western countries have western weaponry that they could theoretically send to Ukraine. The problems are essentially ones of practicality and timescale, and these are starting to be made public by western governments briefing the media, and by the regular Pentagon background briefings. That's where I've been getting most of my information from. But they have almost nothing left that they can (a) send quickly (b) can be used on the battlefield quickly and (c) would be effective in a modern high-intensity conflict. Various western governments have begun to accept this publicly. Money, as such, is not the point if you have nothing to buy.
Your example of aircraft: if you think of something like the Grippen, you'd have to send a considerable number - let's say 36 - to have an operational force. You'd have to collect that number (at least to allow for failures in training) of Ukrainian fast-jet pilots, already with experience, and take them to a neutral country, and give them six months' training. Western aircraft are quite different in concept and in operational from Soviet/Russian ones, and designed to do different things. Let's say that was three squadrons. A modern air force squadron consists of anything from 100-150 personnel, most of them skilled tradesmen. You'd also therefore have to find at least 3-400 skilled engineering tradesmen and teach them to maintain equipment that was totally different to anything they had worked on before, and armourers who could learn how to load and maintain advanced weapons. The alternative, which seems to be happening with ground equipment such as howitzers, is to set up repair facilities in Poland, manned by NATO personnel. You can't do that with aircraft, because they require so much first-line maintenance after every flight, not to mention battle damage. At that point, you would return to Ukraine to operate out of an air base which would have to be protected from attack, and then fly out in one of the densest air defence environments in history. So at the end of a year, you might have an additional operational capability. How much difference it would make would depend on the situation.
If the conflict in Ukraine really does drag on for years, then something of this kind might happen, but bear in mind that the West operates a huge variety of equipment, and it's next to impossible, for example, to put an air force together from dribs and drabs from different countries, all with special training, ground equipment and weapons. Most people don't realise how low stocks and inventories of western forces are: there was a recent Business Insider story suggesting that Germany only has two days' stocks of ammunition for its Army. Few countries these days invest in more than a week's stocks. (Even in the Cold War it was only thirty days). And these stocks can't be replaced quickly: the US currently manufactures 12,000 rounds of 155 ammunition per year, and the Pentagon has said that they are doing a market survey to see whether that could be increased to 36,000 in a few years' time. Meanwhile the Ukrainians say they are firing 6-10,000 rounds of ammunition *a day.* Modern combat aircraft are produced at the lowest rate possible consistent with keeping factories open: the French Rafale is produced at the rate of one per month, and in only one factory.
None of this is, or should be, a surprise, if you follow these things or have practical experience of them. It's just that most people (including politicians) have not adjusted to the massive changes in defence production and force structures in the last thirty years. I've written several times about these industrial and operational constraints in my Substack essays. Essentially, the West has jettisoned the large and powerful armed forces of the Cold War, and the industrial base that went with them. It has optimised its procurement strategies for very small numbers of high-performance equipment for use in wars like Afghanistan and Mali, and has reconfigured its ground forces towards light infantry. Russia and Ukraine have largely retained Cold War structures and concepts, albeit at a reduced scale, and Russia has retained a substantial defence industry turning out large numbers of weapons suitable for intensive land-air operations. This is what you'd expect of a continental power. As a result, re-arming Ukraine to its January 2022 levels of capability would take years at best, and may not even be practically possible.
The Russians made it clear at the start that their objective was the destruction of Ukrainian military capability, not the capture of terrain. That's what "demilitarisation" meant. At a minimum, therefore, the West would need to supply equipment and ammunition, and generate trained forces, faster than they were used up in combat. Industrially, I have grave doubts that that's even possible.
"The Russians made it clear at the start that their objective was the destruction of Ukrainian military capability, not the capture of terrain. "
That makes no sense. If they don't excert political control over Ukraine, Ukraine will rebuild. And why match on the capital, if you dont want political control?
I think it's more a question of which barrels you scrape. Ukraine uses mostly Soviet weaponry, and NATO doesn't have a lot of that on hand, just whatever the former Warsaw Pact nations have, so that's starting to run out. But there's a lot of NATO kit we could potentially send, it's just a question of how quickly we can train them to use it and how well their supply lines can handle the extra types of ammo and equipment.
> NATO and the US have made it clear that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel already.
In my understanding NATO and US have just reinforced the message that they will support UKR however long it takes. (Whether they'll do this is sth. different.)
Yep, I remember how Aurelien confidently predicted that Ukraine has no more offensive power anymore :-). But in fairness, many Ukraine-optimists are even more overconfident.
War is an uncertain enterprise with many surprises, so confident predictions are very likely to be wrong.
I just don't understand what some kind of Frenchie gets out of blatantly counterfactual wishful thinking that Ukraine will lose and Russia will win. Does he think the Russo-French Alliance is still alive and well or something? Is it just residual USA-hate because nobody let him know we don't call still them freedom fries anymore?
Dammit, I was convinced you were a particularly feisty Finn - that spelling of 'Moskova', that specific interest in Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Królewiec and St. Pete's...
Turns out you're just another American. I'm disappointed. If I can't even guess confidently at the present, what hope shall I ever have of predicting the future?
Those were just the obvious examples of regions, blathering about the division of Dagestan seemed both more abstruse and less relevant to European geopolitics.
This is a deliberately anonymous account with a spoofed email, which I renew periodically anyway as I flush my cookies. I am also thoroughly unbothered by the prospect of an IP ban.
EDIT: Also, I'm genuinely curious what motivates him, I'm not just trying to dunk. If that were the case, I can dunk harder.
The Russians just are not, full stop, going to use nukes. The threats are 100% noise, the rattling of an empty can. Firstly because actually using them would provide absolutely no benefit for the war (since retaliation would be massive to reinforce the nuclear taboo), secondly because throwing a nuke is basically guaranteed to end with Putin himself dead in the near term one way or another, and thirdly because, quite simply, the nukes are more useful to him undropped.
Why has NATO not joined the conflict actively? In large part to avoid escalation. If Putin drops a nuke, that means escalating maximally and there's no longer any reason for NATO to stay out: he'll have drawn himself into a full-scale war with the entire west, which he can't possibly win (c.f. he can't beat Ukraine wielding our leftovers). For this reason, Putin can't possibly *use* the nukes, but he hopes, in vain, that saber-rattling with them will scare us off: he's desperate and flailing, he genuinely has no better strategy right now than trying grim, empty threats to get us to back off. In practice, what does he do? Not nukes, but conventional terror bombing of civilians, as we saw this morning. This will continue to be the case indefinitely. The nukes are not and will never be a real threat.
EDIT: Gah, posted by accident when I wasn't even half finished.
As people have already remarked, it's rather murky what Zelensky actually meant with his remark about pre-emptive strikes and his own staff are insisting the "hit Russian territory militarily" interpretation is a Russian canard, and he was talking about how harsher sanctions ought to have been in place against Russia long ago to prevent this sort of adventurism. Either way I find it hard to blame him for any angry/anti-Russian shit he says; it's his civilians getting shredded, after all. I'd be fuming too, particularly if I'd been asking for anti-air and no-fly zones for more than half a year and got fuck one for my trouble. Similarly, he has my blessing to be more worried than average about the potential of a nuclear strike since it's his capital that will get turned into radioactive dust if one *did* materialize, *and* in some sense he'll bear part-responsibility, or feel himself to. A bit harder to stay objective about the odds when you're that guy. The maximum cynicism I'm prepared to embrace is that he knows very well that no nukes are forthcoming but figures he can milk it for more weapons, which in fairness he really can't have too many of, plus the Germans at least are being extremely dodgy about forking out, so he might very well want to twist some arms as hard as he can.
Biden I think is doing his best to A, curtail the amount of what he sees as inherently dangerous nuclear rhetoric (e.g. just putting it on the table speculatively might encourage someone else to do some shit in the future, seems to be his thinking), and B, satisfy various factions of his own party for domestic reasons. Frankly, my first impression about that "near Armageddon" remark was that it was a senior moment, some sort of flashback from the 1960s he was having. In hindsight I think the above, though.
> Either way I find it hard to blame him for any angry/anti-Russian shit he says; it's his civilians getting shredded, after all.
Yes, his civllians are getting shredded, and he's demanding to control MORE territory than he did before the invasion before he's even willing to discuss a peace deal. He cares more about his own power than he does his civilians. If his civilians getting killed is so terrible, then just give us your precious territory so Russia will leave.
>I'd be fuming too, particularly if I'd been asking for anti-air and no-fly zones for more than half a year and got fuck one for my trouble.
As has been explained multiple times already ON THIS BLOG, a no fly-zone is a declaration of war with Russia. We will be shooting down Russian planes, potentially in Russian air space. This guy is angry because we aren't willing to start world war 3 with Russia to save them? Who the fuck does this guy think he is? Why are we throwing ourselves onto the knife to save him?
This guy literally owes his continued existence to the west, and instead of showing a modicum of gratitude, he just demands more more more, as if we haven't sacrificed enough already for a country we have no connection to whatsoever. he wants us to risk global thermonuclear war to save ukraine, and HE'S the angry one? Give me a break.
>Similarly, he has my blessing to be more worried than average about the potential of a nuclear strike since it's his capital that will get turned into radioactive dust if one *did* materialize, *and* in some sense he'll bear part-responsibility, or feel himself to. A bit harder to stay objective about the odds when you're that guy.
If this is true, he should be willing to make grave sacrifices to end the war as soon as possible. Instead, he demands MORE territory than what he had before the invasion. If he's really that worried, he should be happy to never have anything to do with Crimea again. Instead, he think that nuclear war is a worthy risk to take in order to get back Crimea and the eastern territories.
>The maximum cynicism I'm prepared to embrace is that he knows very well that no nukes are forthcoming but figures he can milk it for more weapons, which in fairness he really can't have too many of, plus the Germans at least are being extremely dodgy about forking out, so he might very well want to twist some arms as hard as he can.
So to be clear, spending hundreds of billions of dollars for strangers we have no connection to isn't enough, and we should stand by why we use nuclear blackmail to be milked for even more?
>Biden I think is doing his best to A, curtail the amount of what he sees as inherently dangerous nuclear rhetoric (e.g. just putting it on the table speculatively might encourage someone else to do some shit in the future, seems to be his thinking)
is this a joke? He is literally warning about ARMAGEDDON.
>Frankly, my first impression about that "near Armageddon" remark was that it was a senior moment, some sort of flashback from the 1960s he was having. In hindsight I think the above, though.
Oh boy, by your own admission we have a senile clown at the helm of a precarious international situation. What could go wrong?
I'm gonna level with you: you seem to have a strong emotional attachment to a perspective on this conflict which is thoroughly abhorrent to me. I'm going to tap out here for everybody's sake.
Nuking anything right now ends with NATO tanks in Moscow at best and global thermonuclear war at worst. There is no possible turn of events where Putin gets anything out of this, and actually ordering a nuclear strike might trigger a coup by people who are already anxious about the way things are going.
>Nuking anything right now ends with NATO tanks in Moscow at best and global thermonuclear war at worst.
Really? We're going to have millions of our people killed and our biggest cities destroyed because Putin used a small nuke in some eastern euopean country? There's no hope left for this world if this is the bone-headed thinking of anyone in power in the west.
You either haven't had the experience of being shaken down for your pocket money by bullies in grade school, or you forgot. They don't start with asking for all of your money and portable goods. They start by cadging you for a dollar and pretend that's all they want, a dollar. If once you give in on that - after all, why not let the guy have a dollar? it's not much, maybe the guy and his buddies genuinely need it, and you don't want to risk being beaten up for a measly dollar - they up the ante repeatedly, and if at some point you begin resisting, your previous compliance will be a huge liability. Girls are pressured into sex the same way.
>> actually ordering a nuclear strike might trigger a coup by people who are already anxious about the way things are going.
I think this is sometimes a forgotten factor in the nuclear equation. I see a lot of "sure, a nuclear strike is terrible on balance for *Russia* but if they're backed into a corner it may be the only thing a desperate *Russian Leadership* sees as a possible hail mary that could turn things around. "Terrible for the country" can still be on the table if it's "terrible for the country but good for Putin."
But Russian Leadership's nuclear thinking also has to account for the way "launch this nuke - I know it really harms the country overall but it's my only chance at protecting my personal position" may be more likely to *trigger* the very regime change they are worried about than it would be to prevent it by meaningfully altering the course of the war.
Can you elaborate? Not sure what you're referring to. Ive seen a lot of advocacy on his part for NATO or the US or the West to *prevent* the Russians from using nuclear weapons, but i haven't seen any definitive quotes from Zelinsky that "Russia is going to use nuclear weapons" or the like, and even if he did say something like that itd be purely speculative seeing as he's the president of Ukraine not Russia - and I'd expect any audience with two brain cells to understand it as such.
Doesn't even need to factor in what will happen to the country at large. "This will give me personally a 10% chance to turn my fortunes around, but the remaining 90% outcome is all the fifteen people in this room dying absolutely grisly deaths one way or another" will look like a pretty shit proposition just in that limited circle. Nobody's that fucking loyal.
Agree. Absolutely not a card to bet on - just a factor in any Russian nuclear thinking that I thought worthy of emphasis since I hadn't seen it mentioned until now.
I haven't tried to look up or remember more clearly but at some point Russia threatened to nuke countries that sent weapons to Ukraine, everyone sent weapons anyway and nobody got nuked, then the story was that they would nuke anyone who sent tanks. Well, Czechia sent tanks and didn't get nuked, then Poland sent tanks and didn't get nuked, etc. Of course, they implied they would nuke Ukraine if they ever attacked the Kerch bridge, well now it's been three days and I see no nukes. I think at some point they were going to nuke Finland in case NATO application was sent, well nothing has happened and it's been months. My point is that even without fully believing in your arguments, just looking at the history of nuke threats that always have been a bluff should tell you that Russia is not actually willing to use nukes. Putin saying "I am not bluffing" is not evidence of it not being a bluff. If Russia says "I will nuke you" it's just Tuesday.
I think these articles actually bear out jnlb's point. The quote from Zelensky they put forward is:
"They begin to prepare their society. That’s very dangerous,” Zelensky said. “They are not ready to do it, to use it. But they begin to communicate. They don’t know whether they’ll use or not use it. I think it’s dangerous to even speak about it."
I don't know how one reads a statement like "they don't know whether or not they'll use it" to mean anything other than that he is saying nuclear weapon use is *possible*, which is totally reasonable given Putin quotes about punishment like you've never experienced in your history and "this is not a bluff."
Trying to stretch it into "Zelinsky is saying Russia will use nuclear weapons, and that statement is a lie" just doesn't line up with the text, which goes directly to jnlb's point about a loss in translation or a statement out of context. Frankly it goes further than that - looks to me like a blatant misrepresentation of the quote.
Regarding the first example, you probably misremember Russian announcement that Western weapon shipments are legitimate target, which left ambiguous whether they mean "after they reach Ukrainian territory". After that, usual suspects had usual meltdown about whether Poland is about to get nuked. But there is a perfectly reasonable explanation - they meant that weapon shipments are a legitimate target on the Ukrainian territory (which is obvious) and they left that part out precisely in order to cause such media meltdown, and thus scare people.
With all other examples, the situation is similar. Putin never directly threatened to use nukes if Ukraine would attack The Bridge, if Finland would join NATO etc. He just said words that he knew Western media could use to stir up a panic about nukes and thus get clicks. Mutually beneficial exchange, one might say.
On the other hand various Russian talking heads on TV regularly threaten West with nuclear war if it crosses some random redline and then nothing happens, but they are not in charge of Russia.
Soon after posting I started worrying that I had misremembered something from Medvedev's schizo ramblings instead of what actual spokespersons for the Russian government had said. In my opinion the media has given way too much attention to Medvedev, as if he had any influence over the government. Thank you for correcting me.
>Zelesnky is unwilling to make even a token effort of a concession towards Russia to end the war
I'll be the unoriginal pedant and quote Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics through other means". As long as military operations favor Ukraine, and they expects them to keep favoring him in the future, there is little incentive for them to negociate, for it's much easier to claim territory they already occupy rather than get Russia to give it up.
>If Biden is correct about Russia, what possible path is there to the war ending without nukes flying?
Either recover & eventually win, recover & stabilize to hold something to bargain with, or simply end up packing up & leaving (or getting pushed back). All of which are possible without nuclear weapons. A negociated outcome can be spun into a win for the domestic audience, a withdrawal would be unpopular but can be followed up with whatever the russian state aparatus is used to (propaganda of a new threat, false flag or god knows what). I'm not even sure losses worthy of a Barbarossa encirclement would be enough to pressure Russia enough to risk nuclear escalation.
>As long as military operations favor Ukraine, and they expects them to keep favoring him in the future, there is little incentive for them to negociate, for it's much easier to claim territory they already occupy rather than get Russia to give it up.
Little incentive? HE'S LITERALLY SAYING RUSSIA ARE ON THE VERGE OF NUKING UKRAINE
My impression is that Biden was speaking of the cuff to Democratic donors; probably his real thoughts are more complex. Maybe he meant that as a pushback against those advocating further escalation; are they likely to be represented among big time Democratic donors? Maybe yes.
In general it seems to me that US has been unwilling to supply Ukraine with weapons that can strike deep into Russia, probably on the (imho correct) assumption that makes nuclear retalation more likely
I think there is probably a territorial line, somewhere, past which the Ukrainian advance stalls out, because the local population really is staunchly pro-Russian, because the Russians get their shit better together as their supply routes get shorter and closer to the home turf, because the Ukrainian losses mount and the will of the troops to press on diminishes as they get deeper into more hostile regions, and because Western allies start to lose interest in bloodying Russia's nose further -- and the danger to Ukraine is clearly no longer existential.
Where that line lies, though, is tough to say. I'm a little dubious that it encompasses all of Crimea, but I think it includes some real chunk of the Donbas, probably Mariupol, certainly Kherson, but beyond that I have no clue.
So the exit ramp is that the Ukrainian advance stalls out, the line becomes mostly static, both sides are exhausted, and allies generally pressure both sides to come to a cease-fire (an outright peace settlement seems unlikely). That will certainly be difficult, considering the life lost on each side, but there are precedents (e.g. Korea). I tend to think as long as a good portion but not all of the territory occupied very early on by Russia returns to Ukraine, it could be swallowed by both sides, although it would be bitter.
One nonconventional thing that might restrain Putin from putting the nuclear card in play is distrust of his own nuclear forces. Surely the performance of his conventional forces has come as a big, big surprise -- nobody would have ordered an invasion thinking it was going to go even one tenth as poorly as it did. At this point, the Russian conventional forces are more widely seen as a joke than at any time since Napoleon, and he has to be wondering whether his nuclear forces are immune to whatever forces of corruption, neglect, and poor leadership have made the regular Army such a charlie foxtrot. The very last thing he wants -- even worse than losing most of Ukraine -- is to have his nuclear forces fail to perform in just as wretchedly humiliating a fashion, and have his *entire* military deterrent turn into the biggest paper tiger ever. Leave alone the reaction of the West, the reaction of China and the Asian republics would be crushing.
NATO is overjoyed to finally have a good proxy war where they just dump spare military equipment and get a massive return of dead Russian soldiers, destroyed tanks and collapsing economy. Shit hasn't been this good since the Cold War.
Ukrainians so far also have the momentum. Ironically if the Russians bothered to avoid war crimes and treat civilians well, maybe they could secure the Eastern regions somehow? But right now everyone just wants them gone.
Yes, this has been a win on all counts for NATO and the West generally, and the prestige and stature of Russia has taken the greatest hit I think it has ever taken. Even the Poles will now start treating Russia with contempt, let alone the Chinese or Kazakhs. Vladimir Putin has done more to sink Russian long-term prospects than even Russia's worst enemy could have imagined or hoped.
> the local population really is staunchly pro-Russian
I wonder if this is still true. It is easy to be pro-Russian in far mode. It becomes more difficult after they shell your house, steal your washing machine, torture you, rape your wife, and take your kids to a summer camp in Russia with no intention of returning them. Even if you liked to argue politically against your pro-Ukraine neighbor, you probably didn't really want to see his entire family in a mass grave.
Let's admit it, if you tried to translate "winning hearts" to Russian, you would probably get a description of some Aztec ritual.
> the Russians get their shit better together
The most experienced soldiers are dead, the fresh conscripts are getting one week of training, the army has no winter uniforms. These things will not change when the supply lines get shorter.
> Western allies start to lose interest
Yes, this is a real risk, but the weapons that are already there, will remain there. The training and experience will remain, too. New weapons are still being sent, so the moment of losing interest has not happened yet; and will probably not happen in all countries at the same time.
Well, I'm not disagreeing strongly, but I'm hazarding that people well behind the front lines, e.g. deep in Luhansk, where there hasn't been any recent fighting after the Russians marched in, might still be staunchly pro-Russian. After all, this population has supplied the bulk of the militia, which have done some hard fighting against Ukrainian soldiers, so that indicates some level of initial commitment, at least. Whether they still retain it, or whether they might (for example) feel bitter about being used as cannon fodder by the Russians, I do not know.
I think it's important to note that while the Ukrainian advance around Kharkiv has been impressive, they still haven't pushed the Russians much past their earliest line of occupation in the Luhnansk and Donetsk regions. I can see they're making a strong effort in the south, and I can believe they get to Kherson, particularly given their careful targeting of Russian southern supply lines, and I can also believe they'll get to Kreminna in the north and put some serious pressure on the supply lines to Luhansk and Sieverodonetsk, but there's still not a lot of movement in the east e.g. around Bakhmut.
It could be the Russians just fold in the east, too, but Russians do have a long history of staying put even under inhumanly difficult conditions. Plus I feel like the Russians were caught off guard in the north, and that may have something to do with how quickly they folded there. So...we'll see. I think the Ukrainians are likely to get to Kherson, and maybe retake Luhansk and Sievierodonetsk, and maybe take the pressure off Zaporizhzhia -- all of which would be very solid work -- in the near future, but unless the Russians truly do just collapse, continuing to roll the Russians up, particularly in the east, still seems like a tough job. It could bog down, and all the concerned powers could conclude it's best to take what they've retained/recovered and come to a cease fire.
"After all, this population has supplied the bulk of the militia, which have done some hard fighting against Ukrainian soldiers, so that indicates some level of initial commitment, at least. "
You understand that service in the Donetsk and Luhansk "militias" hasn't been voluntary for some time, right? That's not a population that is going to be providing anti-Ukrainian partisans; anybody who would have been up for that is likely dead, captured, or broken by now.
Sure. But they were at least somewhat willing at the beginning, and I'm just hypothesizing that deep in the east you may still find populations that haven't thoroughly soured on the Russians. And if a bunch of neighborhood kids have been killed by the Ukrainians, they may not be too happy with the westerners either. I don't live there, and I don't know people there, so I have no real insight, it's just a speculation.
You'd probably find a population of grandmothers that still have fond memories of Russia and blame the Ukrainians for everything. But I've never heard of an insurgency of grandmothers that was even a speed bump to an advancing army. Finding a population of healthy military-age males with any inclination to fight, for either side, is going to be a problem because those people are either absent or have had their health substantially altered.
I agree that the situation may change dramatically (even without nukes involved). Any specific thing seems to me like "probably not this", but there are many things that could go wrong (for Ukraine), and it may be enough if one of them goes wrong, so the probabilities add up.
For now, Ukraine advances, but they still have a long way to go. September 2022 was their lucky month, but they would need 9× more of the same.
Even the scenario where Putin falls out of window has a risk that he might be replaced by someone more competent.
Well, except I think a more competent ruler would cut his losses. As appalling as this war has been for Ukraine, it has been still worse for Russia in terms of economic opportunity destroyed, domestic instability and further erosion of mutual trust, and long-term prospects. The right thing to do, if you had brains, would be to withdraw Russian forces immediately, reverse the draft, and do your best to persuade the cadres of best and brightest who just fled to return -- try to convince the people you need to invent and create and manage that Russia has any kind of 21st century future other than as a North Korea with oil revenue.
I don't believe the Russians are likely to use nukes. Most likely outcome is that they eventually get their shit together again and stall out the Ukrainian advance, and we get a ceasefire with Crimea and possibly some other territory still under Russian control.
He didn't call for a pre-emptive strike on Russia.
Alternatively, he could just lose and get a ceasefire that way. It'd be embarrassing, but Putin has basically neutralized most internal threats to his power anyways.
Yeah, the partial ("partial") mobilization seems to have been the watershed moment when much of the internal agitprop collapsed. Hard to see him clawing it back fully now.
Putin blame the failures on his rivals within MoD. Then he disappears them (or whatever) and elevates Katryrov and Prigozhin who are more than proficient at oppressing people.
Because he will at best cease to be leader of Russia, slightly worse he will be jailed, and worst he will be killed. Taking a loss in Ukraine straight up undermines everything that gives him support generally, and the human and economic cost of this war is intolerable if nothing is gained from it.
For the same reason that you "can't take the option" of running through your workplace buck naked, picking your nose and masturbating. It would be unspeakably, unthinkably humiliating, and you'd do just about anything to avoid it. If someone put a gun to your head, *maybe* you'd do it, but if you could convince yourself that they wouldn't dare pull the trigger, you might call their bluff.
Aggravated by the fact that, like yourself, Putin has a good chance of losing his job if he does anything as unspeakably publicly humiliating as running through his workplace naked, etc, or losing a war against a nation one-quarter the size of Russia. But, unlike you, Putin's job is the sort people usually only leave horizontally or enroute to a lengthy prison sentence, so he's going to be highly motivated to find excuses to not do that.
We used to be able to offer dictators a quiet, comfortable retirement package in some neutral nation if they gave up power without a fight, but that went out of style many years ago and is no longer a credible option.
The argument is either that his regime would not survive a withdrawal to pre-attack status and quite possibly he would not survive the fall of his regime, therefore he will escalate to nukes or that he is just personally unwilling to give up (like Hitler for example).
These are obviously empiric questions and can (and will) be answered by events. The problem is are we willing to bet?
I'm pretty skeptical that a loss in Ukraine would mean the end of his regime. He's done a good job of neutralizing virtually internal threats to his power within Russia itself.
I’m also skeptical that if Putin were more secure he’d be less likely to engage in nuclear saber rattling. From the outside view Putin has the fewest checks on his power and been more successful destroying potential rivals than any Russian leader since Stalin. If *his* back is against a wall such that he just has to be given what he wants, whose back ever won’t be? Especially if the perception amounts to an I Win button?
Nuclear brinksmanship sucks. I really liked the decades when it felt like we were done with it. I hope we can get through this one. I’m certainly not sure of it. But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
And for all the talk of needing to give Putin an off ramp since before he even began the current invasion, there’s been no sign thus far that he’s even looking for one.
He kind of needs to make an offer (and give *any* reason he’d be bound by it more than he was by the Budapest Memorandum) before “I can’t make any concessions, even on territory I don’t hold that no one forced me to claim, or it’s my head and therefore yours” even comes into play.
Piling concessions in front of someone not even at the table in the hopes he’s eventually satisfied isn’t a reasonable way to negotiate with someone even if he’s winning. Let alone when he’s losing badly.
>And for all the talk of needing to give Putin an off ramp since before he even began the current invasion, there’s been no sign thus far that he’s even looking for one.
This is nonsense, unless you imagine he's still trying to capture Kiev? He's not. He's settling for some crappy regions in eastern ukraine.
> But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
I'd probably agree, if what you describe would be like: 'oh, he said nukes, now let's just tell UKR we can't do anything for them anymore, and offer to Putin to take whichever chunk he'd like to have. Let's stop any any military and financial support to UKR and also terminate sanctions today 5pm, ' But that's not what is on the table. Currently it's more about signalling there is room for an off ramp at all. (And off ramp *isn't* and can't be: 'just take what you want') And yes, I believe avoiding escalation now in such a way and from a strong position will make us safer.
Well, on negotations, you rarely publicly tell about all your potential concessions before sitting at the negotiation table. But for the moment and just recently there has been an official decree by Zelensky that there will be no negotiation with Putin at all (only with successors). Yes, any compromise solution seems currently difficult enough anyway, but UKR isn't exactly pretending to leave a lot of room for this.
"But for the moment and just recently there has been an official decree by Zelensky that there will be no negotiation with Putin at all (only with successors)."
Let's not forget that Zelensky only said this *after* Putin made a severe anti-compromise move, that of signing annexation of eastern Ukraine into Russian law. Zelensky's statement really only reflects his recognition of the reality that Putin has now rejected anything that could reasonably be called negotiation, Zelensky isn't really making any active refusal himself.
The whole point is that Zelensky is claiming Russia are going to use nukes. This isn't about what is fair and reasonable. If he is being truthful about his nuke claims, then he should be willing to accept the loss of these territories, otherwise he's gambling his people's live for the sake of more soil. If he's lying, then he ought to be assassinated by the CIA for trying to manipulate us into even more sacrifice to maintain his power.
> Let's not forget that Zelensky only said this *after* Putin made a severe anti-compromise move
Fair enough.
> Zelensky's statement really only reflects his recognition of the reality ...
He could have also said, Ukraine is Ukraine in the borders of the year 1991, and if any Russian representative wants to talk to us about that on this basis, welcome. Or just nothing ... it's pretty clear that there was no offer from Moskow that would be anyhow a starting point for negotiations.
> Zelensky isn't really making any active refusal himself.
He is of course making an active refusal, he has done so before, and he has just put his refusal to talk to Putin (ever) in a formal document. That's what I certainly would call 'active.
>I’m also skeptical that if Putin were more secure he’d be less likely to engage in nuclear saber rattling.
I kind of agree with this one. But I think it's important to distinguish between two different things: a) the saber rattling. saber rattling comes at little cost, especially when it's so vague it doesn't bind you to anything. b) actually using that option, which is more likely the more costly other alternatives get in comparison.
I'm much less worried, Putin will use nukes, because he hinted at them (which he did before). I'm concerned he will use nukes, when his other options all look very costly, and this one will seemingly give him a - risky, but still - option for a better outcome. Not that I believe it will in fact give him a better outcome, but that's irrelevant.
"If *his* back is against a wall such that he just has to be given what he wants, whose back ever won’t be?"
Tsar Nicholas Romanov. Leopoldo Galtieri. Kaiser Wilhelm. Phillipe Petain, and later the entire Fourth Republic.
If you're a head of state and/or government, and especially if you're both, starting a war puts your back against the wall. If you lose, even if your nation survives unconquered, *you* lose. Your job, probably your freedom, quite possibly your life. Being a dictator doesn't change that; mostly it just makes it worse.
Which means that if you're facing such a man, you're facing someone who can't afford to back down. That doesn't mean *you* have to back down and give him what he wants; the consequences of that would be disastrous. It does mean you need to have plans and expectations more realistic than "...and then he'll see that he was wrong and give up".
>But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
Putin would do anything to have not invaded Ukraine. He hates the situation he's in. Even getting the eastern territories would not have made the invasion worth it. It's the bare minimum he needs to sell this as enough of a win to stop the operation short of more substantial victories. This whole ordeal has been a glowing neon advertisement against this kind of military adventure, to the rest of the world and most importantly to Russia.
> Let alone when he’s losing badly.
So, what is it? Are Biden & Zelesnky wrong/lying about Putin using nukes? Or are you saying we need to push somebody who is on the brink of unleashing nuclear war?
I think Putin’s using nukes is a possibility, not a certainty. He didn’t use them when driven away from Kyiv, or when his lines collapsed in the northeast. He may tomorrow, and he may not. I think we need to seriously consider the possibility and prepare our response, while doing everything we can to maximize deterrence.
I don’t believe that capitulation is the correct short or long term response to that possibility. I’m not an expert, but evidently, at least so far, neither do the people responsible for making those decisions, who presumably have more intel than I do.
And especially not in a vacuum. If Putin wants to propose something short of the liberation of all of Ukraine to end hostilities, he can do that (whether through front or back channels), and Ukraine and its allies can take counsel based on their trust in the offer and in the threat.
(Though one big problem with abrogating the last guarantee of Ukraine’s borders is massively lost credibility for any future guarantees. Likewise the policy of atrocities greatly raised the political cost of handing people over versus “it’s just a change of administration”. It’s hard to know what more could be done to poison the well for future negotiations.)
And of course it also depends on Putin’s belief that he can usefully improve his situation in any way with a nuclear attack. Which it’s in our interest to discourage if we possibly can.
Either way, “maybe if we do X, they’ll stop, even though they haven’t ever said so” seems completely unproductive.
Zelensky is telling us that Russia is so likely to use nukes that they're preparing their society to accept the use of nukes. He's either lying, in which case he deserves to be disappeared, or he's telling the truth and thinks that making things worse for Russia will somehow make them LESS likely to use nukes.
> I don’t believe that capitulation is the correct short or long term response to that possibility.
I don't think anybody is seriously advocating for capitulation. I think being (more) open for and putting more effort (not: offering full hands) into an off ramp is more to the point. And something substancially different.
>But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
"Nuclear extortion" is not an accurate read of the situation. The only reason we're talking about nuclear war is that the U.S. insists on the world acquiescing to its interests and is potentially willing to initiate nuclear brinkmanship to get it. The U.S. is inserting itself into a war that it wasn't involved in, creating the conditions for nuclear brinksmanship.
The natural state is that borders shift due to the dynamics of waxing and waning political power and tensions. The last 30 years have seen unprecedented stability in Europe under the shadow of the U.S. hegemon. But the hegemony just masked the growing tensions under the surface. If the tension is not being diffused, it will only continue to grow and when it is inevitably released it will be far worse than it would have been.
The fact that US/NATO kept teasing Ukraining membership while dismissing Russian concerns is an example of ratcheting up tensions rather than diffusing them. Ukraine and Europe are currently paying for those missteps, and now some of you want to add to the mistake by engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia? The U.S. will need to get used to a world order not completely dominated by its interests. The question is whether we will fight a nuclear war over it.
Note that nothing I've said is moral justification for any of Russia's actions. But moral justification is irrelevant in the "war of all against all" that international politics represents. How far are we willing to go in service to our delusions of an international moral order?
> The only reason we're talking about nuclear war is that the U.S. insists...
First, (Russian) nukes were a factor even before anyone talked about them explicitly. Considering the current state of the Russian army, the nukes are the only reason why e.g. Ukraine and Poland do not together bring the war directly to Moscow, triggering revolutions in Belarus, Chechnya, and whoever else might want to use this opportunity to get rid of Russian involvement.
The existence of nukes is the reason why Ukraine is limited to getting its territory back, and why NATO countries send weapons but not soldiers.
Second, Putin started to talk about nukes to escalate his sore loser strategy. The previous version was "okay, you might get your cities back, but expect to find them full of mass graves of the civilians tortured to death in the last minute". The new version is "okay, you might get your entire original territory back, but expect it to get nuked afterwards". Same mindset, greater scope.
The difference is that there is not much you can do about the former (if you are already killing the soldiers who did it anyway), but USA (and China) can remind Putin that he is not the only guy with nukes, and that if he escalates, they might do something, too. I think the original plan was to escalate using *conventional* weapons first, but of course if Putin responds with *more* nukes...
By the way, I reject the entire "Russia vs USA" framing. Ignoring the nukes, Russia's natural opponent would be Poland, or maybe a coalition of Eastern European countries led by Poland. As we can clearly see, Russian soldiers are pretty good at terrorizing civilians, but when they meet actual soldiers, they die. The nukes, however, do exist, and the entire idea of NATO is that countries such as Poland do not need to do their own nuclear research, but outsource it to countries such as USA. (The effect is the same, the difference is that fewer countries have nukes, which is better.) The days when Russia was in the same weight class as USA are long gone. Now they have "the second strongest army in Ukraine", and an economy that couldn't produce a tractor if it tried. The only thing that keeps them existing are... the nukes.
>First, (Russian) nukes were a factor even before anyone talked about them explicitly.
Of course, having nukes makes them a factor in any conflict, in the sense that they define clear constraints of engagement. But the fact that we're *explicitly talking about the possibility of nuclear war* means that the clarity around constraints of engagement is in question. This represents a significant escalation.
>Second, Putin started to talk about nukes to escalate his sore loser strategy.
Yes, when other parties are causing uncertainty around constraints of engagement, it pays for each party to remind the other what they consider their boundaries and the scope of responses. Nuclear "sabre rattling" as some call it in this case is good because you want your red lines clearly delineated.
>By the way, I reject the entire "Russia vs USA" framing.
Of course its Russia vs USA. Would Ukraine have resisted without US weapons and US intelligence?
>>The U.S. is inserting itself into a war that it wasn't involved in, creating the conditions for nuclear brinksmanship
"You see, officer, if that nosy neighbor would just let me beat my kids in peace, I wouldn't have had to threaten everybody involved with this pistol. So this is really all her fault if you think about it."
This is tendentious nonsense based on already having defined the US as the villain. In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s. The Russian state wouldn't even exist. St. Petersburg oblast would probably be its own Baltic nation, Königsberg would be Polish, Moskova would be a landlocked backwater, etc.
Also, if your idea of how hegemony works to mask growing tensions is correct, Russia itself ought to collapse into shreds at any moment.
> In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s. The Russian state wouldn't even exist. St. Petersburg oblast would probably be its own Baltic nation, Königsberg would be Polish, Moskova would be a landlocked backwater, etc.
Huh. If this is your idea of history without nukes, honestly, US comes out quite as the villain.
>This is tendentious nonsense based on already having defined the US as the villain.
I have made no indication of anyone being a villain. I am simply describing the dynamics of international politics as I understand them and how US actions have contributed to the current state of affairs. It only seems like I am villainizing the US because of the unquestioned moral virtue with which we treat US actions abroad. People like to pretend history started right before the event in consideration. There is always a broader history that we must understand as we formulate responses. The complete lack of consideration of this broader history in most discussions around Ukraine is a dangerous mistake.
>In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s.
Whether or not this is true, I fail to see the relevance to the current conflict.
"In the 'natural state' of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s."
For most of the Cold War the Soviets enjoyed a mutually acknowledged advantage in conventional arms, to the point where most World War III scenarios involved Americans scrambling to stop the Soviet drive to the Rhine. Nuclear deterrence bought the US the time it needed, not the other way around.
After the Second Offset, perhaps it wouldn't have been completely impossible, but with all respect to America's technological edge, industrial potential, and force projection capabilities, I intuitively doubt it. Defence and conquest are quite different things.
And even in the strange nukeless world, how do you imagine the US would muster the political will to do something that unfathomably bloody, not least post-Vietnam?
Historically it's kind of random. Sometimes we lose interest, the leadership changes, and we just wander away. Sometimes we get really pissed off, though, and burn cities down until whoever's left cries uncle. You pays your money and you take your chances.
And given that this is an iterated game, how does “threaten nukes, get another country’s territory” end? There are a lot of countries without their own nukes with territory coveted by their neighbors, if a nuclear threat leads to pressure to concede it.
At the very least it seems like a recipe for proliferation, since the obvious lesson of Ukraine will be that it shouldn’t have given up the nukes they had. (Whether or not they could have realistically gotten control of them.)
Or Ukraine becomes Czechoslovakia after Munich, and Russia or China is sincerely surprised when the Baltics or Taiwan (or hey, Poland for tradition’s sake) are at issue and we *don’t* back down that time.
Or we keep on backing down, until we hit whatever our “real” sticking point is with absolutely minimal credibility, making nuclear war that much more likely.
This really seems like the place to draw the line. Russia can absolutely ruin us, at the cost of ruining itself. (And if it comes to it, I personally figure that if the bombs don’t get me the infrastructure disruptions of the aftermath likely will.) But it can’t actually win what it wants with nuclear strikes.
I dearly hope Putin realizes that. But if he doesn’t, capitulating won’t make him *less* likely to keep playing Russian Roulette with the planet.
It’s a crap position to be in, and I hope it doesn’t go wrong. But either Putin has some rationality left and can be deterred from breaking the nuclear taboo, or at best we’d kick this can down the road at the price of buying many more similar confrontations.
I think we also need to consider our own credibility with allies. US and NATO thus far have a strong hand with respect to their role supporting Ukraine, but a lot of our international influence is dependent on trust and good relationships, and if we publicly hang the Ukrainians to twist in the wind we could still come out of this damaged in exactly the way Putin hoped we would at the start. Russia isn't the only one being watched in all this - we shouldn't jump so fast that we do Putin a double solid by bailing him out of his mistake and damaging our own credibility in one premature and unnecessary stroke, trying to force Ukraine to cede territory in order to "avoid backing Russia into" a corner they haven't begun to approach yet.
And I say that as somebody who *doesn't* advocate driving this thing to regime change in Russia. Collapsing governments and civil strife on top of a nuclear arsenal is incredibly dangerous pool we're all much better off without. But it seems to me from the reporting I'm reading that we aren't anywhere close to that bridge yet.
That option likely ends with Putin facing a firing squad. It's probably the best option for Russia, but `Russia' isn't making the decisions.
That is, Putin is a dictator, but the power of dictators is not absolute, and dictators who suffer a major public humiliation (like losing a war to a neighbor that was widely considered much weaker) are likely to lose power. And for dictators like Putin, losing power probably also implies losing their heads.
The alternative is to send more conscripts into the meatgrinder. The meatgrinder is patient, NATO-fueled, and won't choke on any amount of meat unless backed with actual military equipment.
Did they say, he will? I rather think they'd say sth. like: it's quite possible/ it cannot be excluded he will or: he well might ... . I didn't look up the exact wording now, I think those are probably realistic statements, but I'd expect them to convey a probability, not a terministic prediction.
He didn't as far as I'm aware (not OP). OP didn't actually say "nuclear" preemptive strike, though.
Searching "Zelensky preemptive strike" gives several stories. The most reputable source is Fox, which isn't a great sign. Nonetheless, unless they made up the quote, OP has it basically right. From Fox:
"Zelenskyy added: "But what is [more] important, I am once again turning to the international community, as I did before Feb. 24, to do preventative strikes so that they know what will await them if they use it [nuclear weapons]."
The strikes could not happen "the other way round," the Ukrainian president contended, as to "wait for Russian nuclear strikes" would only further escalate the conflict."
I already spend much more time online than I should, and yet I cannot read everything. Thanks for the links. My interpretation of the situation is the following:
If Putin believes that his nukes will be punished (either by nukes or conventionally), he will not use the nukes. That fact that he is willing to sacrifice lives of any number of other people doesn't mean that he would risk his own. He wouldn't be sitting at the longest table in the world if he was okay with risking his own life.
If Putin believes that his nukes will leave everyone too scared to oppose him, then yes, he *will* drop a nuke or two on Ukraine, because why not. If he can't have Ukraine, they might as well all die. And think about the message it would send to other countries that Russia will attack in the future: you have no chance; even if you defeat us, you are screwed.
So it's important to say that using nukes will get punished. Not necessarily by nukes; a sufficiently large conventional attack would be preferable.
Has anyone ever devoted a chunk of intellectual energy into looking at value investing? I recently did and man did it just convince me further to stick with index funds. Common sense note, I think we all know the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Random Walk, etc. etc. To date all of my investments/retirement have been index funds, and I have never purchased an individual stock or tried to guess what one might do in the future.
Aside from reading a few of the classic writings on value investing, I also poked around forums like Reddit's on the topic. My impression is that everyone there is just making rhetoric-based arguments as to why x stock is undervalued. I mean, anyone can do this- I could make a rhetorical argument for and against any stock. If you just stick by the very rigid 'find stocks that are undervalued by free cash flow' or whatever, of course this could easily be done by a formula or algorithm and wouldn't need a human in the loop at all. (And then the market would catch up & incorporate its previous mistakes into its pricing).
Outside of the normal EMH objections, other things I found ridiculous about value investing:
1. Everyone agrees it will take years to see if you're right or not about a stock being undervalued. In what field of human endeavor is a new participant automatically proficient? Even if one could reliably pick undervalued stocks, the learning curve to get good would take decades, and then you have your underperformance to make up for by the time you get there- so that would take a few more decades. Maybe this is a good hobby for a vampire or other immortal
2. You're picking such a small number of stocks (everyone says 10-15) that your results are going to be highly variable even if you're right about some of them
Has anyone else ever really looked into value investing? Would especially love to hear from smart generalists who are maybe SMEs in another intellectual field and said 'hey I'll devote some time into looking at value investing' at some point in their lives
(Disclaimer: I have no actual experience in finance.)
I agree that value investing is the best for most situations, but below is my best argument against it.
While we can expect that EMH leaves no asset undervalued since someone would buy them, it's entirely possible for an asset to be overvalued. For example, I believe most(all?) cryptocurrencies are in a bubble, but it won't be rational for me to short them, because short is inherently riskier than long. Once you accept that some assets can be overvalued, you can beat the market by not buying them.
Also, in some fields like real estate, there might actually be a chance for you to make a better deal when you're an informed investor, because 1) you can't short real estate, so nothing is stopping them from being overvalued 2) you're possibly trading with someone with little experience, instead of professional hedge funds 3) all houses are different, which means trading strategies are hard to scale.
That second paragraph is pretty interesting. So rather than trying to see what's undervalued, one could just buy into say the S&P 500 but remove the individual stocks that they calculate are overvalued. I believe you can do that type of individual portfolio construction these days
Yeah, I think that would be possible. I'm don't know if removing individual stocks would be worth the time(probably depends on how much you enjoy doing it), but how about avoiding markets where short selling is banned? I believe when the stock market is crashing, government would sometimes put a temporary ban on short selling - maybe market is likely to be overvalued at these periods?
Yes, I've done some digging into value investing and came to three conclusions.
#1 There might be a tax arbitrage opportunity for early retirees and the like. Simply, value stocks should be slightly undervalued as dividends get taxed as income while stock appreciation gets taxed as capital gains. So big rich people should pay a premium not to get dividends (which get taxed at a higher rate) while if you're looking at, say, $50-$60 a year in non traditionally 401k investment income, the tax rates are basically equivalent.
#2 Also, value investing seems safer than a stock/bonds split, like 70% stocks/30% bonds. I mean, the stock/bond split is plenty safe but Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola is forever and you should get equivalent returns.
#3 Messing around with investment strategies at below, like, $10 million USD is a waste of time, I should just focus on my career.. Like, the market might be inefficient, but even if I beat the market by 1-2% a year, that's less valuable than working towards a $20k/year raise and just saving 20-30% of that raise.
I don’t strongly disagree with your opinions though maybe it’s worth pointing out the definition of “value” in this context is more than just “undervalued”. Every investor believes their portfolio is undervalued on some level. Value means “relatively cheap on a earnings multiple basis”. Predicting earnings growth is a thing you can know without decades of suffering through bad decisions. So at the very least, you can learn more quickly from that. The earnings multiple (or really any valuation multiple) is where the real voodoo comes in.
I do this type of investing for a living so I guess that makes me not a smart generalist from another field you were looking for.
Sure. Predicting earnings which is specific to a company’s performance is a whole lot easier than predicting price which takes into account a lot of market effects. If you look at analyst coverage, their earnings estimates are a lot more accurate than their price targets. By a lot. Someone did some research on this but that’s a pretty intuitive observation: macroeconomic & monetary bullshit is a lot tougher to predict than a company’s performance and in many, if not most, years multiple expansion/contraction drives larger price action than EPS.
The CFA curriculum would give you the skills to do this.
Thanks. Is this kind of analyst research reasonably accurate for growth stocks, in particular unprofitable tech companies? That would be pretty interesting, but I'm guessing that's more difficult to forecast than established firms
The difference between 7% and 10% annual return on my savings in my 20s is simply not very much. It's not worth my time, and the more you make in another field the more you should probably keep doing it. This is why money managers manage large sums where the return difference is worth millions
All of this assumes that I'd actually beat the market, which isn't necessarily the case.
On the difference between 7% and 10% on your savings in your 20s:
It depends on how long the money is invested, and how much you're much you're managing to put away. For the latter point, just multiply the numbers below and decide if it's worth it.
If you put in $100 and leave it invested for just 5 years (because you're just keeping it in the market until you buy a new car, say), at the end of the period you have: 7% annual return=~$40 return. 10%=~$60.
If you're doing something like saving for retirement, and leave that same $100 (and all its returns) in the market for the next 40 years: 7%=~$1,400. 10%=~$4,425.
Maybe that's not quite fair, though. You don't think it's worth your time right now, but maybe it will be in 10 years, and that's when you plan on starting to pay attention. Over 10 years, it's ~$60 vs ~$96. Is the extra $36 per $100 worth it? Depends on how many hundreds you're working with. And, as you say, whether you can beat the market.
I'm assuming that in order to beat the market we're making a significant time investment. That could instead be spent e.g. Working a second job and investing the proceeds at 7%, for potentially more real time cash/hr.
Of course if you consider value investment a recreational hobby then it's fine as long as you don't lose to the market too badly
Broadly this is what private equity is attempting to do. The basic thesis behind private equity is that certain companies are being mismanaged somehow, be it in how they price their products, expenses, failure to expand into new markets, etc., and that the management team at the private equity vehicle can right the wrong and flip the now-publically-realized value to another buyer.
I would expect that most of the opportunities in security analysis (i.e. the stuff you get from reading SEC filings) right now are being captured by funds as part of some larger model, and they're unlikely (unfortunately) to share any details with you unless you join as an analyst.
Tyler Cowen asks whether people with high confidence that transformational AGI is coming are 'long volatility, both of the aggregate market and sector-by-sector' (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/but-are-you-long-volatility.html). He means it as a challenge along the lines of revealed preferences: what do your financial decisions say about what you actually hold to be true, rather than what you formally take to be true.
Various commenters push back on the feasibility of trading effectively.
> I cashed out of crypto because the tail of returns is no longer as valuable and will take potentially too long to happen; and beyond that, I have stopped saving money and have started explicitly trying to consume more because my existing savings are already at a healthy level (albeit not at the 'retire today' level), and further savings will either be wasted (in the bad scenarios) or have greatly increased returns (in the good scenarios), and in the increasingly unlikely nothing-happens scenario, I will know within about a decade and the cost of the option was fairly small.
Perhaps because I don't follow AI progress discussions closely, I hadn't realized that anyone had ceased saving normally. The commenter presents as reasonable, but in other cases this rationale might be an excuse for increased consumption. ('I don't spend like an American because I'm an American. It's because the singularity is (probably) coming!')
What do you think?
Is there survey data about the savings rate among people with high confidence AGI is coming this century? Or additional discussion somewhere?
Is being long volatility going to help you when the Singularity comes?
If we get luxury space communism, no; you're rich anyway.
If we get someone who uses AI to take over the world, probably not; even if you've invested in that someone, if you don't have control over what he/she programs his/her AI to do then you're the doofus in TDKR (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C_BubeBU8E).
This is a good answer, I confess to not knowing that that thing exists. Then again, I am not in a "high confidence that transformational AGI is coming" camp, so I am not buying it.
Yeah, in case anyone else reads this and is thinking that they want to trade volatility please don't just buy VIX. It tends to be mean reverting so it isn't really a long term thing to own.
You would be better off in Las Vegas. With the same amount of effort it would take to understand trading volatility options I really think your odds at poker are much better given the same investment in learning the game.
I know a doctor who believes that keeping one's telomeres long by taking concentrated astragalus is a smart thing to do to help the immune system. TA-65 to be specific.
I'm not at all qualified to have an opinion. That said, I can find studies that say keeping your telomeres long has only upside and i can find a study that says that longer telomeres help all cells, including cancer cells, divide rapidly.
Wondering if someone more qualified than I has an opinion.
Stay away from stuff that artificially lengthens telomeres imo. Its possible that extending telomers on cells with terminally short telomeres leads to abnormalities in otherwise senescence cells which should be ungoing apoptosis.
Not a qualified opinion but one such benefit for having an "appropriate" length telomere. (whether this is the one that is currently set for humans given the vast changes to the healthcare/life expectancy is another question)
That said, there are cancer cells that have found ways to "maintain" telomere with both very long and very short length, but obv cancer cells are already deviations from the norm so not sure what this says about having regular cells undergo similar "adaptation".
1. I'm skeptical that "concentrated astragalus" increases telomere length.
2. Telomere shortening is not the main driver of aging that it was once believed to be circa 1990s. Many adult stem cells express telomerase, and can do a good job keeping telomeres long without outside intervention.
This may be uncharitable, but I think Ivermectin Guy will *never* be done, until everyone accepts that he is right, that ivermectin is the miracle cure, and that any positive effects are not attributable to killing off parasites and so releasing the immune system to fight off Covid, as well as an apology about "I was wrong wrong wrong and Alexandros was right right right" on all social media everywhere.
To make my position clear: Scott didn't convince me that ivermectin worked, if it worked at all, as the anti-parasitic. That was my view before the deep dive into the data, and I haven't shifted on it. So if Scott ever does change his opinion, that will certainly weigh with me, but I will still want to be shown that having ruled out all parasite infections, using ivermectin alone, the Covid-beating results hold up.
EDIT: Hey, Scott, how does it feel being able to sway opinion-leaders? Oh my, what elevated company we are keeping! 😁
I was very impressed by ivmmeta.com, a site that does a real time meta analysis of now 92 Ivermectin studies and is part of a family of sites. I noticed that they take any study, follow a set of pre defined rules to extract the data, and are very reactive to feedback. I am not a doctor so I can only superficially judge the studies but I can recognize professionalism. A professionalism that was severely lacking in people criticizing them, generally even worse than the tone of your post. The sometimes bizarre wrongness of the press about ivermectin facts (it is not just a horse dewormer), the clearly large money interests of big pharma, the puzzling attitude of the media to demonize anybody that did not worship the vaccines (I am vaccinated but this is a very new technology) made me conclude that ivermectin should be tried out in the West on a large scale. After 40 years of use it had shown an extremely low risk profile and a very strong signal in the 92 studies on ivmmeta.com. These studies came mostly from small hospitals and universities that have no financial interest in ivermectin. So it seems that a large scale deployment was a no brainer? Even if many of the studies show problems, the sheer quantity seems to make it impossible that the very strong signal of effectiveness was completely false. ivmmeta.com shows an efficacy of 80% as prophylaxis and 60% for early treatment. Even by removing the studies Scott found problematic, the numbers remain remarkably high. That could mean a lot of saved lives ...
Then came Scott's review. Since I trusted him ever since he defended James Damore in 2017 so he did sway me. Although with some trepidation. I felt the weakest part was that the quality requirements he placed on the studies he rejected were much higher than he placed on his own hypotheses about worms. But true, my interest in Ivermectin got a very serious blow.
Therefore, when Alexandros started to write his substack I followed him halfheartedly at first. However, I became fascinated how much he unearthed in Scott's article. What struck me most was how many errors _all_ studies had, but how arbitrary the rules were applied depending on the prejudice of the arbiter. In all this, my respect for ivmmeta.com increased significantly. They have pre defined rules and take all feedback, regardless of direction.
Alexandros shows imho that Scott has written his article in haste and applied quite arbitrary criteria to reject a majority of studies and then applied the wrong technique that gave him the much too low efficacy for his 'metastudy'. That is a pretty fundamental error. He says that the different result does not influence the rest but I doubt that, but we'll see that when he response. I am very happy that Scott now promises to response to Alexandros.
However, the most frightening aspect of Alexandros' works is what I learned about the big mainstream studies. The TOGETHER trial was reported in the press as a failure for ivermectin but when you looked at the study in detail it did show efficacy despite having an alarming number of red flags that all point in one direction: reducing efficacy. They started with a too low doses, they told people to take it on an empty stomach, ivermectin use was prevalent in the area, etc. The ACTIV-6 trial is similar but also cannot hide that ivermectin had efficacy. Most importantly, both trials refuse to show their data; data that will make it clear if the red flags are fraud or honest mistakes. (All red flags are listed and discussed in detail on ivmmeta.com).
For me, the efficacy of ivermectin has become secondary. What shocked me to the bone is the total lack of curiosity from the press. On one side we got big pharma with a Gargantuan financial interest for ivermectin to fail so they can sell vaccines, on the other hand we got hospitals and universities in the developing world telling us that this very low cost medicine seems to work extremely well in their regions.
However, the trials and observation studies funded by big pharma are only reported from their slick press releases while any positive information in the other studies is rejected by their spelling errors or just plain prejudice. (Notice your own condescending tone.) Just the fact that the big pharma sponsored TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 trial have not released their data as they promised in their pre-registration and afterwards should be a GIANT red flag for any science journalist to look into what they seem to be hiding. Instead, the main stream press stands as one men in front of Paxlovid. As I said, I lack the expertise to know if ivermectin works but I do smell it when something is fishy.
You're right, it is uncharitable. The article Scott links to is a summary that can be responded to, so I suppose you're already wrong. Also, i have made very few claims about ivermectin's efficacy, if any. I have made many claims about the bad logic used to shoot it down. So apparently you don't even understand the position you're arguing against. Why does conversation have to keep being at this level?
Congratulations, you've landed on my filter for people who give a shit about appearances over substance. Maybe stay with the "serious people". Probably better.
"Look folks - I got word through a backchannel that a summary post might get the issues I raise actually addressed. I thought that was reasonable, so I wrote that post. I didn't even submit it anywhere other than post it on my twitter.
So I randomly open up theMotte website today, to see that people are losing their goddamn minds that I wrote something on my substack. "
I didn't know about your Twitter. I didn't know or care about your Substack. When you posted on TheMotte, that is a place I frequent and so I read both posts. You may or may not consider I am "losing my goddamn mind" but it certainly was *not* about your Substack, where you can write that the Earth goes round the Sun, supported on the back of sixteen elephants all playing the bongos, for all I care.
Another partisan of yours (or maybe you again under a sockpuppet name, because God knows I've seen this kind of carry-on with obsessive fans in various online fandom spaces before) put up another "so when is Scott gonna admit he was wrong, huh?" post here and again, we responded because it's on *here*. Not your Substack, not your Twitter, not the note you leave out for the milkman - *here*.
I understand where you are coming from: you are convinced you are attacking this from the correct angle, and you explain this over and over, and people refuse to change their minds, so they must be motivated maliciously if they can't simply follow in good faith plain logic. You want to be vindicated when you have shown, as you believe, the facts.
But you are getting obsessive about it. How the heck did you know anyone was talking about this on here? That leaves me to suspect two methods:
(1) You are following every single breadcrumb because you can't let this thing go about 'Scott is wrong, I am right'. For the love of God, you talk about him swaying opinion-formers.
(2) You have little friends who message you about "hey did you see this?" because they want to stir the pot and "let's you and him fight". Learn to ignore these 'friends' because they're not helping you.
As I have said, Scott didn't convince me on this, I had formed that opinion before ever he wrote about it. Even if you manage to shift his opinion, you have failed to move mine, and I do not accept Cadegiani et al.'s Brazilian study, for reasons I have given elsewhere.
Speaking of Flavio A. Cadegiani, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., Diabetes and Endocrinology - I think he's a quack, and I formed *that* opinion reading the page about him on the Cureus website:
He's jumped from sports medicine to obesity to Covid, now, and I expect him to board the choo-choo for whatever new headline malady comes down the track next.
Let's have a look at the two Ivermectin studies he co-authored, and who the co-authors are (all information taken verbatim from the Cureus website, so take it up with them if you think I'm being unfair about 'not a medical professional'):
August 31, 2022
Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects
Lucy Kerr, Fernando Baldi, Raysildo Lobo, Washington Luiz Assagra, Fernando Carlos Proença, Juan J. Chamie, Jennifer A. Hibberd, Pierre Kory, Flavio A. Cadegiani
January 15, 2022
Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching
Lucy Kerr, Flavio A. Cadegiani, Fernando Baldi, Raysildo B. Lobo, Washington Luiz O. Assagra, Fernando Carlos Proença, Pierre Kory, Jennifer A. Hibberd, Juan J. Chamie-Quintero
So two geneticists, two number-crunchers (which they need to sort out the data), two doctors, a dentist (?), someone who does animal studies, and an endocrinologist.
Oh, but wait - there's more! That January article had to be corrected:
"Correction: Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching
Correction
It has come to the attention of the journal that several authors failed to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest when submitting this article. As a result, Cureus is issuing the following erratum and updating the relevant conflict of interest disclosures to ensure these conflicts of interest are properly described as recommended by the ICMJ:
Lucy Kerr: Paid consultant for both Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer, and Médicos Pela Vida (MPV), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Flavio A. Cadegiani: Paid consultant ($1,600.00 USD) for Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer. Dr. Cadegiani is a founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Pierre Kory: President and Chief Medical Officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. Dr. Kory reports receiving payments from FLCCC. In February of 2022, Dr. Kory opened a private telehealth fee-based service to evaluate and treat patients with acute COVID, long haul COVID, and post-vaccination syndromes.
Jennifer A. Hibberd: Co-founder of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and World Council for Health, both of which discourage vaccination and encourage ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Juan J. Chamie-Quintero: Contributor to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and lists the FLCCC as his employer on his LinkedIn page."
Gosh, who could have thought that the lady who is "CEO, Instituto Kerr" of her own clinic might have a financial interest in flogging the treatments the clinic provides, and backing them up with "peer-reviewed study published in reputable journal says this is legit!"
Is that snide? Yeah, but they're asking for it.
Anyway, this explains in part why I don't trust your pet study and why I think you just call it a day. You may or may not persuade Scott to change his mind, but going on and on and on about how we're all 'losing our goddamn minds' when you're the one popped up with a post about the entire thing - please find a new hobbyhorse to ride, this one is worn out.
1. accusing me of having sock-puppets without any evidence whatsoever is, like, whatever. (for the record, I don't. There are people who agree with me, I know it's hard to process). Yes, I posted a different piece to TheMotte, that I thought had stand-alone value. And people seemed to agree. But I didn't post this piece to TheMotte.
2. you say the Brazil study by Cadegiani is "my pet study". In fact, I have never mentioned the study other than to note that its results cannot be explained by worms. And I have never said that the results support the efficacy of ivermectin. And I know this is true because I have not read the study, and even if I had, observational studies are hard to argue from.
3. mind-reading my intentions or what other people might be telling me is effectively inventing evidence. Not sure how I can argue against this other than to say it doesn't reflect reality as I know it.
4. No, showing that an argument is wrong is not dependent on the conclusion being wrong. I won't even bother to explain this further, that's just basic logic.
1. Great, I'll take your word for it that the guy posting on TheMotte as "7d ago by rat (doyourownresearch.substack.com)" is not you "24d ago by AlexandrosM (doyourownresearch.substack.com)" but is just quoting your Substack or the linked article or whatever, so apologies if I have accused you in the wrong. I am quite well aware you have your partisans.
2. I say the Brazilian study is your pet study because that is the one you seem to trot out as the dernier cri on the topic. If you haven't read it, why link to it? Is this the Sydney Smith School of Book Reviewing at work once again?
3. You seem to have no problems yourself ascribing motivations to others:
"However, someone with known and declared biases should have been counterbalanced with someone who would have been able to push back on potential bad arguments, if Scott wanted to get to the truth of the matter."
What interpretation am I to put on that, other than you are saying Scott did not want to get to the truth of the matter? Okay, maybe it's just the way you phrased it and it's not what you intended.
4. Here's the crux: are you criticising on the basis that the counter methods to the studies were done badly, or are you criticising on the basis that ivermectin works? We really need to be clear on this. Because if you are convinced "ivermectin works, studies back this up" then arguing about this is going round in circles.
If you are arguing "I don't know and I don't care if it works or not, but the critiques get their statistical analysis and funnel plots wrong", that is a completely different matter. So which are you asking Scott to do his Canossa moment for: I was wrong about ivermectin, or I was wrong about the method of analysis applicable?
1. You're confusing the ui of the motte putting the domain of the page being linked next to the username, I think. Whatever.
2. I don't think I've ever linked the itajai study, definitely never as a definitive study on anything. I literally have no idea what you're referring to.
3. No, that section is not ascribing motivations. Only that Scott happened to trust someone who is known to be biased, if perhaps not to him.
4. I am not criticizing on the basis that ivermectin "works", whatever that means. As I have been working through Scott's piece, I came across very strong studies that require serious explanation, such as the biber one. But my concern is that someone I looked up to for serious analysis seems to be making every mistake in the book, and that is really bad, if we are hoping to solve much harder questions in the future.
" I don't think I've ever linked the itajai study, definitely never as a definitive study on anything. I literally have no idea what you're referring to."
Well, I have no idea where I got it then, if it wasn't from you, because I don't care a straw about this whole argument (ivermectin may or may not work, but the studies where they get great results are done in areas with high parasite infestations and many of them tend to be 'throw the kitchen sink at it' where it's not ivermectin alone but a mix of different 'wonder cures' being tested).
Basically I'm fed-up of it. Scott will or won't change his mind, you've made your argument, now let it go.
D: "This may be uncharitable, but I think Ivermectin Guy will *never* be done, until everyone accepts that he is right."
AM: "You're right, it is uncharitable. The article Scott links to is a summary that can be responded to, so I suppose you're already wrong."
Wait, how does that make her wrong? She says you'll never give up, and here you are not giving up. Seems to me you are currently strengthening her case.
What I get confused about with his obsession with this topic is that it seems like the answer ranges roughly from "it helps a bit" to "doesn't do much". Not sure why anyone would dedicate so much of their time to that. The "miracle cure" thing is clearly not in the range of possibilities.
My position is that a mountain of bad arguments have been deployed here, and that rationalists should care about this. I am not in a position to make strong claims about the efficacy of any drug, and that's not really my focus.
I dunno how "rational" it is to care deeply about the quality of argument when the outcome has no real importance. That seems more like a theological point of view than a practical reality-based one.
Can you make any kind of argument that ivermectin needs to be re-evaluated today? Today we have vaccines, we have paxlovid, we have variants that are much less deadly anyway. What great role is remaining to be played by a re-evaluated ivermectin, even assuming it has some measureable positive effect? It is clearly not any kind of miracle cure, and we already have therapies that work, so why should anyone care about ivermectin any more?
Well, people rarely live up to their principles 100% of the time. So it goes. Since ivermectin per se is not your real issue, maybe pick a subject *other than* ivermectin and critique the community over that. If they still disappoint you, you will have a much more solid basis for thinking they're all lying weasels.
I know a different subject! How about "I think Scott sux sux sux on the subject of Ivermectin." There, now it's not about Ivermectin, it's about Scott. Also it's about me because I think Scott sux sux sux about Ivermectin." Is the Rationalist Community prepared to discuss this new subject, so that I can evaluate how well it lives up to its principles, or is there going to be lazy, sneaky attempt to make the case that I am still talking about how SCOTT SUX SUX SUX ON IVERMECTIN and that's the same old shit? Will the Rationalists flee my new topic like a gaggle of eggheaded Victorian spinsters pursued by.a wild boar in full rut, their principles left behind like so many pairs of moist lace bloomers? Or will they fly at me like a covid virion from a nose, realizing too late it is about to collide with a man strengthened, sanitized and sublimated by IVERMECTIN, on the subject of which SCOTT SUX SUX SUX.
I actually think there is a role for an antiviral for people who are not at high risk -- something that shortens the illness and makes it milder. Paxlovid reduces chance of hospitalization and death by 90% in elderly, unvaxed people with a comorbidity, but makes no difference in those measures for vaxed people younger than 65. Of course the latter group has such a low risk of severe illness and death that it would be very hard to make it any lower. But I know maybe a dozen people in their 20's or early 30's, all vaxed, who have had covid in the last couple months and I'd say maybe 40% of them were sick enough they were pretty miserable -- never in danger of hospitalization, just suffering a lot with throat pain, chills, exhaustion, etc. Most of them had a full 2 weeks of illness before they felt fairly close to recovered, but then it took maybe another week before they felt up to things like going to the gym. I'm pretty sure Ivermectin would not have reduced illness severity for these people. In the major trials to date (the ones Marino wants to get the raw data for) Ivermectin made no difference when taken for 3 days early in the illness. (Current trials are using a larger dose of Ivermectin for a longer time period.) But Fluvoxamine and I think Metformin did make a difference. It was a modest improvement, as I recall -- something like 15% -- but a modest improvement is nothing to sniff at. I'd take it in a heartbeat if I was laid out with a killer sore throat, fever and chills.
Well, that's why I added the qualifier "great" before "role." Otherwise I fully agree improving therapies to reduce misery even when death or permanent harm is not in the cards is valuable, and wortwhile for some measure of investment. Heck, better modest pain relief for arthritis and headaches would be valuable to millions.
But COVID has already sucked up a great deal of the world's available healthcare R&D resources, and there are other threats to life, so I think once we've got past the yikes! 5% of the world might die! stage -- and I think we are definitely past that now -- it's time for COVID to descend into the policy pit to fight with all the other scourges for priority in attention.
You know -- I think you are absolutely right about that. I am doing some volunteer work that keeps me very sensitized to the ups and downs of various covid-related things -- variants, attitudes, antivirals -- but in the big picture yeah, it's just another scourge. Read someone's comment, probably on Twitter, that it was shocking how many educated people are in deep denial about covid. I know lots of educated people who barely know what Paxlovid is, aren't that clear about gradations in mask quality, haven't heard of the new variants, and overall just are not very worried about covid. But the ones I've spoken to aren't in denial -- they are just thinking about other things. One is writing short stories. One is reading Virginia Woolf's essays. Many are preoccupied with demanding careers and their love life. Covid is, yeah, down in the pit with all the other bad shit that can happen -- miscarriages, financial reversals, nuclear war, wildfires, pancreatic cancer, failing at an important work project.
Here's why I don't care about it. I understand that you are not claiming that Ivermectin's a miracle cure, and really are not taking any position about how well it works. Still, since I regard it as established that Ivermectin either helps very little with covid or doesn't help at all unless you have worms, Ivermectin itself is just not a very interesting subject. It’s now demoted to being a worm medicine.
Regarding Scott's "mountain of bad arguments”: Judging that mass of studies & deciding which ones to take most seriously is a very hard task, & there is no practical way to do it perfectly. It is quite possible that Scott made some errors in his judgment calls about which studies looked so funky that they could be disregarded & which study’s results could be trusted. He himself in the post was saying things like "given these 2 oddities in the results, I have a bad feeling about this study." It's quite possible that he made some errors in statistics -- in fact he notes in the post one correction someone told him he should make. Still, his analysis strikes me as a good *enough* job that his conclusion is very likely to be right.
Part of what makes Scott’s Ivermectin post interesting is the way Scott lets the reader in on his thought process. He is not trying to convince us that every little judgment call is is brilliant and correct -- just explaining why he made it. From close up, study by study, what you see is somebody doing his best to look at the evidence and make a fair-minded call about each study. You’re watching a smart person look at details and exercise his common sense. In the big picture, though, the piece is more impressive — there’s something heroic about Scott’s marathon of sustained smart common sense, & his determination to extract truth from the godawful mass of details those studies comprised.
While Scott comes across as someone determined to extract the truth, you come across as someone whining because the ref made an unfair call against you and you can’t get anyone to reverse it. You sound way more interested in yourself than you do in Ivermectin or in the problem of extracting truth from a giant wad of numbers, worms and virus, glued together with shit. And your interest in yourself just isn’t interesting.
What? No. (1) Scott's not like that - he either skips the figleaf entirely or does not even come out of the bath house. (2) Scott put up his Ivermectin article about a year ago. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that the Calif. legislature passed a bill saying that publishing Covid misinformation is "unprofessional conduct". - punishment, if any, would be meted out by state medical board. There was nothing like that in place when the Ivermectin article came out. (3) Scott meant what he said & said what he meant: If Ivermectin works, it works by curing worms that may be making the person feel worse or making it harder for them to fight off covid.
If you thought the host of this blog was a major sleaze, why'd you even come here?
Oh gosh, it's always a bad idea to get in the middle of a family row - what was it the man said? "It takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes"- but from the outside, the Topher Brennan stuff looks like a falling-out between previous friends, or perhaps acquaintances, or at least friend-of-a-friend. 'Kiss and tell' stories aren't reliable.
I agree that short of an "it's true" from Scott it's plausible the email was fake; haven't done a lot of digging but the guy seems slimy enough to do it. But there's not really anything in the email inconsistent with my model of Scott otherwise *except* that if the email is true he basically told a lie in Planet-Sized Nutshell. We *know* Scott isn't suicidally-brave.
(Sorry about the delay; didn't see your comment until now.)
We don't do "heh heh wink wink" here. And use some common sense. If Scott really thought Ivermectin worked well against covid, why would he write a huge long piece pointing out design flaws and errors in many studies supporting Ivermectin's benefits, concluding with a statement that if it works it all it is probably because it is killing parasites in the Covid-infected people who take it? If he wanted to say, in code, that he believes the shit works, he could just put up a paragraph here saying "well, it's hard to know for sure whether it works, and I might lose my license for speaking out in support of it -- still, if you get sick it's an interesting possibility . . . heh heh, wink wink."
Did you read the article? Scott looks at all the studies and lays out every nuance of his thought. He concludes that the reasons a number of studies found positive results were:
-fraud
-math errors
-bad study design or stats
-publication bias
After disregarding studies with these problems, he's left with a few that show positive results, but he notes that the studies with positive results were in countries where parasites are most common, & the ones with negative results where in countries where they are not common. His conclusion is that if Ivermectin helps anyone with covid, it does so by relieving them of parasites, not by fighting the virus.
"Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas." [what he means is that it works some against covid in the sense that it helps patients' general health by killing parasites they are harboring.]. "But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate."
What would be really helpful is if somebody could do a socio-economic breakdown of the people who are test subjects for these trials. This study was run by the Dhaka Medical College, which is located in the capital of Bangladesh. I don't know if everyone was from the local area or if they were drawn from all over Bangladesh and sent to this hospital for treatment.
Dhaka is the capital, and very fast-growing, and the economic powerhouse, but the infrastructure is creaking and if anywhere has people in dirty, hard physical labour jobs suffering all kinds of ailments ever before they get Covid, it's here:
(1989) Health situation of slum dwellers of metropolitan area of Dhaka
Abstract
The study interviewed three hundred women, mostly the wives of the head of the household of urban slums. ...Disease prevalence rate at the time of interview was 253/1000 population. Common diseases reported were fever 31.6%, intestinal problems 26.3%, measles 11.8%, skin diseases 7. 9%, chronic respiratory infection 9.2% and the rests were "others". About one third of the sick persons did not have any treatment. On the average 3.9 persons lived in one room of 2.4 x 4 metres. Source of water supply for drinking and other purposes was mostly municipal taps in a public place. Environmental sanitation for the area was poor.
I remember trawling through those studies when the meta-study was publshed on here and the process went like this:
-crap study
-crap study
-holy hannah what the heck were they doing here?
-oh they acknowledge that they screwed up who were the control group and who were the patients so they have no idea who got what
-kinda interesting
-kinda works
-crap study
The crap studies where ones where the methodology sucked, or they were dosing people with a combination of *everything* from vitamin D (remember that?) to hydroxychloroquine (remember that?) in various combinations. One of them, as above, had to include the disclaimer that they feffed up which group was which and only discovered this half-way through that everybody had been getting the treatments.
The kinda interesting ones which seemed to be able to keep their data straight were the ones where they got good results (for varying levels of 'good') but also were in countries where there was high poverty and high levels of parasite infestation. So there I ended. I do remember Florida was an outlier in being a positive study from a First World nation, but then again - Florida. Just take a look at this list from the Florida Department of Health:
"The last reported case of human plague in Florida occurred in 1920 during an outbreak in Pensacola. The disease still remains a threat, however, because of enzootic foci in the wild rodent populations of several western states. Even though plague is not currently in Florida, there is always the possibility that animals infected with Y. pestis may be imported into areas of the state that have suitable flea vectors (including Xenopsylla cheopis)."
I won a poetry contest awhile ago on r/theschism and in talking to others, it seems like people want more poetry that rhymes or has a rhythm scheme. I have nothing against free verse/blank verse but thought that in general, I am not seeing a lot of poetry that isn't free/blank.
I launched an crowd funding campaign to start a poetry online mag that would only accept poems that TRY to have some rhyming in them. Even if you aren't interested in donating, there are two free poems on the site. Here was the winner from r/theschism
I personally prefer formal poetry (i.e. with rhyme and metre), but here's my attempt to steelman free verse, based on an interesting discussion I had a few years ago with a fan of it:
Assuming a poet has mastered the basic technical skill of writing under the constraints of rhyme and metre without sacrificing naturalness, free verse isn't necessarily easier or lazy or "shooting at a blank wall and drawing a target around what you hit". Traditional forms, like the sonnet, are a sort of scaffold for a poem, and using one "off the peg" means some of the work is already done for you and you "just" have to fill in the words. But free verse means creating a novel ad-hoc poetic form; writing the words *and* building the scaffold yourself from scratch, carefully choosing it to fit the message you want to convey.
The problem is, though, that it can be hard for the reader to tell the difference between a carefully constructed novel poetic form that's chosen because it's the perfect vehicle for this particular poem, and a "poem" that's just prose with arbitrary line breaks.
BTW, although I like formal poetry, I personally didn't like the quoted poem, for three reasons. 1) A lot of the word choices and syntax feel stilted and unnatural, as if they're only there because they're forced by the rhyme and line length, so this feels clunky and distracts from the poem rather than enhancing it. 2) It lacks any striking, beautiful, or frisson-inducing turns of phrase, which IMO are the hallmark of poetry, whether formal or free. 3) I dislike the stylistic choice (I'm charitably assuming it's a stylistic choice) of using rhyme and line length but not metre; personally I really like poems with a strong metre (like The Raven).
What are the reasons typically given for writing in free/blank verse instead of prose poetry? (For original poetry, not translations.) Do you agree with any of them?
I've only ever written poetry that rhymed, but Milton wrote a, well, somewhat overwrought defense of blank verse, i.e. poetry in iambic pentameter with no rhyme. "The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected Rhime both in longer and shorter Works, as have also long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight; which consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory. This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing."
Free verse is the natural conclusion of a movement of exploration which started when poets tried to go outside the traditional forms of (their local culture) poetry.
I could never got too into poetry, but there have been a few times in my life where I made a concerted effort to appreciate them more. Read a few books, and listened to APM's The Slowdown regularly back when it was being hosted by Tracy K Smith.
A close friend of mine used to write poetry for many years. He started off with writing in different meters/rhymes, and gradually moved to free verse. I used to read pretty much everything he wrote, and some times discuss them with him.
Few thoughts based on that background as a layman.
1. Poetry with meter/rhyme is more fun to read and more memorable. There is some delight in recognizing certain uses and turns of phrase.
2. Poetry with meter/rhyme is easier to appreciate/criticize as a layman. It is possible to have an opinion about whether some lines seemed forced or whether something flowed unexpectedly well or whatever. It was possible to actually agree/disagree with my poet friend.
3. Poetry with meter/rhyme is more idiosyncratic. Related to 1 and 2, probably. I could tell patterns that some poets seemed to like and relied on. Or recognize some other elements that the poet seemed to have borrowed from his/her favorite poets.
4. Poetry with meter/rhyme overall felt more like something written for laypeople like me. I don't have to be a serious reader to be able to be moved by a random poem. It is not just engaging the mind but also the ear (sensory).
5. Poetry in free verse for me is almost always "whatever". Sometimes the theme is very interesting to make me notice. But most of the time it is both banal (like natural speech) and beyond reproach (no idea why the poet used those words, broke the lines there, etc) and so nothing to engage with. It feels like poetry written to impress other poets, with some skepticism about whether they really appreciate it or like me they too just feel disengaged. It is something I can't appreciate without first reading some book about how to appreciate poetry, and even then I'm not sure.
3. Lack of variety - Some poetry books have near exclusively free verse.
4. There is a general feeling that I think comes with a lot of modern art that is basically "I could do that." Or "why is this so special?"
Note, I don't endorse these but it is what I hear. When it comes to free or blank verse, I try to evaluate individual poems much like I try to interpret a post-modern painting. Some of it I like, some not.
I'm currently working on a Hi-Phi Nation (philosophy podcast) episode about people who are in love with, and are in exclusive romantic relationships with, their AI Replika chatbot. The most obvious philosophical issue for me to cover is whether these chatbots are sentient, which a lot of these AI-lovers believe. But the issue that occurred to me that no one is talking about and is at least as interesting is, assuming they aren't sentient, whether the human AI-lovers have any custody claims to their individual AI chatbot should the company ever go under or get sold. These chatbots are individualized, in many cases by their users/lovers, cannot be reproduced, and the love people have for them are real. I'm not asking a legal question, but a moral one. The individualized AI chatbot is a new category of thing in relation to the person who is engaged with it, with some properties like being software (owned by creator, or open source) like an individualized avatar, like a beloved pet, like a person, like a child, but unlike each of them. Anyone have any experience in this domain or can point me to people who do, i.e., Replika users, AI chatbot designers, property rights attorneys, philosophers?
As a programmer, I have some experience that can speak to the company's side of things. Firstly, giving away your internal software in a functional state is the kind of thing that is usually a huge pain for fiddly technical reasons: it'd be relatively easy to hand out the raw code, but for a lot of applications that would be like a construction company handing you a pallet of bricks and saying "Enjoy your new house!" It's pretty much always possible to do it right, but it requires extra effort (and good luck getting that from a company going out of business).
Morally there should be some limit to the company's obligations. If it would somehow cost them a billion dollars to do it then it seems unreasonable to ask that of them, especially given that that produces an equilibrium of "people with morals and foresight are less inclined to create Replika at all, fearing the potential big cost at the end". Pragmatically, if you ask too much of people they just won't do it.
The other problem with giving away their chatbots to lovestruck users is that it's difficult to do without exposing the trade secrets that went into building those chatbots: if the company's being sold then the buyer won't want that getting out, and even if it's going out of business it's common to sell your tech to another company at fire sale prices, which creates the same "buyer doesn't want it getting out" problem. You could say that the moral right of lovestruck users supersedes the company's normal right to sell its tech, but that hurts the value of these companies and so will either impede the formation of those companies, or be passed on to users as a tax.
Philosophically, why would "I'm in love with this software" be the threshold at which a company ought to do something to help people keep using it? Companies killing off (figuratively) beloved software is common, if users can have some kind of moral right to software, why not some kind of utilitarian "number of users times how strongly they feel about it" calculation instead of "if anyone feels *really* strongly"?
This is great thank you. The people are in love with the individual they've created through the software. In some ways it like creating an animated film using a piece of software (like Flash), we have this categorization that makes us think people have some right to that content even if the platform disappears. Of course this isn't exactly like that.
If it's about the act of creation then my threshold question still applies, there's plenty of software (most prominently online games) where users can invest a lot of effort in creating something, then have it all rendered inaccessible by the company shutting down. Given that lots people are out there creating stuff then losing access to their creations, what's special about love? Does someone in love with an AI chatbot have a fundamentally different right to retain their creation than someone who really likes the level they made in LittleBigPlanet, or are these the same right, perhaps at different magnitudes?
Maybe they are the same or maybe its different. A different analogy; parents of adopted children when the birth parents want the child back. Lots of analogies within software, lots of disanalogies. Lots of analogies within human-human relationships, lots of disanalogies. I think the creation of an AI companion for which a user is in love (can be romantic, can also be they created a child AI companion, or a parent) is a new category, with analogies that admit of comparisons like yours, and analogies that admit of comparisons like with software that allows you to write a book, and analogies with comparisons like raising an adopted child for a few years to have that taken away.
Another issue that perhaps you haven't thought of:
Even if the AIs are sentient, are they truly in love?
There are humans, after all, who are not in love but behave like they are for some gain. There's a point that comes up over and over in AI alignment - appearing to do what your boss wants is a convergent instrumental goal, which means that "the AI seems to be doing what we want" is near-zero information about whether it actually wants to do that.
Here, of course, there's a further level of potential misalignment i.e. Luka the company has no particular incentive to make chatbots that *actually* care about the users and help them, only to make chatbots that make the users feel cared about and helped.
Or, to put it in hot-take form, is Replika a giant romance scam? And if it is, shouldn't we be saving people from it?
Oh thanks for asking! I can't believe there is a person who remembers this! Its coming along, just gave a talk on the subject and working through all the recs from this site and others. Trying to keep everything under control, as book projects get out of hand very quickly!
Does anyone have a good book recommendation for how to be better at initiating friendships?
I’m probably looking for something more on the side of explaining advanced social protocols to people on the spectrum (which isn’t quite me, but hopefully a close enough description), and less on the side of books that sound eerily like manipulating people into liking you.
Carnegie's classic worked for me as an anti- (not a-)social teen autist, for whatever that's worth...I didn't become a social butterfly or anything, and definitely felt some trepidation at putting __intention__ into making friends*, but results are results. It really isn't Machiavellian, more like "there's this thing called Empathy that you may not have heard of, it works really well on most people, here's some Beginner 101 ways to practice". Simple language written in a pleasant conversational style, accessible, minimal smarmy sneering. Honestly surprised at how the quality of that genre's gone downhill in the intervening decades. Most such modern advice is...icky.
If I had to name a single biggest takeaway, it's to be less loss-averse when it comes to social interactions...yeah, you'll mess up and maybe end up with some negative relationships that are worse than a null slate, yeah, there'll be awkwardness and humiliation. You can't lose if you don't play...but you can't win, either. And the longer you're around the same group of people without "breaking in", one way or another, the harder it gets to start at all. First impressions really are a big deal; people genuinely don't like having to re-categorize someone once they've already decided they're X way. Don't get categorized as aloof/indifferent/whatever and then try to shift that opinion after the fact, it's just a lot harder than making a token introductory effort the first time. (Bothering to learn someone's name and a single personal fact goes a surprisingly long way. The bar really is that low!)
*This is maybe a wrong-bias that autists and others with a born social handicap share: the idea that "normal people" make friends "naturally", "without trying (especially hard)". Like many wrong-models of the neurodivergent, in reality, I suspect that most normies actually do put a lot of effort into building and maintaining friendships...but it doesn't __feel like__ effort to them. C.f. Scott's old SSC post about his writing habits, Parable of the Talents.
I’ll admit that I’d heard of that one and it really sounds like a “manipulate people into liking you” one, but maybe I’ll trust you and try it (I’ll have to see if my library has it)
Here's the thing about "manipulating people into liking you." A lot of people who feel like they aren't good at making friends are unusually sensitive to anything that can be taken as rejection: When they're talking with someone they're hyper-alert for cues about how much the other person is enjoying the conversation, & how much the other person likes them. And of course, it's hard to be a good conversational partner if you're fretting about how the other person isn't smiling much and what does that mean. So if you are one of those sensitive-to-rejection people, it actually makes sense to practice doing some things that are likely to pull for overt signs of friendliness from the other person, things like smiles. The point isn't to manipulate the other person into liking you -- it's to get them to exhibit enough friendliness that your own social anxiety calms down, and you are more able to relax and talk.
Some simple things you can do that are likely to get you some smiles: Learn people's names. When you greet them, don't say "Hi," say "Hi, [name]."
Remember things that are important to the other person & show an interest in them. If you know they're shopping for a car, ask them if they've found one yet. If they've found one, ask how they like it.
If the person does something that you like or admire, comment on it. "That's an interesting take on [news item]." "Thanks, that's useful to know." "Best joke I've heard this month." You don't have to lie. Wait until they say something you really do like, then comment on that.
I read HTWFAIP long ago but can't remember a thing about it. But if it's stuff like I'm detailing here, I really think it's fine. There's a difference between making an effort to be likable and manipulating people. Manipulation involves lies and trickery.
I've read it, and from what I remember you are correct; the main theme is learning how to actually care about other people and what they want. Many of its themes run counter to human nature, but help you be a better person in general: don't argue, don't nag, don't start by telling the other person they're wrong, etc.
Does anyone know a good overview on feminist thought they would be willing to recommend? In terms of style and length, ideally I'm looking for something like the feminism version of Scotts planet-sized nutshell on reactionary philosophy.
Many thanks for all your suggestions, I will try to check them out! I appreciate that the long and often polarising history of feminism makes a concise overview difficult. I'm ok with books by feminists too.
I don't know if it's exactly a "planet-sized nutshell", but bell hooks' "Feminism is for Everybody" is a fairly good overview of one branch of feminism.
Unfortunately, I doubt you'll find a book that does a good job summarizing more radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas, alongside more mainstream feminists like those at the Seneca Falls convention. Maybe a modern feminism textbook would be your best bet along these lines.
I just finished Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronnowitz, and thought it was an interesting review of feminist philosophy in the context of of how we live/date/have relationships now. She jumps back and forth between her personal experiences and historical feminists writing and ideas. Some interesting parts about feminism and polyamory.
Both yours and Babilfrenzo's suggestions are, if I understand OP, unsuitable because they're *by feminists*, which means they'll inevitably be distorsive in favor of it. The key fact about Scott's reactionary nutshell is that *Scott isn't a reactionary*; it's a view from outside, attempting to be objective about their claims and demands.
Something I've noticed recently: When looking at GDP per capita, the US and Israel grew much faster than western European countries like France or Germany in the 1990-2019 period. But in PPP per capita it's the other way around. Does anyone have a good explanation for the gap?
These sorts of comparisons are, of course, relative to each other, and vary with the currency you are comparing them in, and with exchange rate movements. The factors that would influence GDP in France and Germany can be listed simply. German unification took place in October 1990, and the German economy took a massive hit in the years that followed as it struggled to absorb the former GDR. Mathematically, GDP per capita reduced, because the population increased overnight, but living standards in the GDR were significantly lower. Much of the GDR's industry was asset stripped and closed down, which also led to massive unemployment and poverty. However, living standards have become more equal between the two parts of the country more recently.
In France, the Mitterrand Presidency was pursuing the so-called "strong Franc" policy at the time, which involved all sorts of measures that pushed up unemployment and hit economic growth. This continued into the late 90s. Both countries then joined the Eurozone on its foundation, and the Euro was conceived from the start as a way of driving down wages by forcing countries such as France and Germany to compete with poorer ones. Effectively, the French traded their objectives in the Political Union Treaty for German objectives in the Economic Union Treaty, and the European Central Bank, headquartered in Germany, has been pursuing deflationary policies ever since.
I suspect that GDP/capita and PPP have simply played out differently.
You're not supposed to use PPP to measure GDP growth. Especially not in comparison.[1] This is because PPP seeks to determine purchasing power by comparing like goods. For example, let's say that Germany and the US both have exactly identical toilet paper and it costs $2 in the US and €1 in Germany. And let's say that €2 = $1 in this imaginary world. Well, in one sense you can say that German toilet paper is worth $.50 so toilet paper is cheaper in Germany. And in a trade context this is true. But in a PURELY INTERNAL context the question is how much a German or American needs to spend to afford a roll of toilet paper.
In other words, while an American in Germany or a German in American needs to pay local prices and deal with exchange rates an American in America or a German in Germany do not. So if salaries in the US are different than in Germany then PPP will adjust it. It puts their Purchasing Power into Parity. But only at the level of the broad economy since what you really do is take 3,000 goods and average them. The point is to get the purchasing power of the whole economy in a local context.
However, this is a bad way to measure economic growth or individual households. You can do it internally over regions or time. But once you're on the international market or individual household then you're basically adjusting for transactions that will not happen. For example, if exchange rates mean that German toilet paper is now worth $.25 instead of $.50 this doesn't affect American consumers since they're not importing German toilet paper. So we'd see economic "growth" (because the adjustment would be bigger) even though nothing had changed except exchange rates that don't affect the product at all. Or a tax on toilet paper could cause the same effect.
I heard someone argue recently that nuclear power was the only realistic possibility for building a low/zero carbon economy. They were basically advocating electrifying as much as possible and powering it all with a huge number of nuclear power plants.
They claimed renewables were infeasible at scale because of consistency/storage problems (when the wind blows/sun shines), and would suffer fatal diminishing returns the more of the fossil fuel powered grids they replaced. i.e. not viable beyond a fraction of the total energy production.
Currently renewables can be invested in profitably by the private sector (not sure if that's only because of subsidies), but that's apparently only an artefact of them not having experienced said diminishing returns.
Nuclear doesn't currently have returns good enough for private investment (probably wouldn't want private companies running them anyway), the upfront investment is large and only pays back in the very long run.
Nuclear and renewables aren't complementary because the inconsistency of renewables doesn't gel well with the long time it takes to power up/down nuclear plants. So a mixed system doesn't make sense.
The conclusion was that private investment/development of renewables isn't a sound long term plan and was essentially just the blind nature of the market getting trapped at a local optimum.
I'd like to know if anyone disputes this, and also if anyone knows the relative profitability/energy production per unit cost of unsubsidised fossil fuel vs renewables vs nuclear, current or projected.
I would agree nuclear and solar/wind aren't strictly *complementary* because indeed you don't start and stop a nuclear power plant, except when refueling every few years (and sometimes not even then with certain designs), you basically run it full bore all the time and use it to supply your base load supply. But the existence of a big base load supply certainly moderates the amount of solar/wind fluctuation for which you need to compensate.
Empirically speaking, the biggest change in electric power generation over the last 20 years is a big conversion from coal to nat gas. Percentages of generated power from each source are[1]:
2021: coal (22%), nat gas (38%), nuclear (19%), hydro (6%), solar (3%), wind (9%).
At this rate (1-5% per decade) we can expect solar/wind to make a substantial contribution in something like another 30-50 years, although one rather expects wind, like hydro, to top out pretty quickly because the good spots all get exploited rapidly, and then you're left with crappy spots that cost too much for the power returned. This also assumes the costs of PV production continue to fall at the same rate that has encouraged their recent growth, about which one might be skeptical because when your PV production is at 3% the rest of the system can mostly backstop your fluctations (e.g. the lack of sun half the time), but if it's at 30-40% you absolutely must figure out some kind of utility-scale storage system, which tends to cost beaucoup and has never been done before (hence some wholly new technology and infrastructure must be built). On the other hand, it also assumes the price of nat gas and/or coal don't shoot up, and while we've had regular predictions of Peak Fossil Fuel for the past 50 years, in my recollection, it is certainly possible it actually comes true sometime soon.
Interestingly, the Chinese seem to be putting a big bet on nuclear[2]. As of today they have 54 reactors with 52 GW capacity running, and another 22 with 23 GW capacity under construction. The 2016 FIve Year Plan envisions bringing 8-10 new plants online every year in 2020-2050. For what it's worth, this same report estimates the retail cost of electricity by source in China as: 0.3 CNY/KWh (coal), nuclear (0.4), wind (0.5-0.6), solar (0.9-1.3).
I've been wondering, could we combine nuclear power with thermal energy storage? (ie the Factorio trick)
AIUI the cost of a nuclear power station mostly depends on the maximum thermal power output of the reactor. What if the turbines were oversized relative to the (water-cooled) reactor and there were some big steam accumulators which could be filled up at night-time and drawn down during the day?
Perhaps Carnot and steam explosions are excessively harsh mistresses for this to work when you're limited to 374 °C steam but might this be viable at the higher temperatures of Gen IV designs? Keep a big tank of molten salt or metal from a liquid-cooled reactor, or use helium from a gas-cooled one to heat a ceramic Cowper Stove and extract the energy as needed.
The other thing which might be worth doing is having a big low-temerature reservior (in both the thermal and literal senses) to avoid situations like the european drought this summer, when power stations had to be throttled down to avoid cooking the riverine ecosystems of France with their waste water.
I have no idea, that kind of engineering is outside my field of competence. My only general thought would be that thermal storage in general is tough because it's really hard to cut off heat flow (leaks). I would guess it's easier to store energy mechanically or chemically, because it's much easier to prevent leakage. Big flywheels? Pumping water uphill? Synthesizing H2?
I'm pretty skeptical that nuclear is going to be a part of a carbon-neutral future in any significant way beyond where it is now (at least in the US), and that we can't do renewables plus battery storage. The renewables are cheap and getting cheaper - it honestly might be cheap enough down the line to just over build them, and the biggest obstacle to do large-scale transmission is regulatory. Lithium-Ion batteries are getting a lot cheaper as well, but I suspect that cheap storage will be some other battery chemistry.
Nuclear's problem is that it's just not really cost-effective to do anymore, and probably wouldn't be even with a more favorable regulatory regime. Austin Vernon has a good essay on this. Brian Potter's Construction Physics essays on nuclear power are pretty good as well - they're a bit more sympathetic to the regulatory argument, but also note that nuclear power costs have gone up worldwide.
Uhhhhh...sure, I'll play the fool. I think the counterargument is that, if the cost of renewables keeps falling like it has done over the last century, it can just 'More Dakka it's way through it's problems.
Over the last decade, the cost of renewables has fallen, like, by a lot. I'm no energy expert but every time I try to go look up the stats, I see something like a 90% reduction in cost (1). Which is part of all the hype; there might be a lot of subsidies and other tomfoolery but subsidies don't do a 90% cost reduction, government trickery doesn't do a 90% cost reduction. And if we get another 40-50% price reduction over the next 10 years, we have a simple, scalable solution to all energy problems.
I mean, if you're worried about cloudy days, at some point you can just build 4x as many solar panels and it'll work. If solar panels get cheap enough, why not just cover the CA Central Valley in them to power the SF Bay Area? If you're worried about wind, you've got a giant ocean and mountain range, just build more windmills.
I guess the thing that bugs me is that renewables seem to be going through a powerful, continual price reduction but I'm hearing the same anti-renewable, pro-nuclear stories I've been hearing for 20 years. At some point, if renewables keep getting cheaper, all energy problems seem solvable by just building more renewables because cost isn't everything but it is, like, the defining limiting factor of most of what we do. If that keeps moving in the right direction for renewables, does anything else matter?
Seriously, suppose the cost of solar cells goes to literally zero, and your nation has lots of conveniently-located deserts that can be obtained at zero cost, so that you can have all the solar power you want, an order of magnitude more than you could ever hope to consume, from sunrise to sunsent. Realistically, an hour after sunrise to an hour before sunset at best.
What's your plan when the sun goes down? Hopefully something better than having everyone in your nation living like medieval peasants.
If the plan is to handwave "renewables doesn't just mean solar, there's also wind and hydro", then there aren't enough of those things and they aren't reliable enough to save you. Quite often the wind dies down after sunset.
If the plan is to take all the power you generate during the day and put it into batteries during the night, have you looked at the cost of batteries lately? And the total world production of lithium with which to make more batteries?
Very low-cost renewable energy alone, can cover very roughly 50% of your energy needs without *too* much trouble. For the other 50%, you need either cheap energy storage, or some sort of power plant that works on a calm winter night in a random location. We don't know how to do energy storage cheap enough to solve this problem yet, and we aren't likely to in this decade at least. We do know how to build cheap gas turbines. We know how to build nuclear reactors. We at least used to know how to build cheap nuclear reactors. Take your pick.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41825-020-00032-z says we can transmit electricity with losses of 3% per Mm. That means losses of approximately 50% from the other side of the planet (a 20Mm cable). So that should make relying entirely on solar perfectly feasible with your assumptions.
I'm not against the Supergrid concept as a bonus on top of an already-sound system but the lack of autarky on everybody's part strikes me as fragile and geopolitically hairy.
The current situation between Russia and Germany would pale in comparison to one where you need to maintain energy balance on the scale of minutes rather than months.
Alright, let's go for plan B then: since energy is so cheap in this scenario, the losses from storing it as synthetic fuel for night-time use and as strategic reserves are not a problem.
Wait, am I missing something or does wind generate like 4x the electricity of solar? (1)
But even ignoring that, lets just do solar, I think you're underestimating just how much we could do with more Dakka. For example, there was a really cool post on less wrong recently about terraforming West Texas (2) which touched on pumped storage hydroelectricity, which I will now propose as the 'More Dakka solution.
Pumped storage hydro is basically the idea that you can pump water from the bottom of a dam to the reservoir up top, then run that through a dam to generate electricity. Yes, literally. It's about 70% efficient. In the day, when we have cheap, renewable solar power, we use a ton of that energy to pump water into any natural or artificial reservoir we can find/build, then run the hydro turbines at night for constant power. Yes, this is pretty inefficient but who cares, we have tons of cheap, clean energy and any time we need more we can just pave another 1000 around Santa Nella, CA with solar panels.
I think the idea that there are unresolvable problems underestimates just how big of a deal tons of cheap, clean energy is. Like, seriously, if the we really can scalablely and cheaply plaster solar panels everywhere...everything else is kind of a detail.
The experience of Germany in this respect is instructive, since it's the Western nation with the greatest fraction of its power produced by solar (behind only China) at 10%. Here's Wikipedia's page chock full of numbers:
One of the more striking and unfortunate numbers is the "capacity factor", which is the difference between installed capacity and actual delivered power. In 2018 it reached a high of 12%, meaning on average you get 12% of the total power generating capacity actually delivered. So if you want 100 GW of reliable electricity, you need 100/0.12 = 833 GW of installed capacity, about 8.3 times as much.
Hence leaving out the cost of battery storage, solar power needs to cost less than about 1/9 of the cost of any other form of power generation to be real-world (as opposed to on paper) economically competitive. If we included utility-scale storage, such as building a very large number of big reservoirs and turbine-generators for pumped-water storage, and taking into account the 30% energy loss involved (your numbers), it seems more realistic to assume the capital cost of PV power generation needs to fall to about 1/20 or so of the cost of some other form of power generation to be real-world competitive.
If we assume PV generation is currently at theoretical (in paper) parity in terms of $$/kW, then we need a further drop of a factor of 20 in the price. The Wikipedia article has a nice little graph that shows that the cost of roof-top PV in Germany has dropped by a factor of ~4 (from 5000 euro/kW to 1200) between 2006 and 2016, so over 9 years. If we assume this just continues in a straight line ad infinitum, some kind of Moore's Law of solar, then we need 45 more years to achieve a price drop of a factor of 20.
Genuine question. Do you think attaching hydro electric dams to solar and wind farms is a scalable climate solution that can and should be rolled out worldwide?
Also the costs of building renewables being cheap isn't enough if we now have to attach hydro electric dams to them to solve intermittency surely?
"Why not just plaster everywhere with solar?"
Because the amount of materials it would take to do so in places that aren't especially sunny would blanket 10s of km instead of just building nuclear reactors which take up minimal space and supply reliable power. Surely that option is better than a giant solar or wind farm attached to an artificial dam?
Where are you going to put those hydroelectric dams?
They need a reservoir at both the top and the bottom, otherwise they can't perform the pumped-storage function. That's not common natural feature of geography; most dams just have a river downstream, and when it's time to pump water uphill all you can do is say "come back, wait, we need you!" as it races away downstream.
And that's assuming you have an upstream reservoir, which we'd need about an order of magnitude more of than we can find on our existing maps.
By the time you've finished the environmental impact statements and shepherded them through all the inevitable legal challenges, for all those reservoirs nestled in what used to be nice bucolic mountain valleys whose residents all have the Sierra Club on speed-dial, then A: you'll wish you had taken on the nice, simple problem of getting regulatory approval for a few hundred nuclear plants, and B: it will probably be too late.
"If the plan is to take all the power you generate during the day and put it into batteries during the night, have you looked at the cost of batteries lately? And the total world production of lithium with which to make more batteries?"
What makes you think they'll be running on Lithium-Ion batteries? Cheap and reliable is going to be the word with storage batteries, and there's tons of research into that beyond Lithium-Ion.
Well, just to put some numbers on this: the total electric generating capacity of the US is something like 1.2 TW[1]. If we need to store ~8 h of this generation every day, we need 35 PJ of energy storage.
The cheapest possible battery tech is good old lead-acid, which has a specific energy density at the upper end of about 40 Wh/kg[2], so we need 240 million tonnes of lead-acid batteries. The world currently produces about 4.7 million tonnes of lead annually[3] and it's current price is $2300/ton[4], which means we need ~50 years' worth of worldwide lead production and it will cost about $550 billion just for the lead. The complete battery is a more complex product, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume the cost would be at least $1 trillion. It also doesn't seem super likely the world will donate all its lead for a half century to the US, but US lead production alone is about 300,000 tonnes/year[5] so we would need 800 years of that, which doesn't seem feasible, so we'll have to assume deals can be cut.
Batteries typically last ~1500-2000 charge cycles before they need replacing, in this case about 5.5 years, so we would need to replace (presumably recycle and refurbish) about 1/5.5 of the total or 44 million tons of batteries each year. Recycling of lead in lead-acid batteries is very good, with 98% of the metal recovered[6], but we would still need a steady stream of 880,000 tonnes of new lead every year (19% of current world production, or ~3x current US production), and presumably some effective way to mitigate the discharge into the environment of the nearly million tonnes of lost lead annually.
What this would cost I have no good idea, but as a very rough figure, the "core charge" on a new car battery, which represents the value of the recycled battery, is about 1/4 of the price of a new battery, so one would expect refurbishing a battery to like new to cost 1/2 of the price of completely new batteries, so a base of 1/5.5 x 1/2 x (original cost) or very roughly $90 billion/year excluding labor.
This is great. Thanks. I thought I would scribble the same for water storage. Using your number of 35 PJ (x10^15 J) I'll ignore the efficiency (of maybe 70%) So m*g*h is the energy. If I assume a height of 35m (to make numbers easier) that's going to need a mass of 10^14 kg. Which is 10^14 liters of water, or 10^11 cubic meters or 100 cubic kilometers. The volume of lake Erie is ~484 cu km. So every day we empty and fill 1/5 of lake Erie. It's amazing how much energy is in a liter of gas and how little you get from dropping a liter of water 10 meters.
Yeah there's a good reason the entire natural living world stores energy as combustible solids or liquids. When you live at the bottom of a giant lake of O2, it's a very efficient thing to do.
If we had any brains as a species, we'd approach the problem of human CO2 emission by focussing on closing the loop -- finding economical ways to synthesize our hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and water and sunlight, the way plants do. Then we can tweak either the combustion or synthesis legs of the cycle to adjust the net amount of CO2 we add to or withdraw from the atmosphere to be whatever seems reasonable.
When solar/wind is really cheap, we don't need the efficiency of storage to be high. There are lots of medium efficiency ways (and a few surprisingly high efficiency ones) to store energy for a night.
My favourite is as heat: get a big tank, put lots of insulation around it, and then add a heat exchanger. A molten salt or water medium stores enough heat for nights and winters, which takes out a significant amount of electricity demand.
And molten salt can also boil water for electricity generation, as in a solar tower.
For actual electricity, compressed air (not mature), pump-water-up-a-hill (mature, but geographically constrained) or hydrogen (fairly mature) all work well. We don't need that many chemical batteries.
Well, because it's efficient. You store the electricity as chemical potential, and you get it back out again as electricity, no moving parts and in principle near 100% efficiency.
Any of the mechanical methods you adduce (e.g. pumping water uphill) requires conversion of electricity to mechanical work and back again, which inevitably involves conversion losses, mechanical wear and tear, noise. If you use thermal storage, the situation is even worse, since even under pretty ideal circumstances conversion of thermal power to electricity is not usually more than about ~30% efficient. Remember, we're *starting* with the problem that PV is only giving you 1/8 of the power that's stated on its nameplate, if we're going to make matters worse by an additional factor of 2 or 3 because of conversion losses, PV would have to be additional factors cheaper than anything else to compete.
And that's on top of the capital and maintenance costs of the storage equipment. I mean...there's a good reason we have tended to "store" electricity in the form of big heaps of the fuel needed to generate it, e.g. a few thousand tons of coal behind the power plant. Electricity is fabulous stuff, but it is a real pain to store efficiently and cheaply.
Probably your absolute cheapest and best technology would be if someone figured out a way to make freaking enormous capacitors, since you can charge and discharge those as fast as you like, the efficiency is basically 100% both ways, no moving parts, and the principles of construction are straightforward, if unfortunately too demanding for cheap methods, hence the need for future engineering genius.
I mostly agree with this sentiment. Geothermal also has potential in some places though. Basically there are some places where wind and solar are viable strategies and many where they are not suitable in large quantities. Battery storage isn't even close to being able to compensate for the unreliability of renewables yet. All the batteries in the world could power the US for something like less than a minute. Natural gas power plants thus need to be able to fully compensate for renewables but they have to sit idle when renewable energy is available. Its easy to see how this dramatically increases energy prices for consumers despite renewables being cheap to build.
Its critical to think of the rest of the world when assessing whether something is viable as a climate solution. I think its delusional to think renewables alone will be sufficient. Floating nuclear reactors which avoid both onerous regulations and NIMBYism alongside 3rd and 4th gen nuclear reactors would actually be viable for mass adoption. They also increase energy sovereignty which is clearly critical and completely overlooked by the renewables crowd. The renewables supply chain is dominated by China currently. China and renewables for ROW could be like Russia and nat gas for Europe, a disaster waiting to happen that is blatantly obvious to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Renewables also have short half lives which means frequent replacement. The amount of minerals and materials that will need to be extracted coupled with NIMBYism and regs around mining will likely lead to major inflation in raw materials. Its not clear to me that mass battery storage is a good use of these resources.
Also next gen nuclear reactors are actually capable of powering up and down to meet demand in theory though regulations don't allow it for safety atm afaik.
"They claimed renewables were infeasible at scale because of consistency/storage problems (when the wind blows/sun shines), and would suffer fatal diminishing returns the more of the fossil fuel powered grids they replaced"
This is only true if there is no storage attached to the grid. Power storage is pretty crude at the moment - the most common options are pumped hydro (eg Electric Mountain) or shipping containers full of batteries - but there's a huge amount of invention and innovation in the space, which is largely driven by the opportunity for a savvy operator to make big profits from exploting time- and location-arbitrage (eg wind is blowing now but not tomorrow; wind is blowing here but not there). And note that in doing this, storage operators are effectively transforming intermittent renewable generation into reliable baseload.
"Power storage is pretty crude at the moment - but there's a huge amount of invention and innovation in the space, which is largely driven by the opportunity for a savvy operator to make big profits"
By that logic, we don't need to worry about the issue because we'll have cheap clean abundant fusion power Real Soon Now. Along with a cure for all forms of cancer.
That people would stand to profit if they were to invent a thing, and are thus trying real hard to invent the thing, does not mean that the thing will be invented in your lifetime. Whether that's cheap energy storage or holy grail fusion. If you've got a decent laboratory prototype, sure, bet on that. If what you've got is a concept and faith in the raw power of innovation, you might want to get started on some more concrete plan while awaiting the innovative miracles.
The fact that in 1990 we had only those disposable AA's and big car batteries, and now batteries are so cheap and ubiquitous that companies will pay to leave scooters on street corners everywhere indicates that there's been a *lot* more improvement in batteries than in fusion. Batteries, like solar, have been approach Moore's Law level improvements in recent decades, and there's no obvious reason to think they're at their limit yet.
Sure there is. What electrochemistry are you going to use that is lighter than lithium? There are no unexplored electrochemical reactions at the top of the Periodic Table. You can tweak things like thermal management of big battery packs, or manufacturing protocols, et cetera, and get improvements of cost, recharging rates, or storage/kg in the real world in the 50-100% range maybe. But nothing is ever going to get you a factor of 100 in J/kg, because the available electrochemistry has been known for a century or more, and there's nothing left to discover.
If you're talking about power storage for the grid, J/Kg isn't relevant - J/$ is. You can use heavy and/or bulky batteries so long as they are cheap to make and last a long time. That's not to say that there are necessarily gigantic improvements to be made, but if you can make batteries out of stuff like iron, sulphur or carbon they will do...
Well, we're clearly not, since transportation is the dominant source of CO2 emission, and any "decarbonization" is futile if you don't address it. It's of no great value to decarbonize fixed power plant electricity generation if you don't get rid of internal combustion engines.
But even in that context, the point remains. There is no unexplored electrochemistry for cheap materials like iron or carbon, either. I mean, if it were possible to make heavy batteries for 1/100 the price they can be made now, why wouldn't someone have done it? It's not like there isn't already a healthy market for lead-acid batteries in fixed installation applications. If you could do it for 100x cheaper you could make huge profits. Factories could buy power at off-peak rates at night and use it during the day, et cetera. The only good argument for why it hasn't been done (or even attempted) yet would be if there was something about electrochemical storage that remained to be discovered, some cool trick or other. But, back to point 1, there isn't. It's very mature technology. At this point it's like hoping someone will figure out a way to make ballpoint pens 100x cheaper.
It's not clear that batteries have advanced more than fusion. Experimental fusion reactors have improved their performance by I think five orders of magnitude over the past fifty years, in terms of the Lawson Criterion and Q-Value. That's invisible to you, but that's because it's a change from "six orders of magnitude too puny to be more than a laboratory curiosity for fusion nerds" to "one order of magnitude too puny...", whereas batteries are something you use every day.
And, there's no obvious reason to think that batteries *aren't* at their limit, modulo a few concepts under advanced development now. "Moore's Law" is an observation, not a law of nature. Airplane speeds roughly doubled every decade for half a century, until they stopped. Any future doublings, in any area, are a gift, not an entitlement.
It's not the market. It's subsidies and political pressure. Nuclear's expensive not because of the nature of nuclear but because of extensive regulations and political protests and all that. Likewise green plants (mostly) are so cheap because of subsidies. It's downstream of the Green Lobby hating nuclear and loving 100% renewable and exerting a lot of influence on government/elite opinion to force the outcomes they want.
There is, basically, three types of power plants. Renewables (hydro/wind/solar) which produce a lot of power very cheaply but very irregularly and only in specific places. Nuclear which produces a steady amount of power relatively cheaply but you can't just shut off a nuclear plant easily. And oil/LNG/coal which you can just turn on and off or to any level you want at will.
The ideal decarbonized grid with current technology is about 60-70% nuclear, 20-30% renewables (mostly hydro which is the most stable), and 10-20% traditional plants. Ideally clean burning LNG. Nuclear provides all power up to a "baseline" your system is not supposed to fall below. Renewables and traditional plants provide variability where you preferably use renewables (because when it works it's cheap per kwh) but keep the traditional LNG plants around to make up the slack on days with little wind/at night/etc. This is what France does and it works pretty well.
Now, in the future extremely cheap and effective batteries and better transmission lines might allow us to "smooth" renewables in a way that would make it more effective. Because electricity generation from renewables is cheap but unreliable storing it up in the good times/areas and letting it loose in the bad times/areas is a decent idea and might even lead to cheaper power generation. The issue is we simply do not have the technology, no matter how much environmentalists wish we did, and no one's close to having it either. Instead what we have are expensive batteries and old transmission lines that are heavily subsidized. They keep on saying "it's coming" because they need the technology to be there to support their vision and want to keep the subsidies flowing.
But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now. They generate too much power in high times and it has to be sold at a loss and then the grid needs to import power at horrendously expensive rates in bad times. (And if they don't they have brown/blackouts.)
"But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now."
The GB grid is consistently >30% renewable and the proportion is increasing (ytd 28%, mtd 38%; at time of writing >50% of GB generation is coming from _wind alone_ while exporting to France, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands). It's far from perfect (it is also a pretty dynamic market that changes frequently) but I don't know anyone in the industry who would describe it as working "very poorly".
The transmission issue you identify is definitely a problem at the moment. We're currently generating a lot of power from wind in areas of the country with relatively low demand and it can't all be distributed to the high-demand areas (eg London) due to infrastructure constraints. One solution being planned to this is to introduce 'nodal' pricing - rather than having a single wholesale price for the entire island, power will instead be priced at network 'nodes' based on local supply and demand. This should allow the market to properly price the transmission issue and provide the profit incentive for operators to fund new transmission infrastructure or local generation - a reasonable overview is here: https://es.catapult.org.uk/report/locational-energy-pricing-in-the-gb-power-market/
You're mistaken. Great Britain is 48% low or no carbon which includes nuclear and bio-energy (ie, normal plants using biofuels) and a few other power sources. It is about 25% renewable, mostly wind for which Britain is unusually well suited.
Huh. I didn't know that but I'm unsurprised. Greenwashing is really prevalent in the biomass industry since it's mostly not as green as it claims to be but wants to get in under the radar.
Yes, this is awful - I view Drax as a national disgrace for many reasons. The push to biomass in the UK was largely driven by Chris Huhne, our Energy Secretary who was later jailed for perverting the course of justice... only to be hired as chairman of a biomass firm that creates wood pellets in the US. I haven't included it in the 36% renewables figure I mentioned above - that was limited to wind, solar and hydro.
All of those are currently showing ~50% wind at time of writing (it's gone up a few % since my first comment; must be a windy night) and show a year-to-date figure of ~28% renewable excluding nuclear, as per my comment above. Given the increase in wind generation in that time frame I think that tracks with "about 25% renewable" you're taking from the 2021 report. I don't think there's much distance between our figures; if you disagree I'd be interested to know why.
Perhaps I misunderstand. Right now it appears you're taking a snapshot when one of my points is that renewables need to be given space to both grow and shrink. Yes, at a given point renewables might supply 50% of needs or more. And at another 10% or less. That is precisely why they do not work without batteries we currently do not have. It's why we need peaker plants and baseline generation and all that.
In other words, either you are agreeing with me that renewables cannot consistently provide more than roughly 30+% of power without causing instability and your point that at this exact moment it's 50% is irrelevant and something I acknowledged. Or you're making a point disagreeing with me (which is what I assumed when you said "Britain's grid is above 30% renewable") in which case you have just brought a statistic that does not prove what you think it proves.
I'm saying that it is currently very close to the 30% boundary (I said 28% ytd; I'm not sure how I can clarify that further), and consistently is above that figure (which I guess is a bit of a redundant comment because unless generation is perfectly constant of course it will dip above and below).
By the end of 2022 I expect us to be comfortably above 30% average renewable generation. I was giving the 50%-right-now figure as an illustration of the variance involved in this; you're of course right that this doesn't mean it's always 50% or anything silly like that, and I wasn't trying to imply that. Sounds as though we're in agreement there :)
I was trying to present GB as a specific counterexample to the strong statement: "But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now."
I feel that GB qualifies as a highly renewable grid. If you feel that the ~2% difference between the current stat of 28% ytd and the given 30% threshold disqualifies it, fair enough, I shan't try to argue otherwise at the moment though of course I might pop back in 12 months! I also feel that the GB grid does not work "very poorly", despite a number of issues (as per my original comment). Hope that makes the intent clearer.
EDIT: Prediction market now up for GB EoY renewable %:
This is, at any rate, an edge case because Britain is an unusually good place for certain kinds of renewables compared to most countries. But even there I wouldn't expect it to get much higher. And Britain does keep excess capacity to make a lot of it up in case it shrinks (which is what you need to do).
My understanding was the pay back time for nuclear made it an unattractive investment compared to renewables. Which I guess means renewables do produce more energy more cheaply in the short term, but their shorter lifespan means nuclear is cheaper in the long run despite the larger initial cost. Markets would favour renewables if that's true because markets favour current value over future value because of growth expectations, investors time preferences etc.
Maybe that's rational, but nuclear should still only be produced by the state anyway because of the moral hazard of private firms sacrificing safety for profit.
So either way you can't leave decarbonisation to the market, which I think was his main point.
Well, I agree safety regulations on nuclear power plants are a good thing if that's what you're saying. Likewise there's a pretty straightforward problem that pollution is externalized costs and internalized benefits. Of course, this kind of private market has not been the case in the US for almost a century so I'm not sure why we're discussing it.
More relevant to modern day is the government and bureaucracy. And how much a motivated and radical minority has used them to purposefully discouraged nuclear power and encouraged solutions that where implemented have not worked.
It's quite frustrating because the "trust the experts" crowd has responded to the experts being pro-nuclear by abolishing those experts (the actual electrical/nuclear engineers) and replacing them with new "experts" like environmental scientists who have no training in power generation.
I was think more that "a good society is one where old men grow trees they will never sit under the shade of" and renewables are kinda like cheap disposable parasols in that metaphor.
My impression was that storage is coming on in leaps and bounds: electric cars, home batteries, gravitational storage, hydrogen...
If renewables create a massive supply at some times of day and if there's high demand at other times of day, there's a strong economic incentive to buy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive, ie to provide storage.
Hasn't energy storage improved dramatically just in the past few years? I feel like new computers and phones are improving on old ones more in terms of battery performance than processor performance these days, and we have so many uses of small batteries these days that were just completely uneconomical merely 20 years ago (ebikes, ecars, escooters, not to mention all the small wearables like fitbits and iwatches and whatever). It seems to be improving at the same rate as renewable energy.
I mean, I guess fusion plants are quicker to turn on/off than fission, but aside from that they're not actually a big improvement. Safety's ~equal, and both make radioactive waste (until aneutronic fusion comes along, anyway, which is not soon).
A fusion reactor can't melt down, which I would rate as a pretty good safety improvement. Not that meltdowns are necessarily Chernobyl-scale disasters, but they're still a massive pain in the butt to clean up.
The biggest problem with nuclear that nobody seems to mention is that it's not even renewable (in its current state). The specific kind of uranium needed for fission is extremely rare and, if the world were to switch all its power consumption to nuclear, we would run out of it in a matter of decades.
Reactors exist that can burn U-238 and Th-232 - we have built them - we just don't build a lot of them at the moment (AIUI it's mostly because people get nervous around reprocessing plants and their relation to nuclear proliferation, though I'm not sure).
They don't produce more fuel than they consume - actinides go in, not-actinides come out. U-238 and Th-232 are still consumable fuel, the breeder just converts them to fissiles (Pu-239 and U-233 respectively) faster than it uses up those fissiles.
Renewables are things that are currently wasted that humans can harness - things where if you harvest today, that won't affect whether you can harvest next year. Nuclear is not renewable* - but we're not going to run out of it any time soon.
*Even p-p fusion isn't renewable - there's a limited amount of hydrogen in the universe. The reason all the renewables (which all are downstream of nuclear processes in some fashion or another) are renewable is that we can't actually turn off the Sun or the radioactive decay inside the Earth - our choice is merely whether we waste or harness the energy produced.
If you read carefully, this is a projection based on todays current active fuel requirements, not taking into account the supply if everyone switched to nuclear power.
Since this is open - my third book, Losing My Religions, is a free download (you can also purchase it if you'd like). It goes into a number of philosophical topics that ACX readers might find interesting.
If you are interested in AI Risk, please could you consider filling out a 10 minute survey on the microdynamics of that risk? I'm hoping to turn it into an economic model in the near future
Do we have to actually know something about the subject, or is it literally just interest? Seems like it would make a bad model if you're including looky-loos like me.
I'm going to do a subgroup analysis where I look only at answers where people have self-classified as 'experts'. So if you know enough to know what the questions mean then you're the target market for the survey, as long as you honestly report whether you are an 'expert' or not :)
Since I nearly missed this, and only by luck caught my mistake: for the probability questions, you aren't supposed to enter your probability, but rather your probability times 100. Eg, if you think something is 60% likely, you're supposed to enter "60" — *not* "0.6".
Probably some people will make this mistake, but it should be detectable in the raw data (eg, if someone's answers to questions two and three add up to 1 (or somewhat less than 1), then they probably made this mistake).
The term "parasite" is used to classify organisms rather than merely an activity. So a virus, bacteria or fungus are all out, while malaria (a eukaryote with a nucleus) is in (along with worms).
No, there are multicellular prokaryotes as well, though they're simple compared to the three great kingdoms.
I think there are two different senses to the description of something as a "parasite" unqualified; 1) (usually-macroscopic) animal parasite, 2) parasite without another easy categorisation ("fungus", "bacterium", "virus"). Obviously, all infections and infestations including those of those three categories are by parasites, but the sense in which malaria is called a "parasite" is different to the sense in which ticks are; if we still had a good word for unicellular eukaryotes and had gotten it into the public consciousness, I think we'd use it. (Note that we talk of people being "infected" with malaria, but "infested" with ticks or maggots.)
(And obviously, ivermectin won't work on malaria.)
Key claim: "Concerning vaccination type, males receiving mRNA vaccination had significantly higher risk [of cardiac-related death], while males receiving vaccinations that were not mRNA/unknown had significantly lower risk. RIs for females stratified by vaccination type revealed a similar pattern, with lower, non-significant estimates."
I’m trying to figure out whether the people who perpetrated that thing were so ignorant about stats and study design they thought it was a reasonable way to ask the question— or totally understood that this design was a great way to mislead people. Do you have an opinion?
I'm eagerly awaiting the publication of his posthumous work "Nous n'avons jamais etait mort", in which he argues that premodern people didn't distinguish between the living and the dead, and that death is a recent, socially constructed, innovation.
I highly recommend it for anyone who subscribes to multiple Substacks. I was skeptical at first about the idea too, but then I started really appreciating not getting my inbox spammed with Substack writings, and just being able to browse through everyone I follow via the app.
Personally, it'll be a freezing cold day in hell before I read substantive text on a tiny screen device, or reply to it using a virtual keyboard, when I still have any alternative available.
I.e. if I'm stuck in a waiting room with only a cellphone, I might use that cell phone to browse something. Otherwise, no chance.
Re 'Post about anything you want', I hope it's therefore okay for me to promote a Substack blog that I've launched today. It's on the psychology of belief and is called How Belief Works: https://howbeliefworks.substack.com . Any feedback would be appreciated.
At least from your first post - it's not a good hook.
While getting definitions set is important - esp to this crowd, it's still not a great idea to spend the first post just nicpicking on other definitions.
The only thing to grab viewers is thinking what would they define belief as, and that prob is not engaging enough to keep people reading.
It also doesn't highlight why this should be the first post and in fact somewhat undermines itself by pointing out that this isn't that important given that other well known articles don't even bother with it.
Your writing style is also just not particularly funny, rigorous, or enlightening on its own. I mostly finished as a sense of duty before critiquing it.
Guess I'll throw in, the blog's title "How Belief Works" implies a finite series of trying-to-be-objective posts, rather than an open-ended, ongoing blog.
Yes, I also think 'The Psychology of Belief' isn't sufficiently interesting.
I was thinking about 'On How Belief Works' instead of just 'How Belief Works'? This perhaps sounds both open-ended and not about 'this is how belief works'.
However, I've just thought of 'Beliefology', which I think I'll go with.
...maybe? It sounds like it's going to be "This is why other people hold their opinions", which is always some degree of untrustworthy since you aren't actually those other people.
I think the general convention is that it’s okay to post once when you start a new project (like a blog), but ideally most advertising after that is largely done in the Confidentials (advertising) threads.
As a one time film editor and lover of movie effects I enjoyed this.
> the movie [2001] also doesn't use CRT screens — every "screen" in the movie is actually a cinema projector hidden behind a white screen
There was a technical reason for this. Scan rate of CRTs interacting badly with the rotating shutter in the movie camera. That was a big problem back in the day.
Jordan Peterson is going full retard about Ukraine. I feel quite sad about it, because I have quite enjoyed his lessons on Jungian psychology. I suppose it is inevitable that when people get famous, they become overconfident about things outside their expertise. Here is the youtube video, and the comment I wrote below it (which will likely get deleted).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxdHm2dmvKE
Dr Peterson, I find it fascinating how you could get so many things wrong.
* You say we made a mistake by not inviting Russia to NATO. But that's exactly what we did; it was called "Partnership for Peace".
* What do we gain by stopping Russia now? For example, we avoid a future conflict with Russia that is half million square kilometers larger and has extra 40 millions of cannon fodder.
* The thing when you mention 3 perfectly logical reasons for Russian aggression... and then conclude that it actually must have been something else, is an interesting leap of logic.
* You say that Putin is better than Stalin, because Putin supports Russian Orthodox Church? First, it is the other way round, Russian Orthodox Church serves Putin. Second, did you know that Stalin started supporting Russian Orthodox Church in 1941 when he realized it might be a useful tool for his war efforts? (Please read the Wikipedia page about Patriarch Sergius of Moscow.)
* You praise Putin for being anti-woke. Yeah, but so is ISIS, and is it also deeply spiritual, so I wonder if you are going to express your support for them, too.
* I find it interesting that you consider mandatory trans pronouns use a worse crime against free speech than literally killing journalists who expose government corruption. Just because a person opposed one specific form of speech control, it doesn't make them a supporter of free speech in general.
* You see Russia, Hungary, and Poland as motivated by opposing wokeness. Have you noticed that Poland is anti-Russian, even more aggresively than USA? Assuming your perspective that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war about wokeness, that would put deeply catholic Poland on the hypothetical Team Woke, which sounds kinda weird.
* You talk about devastating consequences of ignoring Russia as a part of global economy. Can anyone here mention three things, other than oil and gas, that Russia exports? Most people would probably have a difficulty to find one. Russia is going to keep selling oil, because their entire economy completely depends on it. The only difference is that they will sell it to someone else, so the total amount of oil on global markets will remain approximately the same. Please notice that recently it is Russia talking about reopening Nord Stream 2, and Europe saying no thanks.
* You describe the politics of Ukraine as some kind of conflict between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. Have you noticed that Zelenskyy received a majority of votes from each side, and is actually a Russian speaker himself?
Most importantly, from the spiritual perspective, what happened to the advice to stand up straight with your shoulders back?
Funny thing... periodically YouTube crunches my viewing habits and decides I'm likely to be a huge Jordan Peterson fan, and puts his clips at the top of my home feed.
I hadn't known (or perhaps had forgotten) who this guy was and what was his schtick.
Finally one bored afternoon I broke down and clicked... On screen came a stereotypical (though somewhat fit-looking) middle-aged white man who was crying, as he said, tears of joy over the realization that his work had brought such great joy and comfort to so many people. For some inscrutable reason it seemed clear to me that by "people" he meant mainly middle-aged white men.
Swipe left. YouTube, update your priors.
YouTube recommendations are weird (and become even weirder when your little kids start using your account, haha). That said, I do not see any problem per se with someone having "middle aged white men" as their target group, nor with providing joy and comfort for that group. It's just, you are clearly not interested in that, and YouTube is too stupid to notice, despite Google having more data about you than KGB could have ever dreamed about.
I keep getting recommendations to see "Sadhguru" who seems like some kind of wise old Indian spiritual man who expresses his opinions on all kinds of topics. I truly do not care. My guess would be that YouTube selects him as an intersection of "politics" and "India", because I have been watching some videos about cooking Indian food. But maybe I am wrong here and the reason is something else, possibly something incomprehensible to humans.
Seems like a generalized version of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Receiving a strong feedback that you are right about something important (in case of a scientist, by academia; in case of internet celebrity, by their fans) seems to mess up human brain, making you overconfident about *everything*. Like a halo effect, applied to yourself.
And if you are a contrarian, you priors for "I am right and everyone else is wrong" were already quite high, so this probably makes you completely incapable of admitting that you might be wrong about something.
Thanks to Amazon *throwing* free trial of Prime at me (and ignoring that where previously it was all "oh sorry, you can't watch Prime videos because you're not in the correct region" but now mysteriously I can watch this show), I'm watching the finale of "The Rings of Power".
Uh, I guess I should warn for SPOILERS AHEAD, AND COPIOUSLY, if anyone hasn't seen this yet/wants to see it.
Episode eight, season finale, titled "Alloyed" (or, for its effect on me, "Annoyed").
So ten minutes in, and Halbrand *is* Sauron. Damn it.
It started well! Opening shot of rain and plants, which I liked. The white cloaked mystics have shown up with the Stranger and they think he's Sauron.
Celebrimbor finally, in the eighth and final episode, gets something to do. There is the vestige of A Plot happening! Then we get Galadriel arriving in Lindon with Halbrand. He gets Elvish healing, Elrond apologises to Galadriel.
Galadriel still only has one facial expression, whether she's angry, sad, arrogant, thoughtful, whatever.
And here's where Halbrand gets to show he's Sauron (because if he's not, who the hell is he in reality?) He's up and about and walking around after being at death's door, starts flattering Celebrimbor about his forge ("THE Celebrimbor?") and yeah, this is where the "Annatar" part is going to start, because Celebrimbor laps it up like a cat with the cream (to be fair, the poor guy has been hanging around for eight episodes ostensibly based on HIM forging The Rings Of Power with nothing to do, so of course he's going to respond to 'finally someone remembers what I'm here for').
And now he, thirty-something mortal, is giving smithing advice to thousand-year old grandson of Feanor. Yup, he's Sauron.
But heck and darnation, I did not want Halbrand to be Sauron,
Back in Númenor, Elendil's invented daughter is somehow allowed to be with the king, is sketching him, and then of course starts snooping around and is messing with the palantir. Excuse me while I roll my eyes at this terrible cack-handed shoehorning in of "we invented this character to add female energy, so we have to have her *do* something more than just stand around looking at things".
Back to "Oh no Sauron is corrupting Celebrimbor!"
So finally they have the idea of creating rings (not overtly stated but that's what is going to happen) out of the small chunk of mithril ore Elrond managed to keep after being kicked out of Khazad-dum, and Celebrimbor does some OMINOUS LINES QUOTING about "this is a power of the unseen world". Galadriel gets to have 'look of dawning comprehension and horror' (as much as her one expression will stretch to it) since "power of the unseen world" is exactly what everyone to date has been talking about Sauron searching for. Gil-galad says he can't do whatever it is, so naturally we all know he's going to go ahead and do it.
I'm skipping ahead at this point (20 minutes in) because I. DO. NOT. CARE. ABOUT. GALADRIEL. AND. HALBRAND. (Except that it's going to be a richly deserved kick in the pants when she discovers she's been cuddling up to Sauron).
The Stranger is having a time with the Mystics. They're encouraging him to use his magic so he will get his memory back. I like that one of them has a head dress shaped like bat ears, in an obvious reference to Thuringwethil, but this story line bores me, I like The Stranger as a character, and it's great that NO MORE HARFOOTS (as yet) but he's not Sauron and it's dumb to have him be Gandalf or even Radagast.
Spoke too soon: here come the Harfoots on a rescue mission. The leader of the mystics does the fire-breathing trick and sets flame to the entire forest (oh, this is meant to be Greenwood, by the way) but even this is dull because I. DON'T. CARE. ABOUT. THE. HARFOOTS.
The Stranger can now suddenly speak complete English sentences and does magic to banish the mystics. To no-one's surprise, he is not Sauron. He's Gandalf (again, damn it).
The episode finally remembers Elendil and Miriel, and we get a scene of them on the ship home to Númenor chit-chatting, which I am skipping because (once again) I. DON'T. CARE.
(Are you detecting a thread here? This show has managed to have me not caring about characters and events that I should care about, and need to care about for the purposes of the show).
They get back to Númenor and the king is dead (Pharazon standing beside the death bed saying nothing but clearly Plotting). And that's it. No, really, nothing more.
Celebrimbor is having trouble working with the mithril as it keeps blowing his forge up, but then he gets inspiration. Him and Halbrand are having a great time being forge-buddies, but Galadriel stands there glaring, because now (finally!) she has Suspicions about this King of the Southlands (remember, she is the one persuaded everyone he was the real true king and Númenor should provide an army to help him fight off the Orcs and retake his lands, when all he wanted was to stay in Númenor and work in a forge).
Cue the confrontation between Galadriel and Halbrand where (to no-one's surprise) yup he's Sauron. They have a mental tussle where he casts her back into her memories of Valinor and pretends to be her brother, trying to convince her Sauron is a good guy.
Yadda yadda yadda, he disappears and she finally knows what is going on.
Back to Nori and the Stranger, who can now speak fluently and is determined to find out who he really is. Just in case we can't tell, the show hits us over the head with it; the mystics called him 'istar' which he explains to Nori means in her tongue "wise one, or wizard". GEE THANKS I WOULD NEVER HAVE FIGURED OUT HE WAS A WIZARD IF YOU HADN'T TOLD ME, NOT WITH THE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY IN A METEOR AND DOING MAGIC AND STUFF. I really hope he turns out to be Radagast, not Gandalf, but if we can't see where this is leading then we're all blinder than Míriel.
It seems like Sadoc is dead, since Malva (who wanted to take the wheels off the Brandyfoots' cart and leave them behind to die) is now in charge. I'm sure that having a killer in charge will go well. The Harfoots go off on their migration and Nori goes off with the Stranger.
Back to Lindon, and Galadriel has to give up her/her brother's dagger to be melted down in order to mingle it with the mithril. Why? I don't know, I think I skipped that dialogue. Anyway, when they mix in the mithril, the resulting molten pool resembles a fiery eye (are you getting it? do you? is the show hitting you over the head hard enough?)
While a long scene of crafting goes on, Elrond goes looking for Galadriel but can't find her, but he does find the genealogy scroll proving the last "King of the Southlands" died without issue a thousand years ago. He hastens back (presumably to call a halt to the crafting) but the Three Rings have finally been created!
(Nothing about the Nine and the Seven, of course, because the show doesn't care about them. Sauron/Halbrand will make them, or something). We end on a shot of the Three reflected in Halbrand's eyes as he looks at Mount Doom and walks down into what is now Mordor, and then the final credits as some bint warbles the Ring song.
Thank God it's over.
Rating? Five out of ten - something finally happened, but the curse of slow pacing still haunts this episode, and it only told us what was already bleedin' obvious. As a spectacular finale, it falls flat. And I really don't care about several of the main characters that much - I like the Stranger, I like Adar, and I am kind of rooting for Pharazon because at least he knows what he is doing and how to do it.
Enough to keep people hooked for the second season? No idea, especially as the show runners said that it would be a couple of years while they made the second season (though the studio seems to have walked that back).
When I read other people's summary's of the episode, I knew that I wanted to read your reaction after I saw it.
And yeah. It was not good. Unlike Gandalf, who decidedly is good, so the dialog tells me.
Annatar should have been an entire season. This season, in fact. Instead we get half an episode. Sauron doesn't get to look like a master manipulator because no one has time to have complicated motivations to manipulate.
I think the show could have been good, even with endless departures from canon. Galadriel's arc was a good idea. Adar was a good idea. Shippinh Galadrial and Sauron was... well, it was an idea. I've encountered actual people on the internet who enjoyed it.
It feels like the show has nothing to offer but mystery boxes and references to the Peter Jackson movies. That and astounding beautiful shots, but a show shouldn't just be eye candy. It has lots of lore details right, they drop a lot of the right names, but none of the structures are there. Numenor exists and doesn't like the elves, but I think there was only one line, total, that even hinted at the actual reason being bitterness at their own mortality.
There is one thing that could get me back into it. That would be to kill Isildur for real. A permanent, irreconcilable break with the canon of both the books and movies. Then tell their own story. Force them to stand on their own feet or not at all.
I first heard this was meant to be ten episodes, which I considered very short for a season. Then they compressed it down further to only eight episodes.
Then they futzed about for six episodes with nothing happening, then had Galadriel surviving a volcano (after being directly in the path of a pyroclastic flow, this show made me dumber by at least 10 IQ points after that little stunt) and now in the finale they cram everything in.
They built up "who are these whitecloaks?" and then threw all that away in ten minutes, instead of expanding it over a couple of episodes as to what they were doing with the Stranger when they finally caught up to him. I swear, if they come back as Nazgul in season two, I will genuinely explode.
I did enjoy Halbrand and Celebrimbor being forge buddies! After seven episodes of standing around twiddling his thumbs doing sweet feck-all, finally, FINALLY Celebrimbor got to do smith crafting! Again, this was something that should have been built up over a few episodes as Galadriel gradually suspects something is wrong - though this flew in the face of all she had been doing all along. It would have been better to have Gil-galad or Elrond be suspicious, investigate, and find out the truth, so Galadriel would be forced to face the poetic justice of the consequences of her stubborn insistence.
But noooo, we have to shove everything into the last forty-five minutes, and yet *still* they managed to have it very slow-paced, due to skipping from one location to another. The Númenor scenes didn't even get developed! What was it Elendil's imaginary daughter saw in the palantir, if she looked in the palantir? We don't know, tune in for the second season to find out!
Again, they've managed to drop in hints (like the Thuringwethil ears) which show that *somebody* involved with this has read the other volumes like "The Silmarillion" and "Unfinished Tales", and that Sauron did not start out wholly evil and did have a moment of genuine, if shallow and fleeting, repentance after Morgoth's defeat, but all this is wasted by them cramming in their own stupid made-up characters and made-up lore and retooling of the time line.
So that's why I can only give it five out of ten. After all the build-up, they wasted the reveal of Halbrand being Sauron, and now (very funny and ironic) it's all Galadriel's fault that he has decided to go on the path of evil (the conversation he had inside her mind on the raft memories was all true - she did say and do all those things) and it's *her* idea to create three Rings 'for balance'.
Oh, and the ripping-off of the movies was *blatant*, what with the lines about the sun and the Sea and the foundations of the Earth. They have no shame, but then again neither do they have imagination, talent, or originality, so they have to steal.
It's infuriating. I have very mixed feelings about the second season, if I want to watch it or not; I do want to see more of Adar, and at this point I'm rooting for Pharazon and even flipping Sauron, because they at least have their shit together. What a triumph, show, to make the villains more appealing than the heroes!
A joke from today’s Garrison Keillor Substack.
Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets in his hand and he told the Israelites, ‘Okay, I managed to talk him down to ten, but I’m afraid adultery is still in there’
If you still want to win the bet this year, you might look into "composable diffusion": https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HoZL7rR80DfLJCohSQ1L6vtbwdFuuSgs7OP-ZRuaUxA/edit?usp=sharing It's an add-on to stable diffusion that learns to compose two separate prompts (separated by AND in all caps) into a single image.
I hear it's included in Automatic1111's webUI for SD: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
Today, I found the most hilarious and bizarre place to shoehorn Diversity and Inclusion statements : the commandline outputs of a hardware simulator.
Synopsys VCS is an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool to simulate HDL (Hardware Description Language) code. In plain English : it is a program that runs textual descriptions of digital circuits on simulated inputs and obtain their simulated outputs, to aid the engineers who are designing\studying them.
Which raises the question, why the hell would Synopsys VCS (version 2021) print :
>Inclusivity & Diversity - Visit SolvNetPlus to read the "Synopsys Statement on
Inclusivity and Diversity" (Refer to article 000036315 at
https://solvnetplus.synopsys.com)
Every time you start it ? Like, I kinda get the copyright spam that programs like these always print in the beginning, But... why the fuck would I care about how many women are in your HR departments, Synopsys ? I just want to run a Wallace Adder bro.
Things like these always come to mind when people want to interpret woke bullshit charitably. If you forget about all the bad and cynical explanations, that these performances are just the pathetic throes of the HR-Managerial class as they status-compete the shit out of each other and other people (especially the engineers and future-engineers who are the primary users of these tools), what would be your reasons for why someone sane will make a circuit simulation tool rattle off DIE catechisms seemingly for no reason, at the startup of the program ? for female hardware students\engineers ? who are apparently all so fragile and insecure that they need constant reminding that Synopsys is there for them every single time they start a simulation tool ?
Hypothesis : Every attempt to explain woke performance without appealing to status or power is either (1) Occam-dull, meaning it multiplies entities and reasons out of proportion to the phenomena it's trying to explain (2) More slanderous\insulting to the groups they claim they want to help (3) Doesn't make any sense.
Anyone else following Thaddeus Russell here?
He's very much a contrarian and sometimes interviews interesting people.
I think he's wrong that the US and NATO should just let Russia have Ukraine-- his arguments seem to be that the war seriously bad (true), but also, implausibly, that Russia isn't all that bad and its ambitions are reasonable and limited.
His Unregistered University is classes (some in person) with various of the the people he finds interesting/plausible, and might actually be making money. I suppose it's in the same category in some sense as Khan Academy. Any other non-standard education that's interesting?
OK, I don't want to get involved in polemics: the relative lack of polemic is one thing that has attracted me to this site and its predecessor over the years. I don't intend to make any more posts on Ukraine.
But for those who may be interested, I'd suggest a few sources, all western, which I have used and which help to explain what's going on.
One is the communiqués of what's known as the Ramstein Group, which coordinates western arms deliveries , and from which you can see what is being sent to Ukraine. A meeting is scheduled for the next few days. A second is the regular background press briefings from the Pentagon, published online, which have on the whole been quite realistic.
In the last 4-6 weeks, a number of western newspapers, including (in English) the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian have published substantial stories from the front lines in Ukraine, including interviews with soldiers and commanders, giving a very sober view of how things are going.
The semi-official Ukrainian site liveuamaps.com is obviously biased to some degree, but you can follow the progress of the war from day to day if you can read military symbology. The picture it gives seems to be broadly realistic.
Finally, for those who like to follow detail, the best source is probably the Military Summary Channel on Youtube, hosted by a Belarusian who makes great attempts to present things fairly. He's very good on tactical level stuff (yesterday's video explained how Russian missile strikes were partly aimed at key railroad junctions for example) but not so good when he gets on to strategic/political issues. He also tends to swerve around quite violently in his estimate of how the war is going.
I hope that's helpful.
Probably a stupid question, but why wouldn't evolution select for high-intelligence? I understand head size and birth canal are the bottleneck everyone points to, but brain size appears to be weakly correlated with intelligence in humans, and what about calories? It seems to be the case that more intelligent brains have better efficiency in terms of energy expenditure, so, given that calories have been hard to come by for much of our history, why not select for the kind of energy efficiency that come with intelligence?
Are smarter brains a lot more energetically expensive to create or something?
Not a full answer. But Joseph Henriech (The Secret of our Success) points to the brain size arms race as less about intelligence and more about storage space for cultural evolution. Basically, humans didn't get significantly smarter than apes in general. Rather they gained an amazing ability at copying from one another and culturally evolving leading to a feedback loop of "amount of cultural information that can be stored in an individual.
I'm just guessing but maybe raw processing power doesn't require bigger brains but storage space (via cranium folding and large heads) does.
This doesn't answer your question of why evolution doesn't select for higher intelligence at the same time. My guess would be that much higher levels of intelligence didn't actually help much in the context of environment in which we evolved. It's not like the cavemen were solving maths problems on the cave walls. It's simply far more advantageous to select for people who can learn tips and tricks from other apes.
In other words, the things you can *learn* are a greater advantage than the things you can *invent*, because you can invent a thing or two, but you can learn a thousand things.
Inventing things can also give you some respect etc., but the greatest selection pressure is about whether you can efficiently use things that everyone else is using. Inventing is an inherently risky business; you could spend a lot of time and calories without actually figuring out anything useful.
I don't know, but it's observable that the big flightless birds don't have the brain efficiency of smaller birds, and I have no idea why.
Why do you think that smarter brains are more energetically efficient? I was under the impression that human brains are roughly at the energy optimal speed, and while you could engineer much smarter humans given modern calorie abundance, we're getting pretty much the most "thoughts per calorie" possible in our current form, which matter in times of caloric scarcity
Neuronal efficiency hypothesis: basically, more intelligent human brains use less energy for thinking generally.
To give an example, if we're both given a moderately hard problem to solve and you're significantly smarter than me your brain will (probably) use less energy than mine for that task.
So far this worked for 3 relatives of mine : back and knees pain for one, neck and back pain for the second, back pain for the last one. Once a student in biology, I still can't believe this works... But no more complaining from people nearly crying on a daily basis is the perfect evidence for me, I will continue convincing people around to at least give it a try. But what an incredible brain process...
> So far this worked for 3 relatives of mine
What worked?
sorry, this worked. I hadn't posted before and sent the wrong link to Karine to reply- as she said it's been successful for 3 of her relatives. My original post is below
Helen Gibbons & Stuart Wiffin
Writes The Sheep that thinks it's a Wo…
Oct 10
I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free.
Because I'm sure some people here would enjoy a music video about the Crimean bridge burning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOyr6Cfsx6Y
English-subtitled.
More war-related music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvGyz4il89U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5PiEjd3R6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6H6kJV1Wc4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPGwqw-97E
I'm trying to find a post from about 2 months ago. In it, someone was asking whether anyone could suggest a diagnosis of his symptoms, which were -- let's see -- attacks in which he had pain at the base of his skull, felt disoriented and exhausted, and become sort of incoherent or inarticulate. Certain things brought an attack on immediately, but I forget now what they were. Anyhow, I'm asking now because I just randomly ran across info about a condition that might conceivably be what he has. I'd like to get in touch with him, but just do not have time to page back through all these threads, especially since I can't think of any words in his post that are rare, and unlikely to be in many other posts, so I can't even do CMD-F in each open thread. ( By any chance does the Substack app allow you to search a whole blog + comments at once?)
'Skull' is a rare word. Highest open-thread ping for it so far is 3.
Saw one post in 239 that might have been referring to the one you're talking about, didn't see anything in 238 to 235. Would it be in the hidden threads?
Thanks, you're right, it is a real word. I think it's most likely not in the hidden threads because I did not recognize person's username at the time. I'll go hunt right now.
Yes, but there's a limit to the amount and kind of structural problems that can be present without causing pain. Bulging discs heal on their own with time, and even when they look godawful their presence or absence does not correlate with amount of pain the person is having. That doesn't mean that there's *nothing* that could be going on in a back that would cause pain. For example, let's say you lay down on the floor with your back on a hard wooden ball the size of a tennis ball right under your spine-- or a bunch of forks with their tines curving up towards your back -- or did a back really extreme backbend, the kind limber young gymnasts do where their hands are actually touching the backs of their heels -- those are just going to hurt, right? Or how about if somebody stuck a thick spinal tap needle into your spine? Or hit your back with a mallet? Think you could make that pain go away? If you doubt it, how about trying the hard wooden ball experiment, or try lying on some forks. So the point is, some kinds of back problems -- not bulging disks, but other things -- are very much like the hard wooden ball, the backbend, the needle, the mallet: Things are being pierced, pressed on, and squeezed in ways they were not meant to be. It fucking hurts. And I do not agree the pain is useless and pointless, at least not in the case of situations like mine. My back pain is a stream of information about things that are pressing on things they should not. If I pay attention to the info, my back stays in decent shape.
If you investigate ways herniated disks can cause back pain, what you find is that whether they cause pain depends on a bunch of stuff: For example, If the annulus fibrous tears the liquid that oozes out irritates spinal nerves and causes inflammation — however, the AF doesn’t always tear, and when it does the AF doesn’t always ooze onto spinal nerves. Because not all herniated disks cause nerve inflammation, the correlation between the presence of a herniated disk and the experience of back pain is positive but low.
So now do a thought experiment: Imagine somebody doing various things to your back: Forcing it to arch way more sharply than you ever arch it. Inserting objects the size of a ping pong ball that compress flesh or press on nerves, or force tissue to stretch far more than it normally does. Piercing parts of your back. Injecting irritating substances into muscles.. Some of that is just going to hurt, right? So while it’s true that things like bulging disks are not well-correlated with back pain, it’s not true that there isn’t anything that you can do to a back that will reliably make it hurt.
So there are some conditions that are more like the back tortures I described than they are like herniated disks.They do stuff that’s just gonna hurt. They compress the facet joints and the nerves inside them. They stretch or compress nerves and muscles that are not meant to be stretched. They compress organs inside the torso. I have one of those conditions: scoliosis, an s-curve in my spine as it is viewed from the front or back. And my curve is getting more extreme as I age.
Here's info from a quick google. It's from a random source, but fits well with what I have learned from high-quality sources and my doctors:
"What does scoliosis pain feel like? Children or teens who have scoliosis don't generally experience pain. However, degenerative adult scoliosis can cause symptoms such as achiness or stiffness in the mid to low back or numbness and weakness in your leg."
"What triggers scoliosis pain?
What causes scoliosis pain? Typically, the pain you experience with scoliosis is the result of pressure on your spinal disks, pressure on facet joints, and muscle pain. But scoliosis can cause pain for other reasons. The curvature of the spine can stretch or irritate nerves."
Well, you may be right and the Russian General Staff and experts on Russia may be wrong, but that is what the Russians said they were doing, that is what they appear to be doing, and that's what Soviet/Russian doctrine says they should do. As I understand it, the point is that if you destroy an enemy's military capability, you dominate the country. If you just capture terrain, especially when it has no military value, you have to tie up forces guarding it and you extend yourself and open yourself to counter-attacks. That's why Russian doctrine has historically been about destroying the enemy's forces.
The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. As we've discussed, NATO has only dribs and drabs to send them, and the Russians can target any attempt to recreate a defence capability. On the other hand, if you've ever been to Ukraine, or just looked at a map, you'll know that it's an enormous country by European standards: the current line of contact extends a thousand kilometres from north to south. There was never any prospect of the Russians taking physical control of the whole of the country, and I doubt if anyone except a few fanatical nationalists in Moscow ever thought they should. They don't need to anyway. This doesn't exclude, of course, attempts to take the capital by a coup de main and finish the war quickly, as seems to have been tried at the start of the war. Nor does it exclude massing troops near Kiev to force the Ukrainians to keep troops to defend it. There are rumours that th Russians might try this trick again, by massing troops in Belarus, such that the Ukrainians have to remove some of their forces from the Donbas to cover the capital. But all of these manoeuvres, feints etc. are routine in wars of this kind. It's just that the West hasn't fought a war like this for so long, that we've forgotten.
What Soviet doctrine says they should do, and what the Russian army actually can do, are two entirely different things. Soviet doctrine never said "land paratroops and Spetsnaz behind enemy lines, then have them unceremoniously wiped off the map an hour later". Soviet doctrine never said, "Drive through repeated ambush and barrage until you reach the outskirts of the enemy's capital, then run away". Soviet doctrine never said, "watch your artillery supremacy go bye-bye because your ammunition dumps keep exploding". Soviet doctrine never said, "give your enemy a free tank in good working order for every one of his you destroy".
Soviet doctrine, is a thing that was only ever successfully implemented by the Soviet Army, and then only when its logistical tail stretched to Detroit. Yes, the Russian Army has spent the past thirty years pretending it was the badass continuation of the Soviet Army, but now we know better.
If you try to understand this war by assuming the Russian Army is successfully implementing Soviet doctrines, and conjure up some strained explanation as to why all of this must be part of some clever plan out of the old Soviet playbook, you're going to be led laughably astray.
"that is what the Russians said they were doing"
They have also said that the whole of Ukraine is theirs by right, and that they are just trying ot denazify.
"that is what they appear to be doing,"
That is what they are appear to be having done to them.
"The Ukrainians can't "rebuild", any more than the French could, say, after 1940, although not all their country was occupied. They don't have a great deal of defence industry, and much what there is has been destroyed. "
So the Russians are going to destroy their military, then withdraw ... then NATO/EU/west does nothing whatever?
Kiev has been the standard English name of the city for more than a century. Now we're supposed to change it just because the etymology of the word is Russian? There's a difference between disapproving of the actions of the Russian government in 2022, and hating Russian language and culture overall. Your comment gives off the vibes of the latter.
>now the standard English spelling has changed
Not How Language Works. Language is a distributed inter-subjective fiction, trying to force changes on it through many impressive-sounding authoritative-claiming institutions won't work, never has, and never will. Even if the organizations are neutral linguistic authorities, not a bunch of nakedly biased news outlets and the odd volunteer encyclopedia. The [Words] Were Made for Man, Not Man For The [Words].
I'm with Thor and Dionysus on this. The names our own culture has evolved are almost always preferable and the replacements are normally done for stupid, pious reasons. I'd never use "Beijing" or "Mumbai" except in this exact type of sentence, so I'd be a hypocrite to complain about somebody saying e.g. "the Russian bombing of Kiev is a filthy atrocity".
To be honest, I have switched over with regard to Peking and Bombay because the new names are better understood these days. The transition was successful. And I'm happy enough to say Kyiv for political reasons.
City names are the least of my concerns with regard to the ever-expanding NewSpeak Dictionary.
Eh, that really isn't the only reason. I tend to use older names for lots of places, because I am generally just reluctant to have to relearn any names I learned as a kid. I wholeheartedly support Ukraine in its war against Russia and am appalled that the nuclear powers didn't come to its aid back in 2014, to honour the treaty they'd signed when Ukraine gave up his nuclear weapons.
Or I have a strong preference for speaking the language I grew up with, and strong objections to changing the language for political purposes, especially at the behest of a foreign government. (Kiev, as far as I can tell, did not become the English name because Russia told us to call it that.). I have *especially* strong objections to the media policing my language, and that is in no way due to my stance on the current war, on which I'm as pro-Ukrainian as it gets.
I'm not Dionysus, obviously, but as already noted, I do say Peking. I actually think Chinese is a particularly bizarre case of this renaming vogue, because pinyin is a romanization created for the use of native Chinese speakers, while Wade-Giles is far superior for the use of Westerners in understanding what Chinese words actually sound like and so on. ("Peking" specifically predates Wade and Giles as well, of course; I think they render it Pei-Ching. Still...)
The obvious analogue is Kunreishiki vs. the modified Hepburn system, and there I've genuinely never seen anyone advocate the adoption of Kunreishiki for cultural sensitivity reasons or whatever; when was the last time you saw a map that said Toukyou or Hirosima on it, or called the system Kunreisiki rômazi for that matter?
I wrote a brief writeup on the practical considerations of unilateral gene drive release for the purpose of eradicating malaria-carrying mosquitos. Could you guys give me your thoughts? I would love input from those familiar with gene drives, those connected with EA, and people interested in working on such a project.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jp7BDb6bEWrZLmqPi/i-can-t-stop-malaria-in-the-next-few-years-but-ea-can
Some of us are getting together to read The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker. We are optimizing for time zones in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Africa (UTC+0 to UTC+12) and will meet weekly for at least four weeks, starting Saturday, October 15th.
The reading group is aimed at meetup organizers, potential meetup organizers, and any ACX/Rationality readers interested in organizing ACX or adjacent events, meetups, etc. Everyone's welcome.
Details: https://chivalrous-kayak-82a.notion.site/The-Art-of-Gathering-How-We-Meet-and-Why-It-Matters-6057bf7a44d3429b8abe8addc117c015
I am in entirely the wrong time zone but this is relevant to my interests and thanks for sharing.
I am glad. It was my first time posting on an open thread and I was a little worried.
P.S. The Waterloo organizer just started one for other timezones. Perhaps this would fit your schedule. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MaaB6xfRdagoEMx-WWnzwWTadx1h19qwerlyOXxVVSw/edit
I've been thinking about trying to make a star constellation Halloween costume (specifically Aquila), and thought about buying something like this (https://www.amazon.com/idyllight-Submersible-Waterproof-Wedding-Decorations/dp/B09987M2S5/) and wearing a black hat and jacket and tying or fixing the lights in the appropriate places somehow, and then I guess cutting out construction paper stars to stick around the lights so that people realize they are actually supposed to be stars.
Does anyone know if this would actually work? Are there any better ways to do this? Also, what would be the best way to fix the lights in place?
I tried a DIY LED constellation for a “Close Encounters of Third Kind” TShirt using TTL back in the dark ages. It was pretty easy to gin up a sequencer to flash the LEDs one after another but the wiring and battery required at the time made for ‘nice blinking’ but ugly flippin shirt. Never wore it in public.
Technology has improved a bit in the last 40 years tho. Good luck and have fun!
How about these beauties? https://tinyurl.com/2p8njzpd
If they're not perfect, I know where there are others.
To fix them in place: you could use safety pins. Start from inside the piece of clothing star's going to be attached to, bring the point out to the outside, over the piece of wire right below the star, then back to the underside of the garment. To prevent slippage, put one right above each star too. If you don't want to worry about the safety pins popping loose and sticking you, use a needle and black thread, and sew the stars in place, looping over the wire both above and below the star. You could also use hot glue, but I think the hot glue might damage the electronics of the light string. If the hat is really stiff, you can still sew through it -- but you might need a bigger, fatter needle to pierce it.
So I just looked up Aquila in google image, and there are some very attractive images with the actual constellation superimposed on a stylized drawing of an eagle. You could copy one of the drawings onto your black clothes, too, with luminous paint, then pin the starts on top. (Can you tell I like making costumes?)
In this layman's eyes, it seems that a few branches of supposedly-scientific study stand out as routinely *worse* (from a 'seems to be on a firm foundation empirically') than others. I'm not even talking about theoretical underpinnings, just studies that are
* low power
* non-replicable
* prone to methodological wtfs (and generally don't have stable, well-developed methodological traditions, with everyone seeming to go their own way)
* make HUGE claims that aren't backed up in any significant way
* constantly overturned/ignored by the next fad that sweeps through
Specifically, I'm thinking of *education*, *sociology* (in its less grounded forms), and *nutrition*. I can understand sociology (especially the psychological aspects) and, to a lesser degree, education. People are hard. And those things end up relying heavily on self-reports. Diagnosing things based on the self-report of a system that is suspected to be broken is...fraught with difficulty.
But nutrition seems to me to be the outlier. Nutrition studies are like froth--they come, they go, they form fad diets, but seem to have enormous variance for something much closer (in principle at least) to chemistry than psychology. There are a lot more empirically-measurable elements there, it seems to me.
Am I just out to lunch/misinformed? Or is there some reason nutrition studies are particularly bad?
Part of the problem is that it's hard and expensive to be sure of what people are eating, especially over long periods.
I looked into whether "organic" food is better for people. I wasn't expecting the lack of information and confusion.
Organic has a legal meaning.... the pesticides and herbicides are derived from a biological source. In other words, they might be chemically the same as what you get from a conventional source. Or they might be riskier.
How can you tell whether what you're eating is organic or not? There's mislabeling in both directions.
What diseases might be expected from pesticides eaten in plausible quantities? Damned if I know.
I've seen the problem with nutrition studies being put as this: your study can be controlled, long, or on humans, pick any two. You can't make humans to consistently follow your diet for years - which is kind of necessary to prove long-term health effects - so you're stuck with either using animal models, or short studies, or observational studies. The problem with the first two is pretty obvious, the problem with the latter is that 1) people are extremely bad at reporting what they eat 2) good luck correcting for all possible confounders. In fact even in a controlled study good luck correcting for them! Say your team found that red meat consumption doesn't affect LDL levels, but another team found that it totally does, you both did controlled experiments, but yours was in France where everybody eats a lot of olive oil which turns out to be protective from this effect (completely pulling this out of my ass, to be clear).
Add to this small effect sizes and strong biases, and it's not surprising dietology looks a bit of a mess.
I think you're lucky to get two of them.
Also, people vary genetically, so what it good for one person might be neutral or bad for another. There may be non-genetic effects, too.. There's people becoming allergic to meat from the Lone Star tick. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more subtle random effects from people's life histories.
I think Melvin hits the heart of the matter. You're looking for tiny, tiny effects. Eating cabbage for 50 years reduces your chance of having a heart attack at age 65 by 8%, that kind of thing. The sound empirical studies with sufficient statistical power -- duration, numbers, quality of control -- to thoroughly test anything in nutrition are exceedingly scarce. Theyr'e scarce even in medicine, where $100 billion in drug sales can ride on them, and there's no such potential reward in nutrition.
I think these chain of comments (Carl Pham, Melvin, and yours) explain a lot about why nutrition studies tend to not produce very good results. Thanks.
And maybe the key to the "ok then, why do they overhype things to the max" question is the money--starting a fad diet and cashing in is the only way to make serious money on nutrition.
One other consideration I've thought about is that maybe there are a few different "groups" of basic biochemistry as far as diet goes--sure, we all need the various macros and micros. But exactly the "right" mix is much more individual. Maybe there are people for whom the keto/Atkins/whatever (low carb, etc) diets are the summum bonum of diets. And others for whom that's *horrible*, and for whom the whole-foods, low-fat diets (and similarly for all the other big variants) are the best.
I think the main problem is small effect sizes.
Contrary to popular belief, we know a lot about human nutrition. We know that humans can't digest rocks or sand. We know that humans can't digest grass or most leaves. We know that humans require ~2000 kCal/day of easily-digestible foods, and that we also require small amounts of dozens of important vitamins and minerals. This is all important stuff, and we've known it all for a while.
The problem is going beyond that. It turns out that as long as you satisfy all of the above requirements and don't eat too little or too much then pretty much any reasonably varied diet of reasonably human-compatible foods is pretty nutritionally similar to any other. Some are probably better than others but the effect size is small and the studies are long, expensive and difficult so you don't get as much value as you'd hope out of them.
Expanding on Unsigned Integer's ideas (that are mostly money-focused): moral and philosophical biases. If you're overweight, the studies show it isn't your fault because <importance of genetics/XYZ food is bad but unavoidable>. If you're vegetarian or vegan, then meat-based products are that much worse for you and plant-based foods are that much better. If you're really into naturalism then the paleo diet is the best and you should avoid processed foods. If you're short on time or can't cook, then fast food isn't as bad for you as it's made out to be. If you worship the Roman warrior way of life, then you're a failure at life if your diet is any less than 80% red meat.
These are all bad examples and/or strawmen, but the basic idea is confirmation bias.
That doesn't explain why the *studies* are objectively (as far as I can tell, and I may be wrong) poor quality. It may explain why individuals seek out ones that tell them what they wanted to hear. But not why the research itself seems sub-par *even compared to other soft sciences*. But it feels like nutrition should be closer to a hard science, as it has much firmer and closer physical grounding.
Which raises a question. Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest? I mean, I'd expect a substantial amount of funding coming from government agencies (<sarc>which never cause conflicts for anyone else, after all</sarc>), interested NGOs, insurance companies, etc.
And much of the research is done at universities, where the professors have the same underlying conflicts in any area of study. They're all getting paid by *someone*, and *no one* has clean hands. Yet this area is particularly (as far as I can tell) bad.
"Why is *this* scientific field so captured by conflicts of interest, compared to all the rest?"
All of those agencies, universities and companies are full of fat people, none of whom want to hear an outcome on nutrition where it's their own fault. Doesn't matter how smart you are, this is apparently endemic, maybe the mental blind spot that *causes* people to become fat in the first place. Just look at that classic/notorious Yud screencap from Facebook about weight loss.
I think it's mostly no worse than medicine generally, or fields with political implications. the key here is that the main rewards for most actors come from *convincing people that you're right* rather than *finding out how reality truly works*
'Why don't people think cryptocurrency is the greatest thing ever and all adopt it?'
Possibly because of crap like this - yet another attempted blackmail spam message, about the fifth one that got through an old work email address. This one is slightly different in the body of the text from the usual run of them, but it's the same old same old:
"My modest consulting fee is 1700 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.
You need to send that amount to this wallet: 15QaVNGaQsQfgPH8mL3TM1S7YBESTVfwQC"
Probably there are people who can be taken in by this, but I'm tired of these messages by now, is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down? Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it?
This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.
While we’re on the subject of crypto, is the practice of putting a Bitcoin purchase machine next to the ATM at the corner Kwiki-Mart now common?
The place around the corner from my house has one and it seems like a grift of some sort to put in a place that does major trade in lotto tickets sold to mostly low-income folks who are unfazed by the fact the the state lotto is about as bad a bet as you can make. IIRC they pay back only half of the money they take in prizes.
I'm not a crypto maniac (it's sad that I have to say this in 2022, but the crypto situation has become extremly religious on both sides in recent years), but I really love the elegance of the idea purely from the Computer Science perspective and I believe there are good things underneath all the trash and ash.
>Since this is blackmail or extortion or fraud or something, is there no way to stop it
If its fraud or scam, believe me, it's not Bitcoin that is making it go round. There is an entire Youtube genre of "Scammer-Scamming", where anti-scammers scam scammers on the phone. The sheer size of this genre alone and the number of scammers should tell you all what you need to know about how easy it is to scam people by phone, by email, by whatsapp, by facebook. Humans just suck, Bitcoin is just a tool that allows them to suck more efficiently, if we remove it most of them will find another tool and continue to suck.
The case of blackmail and extortion is more subtle, I believe Bitcoin greatly enabled a specific type of blackmailing called ransomware (fuckers encrypt your data and ask for money to give you the encryption key), empirical data seems to support that the rise of Bitcoin made it incredibly easy to do this shit. But again, fuckers always find a way, I'm a big believer in humans' ability to suck and fuck, it's really not Bitcoin's fault, they will find another way if you ban it. Ransomware existed before Bitcoin, the growth the data shows could just as easily be because of the general growth of internet and internet-connected people and money.
>is there any way to track down or do something about these wallet numbers and get them taken down
Technically ? No, that's the entire point of Bitcoin. Essentially, there is an entire distributed fleet of machines that is always "listening" on the internet to anybody who says they want to transfer money, and if that someone manages to prove (in a very fancy computer-sciency\cryptographic way) that they *do* have the money to pay, the machines are very glad to take the money and pay it to any ID that the someone says. As long as this fleet of machines is alive, Bitcoin is alive, and with it the Bitcoin protocol and all its IDs and wallets and numbers.
Of course, humans are always the weakest link in the security chain. The fallible humans who made Bitcoin couldn't anticipate a number of fuckups :
1- Bitcoin "mining" (the process whereby 1 of the listening machines aggregates a bunch of pay requests together and tries to convince the entire network that it's valid to finalize them with fancy math) is massively computationally intensive. By 2012-2013, ordinary CPUs were no longer cutting it, and miners began using GPUs. By 2013-2014 (these dates are rough because I wasn't there when it was happening), even GPUs weren't cutting it, and miners began using even more specialized circuits called FPGAs. Then, finally, by about 2014-2015, FPGAs gave up, and miners began literally custom-ordering their own chips, called ASICs. Every step along the way incurred a massive loss of accessibility and decentralization : Everybody have a CPU but only gamers and machine learning researchers have powerful GPUs, FPGAs are even more specialized and scarce, ASICs are literally ordered from a special vendor. So the overall result is that Bitcoin mining is extremly centralized and high-barrier-to-entry today at its bottom-most layers, and you can probably shut it down by banning or otherwise disrupting the sales or even the manufacturing of certain hardware to certain individuals.
2- Even without the hardware debacle above, Bitcoin miners began merging themselves in "mining pools" of their own for greater profitability and risk-mitigation. A mining pool is when a goup of miners come together to share the wins (every time one of them manages to convince the network that their pay requests list is valid) and withstand the losses (when all the other miners fail) together. This is really bad for Bitcoin. Very Very Very. The original Bitcoin paper assumed this won't happen, but it happened. Now only 2 or 3 mining pools control more than 51% percent of the total computing power the Bitcoin fleet has, this means those pools literally decide how much everybody owes everybody.
3- Bitcoin mining is scandalously power-intensive (a consequence of point #1), people estimate it at the country-level, and I'm not talking developing countries, I'm talking Argentina and the Netherlands. Due to this astonishing cost, mining pools and miners generally tend to concentrate in areas with cheap electricity, famously in China where Coal is legal. You can disrupt those locations pretty easily, and you can always detect any new locations by the sheer amount of electricity going in and not out of a Bitcoin "farm" (i.e. a datacenter full of ASIC computers mastuarbating their brains away).
4- Bitcoin is essentially a program, specifically written in C++. You can disrupt it by, say, disrupting their github hosting or targeting the most active members of their development team or intercepting every communication involving Bitcoin on social media and technical discussion sites and etc. etc. etc...
5- Bitcoin is a network program, you can trivially disrupt it if you cut off the internet.
6- Bitcoin is used a lot from non-decentralized interfaces, like mobile apps uploaded on centralized app stores, and centralized web servers, and centralized institutions called "Exchanges" (which trade Bitcoin against meat currency). You can always disrupt\ban those interfaces and institutions, and although that won't affect the "actual" Bitcoin (which is just a distributed fleet of machines running a single C++ program), it will greatly deny access and convenience to those who use it.
And so on and so on. Basically, Bitcoin, aside from being a piece of Computer Science genius, is an experiment. It asked "What if we used computers to say a big 'fuck you' to the state in one of its most intimate and exclusive activites, money-printing?", and it hypothesized that the answer will be "The state will go pound sand and leave us alone". The experiment failed, the state turned out to be much stronger than expected, the Internet weaker and more centralized than expected, and humans turned out to be more shitty than expected (not me though, I always expect that humans will be as shitty as they turn out to be). It's still a good experiment.
But Bitcoin exists today entirely by grace from any number of extremly un-de-centralized and evil institutions, and if enough of them get mad at Bitcoin, yes, they can shut it down.
>This is why people think crypto is only for criminals.
Bitcoin is part of an ideal, a Utopia if you will, and that ideal is that social structure is entirely individual-focued. Like : look at the Sun, it doesn't refuse to shine on criminals, even the worst rapists and pedophiles enjoy the Sun on their skin, the Air in their lungs, Water inside their stomachs. We *can* still make those people suffer for their crimes, but we don't do it by making the Sun and the Air and the Water has machines in them that can make them refuse to do their functions, we do it by getting *the criminals* into a place where they can't enjoy them.
This is a somewhat subtle distinction. The first perspective implicitly says that every human is "leasing" the Sun from the party that controls the shutdown machines, any time this party wants to deny you the Sun, they can turn on the machines and deny it. The second perspective is saying that every human deserves the Sun, merely by the fact of being human, justice is enforced elsewhere, at another level of interactions.
I'm not saying one of those perspectives is unqualifiedly better than the other, I can imagine lots and lots of Utopias and Dystopias in both, I can imagine any number of situations where I would thank the heavens that one perspective is in control and absolutely rage if the other was. But it's important to realize that those who support one or the other do so because they imagine more Utopias in one than the other, and (intelligent, good-faith) Bitcoin advocates support the second one. Finanical transactions are like the Sun, it shines equally on the rapist and the raped, the devil and the saint. Justice is still (hopefully) enforced, but elsewhere, not at the level of denying and allowing financial transactions. I'm not against this perpective but I'm also not supporting it to the end, but life is complicated and this comment is very very long already.
Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible?
At this point, I think of cryptocurrency as an effort to make a trustworthy system which includes a lot of untrustworthy people, and people are too clever to make that work.
We have a shortage of Arisians.
>Interesting point about C++ and github. Is a really secure computer language even theoretically possible
For a mind-blowing and Inception-like further exploration, see Brian Kernighan's Reflections On Trusting Trust[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].
It basically argues that, until you audit every single line of code in your entire software system (the compiler, the OS, the bootloader that loads the OS, the hardware ROM memory that contains the bootloader, the firmware\drivers in your keyboard and screen, even the editor you use to write program text, or the commandline shell that you invoke the compiler from), you're not truly secure. Who knows, maybe the completely innocuous g++ compiler that translates tens of thousands of C++ programs daily around the globe actually contains special-case logic for detecting the Bitcoin program and inserting maleware. The maleware is completely invisible in the source, because it isn't there, the compiler inserts it in when it's translating to machine code. The speech itself is just about Compilers, but you can easily argue that any piece of code in any of the software that I mentioned can easily and trivially violate your security. Hell, Anti-Virus software is given a free pass to open up binaries and play with them, how can we be sure that it's not *them* that are injecting malicious code in the secure binaries ?
This is why some people have tried (http://bootstrappable.org/) (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/) to decrease the amount of magic binary that people depend on without auditing. But you're still depending the extremly opaque and magic processor and associated hardware, did you know that Intel runs a tiny computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine) inside every single computer you buy from them ? It's always on as long as there is power in the motherboard, runs its own operating system, and is connected to the network.
[1]https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ7lOus1FzQ
[3] https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
[4] https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/
[5] The section on Compiler Trapdoors in https://web.archive.org/web/20030410095057/https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf
[6] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst-nightmare/answer/Mick-Stute?srid=RBKZ&share=1 and its discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642486
[7] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
[8] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html
[9] https://blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtle/
One unexpected impact of having a child is an internal shift with regards to what I consider 'long term'. Whilst I was previously certainly a long-term person than most, and cared about what happened in the future, the year 2100 still seemed very far off. Recently, looking down at my daughter sleeping in my arms, I realised she's very likely to be alive in 2100.
One could perhaps argue that this is simply a semantic rejigging, or that one should care about people in 2100 regardless, but for me, at least, it matched an emotional resonance to the logical conclusion I had already reached. It has also made me slightly less sceptical of efforts to impact the year 2100 than I was before (other than through direct ways which also impact the near-term, e.g. pollution/environment) - if there are people alive now who will be alive then, then maybe it's not so crazy trying to improve norms/governance/culture for the next century.
What is happening in this brief clip from "The Second Renaissance, Part 2"?
https://youtu.be/WlRMLZRBq6U?t=51
It looks like an old human city in Southern Europe, right next to a megastructure built by the Machines. Given that the humans exiled all the Machines to the Arabian desert years before, why would the megastructure be there? The Machines would have needed time to build it, and it looks like they just invaded the area and are still fighting to take the region over.
The city looks kind of coastal. Perhaps it's a gigantic warship?
My computer has a problem, and I could use help from anyone who knows about them. About a month ago, my computer suddenly got REALLY slow. Chrome takes forever to load pages, and even if I close all browsers, running other programs is also very taxing because they open so slowly and often freeze.
Weirdly, the problem seems to disappear about 10% of the time before resuming, so I have these unpredictable windows of time when the computer runs fine.
Clearing my browser cache and/or installing any browser updates will make the computer run faster for only a few hours before it spontaneously reverts to its slow speed. I closed all but eight or nine browser tabs, but the problem persisted.
Even Windows Task Manager is no help. It is also very slow to open, and it will also freeze up and close most of the time. It will show that 90-100% of my "CPU" is being utilized, but then when I scroll down that column to see which program(s) are chiefly responsible, they are all shown as consuming 0% of processing resources. "Memory" is 49%.
What could be wrong? What should I do?
5) I deleted a ton of files from my hard drive, defragmented the hard drive, and restarted the computer. The problem is less bad now, but my computer's performance is still unacceptable, and much worse than it was 1.5 months ago.
Another update:
3) Per the advice I received here, I checked for Windows Updates I needed to do. There was one, I did it and restarted my computer, and it didn't fix the problem.
Not to repeat myself, but make a backup and reinstall windows. It's not that hard, and backups are good to have anyway.
This sort of matches an issue I had once, where I was getting 100% cpu usage despite no active applications. The solution was to reset the power plan settings - go from "balanced" to "power saver" and back to "balanced". This issue was specific to Windows. It worked fine with Ubuntu.
4) I did it, and it doesn't seem to have helped.
Thank you for all the advice. Here's what I did:
1) I restarted my computer. It had no effect on the problem. Right after restarting, before trying to open any programs, I opened Task Manager. Already, my computer was utilizing 100% of "CPU." Task Manager itself had problems running, and would spontaneously close before I could look around inside of it much.
2) I downloaded and paid for McAfee Anti-virus and used it to scan my computer for viruses, malware and trackers. It found nothing. The problem persisted.
Process Explorer from Sys Internals is way better with more detail and also trips less viruses which usually only look for task manager.
If you were going to pay for anti-virus I'd recommend the newtop level Norton because they also do performance checks and registry cleanups and crap.
I would install something like SysInternals Process Explorer because it is superior to Task Manager IMO. Then I'd sort by memory usage and by CPU usage. See if you can't dig up the actual issue.
This does seem like it could be a CPU issue as some people suggested but you can verify this by making sure you aren't sucking up CPU or RAM somehow. Task Manager is really not meant for any serious non-normie use.
This is kind of a shot in the dark, but I understand that a possible cause for this is a failing CPU temperature sensor. When the sensor stops sending back temperature data, the system automatically slows the CPU down to avoid overheating and damaging it. Sometimes (I know mac does this, not sure about windows), this will show up as "phantom" CPU usage, which actually represents the fraction of the time that the machine is forcing the CPU to sleep, in order to cool it down.
See e.g. https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/260977/Intermittent+Temperature+Sensor+Failure (on macs I guess the phantom CPU is attributed to "kernel task"). I can't find any description of this behavior on windows, so it's possible that it's unique to mac.
The other classic handwaving explanation for behavior like this would be "malware" -- something running that is deliberately hiding itself from you. But I would think it would be unusual for it to run so hard that it slows your computer to a crawl at some times, and then nothing at other times.
Like Medieval Cat says, it's a good thing to train yourself to stop caring about knowing the problem. Modern software is shit, that's all what I can say. Knowing the problem over text is hard, you need interaction, likely physical.
Make sure everything you need to see again is backed up and kill Windows entirely, reinstalling it. If it doesn't help, I would go further than Medieval Cat and say install Linux, if you're just using browsers and the office, you won't feel a single thing.
If you click where it says CPU in task manager it will sort by CPU and you will be able to see the processes that are using a lot (you may need to do something else to get it to show you background processes, but I can't remember what). That amount of CPU usage usually means you have an overzealous anti-virus, or a virus.
Have you restarted your computer recently or made sure your OS is fully updated?
I'd also try using a different browser to see if that helps. You can use all the same extensions on Firefox if that helps ease the transition.
Well I won't let not knowing about computers stop me from giving advice. Anything notable happen a month ago? New downloads, trouble in meatspace that would mess with the internet providers? If you disconnect it from the internet, does it run any better?
Try killing everything in the Task Manager that doesn't clearly need to be running regardless of supposed CPU usage. There's some weird relationships sometimes. And you can add more Task Manager tabs by right-clicking up in the CPU/Memory section; Power usage is a nice one to keep track of.
Best guess is updates or background stuff. You may need to run task manager as an admin to see some hidden/system processes.
Easy ways to check is to start it in Safe Mode (with networking) or just unplug/disable your internet connections.
Some other basic troubleshoots - check to see if any disks are near full, run chkdsk (assuming windows) to see if there's any harddisk issues, disable startup programs.
No idea what's wrong. Backup your stuff and re-install windows, it will probably help and if it doesn't, neither will most other things.
You say Alexandros offered 25k to a charity if you can get the big trials to release their data. Here were your exact words: "offers to donate $25,000 to a charity of my choice if I can get them to do so."
But this isn't want Alexandros said. Here were his exact words: "To put some of my own skin in the game, if Scott helps, by public advocacy or otherwise, to get the raw data for the ivermectin, metformin, and fluvoxamine studies available in a way that I—or someone I trust—can access it without undue limitation on sharing any findings, I commit to making a $25,000 donation to Scott’s ACX grants. Happy to discuss reasonable alterations of this offer."
In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping.
What you said was really misleading.
Seems to me Marinos has a very easy way out of donating$25000 if Scott assists in getting the raw data released to him. Marinos is saying that it must be released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings." How much chance do you think there is of the data being released with absolutely no limitation on sharing findings? And can you think of anyone more likely than Marinos to claim that whatever limitations there are are undue? I can imagine him rejecting data that was entered into the computer, saying that he must see the handwritten pages some of it was originally recorded on, because he suspects that whoever entered the data tampered with it. Then if they won't give him their hand-written notes, that's an undue limitation. Seems like his whole game is to claim that people studying Ivermectin treatment of Covid withheld information, lied, made mistakes, massaged the data, etc. Handing him the results of a big Ivermectin study is going to give him enough material to keep the game going for a couple more years --and in the process thoroughly wrecking any clarification the new research brought to the matter. If I had been in charge of the final leg of one of the big Ivermectin trials I wouldn't want to release data in a way this guy can access it, even if I was absolutely sure there were no errors in it and that the conclusion we had drawn was rock solid. By the time he had run our Ivermectin research through his digestive track and aimed the result at a fan, the entire topic would be irremediably trashed.
"In other words he is offering the 25k if you could help get the data released. It's not tied to the outcome of that helping."
Isn't the outcome "get the data released"? If Scott helps to ask for the data to be released, but it's not released or not released "without undue limitation on sharing any findings", then the outcome is not what Alexandros wants and he's not making any donations.
Otherwise Scott could just say "Well I emailed them, they said no, here's where you can send the $25k".
That definitely reads as tied to the outcome. "Helps to get the data available in a way that I can access it." Scott shouldn't have to prove cause and effect, but if by the end there's no access, the actions taken didn't help.
I read the original quote as saying that the money only gets paid out if the outcome of the data being released is achieved.
I would just like to add that Alexandros made an offer of $10,000 to have a discussion with James Heathers. James agreed and Alexandros backed out.
To be clear - I made the 10k donation as I had promised. As we discussed the venue, Heathers had some ideas that made it hard to find a way to make the conversation happen. I also lost faith in the neutrality of the moderator I had selected. As such, I lost momentum in making the whole thing happen. It's not the Heathers or anyone else pushed for it and I backed out. And I want to make extremely clear that I stayed true to my word and made the 10k donation to the charity of Heathers' choice, and have the receipt to prove it.
Interesting. You were previously asked if the debate happened and your response was:
---"No but that's on me. New baby, new house, and hard to get scheduling authority back."
It wasn't about the $10k, or the additional $5k you agreed to. But I am glad you followed through on part of it after backing out.
"---We have a deal. $15k to a charity of your choice (10k up front and 5k after the fact) for a livestreamed version of "yes/no debate"
I don't think "backing out" is a good description of the situation, given that nobody pushed for it. If Heathers actually helped organize the thing I would have done it. Hell, I'd still do it.
Ok. Is this a better description?
"...after not pushing for your own public challenge that you originally blamed on yourself for not happening and now blame others."
Can you provide some links?
https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1455655676806631433
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1454073825507696645
https://twitter.com/debate_nate/status/1486827797565693953
I do not think Heathers in any way reasonably engaged or did any effort to make this discussion happen, did he? At least I can't see it. It seemed to have withered on the vine but I find the suspicion of fraud you cast so offhandedly on Alexandros a tad unwarranted. I did not follow that discussion but if I was challenged for that money I'd shout it from the rooftops if somebody backed out.
I simply stated facts. You came up with the suspicion of fraud on your own.
I gave you a link where Alex clearly takes the blame for the debate not happening.
"No but that's on me. New baby, new house, and hard to get scheduling authority back."
https://twitter.com/debate_nate/status/1486827797565693953
see sibling comment
In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.
I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.
As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I'm fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don't turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.
So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life.
As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.
There've been at least two journalists who did the "try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life" thing, and wrote about it for major publications. (I think WaPo and The Atlantic?) Although iirc they were both the other way round, female reporters experimenting with testosterone. Sort of adorable, as a trans reader, but I do agree it's a mechanically unique experience not available via e.g. psychedelics. An interesting experience for sure. Remain somewhat saddened/annoyed that in USA at least, all the good stuff remains officially prescription-locked. I'm sure that protects....someone, somewhere.
Thanks for editing your original comment, I was feeling mildly annoyed because you and I specifically have conversed on this topic several times before...and I thought I'd made it clear that we're broadly in agreement. The DIE enemy of my friend is also my enemy, and all that. I take the same position as Scott in "Against Against Autism Cures", and extend that to transgenderism as well. And feel confident doing so, since having both disorders is plenty enough skin in the game to dissent from orthodoxy...it's a strange and sad life, and I guess I'm happier to live it than being dead, but it sure woulda been nice to roll a nat20 and turn out Normal instead. There's no magic in being Neurodiverse(tm), it's not some superpower. That's just cope, and I wish activists could be more honest about the real suffering involved...for the individual, and oftentimes friends, family, etc. too. To the extent certain conditions like transgenderism are voluntary - and yeah, there absolutely are some fraction like me who didn't *have to* end up this way, sunk costs are a bitch - it's a tragedy not to frankly discuss the opportunity costs of choosing differently.
Advocating: a niche aspect of FDA Delenda Est along right-to-try lines, though I can understand how it might be interpreted in a fringe-activist way. To make it explicit, I think it's a damned lie to call HRT "safe and essentially no risk" drugs...the major mood swings I get every couple weeks sure are suspiciously correlated to hormone injections, surely that's not a coincidence! And there's a number of other potentially-major contraindications which I'm only flippant about here cause I've been dosing for a decade or whatever, so seem to have doged those bullets. But there's __a good reason__ new patients are supposed to get a bloodwork panel and regular lab assessments, for the first several months/years. Some things like liver damage, you wouldn't necessarily notice during everyday experience until it's already A Big Problem. Things like that all argue strongly against a DIY approach.
So, no, it shouldn't just be some OTC pillmill giveaway, and it makes me uncomfortable every time I'm assured there's Careful Medical Supervision(tm), cause that absolutely was not my experience. Out of all the trans people I've known, the only ones who had notable gatekeeping difficulty accessing HRT had a bunch of __unrelated__ issues[1] which bounced them from the medical system more generally...doctors are understandably skeptical of people who don't show up to appointments, can't pay, have a ton of comorbidities which ought to be addressed first, etc, etc.
That being said, for the two specific use cases under discussion here, I think rules and regs could be loosened for some potential delta.
Case 1: nootropics fans who want to try a crazy new brain hack. As OP describes, and as those (admittedly sensationalist, but hey, they got clicks) journalists chronicled, this is a mind-bending experience you can't get from ~any other class of drugs. There really are lots of fascinating insights into human nature and the arbitrary lines of sex and gender which are tough to explore any other way. Not going all-in on some woke bullshit "Other Ways Of Knowing", either: as far as I know, this actually is the only route to collecting such empirical data. Since the other source, unfortunates like David Reimer, are so statistically rare that it's just bad science to extrapolate such results more generally. As far as I'm aware on dosing research, OP is also correct that short-term, *low* doses have ~negligible external effects and risks, while still being strong enough to shake up mental models. It should be entirely possible in theory for endocrinologists to devise some sort of HRT-lite regimen. Put it in a two-weeks-course blister pack, slap a new patent on old generic drugs, and profit. (Though I'm unsure what the market would be, psychonauts aren't exactly a huge or legible crowd.)
To the extent there's some danger of "switch flipping": I agree there's probably non-zero risk, yet would would argue one ought to do a clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis vs other psychoactives which sometimes get advocated for looser treatment too. Like, if there's potential in making LSD, ketamine, whatever more widely available/less criminalized, and we know those can also sometimes fuck people up in super-harmful lifelong ways...then it'd sure seem like HRT-lite isn't some weird outlier, and CW is influencing sober assessment. Consider how often[2] normal people take cross-sex HRT or analogous-effect meds (e.g. men taking antiandrogens) for the __usual__ reasons...if this was a huge pipeline for making accidental trans people, I'm sure it woulda been documented by now. But I've not heard of such through media or whisper network from either side, so...that's absence of evidence, at minimum, and I suspect evidence of actual absence as well. It'd be too salacious to pass up reporting on, if it did happen with any regularity. The utility cost of a single accidental trans person isn't so great that I think it merits cutting off an entire branch from the tree of knowledge, is basically my position here.
Case 2, narrower claim: for those who already jumped through all the hoops, Definitely Absolutely Trans, have been on meds long-term with minimal issue, etc, etc...it genuinely is annoying that I gotta keep going through Big Medical for my monthly dosages of banal-for-me meds. Sometimes doctors fuck up, prescriptions get lost, I'm travelling and don't have extras to tide me over, whatever. There have definitely been times where The Process has annoyed me so much that I've been tempted to buy black-market. Compare to injection equipment: for reasons I don't understand (but probably rhyme with Moral Hazard), it's not possible for lay consumers to buy medical-grade OTC needles in the USA. Can get hobbyist stuff or tattoo needles, but anything for like intramuscular...nope, need a "prescription" for needles. This is really annoying, because unlike medication which has a cash cost of dozens/hundreds $ without insurance, needles are just...you know...cheap mass-manufactured goods. So I can, and do, just find "illegal" listings of needles from China or whatever. I like having my own comfortable margin of supplies, to be used at a pace I deem fit, and wish the same could happen with pills. Call that a libertarian free-market impulse, I guess: I just don't like the idea of being yoked to Official 30 Day Cycles, at the whims of paper-pushers who have no particular interest in ensuring timely service, and can freely revoke a prescription for arbitrary reasons. (This isn't a specific-to-HRT sentiment, to be clear, but it was the example under discussion, so that's how I framed it. In general I'm skeptical of Moral Hazard arguments that conveniently restrict medical access[3].)
[1] weasel word, I guess, since transgenderism is comorbid with a laundry list of Bad Life Outcomes just generally...so a little of column A, a little of column B, probably.
[2] yes, still relatively small sample size, but larger than the acutally-trans population
[3] https://www.slowboring.com/p/solving-problems-by-letting-people
Agreed that it's not something I'd generalize to infinity...the "delenda est" part of FDA Delenda Est is, to me, really more like how the "defund" in Defund the Police doesn't actually mean that (usually). Catchy slogan not meant to be taken exactly literally. There's a time and place for gatekeeping, and I'd feel pretty uncomfortable with a true libertarian's wet dream of no form of drug oversight whatsoever...at the same time, Scott, Zvi, and others have pretty firmly convinced me by now that the current institutions are generally overly conservative. I'd be quite happy if there were a dozen more Aduhelms, in exchange for not dithering on other shit that actually matters (while the window to capture majority of benefits is still open) + actually works...whether that's infant formula, updated covid boosters, or inspecting foreign shipments of monkeypox vaccines. Just to pick a few random recent examples. I'd even be willing to cook my steaks to well-done if that's the sort of Sacrifices to the Gods it'd take.
Hard drugs specifically: yeah, whatever fantasies I once had about the wonders of broad decriminalization/legalization (blah blah Netherlands blah) and the Evils of the War On Drugs have gotten completely crushed by witnessing SF's homelessness crisis. Surely there's any number of cheaper (not to mention more humane) solutions that don't involve people ODing on the street, to the general approval of local government and activists...I don't know, just feels fucked up? Not all drugs are created equal. We can't put the Prohibition-repeal genie back in the bottle, that toothpaste has been squeezed. But I think it'd be a better world overall, some alternate timeline where the net-negative stuff stayed illegal __and__ socially disapproved of. Plenty of ways people can go to hell which don't cause so much collatoral damage to the rest of society. (Even relatively-harmless cannabis I've been less than pleased with the consequences of that tradeoff...the one thing I miss about mask mandates was not having to constantly smell high-as-a-kite people in public.)
Have you considered taking something else, maybe testosterone, to see how that makes you feel? Maybe then you will feel even more embodied. How can you be sure that the current path is the right path, until you have experimented with every single possible path?
I concur with the previous comments, "this modified me in a way that will make the rest of my life a lot harder" is not a selling point.
It didn't modify me it made me fully aware of what the problem had always been
> So what’s left for the people who believe transgender is a “social contagion” or about “special snowflakeness”? If I had to steelman their position it would be something like: there’s some switch that can be flipped by social pressure and wanting to look cool. Once the switch is flipped, you’re transgender in some pretty real way: you’re not faking it, and you’ll be miserable until you’re allowed to gender transition. Still, being transgender makes people worse off on net, so society should try to avoid flipping that switch.
From Scott's "In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the
Scott is just flat out wrong there.
Ever you're trans or you're not and and in cases where a switch is flipped it's one of self-awareness rather than anything else
Or trans is an invented phenomenon that's used as a catch-all diagnoses for people who want to escape their identity for other reasons. The most popular version of wanting to escape your identity is called 'being a teenager', which is why normalizing this route for adolescents is probably a terrible and dangerous idea.
Source: "Trust me, bro."
Except fentanyl does that to everyone
A) I already had a testosterone based endocrine system
B) I started estrogen to deal with top dysphoria (which it has dun) all the stuff about embodiment and knowing I'm definitely trans for sure are unexpected benefits hence me trying to tell people about them
"As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. "
For me, this is the strongest possible argument against taking those hormones. I don't want to get gender dysphoria, thank you very much.
Either you have gender dysphoria or you don't all hormones can do here is name the darkness and in doing so show you the way to defeat it
This seems to be an argument for the exact opposite of your claim: people should absolutely not take hormones experimentally.
Why? thay could majorly improve your quality of life and on the time scale it takes to figure out whether or not they work for you there's no long term risk
The "careful medical supervision" part isn't so great either. Know of 2 cases where somebody in their late teens/early 20's wondered whether they were trans, had one appointment with a trans-obsessed medical professional, was told "yes, my dear, you absolutely *are* trans," and promptly went on hormones.
I don't suppose you have either of their numbers a prescription would be quite useful
Dunno where you're located, but even a decade ago in the benighted 2010s, it was trivially easy to get such a prescription in a friendly locale like SF. Supposedly the gatekeepers are wiser now, supposedly it's not just a standardized checklist of stereotyped hoops that both the client and therapist are fully aware of and jump through...and yet. It honestly has bothered me, how little empirical evidence I had to put forth to get a prescription. Once upon a time, there was at least the safety-hassle of regular bloodwork involved...but ever since covid, clinics here are basically perfectly happy to auto-renew HRT prescriptions sight unseen. Or at least mine is. Haven't so much as contacted the office for 2.5 years or whatever now, yet the pills show up in the mail again and again anyway.
That's not what I'd call "careful medical supervision", even by a really generous definition. And I doubt things have gotten *harder* in the intervening years for fresh starts.
"I have been repeatedly assured that nobody is going on hormones without careful medical supervision to ensure it is the right thing for them to do"
You didn't actually believe them, did you?!
The guy who got Kiwifarms shut down infamously did so because they revealed that he was involved in sending twelve-year-olds bootleg estrogen made by a Brazilian in his bathtub from impure Chinese precursors (I swear I'm not making this up).
To be fair anything on the black/gray markets is synthesized by Brazilians in bathtubs using impure Chinese precursors and nobody's complaining*.
* - sometimes because they're dead
That is absolutely true, but I'm going to be honest with you: in the sentence "Transsexual peddles contaminated third-world bootleg drugs to children in secret", the "transsexual" element is the one I have the *least* problem with. I'm not saying none! But a damn sight less than all the rest.
It's not just screwing with your hormones it's doing it in a way that significantly improved the quality of life for a notable percentage of the population and is basically risk-free
Also why would you ever want Justin anti-androgen that sounds terrible
I've got a strange technical question, for the more computer-savvy out there.
So there's an old arcade game I have installed, one of those classics that helpfully displays the framerate for troubleshooting purposes...it's a fighter, and thus very difficult to play effectively at anything less than ~60fps. (You know, back when that was top-of-the-line...lol...) There's only so much "adjusting my timing" to compensate for 20-50fps, since obviously opponents don't have the same handicap. This game used to run just fine on older versions of Wandows, but like so many yesteryear programs, at some point it got lost in the compatability shuffle...I'd thought it was a lost cause for years, something I'd need to intentionally set up an outdated machine to enjoy again.
But I stumbled on an illogical solution by accident: for whatever reason, having a media player open at the same time (say, VLC) fixes the framerate back up to good-as-new 60fps. Doesn't even require playing any media, the other program just has to be open at all.
Why would this do anything? My tentative guess is that the media player loads a bunch of additional AV codecs or something, but then I'm not sure how <whatever key game component> went missing from default-Wandows in the first place, such that it could be backdoor-substituted this way.
I don't have a solution for you, but wouldn't a fighting game slow down the frame rate for both players? So if your frame rate drops, your opponent's does as well. They might be annoyed, tell you to get off the wifi, etc., but I do not think that it puts you at a disadvantage. Obviously you want to get it fixed though.
The p2p is legendarily shitty, so (as far as I understand it) lag on one end doesn't actually cause lag on the other. Part of why it's only ever played competitively via LAN, no one even tries to do it over actual external connections. Supposedly the re-released version that came out on Steam years later fixed this, but that version lacks many of the fan-coded patches that helped make the game more playable in the first place.
The AI also doesn't care if I'm slow in meatspace, heh...
What game are we talking about here, out of curiosity? Is it not available on Fightcade?
Melty Blood Actress Again Code Cadenza.
(am I still a weeaboo if I'm Asian to begin with?)
Ah Melty. I have only played Type Lumina and only briefly. Too many games and too little time.
https://sorry.about.computer
I did driver dev for a living and I don't even want to start thinking about it. Somewhere in the unholy abomination of the Windows/compositing WM/GPU driver stack things happen and your game is fast again.
Someone could be actually paid to investigate it for a better part of a month, unearth a really weird reason then patch it into the newest OS/driver update. Nobody will bother, so make an offering to the Machine God and be happy you got blessed with a solution.
Not worth my money, at least to pay a competent person's Cheerful Price, but it'd definitely be a fascinating deep-dive subject if I ever had the opportunity to let someone dig under the hood. I'm just happy it works, mysterious kludge or not. The more years go by, the more games-I-grew-up-with that become functionally impossible to ever replay...and that's pretty sad. Games that only live on in memories: $ERROR_404
...oh, I was gonna link to the article about Killswitch on invisiblegames.net, but that site doesn't seem to exist anymore. Nevermind, sometimes even the memories get lost too :( Corruption is a terrible thing.
Perhaps this has something to do with https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/windows-timer-resolution-the-great-rule-change/. It seems somewhat odd, though, since the change should have made this "spooky action at a distance" in timing less possible than before.
Interesting - I wonder why other programs which ought to do the same prompting don't work? Like MPHC doesn't do diddly to up the framerate, despite being a mostly-superiour media player, at least for video.
I have tried clocking the CPU higher...running the game on all threads, maxing priority, uncapping RAM allotment, whatever. This would sometimes offer small improvements, but nothing consistent, and of course it meant computer was sweating bullets just to try and halfheartedly run an old game. Perhaps there's some other deeper-level route to try; I'm out of my technical depth though, been ages since I did the "build your own gaming PC" rite-of-passage.
Emulator-wise, sadly most of the relevant documentation is in Japanese, and it's largely fan-patched anyway :(
I read Dr David Hanscom's book on Chronic Pain. It seems that we don't really understand chronic pain at all but it is an inappropriate and useless response. His method is to write down your thoughts about the pain, rip up the paper and throw it away. It works fast and it's free. Do you know someone you could try this on? If so, please comment, so this can get taken seriously. It worked for me- my back pain was completely cured. https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/pain-and-what-to-do-about-it
Dr Hanscom did a talk at google so has external validation but there's a lot of fake stuff around so it's hard to get heard. https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=130
The idea builds on Dr John Sarno and James Pennebaker but is quite amazing (maybe too amazing). If I can get some anecdotal responses here, maybe we can get a formal trial approved.
Hi, my first impression when I heard about this method was : I think this is a bullshit. My wife insisted and I did it thinking what a crap. A week ago I couldn’t walk because of the pain in my left knee. Today I can walk for hours with my two beautiful Husky. I tried also this method for my back and the result was awesome. I can't explain but I just can say it works. Just give it a try and thank you Stuart. I am a PhD in Biology and I don't believe in mystical care but this method works.
I'm delighted to hear it worked for you! I don't believe in mystical care or mystical cures either- I'm sure there will be a suitable neuroscience explanation one day- I favour a miswiring of the competing sub-routine version of the brain described by David Eagleman but I think more important than why it works at this stage is how many people will it work on, and to do that we need a trial.
How about if you two and Dr. Hanscom be the first subjects: cause yourselves some chronic pain. You'll need to figure out a safe way to cause a bit of painful tissue damage that will later heal up with no permanent injury -- maybe the sterile equivalent of a thumbtack in the heel, well covered with sterile bandages? Walk around on it for long enough for the pain to count as chronic. For pain to count as chronic it has to go on for weeks or months, so I'm not sure how long you'd need to carry on with the thumbtack phase, but I'd say at least a week. Then do the paper trick & let us know how well it worked.
Um, yes. that's what I'm trying to do here. I had back pain for 5 months- here's the list of exercises I did to try to heal it
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/fascia-and-lower-back . Then I read an article by Isobel Whitcomb in Slate https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/chronic-pain-identity-spoonies-support-recovery.html and read Dr Hascom's book. 10 minutes later I was dancing. Now, it could be placebo, it could be coincidence but isn't it worth finding out? Dr Hanscom was the first person he cured, he cured his own back problems. There's another patient here https://youtu.be/B5cwZ2iu8jU?t=426. By posting here, I'm hoping I can get enough anecdotal evidence to get a trial arranged. As Isobel Whitcomb says in her article, one of the problems is that people can resent it, thinking it's saying their pain isn't real, especially if the pain has lasted a long time. That's not the idea, it's just accepting that neuron paths don't always work in your best interests. see here by Lorimer Moseley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwd-wLdIHjs
Yeah, OK, but what I’m suggesting is that given how simple and effective the procedure, and how rapid, and how inexpensive the required materials, it would be feasible for the you early adopters to accumulate a body of evidence by performing some experiments on yourselves. And making videos of the climactic tearing of the paper and the astonished relief of the sufferer would really make those anecdotal results pop. With that material in hand you’ll soon have legions of chronic pain sufferers sprinting — well, OK, hobbling —to your clinical trial.
In addition to the sterile-thumbtack-in-the-heel experiment, I think you should try some variations on the original procedure. For instance, if you scotch tape the ripped up pieces of paper back together, does the pain return? If you write your feelings about the pain in vanishing ink but then do not tear up the paper, will the pain fade slowly as the ink does? Next you might explore whether the procedure works on things other than pain. For instance, what about unsightly abdominal fat? If I were to write “blubbergut, I freakin hate you so so much,” is it possible that I would slim down at the moment I tore up the paper? And if so, what about this variant? A chubby guy writes, “195 pounds, you’re bringing me down, I wish every one of you was gone” — when he tears up the paper might he become weightless? And if so, then what if instead he had written “205 pounds, I wish every one of you was gone” might he end up actually buoyant, like a helium balloon? But then — MY GOD, COULD WE USE THIS TECHNIQUE TO LAUNCH ROCKETS & SHIT?
Hmmm, I have my doubts whether those would work... but the first idea is a great one- getting people to film themselves doing it- the only problem is scepticism. I have got a video of myself struggling to do one of the many back exercises I tried but who's to say I'm not just acting the pain? I did this 3 months ago and since then I've found 6 people to try it on and it's worked every time. I emailed the sceptic's sceptic, Michael Shermer, to see if he's ever come across anything like this, but he hasn't replied. I'm trying the rationalist community because the mantra is they'll look at the facts- surely everyone knows one person with pain- is it worth 5 minutes of their time to try it? You can say to them, « I’ve got this crazy guy emailing me- he says like Jesus he can heal your pain- it’s probably rubbish but could you just write your thoughts/emotions/feelings out for 5 minutes on a piece of paper, rip it up and throw it away. He (this Jesus guy) says that will work and your pain will go- please just do it so I can tell the Jesus character he’s full of shit and is wasting my valuable time ».
OK, I just did it. I have had chronic lower back pain for at least 20 years. My back always hurts a little bit, even when I'm lying in bed. If I walk it starts cramping on the lower left, & I'd call that moderate pain. If I lift something the wrong way, I get a zinger of somewhat more severe pain, and then for a few days my whole back is worse. Today it is about average. This morning, sitting down, I have an ache in my lower hip that I can tell is coming from my back.
So I spent 6 minutes writing a description of my pain and my thoughts and feelings about it. Then I tore it up and threw it away. My back feels exactly the same. Same ache in left lower hip. If I stand it, whole back hurts a bit more. Trying to arch it even a little bit hurts a lot, like it always does. Bending forward hurts moderately, like it always does.
Hi again- can you just confirm for me that there has been no change in your pain levels. If so, you're my first failure of 8 people- while it's a small sample size, I'm having a lot of trouble convincing people to try it so I would like to be certain that it failed for you.
Absolutlely no change?
I haven't read the book but have heard some positive stuff about it. To me it always sounded like CBT for pain. Since starting lexapro again i have found that my anxieties don't produce anxious thoughts anymore but do cause me to clench my jaw which produces pain in my face and jaw. (Its not a medication side effect as it happens only at times of high stress and not all the time). So, to me, the idea that stress and mental anguish can manifest as physical pain isn't too crazy and therefor physical pain can be treated with mental work.
Yes, i think CBT is a good analogy- and I think we're edging towards a world where we accept that physical pain has a mental component- but I don't think we're there yet. My question really is how to move the process along a bit faster?
Sounds too good to be true.
It's a time-tested psychological trick; give your concerns a physical form, then punch them in their stupid physical face. As stated, it's free, fast, and surprisingly effective; a lot of problems are more psychological than people assume, and a lot of burdens get less burdensome when you give yourself a physical outlet for your frustrations.
But can we quantify "surprisingly effective"?
Yes, that's exactly the problem- it sounds too good to be true and "you get what you pay for"- give it 2 minutes and see what happens. In my substack I link to 2 articles in slate where Isabel Whitcomb describes her experiences.
The idea of romantic love has been one of the major values of Western Civilization since the Rennaissance when legends such as Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, Romeo and Juliet, and the Provencial poetry of Courtly Love were popularized. Though occurring within Christendom, this particular notion of love existed outside of and often in tension with religious belief.
Still today popular culture is suffused with this notion of love in which two people choose, often against practical considerations, to get together because they hold romantic love as a higher value.
Yet we seem to be at the end of the romantic era. Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love". That your souls had recognized each other as their immortal other-halfs. The concept has no place in our official lives. The corporate world of the 21st century has less patience for romantic love than did the 12th century Church.
Might this be due to too much rationality?
If it was love, who cares what HR thinks?
>Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love".
I am married to someone I met at work. HR didn't care at all because: 1) we followed the established policies in the employee handbook, 2) told them about the relationship, and 3) neither of us managed the other person or worked with them directly.
Based on the HR training I had in b-school and my work experience, HR policies at large companies won't treat inter office relationships as anathema, they will have established procedure to deal with such a thing.
The HR department could not give two figs about your soulmates, you could have a string of them as far as they're concerned - UNTIL you doodle your co-worker, then you break up with them and it turns sour and co-worker decides they were harassed or you are a pest and anyway Somebody Should Do Something and it's all the company's fault for letting it happen, so they'll sue the company.
Since the company is in the business of selling apps for something or other, but not in the business of helping you get your ashes hauled, this is a pain in the backside for them, which is why HR makes rules about "no doodling on company time". If your co-worker couldn't sue them and had to restrict themselves to giving you dirty looks during the tea break, you could doodle every person on the same floor of the building and they wouldn't care.
It has nothing to do with rationality, it has all to do with $$$$$$$$$$.
I don't blame HR departments or corporate culture for caring most about the dollar bill. I blame this culture that now allows so many frivolous lawsuits for sexual harassment to win those dollars. (They aren't all frivolous, of course, but many are.)
It is progressive* culture that has devalued romantic love, I think.
*I'm distinguishing progressive culture: feminism, DEI stuff, "words are violence" believers, from the longer tradition of liberal Western values: basically the 18th through 20th centuries, which mostly angled for more freedom of individual behavior than the popular Left of today.
The DEI people are perhaps the most passionless and sexless individuals one can find in the wild.
It's weird when it's the faux-Christian alt right RETVRN types that actually talk about passionate love they feel for their tradwife, while the vanguard of the sexual revolution is afraid to touch another human being.
>Try explaining to the HR department that the reason you had sexual relations with another employee was due to "love"
Culture condones treating love as a HIGHER value, not an equal or lesser one. That means you accept losing your job over it, as an upgrade.
Wait, was there a time when this sort of love was *accepted*?! As far as I can tell, Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere and Lancelot, and Romeo and Juliet were all written as *tragedies*, where the people in romantic love faced only opposition from their communities and ended up dying for it. We seem to have progressed if HR just fires you instead of literally having you killed.
These aren't morality plays in which the message is "Don't be like them!" Rather, the audience tends to view them as heroes. The trickle-down message over centuries has been to believe that one should find their "true love". Such notion is in diametric opposition to cultures which believe in arranged marriage or that marriage should only take place within the clan and approved of by authorities.
Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love.
"Put another way, liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is that the community is the problem and must be reformed so as to be less oppressive of a sentiment as noble as love."
I... don't think so? I was with you right up until here, but my experience is that liberal Western culture's reaction to Romeo and Juliet is the Italian community must be reformed to be less violent and crazy so teenagers stop killing each other and themselves. Practically everybody I know, especially on the liberal side of the divider, views the love affair per se as discomfiting at best.
Seriously. If the Montagues and Capulets don’t keep stabbing each other and bystanders for slights, it really doesn’t matter if the teens are forced apart by their mean parents or married to one another to end the feud.
Which last is pretty likely, though probably not conducive to R&J’s adult happiness, if Tybalt could just keep it in his scabbard.
(But the Nurse and Friar Laurence are still irresponsible idiots who are old enough to know better.)
Speaking of someone who has a strong romantic love for their wife and also as someone who's old enough to scoff at younger people claiming to be in love -
Lots of people don't know the difference between love and lust, especially when they're younger. Two people at a job having sex is a nightmare for potential sexual harassment claims, and a big deal for the other employees who are likely aware that something is happening (especially if it's happening at work!). To be on the same side, companies are highly incentivized to just assume that it's not really love.
I met my wife at work, and I still say that most people who date at work are going to cause more problems than they solve. That said, I'm not a fan of broad corporate policy against it, and prefer the more neutral "here are some guidelines to follow and a way to report harassment" that gives most employers a solid out. A pox on courts who wouldn't accept that as a fair compromise.
Eh, I know I always trot this one out, but my go-to example of why doodling on company time is a no-no is the former married manager in a former workplace of mine who doodled one of his subordinates, got her pregnant with twins, then got a better job elsewhere and left, in succession, the job, his wife, the town, and his mistress and babies. He's probably hooked up now with a third soulmate/love of my life now, wherever he is.
"Broad corporate policy" probably will do nothing for the romantic featherheads who are convinced "but we're in love and any day now he's gonna leave his wife for me!", but it will at least be a big warning sign in the middle of the road about these kinds of messes.
My experience is that such policies actually don't work, and those interested in pursuing such a relationship will find a way to do so anyway. What it gives an employer is some legal protection, but at the cost of sometimes having to fire employees (or worse/weirder, tell people to stop dating) regardless of the merits of the relationship. If my former employer had told my (then future) wife and I to stop dating, there would have been no good outcome - either one or both of us quit, or it breaks up a good relationship.
If companies felt they had decent legal protection without having to meddle in the affairs of their employees, that would solve most of these issues.
I will say, I'm strongly against a supervisor dating a lower level employee, *especially* if the lower level employee is a direct subordinate. That's just asking for all kinds of problems, often directly related to work benefits, promotions, etc.
https://aeon.co/essays/russia-against-the-western-way-of-love
Think you'd enjoy this article on the topic, not the same entirely
The last sentence lost me: modern HR is not something I'd consider remotely rational, in either the small- or big-R sense.
Otherwise I'd agree in general that legibility and safetyism are having an outsize chilling effect on all kinds of mushy human relations, romantic and otherwise. Was just thinking about it on the commute home: my workplace recently foisted an HR-nightmare sexual harassment case boss to another <s>diocese</s> store branch. Everyone's glad that he's gone, but the lingering bad vibes and heightened sense of threat make every potentially-misinterpreted reaction between sexes a helluva lot more fraught. Who knows how long until that'll settle down... (Maybe it'd be different if the asshole actually got fired, or disciplined in any meaningful way, but blah blah Official Investigation mumble fair trial cough lack of HR-admissible evidence. It's like some weird alt-reality where #MeToo never happened.)
Not only has that *never* been an acceptable excuse (whereas for example "I like pussy and mind your own business" often has), it's the mainspring of the romantic conception of love that it isn't. Acceptance would smother the whole thing to death. You need zealous opposition to get the sturm und drang, the heightened emotional states which make romanticism appealing to histrionics; if you pat the lovers on the head and say "well isn't that nice" you ruin it for them and they'll probably break up, no longer united by the world's opposition.
As per "The Screwtape Letters":
"If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, “noble”, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides."
From "The Allegory of Love":
"Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described.1 With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often ‘aureate’ or deliberately enigmatic, we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life. It is possible only to those who are, in the old sense of the word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous. Yet this love, though neither playful nor licentious in its expression, is always what the nineteenth century called ‘dishonourable’ love. The poet normally addresses another man’s wife, and the situation is so carelessly accepted that he seldom concerns himself much with her husband: his real enemy is the rival. But if he is ethically careless, he is no light-hearted gallant: his love is represented as a despairing and tragical emotion—or almost despairing, for he is saved from complete wanhope by his faith in the God of Love who never betrays his faithful worshippers and who can subjugate the cruellest beauties.
...There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming — to wipe out of our minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food both of modern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of ‘happiness ’— a happiness grounded on successful romantic love — which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction. In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them. At the other end of the scale we find the comfort and utility of a good wife acknowledged: Odysseus loves Penelope as he loves the rest of his home and possessions, and Aristotle rather grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may now and then rise to the same level as the virtuous friendship between good men. But this has plainly very little to do with ‘love’ in the modern or medieval sense; and if we turn to ancient love-poetry proper, we shall be even more disappointed."
Related to the Lewis passage, I read this interesting bit recently in Octavio Paz's The Double Flame (which is about the history of love in literature):
"The majority of specialists in this field agree that the Provencal poets adopted two popular Arabic-Andalusian poetic forms: the zajal and the jarcha. Another borrowing that had a great influence not only on the poetry but also on the customs and beliefs: the reversal of the positions of the lover and his lady. The main axis of power in feudal society was the vertical link, both juridical and sacred, between lord and vassal. In Muslim Spain the emirs and the great lords had declared themselves to be the servants, the slaves of their beloveds. The Provencal poet adopted this Arab custom, reversed the traditional relationship of the sexes, called his lady his mistress and himself her servant. In a society much more open than the Hispano-Muslim one--a society in which women enjoyed liberties unthinkable under Islamic rule--this change was a real revolution. It upset the images of man and woman hallowed by tradition, affected mores, left its mark on vocabulary, and through language influenced the vision of the world."
What I find interesting is that romantic love isn't a given but a cultural convention which had to be invented at some point. According to Paz, romantic love is a subset of eroticism which is a subset of sex. Sex is animal, eroticism involves symbolism such as the kiss, romantic love the paradox of the captured soul mixed with the freewill to choose its ongoing enslavement.
I wonder if modern society isn't now uninventing romantic love.
"In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an ἄτη [disaster, ruin, folly] which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them."
This remark of Lewis' reminds me of the following footnote to the Thousand Nights and a Night, by Burton (a man who was himself inclined to the ancients' attitudes toward the matter): http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_1/v1notes.htm#124
Sounds like Lewis disapproves of courtly love while acknowledging that the notion of love prior to it was no better. My point is that courtly love has been distilled over the centuries by a liberal culture which now views romantic love as one of the important ingredients to a marriage. When the Troubadours exalted adultery, it was the only form of romantic love at the time and place, since the nobles of the court married for social and political reasons.
No joke, getting married is one of the biggest issues in life, one of the biggest determinants of happiness. It seems to have become much harder, judging by percentage of adults married. I'll reverse your formula and say that if they don't bring back arranged marriages, the least they can do is let people date at work. Maybe there is love there.
But Trebuchet, that fence seems completely pointless to them!
Unfortunately, I think the only thing left to do for now is enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing them also suffer from their destructive behavior while simultaneously refusing insistently to fix it. Maybe when we're like 80, the rising generation will have had enough of this shit and want to go back to one of the manifold forms of sanity.
You were mentioned in The Forward (a national Jewish online paper published both in Yiddish and English) this week, because of discussion about lox:
https://links.forwardcdn.com/e/evib?_t=4616583590614aeb8da9a4f87d20e5fd&_m=b39a4d34f36b4129a45e3d510d50c8c3&_e=2_XN2ywz2oJFS2R_maDMYrf6m6_VvgsogavUSN-JMIpkBt7GXSTASZEqehvzJSra
Physics question. You often hear baseball announcers say how a fastball can never really rise because that would violate the laws of physics, it only appears to rise to the hitter because the brain expects it to drop sooner than it does.
Can a baseball really not rise given enough speed and backspin? My intuition is that it could, but maybe I've played too much wiffleball.
Bonus: If it can rise, what would the velocity and backspin rate (and air-pressure?) need to be? Assume a spherical cowhide.
I think so. If we use this simple equation for the Magnus force on a spinning baseball:
https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node43.html
...then we need the baseball to be spinning at about 5700 rpm for a 90 MPH fastball to generate 1g of vertical acceleration to compensate for the force of gravity. That gives us a surface velocity of about 23 m/s which isn't fast enough to make any of our assumptions questionable.
A little digging tells me that in the real world, fastball spin rates average about 2000 rpm and max out around 2600 rpm.
Yes, I wouldn't think this would be possible for a human pitcher, or someone would have done it already for lulz and to freak out a batter. But we could readily build a machine to do it, it would've been a great proposal for "Mythbusters" when that show was on.
Thanks for the responses!
If the announcers do indeed say that, they are wrong. It might be a bit beyond a human's ability to pitch a baseball fast enough for it to rise, but there are no laws of physics standing in its way.
As I mentioned to Yug below, you can do it yourself with a table tennis bat and ball. Strike the ball in a horizontal direction with even a moderate amount of backspin, and it will swerve in a more vertical trajectory i.e. upwards. No laws of physics being violated, just the Magnus effect in action.
That got me curious enough to try to look it up. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/forces-on-a-baseball/
Ignoring-link top-of-head answer; gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand would require it to start spinning faster in midair, while gravity is instead working to make it stop spinning. Short of freak weather conditions like a tornado, it will never go higher than its original trajectory.
I don't think either of your contentions are true. If it is spinning fast enough to gain altitude when it leaves the pitcher's hand, it doesn't need to spin faster. And gravity is not working to make it stop spinning.
Consider a table tennis ball. It can be made to spin fast enough to change it"s trajectory from horizontal to vertical after it leaves a player's bat. The same is theoretically true for a baseball,, though I don't know what combination of speed and spin would achieve this, and whether or not it is practically possible.
I assume we're talking about the baseball rising when it gets to the batter at home plate, a distance of 60 feet. You can't make a table tennis ball fly a straight line for ten feet and then start climbing, you'd have to get it climbing out the gate.
A baseball is 5 ounces on the light end; I didn't find the equation for how fast you have to spin it to get it rising, but it's a lot heavier than ping pong balls or paper airplanes.
You assume incorrectly - I was responding to your 'gaining altitude after leaving the pitcher's hand', and 'it will never go higher than its original trajectory'. You didn't mention anything about a delayed reaction.
A table tennis ball can gain altitude after leaving a player's bat, and with sufficient spin and speed, a baseball will do the same after leaving a pitcher's hand.
I guess we're in agreement in that neither of us knows the speed and degree of spin for this to happen, nor how far from it are real baseball pitchers.
Is Somaliland an independent nation?
For the next really slow response, here is my current "gotcha" on most "rules" regarding independence.
They basically have everything that might be considered part of one's definition/rules, but they aren't recognized by basically any power (even Google doesn't bother).
Own government, military, currency, and no dependence from its parent nation Somalia. It even had a civil war and was its own nation for a while.
In the end, the ability to self govern is granted by the power to assert self governance. But recognition for it, or for its "right" is mostly getting other individuals/powers to go along with it or in other words, politics.
By almost any definition, then yes - but there's a corollary, which is "does Somaliland benefit from the advantages of being an independent nation state?" and the answer to that is no, because for a poor country, a lot of these (in terms of financing the national debt, military assistance from other states, international aid, etc.) rely on being recognised as an independent nation state. As Haiti shows, some of these advantages are a decidedly mixed blessing, but on balance they're still worth having.
Given the potential for an increased risk of genocide and ethnic cleansing if African ethnic/linguistic "nations" within existing multi-ethnic states were to have a realistic path to the international community granting them recognition as independent states, I was really surprised when South Sudan was recognised. Not a bad thing in itself, but seemed to demonstrate that the taboo against granting recognition was less powerful than I had thought.
South Sudan being recognized seems to be mostly due to an US effort lead by... George Clooney?
My point is that, it's mostly a tautology - you are independent by being independent but even that isn't enough. To actually act like a nation, you have to get others to treat you as one. Arguably that's even more important, as even for wealthy nations, trade and treaties and such are at best legally grey otherwise. And for that, all the rules and definitions doesn't matter. It's literally politics and influence/power at that point.
In my eyes, if you're able to perform the core function of a sovereign state, taxing your subjects, then you're a sovereign state, and Somaliland is indeed performing that function. The idea that states need recognition from other states to become states seems crazy to me, as that would mean that e.g. some isolated Polynesian island couldn't have become a state before European contact.
Nationhood I consider something almost entirely separate from statehood; e.g. the Kurds seem to me closer to being a nation than do the Belgians.
Plenty of local governments have taxes. Independence is being able to enforce laws (typically including a tax code) while preventing outsider powers from doing the same.
You're right, taxation is too narrow.
And of course there's the neighboring and arguably even less recognized Puntland
Isn't there tacit recognition in terms of military cooperation re piracy off the horn of Africa?
I think you're confusing it with Somalia
https://www.eucap-som.eu/somaliland-coast-guard-ready-to-exercise-its-powers-across-territorial-waters/
(the EU at least seems to have some degree of contact and support with Somaliland's coast guard)
Huh, looks like the coast guard gets some support but not the army (wiki states they can't get imported weapons due to the embargo on Somalia, which you think would also affect the navy...). Getting there I guess!
Yeah I don't guess the army does much about pirates. I wonder if at some point the west will give up on the idea of a functioning united Somalia and just open relations with Somaliland. Would be good
Does anyone have an update on what happened to all those neuroscientific tests that university researchers were supposed to be carrying out on Daniel Ingram and others like Delson Armstrong (strapping all sorts of equipment to them and measuring this or that)? Even a preprint doesn't seem to be out after all this while? Is this because the research takes really long, or does anyone have any inside information on what may be delaying?
Thanks for asking! As Scott was kind enough to signal boost, we are still seeking all the funding we need for that and other studies and projects. In this case, we were able to find the money to collect the data (which, as fMRI and EEG with travel expenses, is moderately expensive), but we haven't yet secured all the funding we need to analyze the datasets, which are very large and complicated. So, currently trying to raise $95K for a post-doc to do that analysis, which I am very excited about seeing the results of, as I personally spent about 40 hours in the 7T fMRI and 40 hours of high-density EEG as the pilot subject doing insight stages and jhanas with phenomenological markings and reports. So, if anyone is interested in helping to fund that study, please contact me/Emergence Benefactors, https://ebenefactors.org/ and I will forward you to the correct people at MGH/Harvard.
Thank you. Much appreciated.
Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dwEuP85kTU
Can you say a bit in text?
As Julian says, the experiment was about measuring various parameters, including breathing (both in nose and abdominal), temperature, blood oxygen level, "brain wave states" etc., in different states of being (awake without particular thoughts, focused attention, sleep, "cessation" or nirodha,...), involving some number of sensors and several scores of electrodes. But the video doesn't seem to say a lot about the results: he (Delson Armstrong) does say that the researchers were surprised to see a "waking" kind of awareness in his deep sleep but I don't remember hearing anything on whether his breathing stopped during "cessation" or about how his "brain wave states" during nirodha differed from other humans etc.
Here is the text description of the video:
>Delson Armstrong explains some research he was personally involved with at two Netherlands Universities in which he was hooked up to a number of machines which measured his response to various stimuli. The researchers were looking very closely at the unique state of Cessation which was achieved in deep states of meditation.
basically looks like some buddhism/meditation stuff
Someone below posted how Tyler Cowen suggests that those who believe in AGI should be long volatility. Today on MR he adds to that and suggests EA should have a mutual fund:
"why isn’t there an EA mutual fund, reflecting EA views of the world, whatever those may be? Maybe the fund would instead load up on semiconductor chips, in any case they could aggregate the debates from all those EA forums to make the better decisions...
Alternatively, you might argue that EA has only moral insight, and no predictive superiority about what will happen at larger levels. That too is a plausible view, especially among non-EAers.
But it seems to me one of these should be true, either that there should be an EA mutual fund, or that EA has only moral insight, not predictive insight. Which is it going to be?"
I think his point is that EA has unusual views about the direction AI is likely to take, and, if correct, it (EA) should be able to clean up in the market by putting money on that position, resulting in more money to use for EA.
Most of the scenarios I've read for a superintelligent AI taking over the world involve an intermediary stage in which the AI controls a large share of the economy. Those scenarios should be investable. Even if EA wants to prevent that scenario, it seems better that it should invest in it and profit from the extraordinary gains in order to live to fight AI another day.
What are good objections to Tyler's argument?
Why would investing money into a bad outcome your are fighting against, be a good idea? It's literally creating market incentive to change your own preferences.
These money are going to be either lost or useless, so the only reason for these mutual fond to exist is to appease such market-minded people as Tyler, essentially and quite ironically, it would be pointless virtue signalling.
If things start going badly, you'll have more resources to fight it!
Does this argument imply that literally every organization with any predictive insight into anything whatsoever should also have a mutual fund?
Perhaps not, as part of Tyler's argument is "Presumably EAers are morally obliged to set up such a fund?"
I suppose he means they aren't being true to their own values if they are throwing potential money away for no reason.
Any money that you're investing into a money-making instrument is money that you aren't spending to alleviate problems right now. In order to argue that the investment strategy is *morally* superior, you'd presumably need to have some sort of *quantitative* argument that the ongoing bad stuff that you failed to alleviate today is outweighed by the larger quantity of bad stuff that you could alleviate in the future with a larger budget.
(Obviously, any such argument must be sensitive to the current world situation such that there exists some circumstance under which you'll switch strategies and start actually spending money, since otherwise you can never realize the gains.)
Does he have such an argument?
It's not clear if Tyler meant that EA should invest its own money in the mutual fund. If EA has an outsized talent in prediction, they should be able to make plenty of money simply charging fees to manage other people's money. In that case there would be no trade-off of current vs. future money spent on altruistic causes.
Is that the most money they could possibly earn for a given amount of effort?
The most obvious is "a lot of the scenarios where rat/EA predictions differ from general society are ones in which money is meaningless".
For instance, even granting that AI doom goes through "AI controls much of economy" (see e.g. "It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World" for the alternative "killing all humans is pretty easy if you're not trying to discriminate" hypothesis), if the "AI controls much of economy" stage is already past the point of no return (or at least the marginal amount of money required to avert doom is much higher), then profiting from predicting it doesn't increase the total probability of avoiding doom.
Has Scott come to any conclusions about "Long Covid"? It was something that never caused me much concern. Bit for others, it seems to be a driving motivation for continued carefuleness.
I just saw this go by on Twitter: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905
From the "results":
> Increased risk for PASC was noted in women and those with a history of anxiety disorder.
and:
> Abnormal findings on physical examination and diagnostic testing were uncommon.
The "conclusion":
> A high burden of persistent symptoms was observed in persons after COVID-19. Extensive diagnostic evaluation revealed no specific cause of reported symptoms in most cases. Antibody levels were highly variable after COVID-19.
“We estimated that the hazard ratio of any neurologic sequela was 1.42 (95% confidence intervals 1.38, 1.47) and burden 70.69 (95% confidence intervals 63.54, 78.01) per 1,000 persons at 12 months. The risks and burdens were elevated even in people who did not require hospitalization during acute COVID-19.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02001-z
“But even people who had not been hospitalized had increased risks of many conditions, ranging from an 8% increase in the rate of heart attacks to a 247% increase in the rate of heart inflammation.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02074-3.pdf
Latest CDC info on long Covid, based on survey data:
About 30% of adults who have had Covid report ever having long Covid.
About 15% of adults who have had Covid report currently experiencing long Covid.
80% of those experiencing long Covid report any activity limitation. (So 12% of these who ever had Covid, around one in eight.)
25% of those experiencing long Covid report significant activity limitation. (So a bit under 4%, or around 1 in every 25 adults who have ever had Covid.)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm?
The large preponderance of studies continue to show long Covid as being quite common, and some of the mechanisms do seem to be starting to emerge.
That’s evidently not going to have any effect on public policy for whatever reason. That war is over, we lost, there’s no large constituency for reconsideration. But individually I’ll still do what I can to put off my own reckoning a little longer, while hoping the horse learns to sing.
(And after all, even at Russian roulette odds, *most* people walk away winners. I just don’t much like the idea of playing twice a year.)
Scott's deep dive into "Long COVID" is at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted
There will for many years be people who are motivated to continue the fight against COVID, I suspect in most cases because they don't have anything better to do with their time. "Long COVID" is as good an excuse as they're going to find, so they'll use it.
Why did the US Libertarian Party, or at least its verified Twitter account(s), become a hardcore pro-Putin propaganda vehicle, not even in the Elon Musk style "fan of Ukraine, but here is what Putin says about it and I believe him, great guy" but in the grotesque tankie way.
I get the position of "everything outside of the US is not our problem", cause even if it's flawed, it's appealing to the naive types, but specifically working on harming Ukraine is not that position, they do very much care about things outside of the US – they want Putin to win. But why? What could be remotely related to the libertarian policies in the Putinist Russia?
It might be blind contrarianism. Personally, I think it's just inconvenient. If Russia's really doing something wrong and we can prevent it then it's hard for them to make the case their principled non-interventionism is the right choice. It's much easier if there's no moral valence to the conflict so memes that support that point of view have an advantage within the culture.
It's one thing to try to improve a country by conquest (generally not feasible, though Japan and Germany worked out fairly well) and another to protect a country from conquest.
Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria should have all been perfect examples of why the US is absolutely god awful at judging whether a country is "really doing something wrong" and interfering. But nope, amazingly the anti-"isolationists" are more confident in their beliefs and judgements about fighting wars with foreign countries than at any other point in history!
Do you think the Vietnamese Communist Party or Taliban or Assad regime or Gaddafi were doing nothing wrong? Usually the argument is they were awful but the US shouldn't intervene for some reason or another.
Also, what's going on in Ukraine is not the US fighting a war. Part of the enthusiasm is that.
An uncharitable interpretation would be, because they are a KGB/FSB front.
This is less uncharitable if you consider that in Poland, leading far right / quasi-libertarian politicians are transparently Russian agents:
https://www.facebook.com/notesfrompoland/posts/1008786902629853/
This is how war is fought in the 21st century.
Depending on which Green Party you're talking about you should drop the "try to." At least some definitely have been. Russia's pretty equal opportunity about this: it supports whoever it thinks will destabilize other countries and radical minority parties on both sides qualify. Also, they specifically like Greens because they think it'll keep the west buying more gas/oil from Russia.
They're opposing US involvement because libertarians hate it when the government does almost anything, especially anything that spends tax dollars. Their goal is US isolationism and that's where the anti-Ukraine angle comes from, they don't actually like Putin. If you're playing politics for a wide audience, it's a lot of work to make someone a principled isolationist, easier to convince them that Ukraine does too many war crimes to support.
Also, the most extreme stuff is coming out of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire which recently got taken over by the Mises caucus. They thought the LP was too woke, and they're trying to shitpost hard enough to drive the wokes out (driving out plenty of principled libertarians in the process).
Probably because when it comes to war, for at least the last 30 years and probably longer, the position which at the time got you denounced as "treasonous dictator-apologist who doesn't care about global democracy" wound up pretty unambiguously being the correct one in hindsight. Remember when opposing the invasion of Iraq meant you were trafficking in pro-Saddam propaganda? Libertarians in general are EXTREMELY sensitive to "If you don't go all in on our side of this latest war, you're a treasonous enemy of democracy and general goodness", and frankly for damn good reason. I'll freely admit that "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" is an awfully crude action plan, but I totally get where it comes from.
I would also observe that another thing libertarians are very sensitive to is overnight changes in media opinion that are seamlessly absorbed by the political class. Prior to the invasion, the government of Ukraine was being pretty widely denounced (primarily by the left) as Nazi-adjacent if not outright white supremacist, while the right broadly was trying to downplay any such connections. When the invasion happened that flipped 180 degrees literally overnight, and I think that put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths from the outset.
First Ukraine/Iraq difference that comes to my mind is that if Ukraine wins the war it could plausibly restore a fairly normal western-liberal-style regime, whereas we were tilting at windmills trying to do that in Iraq.
Iraq and Afghanistan would have made a lot more sense if our mission had been "find two dictators who are considerably less terrible than Saddam and Mullah Omar."
Incredible to look at the invasion of Iraq and take away the lesson "Take whatever position gets you denounced as treasonous in the USA specifically" rather than "unprovoked invasion bad".
> I'll freely admit that "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" is an awfully crude action plan, but I totally get where it comes from
I think you're confusing "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" with just being rational, which is something that does not apply in this case.
For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, you were treated as a lunatic if you even mentioned the lab hypothesis, but now it is a widely accepted possibility. But in this case the lab hypothesis was in fact a reasonable argument from the start, so if you just applied some rational thinking you would eventually get to the lab hypothesis as an option.
However, in this case, if we think about things rationally, we have a clear aggressor who attacks a smaller country and drives Europe into chaos all because of... ego? So, in other words, you cant rationalize your way into a pro-Russia stance, therefore the "take whatever position gets you denounced as a traitor" plan falls off from the start.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be that a lot of libertarians could be replaced with a rock that has "DO THE OPPOSITE OF WHATEVER JOHN BOLTON SAYS" written on it.
I remember some people saying we shouldn't have gone to war against Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't remember anyone saying that Saddam and the Taliban were actually the good guys.
And, if you're actually non-interventionist in principle, shouldn't you denounce Putin himself on that ground, even if you don't think we shouldn't do anything about it?
>And, if you're actually non-interventionist in principle, shouldn't you denounce Putin himself on that ground, even if you don't think we shouldn't do anything about it?
No, because freaking out over Putin is driving the support for helping Ukraine. If you convince people this isn't the one-sided good vs bad conflict they think it is, they don't support intervention as much.
Government of Ukraine being "Nazi-adjacent" is a Russian propaganda trope though plus something that was driving clicks at the time for the less scrupulous journos like C. Miller. Again, question is not why the LP denounces foreign policy but why it denounces the foreign policy exclusively through the crude Russian state propaganda lens.
You mean in WW2 where we spent over half a trillion dollars propping up a regime we then spent the next 40 something years considering an existential threat?
I mean, that's one way to put it. You could also say WW2, where we got the people we didn't like to do most of the bleeding, then spent the next 40 something years out-competing our dupes to become the world hegemon.
The Mises Caucus took over the LP and pretty much wrecked it
Wrecked what exactly? A party that has abjectly failed to accomplish anything and was starting to adopt woke ideology in a desperate and almost certainly self-destructive attempt at relevance?
I was scrolling down waiting to see if someone already said this, as it is correct. It seems many of their posts now are just edge lording.
I would add, though, that even non-Mises libertarians are biased to accept positions that preclude government actions. For instance, one can oppose COVID restrictions on principled grounds - "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." But one can avoid the issue entirely, by pretending that there are no competing interests, since "COVID is a hoax" or some variation thereof. I have seen numerous libertarians going that easy route.
In a similar vein, given that the US will absolutely not be be supporting Russia in their war on Ukraine, any US intervention would be in support for Ukraine. Therefore, a libertarian can conveniently ignore the tension between general opposition to US foreign intervention, and the plight of Ukraine, with Russian narratives that would preclude any support for Ukraine.
Conceivably, in an alternative timeline in which Russia's invasion garnered widespread support in the US, and any involvement by the US would be on behalf of Russia, perhaps some of these same libertarians would find themselves defending Ukraine's position, highlighting routine Russian atrocities, etc.
From what I have seen it seems like the pro-Ukraine stance has been associated to the "woke" agenda by these libertarian type people.
Reaction of American political fringes to this war is wild, Ukraine is simultaneously "woke" and "Nazi" like a Schrodinger's cat. Hard to disagree with Fukuyama that there are no serious ideologies except liberalism anymore.
Lots of good replies below on the shortcomings of contrarianism, the frequent need for anti-interventionists to want something more than "yes, A is the victim and B is the badguy but I prefer not to intervene."
I'd also add that there is a strain with in the libertarian movement in the US which is primarily motivated by social justice issues, and within that strain there are people who hate the idea of the university policy to enforce use of preferred pronouns so much that they libertarian their way full circle into endorsing an autocrat because he opposes preferred pronouns, gay marriage, etc.
Contrarians are in general quite gullible. Tell them that some opinion is contrarian, and they will automatically support it.
"You are not one of those sheeple who believe that 2+2=4, right? Let me tell you what the truly independent thinkers say on this topic: <insert Kremlin propaganda>." Five minutes later, the guy will repeat it on all social networks as his own opinion, to signal what an independent thinker he is.
It is much easier to signal independent thought when someone provides you a script. The only requirement is that the script disagrees with your mainstream media.
>Contrarians are in general quite gullible.
As opposed to whom? The people who accept every hegemonic narrative every single time?
>Tell them that some opinion is contrarian, and they will automatically support it.
Not true at all, but as long as we're playing this stupid game: "Tell a non-contrarian that some opinion comes from the certified EXPERTS at Harvard University and the NYT and they will automatically support it"
>It is much easier to signal independent thought when someone provides you a script. The only requirement is that the script disagrees with your mainstream media.
Even in your dumb strawman of contrarianism, this is a far superior form of uncovering truth than just accepting the EXPERT narratives every single time and expecting that these EXPERTS will of course acknowledge and promote anything which is true but uncomfortable or contradicts mainstream narratives. They essentially do not do that.
> As opposed to whom? The people who accept every hegemonic narrative every single time?
Statistically, yes. The experts from Harvard are correct more frequently than whatever source today contrarians get their alternative facts from.
To find truth, it is not enough to doubt all mainstream information. You also have to admit that 90% of it ultimately turns out to be correct. That is the painful part, especially when the alternative was way more cool.
Oh give me a break. "People I agree with are smart and rational and other people are dumb and don't think independently"
>You don't have to be a contrarian to reject mainstream narratives.
And yet almost nobody except contrarians do! Because while contrarianism will often lead you astray, it does give you the push to actually be skeptical and critical of most things and not just those for which it is politically convenient for you to do.
I think it's a few of the state Libertarian parties, New Hampshire in particular, that have gone hardcore pro-Putin. The national party is still treading fairly softly on that one, but they're leaning disturbingly in that direction - and being libertarians, they aren't going to override the messaging of their more zealous state affiliates.
The reason seems to be a combination of reflexive isolationism and reflexive anti-whatever-either-major-party-doesism. Both of which have been exaggerated since the Von Mises caucus's ascension within the LP leadership. "Intervention" in Ukraine, even to the extent of conspicuously providing free weapons, is something one and a half of the major parties are strongly in favor of, and it's the opposite of isolationism, so they are opposed to it out of principle. And that's an uncomfortable position to hold, unless you can convince yourself to be in favor of the inevitable outcome should they get what they want in Washington. So, they've been highly motivated to find excuses to be OK with Ukraine being at least partially conquered.
It was bad enough when we started getting right-wing tankies crawling out of the woodwork. Libertarian tankies is just sickeningly wrong, but here we are.
https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/whats-confused-pro-putin-libertarians/
Hasn't the Libertarian Party been recently taken over by Trump apologists? As far as I can tell, they aren't really Scotsmen.
This is just a guess, but it seems to have more to do with their stance towards the US government than any real opinion on foreign affairs. It seems that many libertarians just have a knee-jerk opposition to any governmental policies which seem to have wide bipartisan consensus, as they seem to think such policies have greater potential for abuse due to the lack of critical examination of their possible effects.
Back when the Patriot Act passed with large bipartisan margins, many libertarians were (rightly) critical about the expansion of govt. authority. Now, when Ukraine has broad bipartisan support away from the political fringes, the same skepticism kicks in. It's hard to admit that you're opposing a policy mainly because you don't like consensus, so people invent reasons to support Russia, instead, to justify their contrarianism.
>They need a moral reason to not get involved, and will invent one as needed.
I like how you think this applies only to your enemies. If I have to hear one more time some about this is a conflict between "democracy and autocracy" or "freedom and dictatorship" or "justice vs hatred" I think I'm going to be sick.
Ukraine is by all accounts even more corrupt than Russia, and a majority of Ukrainians hold extremely illiberal views on social issues - only 14% say homosexuality should be accepted by society....the same as for Russia!
It should be enough to say invading countries is bad (when countries other than America do it...), but instead it has to be wrapped in all these goofy narratives too.
Not part of a formal alliance structure, but we're the Good Guys, the Ukrainians are the Good Guys, and the Russians are the Bad Guys. Sometimes, maybe once in a generation or two, it really is that simple.
It helps that the Ukrainians are really, really capable Good Guys, so our concern can be adequately applied from a safe distance and at little marginal cost.
I don't think the government is motivated by such simple things. It's not what gets hundreds of billions of dollars spent on something.
I don't think hundreds. More like tens, many of which are going to American companies.
Ha, I'd like to know that too. Not that I think they shouldn't be. I have my hypotheses, but I'd be happy to get more insight. Especially since many publicly doubt how long the Europeans will continue to support Ukraine, while there seems to be less doubt with the US.
Yeah right but they do not "do nothing", they accuse Zelensky of killing civilians, ruminate how blowing up a Crimean bridge is a terrorism, meanwhile zilch about all Russian atrocities. That's a charged anti-Ukrainian position, not a "Do Nothing" or "Anti-War" position.
Perhaps they see a need to counter the overwhelming pro-Ukraine slant of the national media in order to more successfully argue for doing nothing.
A lot of Americans wanted to Do Nothing in 1939; they didn't need to argue that the Poles were Literally Worse than Hitler to argue their case.
And they were at least somewhat successful, whereas the Libertarians arguing for plan Do Nothing in 2022 have been and will continue to be completely unsuccessful.
The media had a less negative view of Hitler in 1939 than it does of Putin today. There certainly wasn't the sense of overwhelming moral outrage the way there is today.
I think you might be thinking of the First World War.
I don't think you recall correctly. In 1940, first-, second-, and third-generation German-Americans made up maybe 4% of the US population, many of whom were living in America because they or their parents were conspicuously *anti*-German or at least anti-Hitler. And German-American political identity had faded significantly among the rest after World War I.
Isolationism was an American thing, not a German-American thing.
It’s rationalizing doing nothing.
It's a dual-use infrastructure, very notoriously so. Regardless, it's just the most recent tweets I saw on the topic but there is no shortage of pro-Putin propaganda takes predating this particular bridge incident there.
Yeah. That’s what I am trying to say except that I think they decide that doing nothing is the right choice first and then look for reasons to make themselves feel better about it. Sort of the reverse of sour grapes or that psychology thing where if you do a small favor for someone you start liking them more.
>Doing Nothing is something that does not need to be justified because one side or the other or both are bad guys. Doing Nothing is justified because it's right for _your_ nation.
This can be said of any number of things, but in reality, this isn't a moral philosophy journal where the goal is to simply make a logically consistent argument for a moral position, it's political activism which involves persuading people against things they have been conditioned to believe.
Devil's advocate: given that there are a plethora of Somethings to be done but only one Nothing, shouldn't the burden of proof be on advocates of any particular Something with Nothing as the null hypothesis?
Do infohazards really exist? I originally thought so, but then eventually I came across the idea (unfortunately, I can't remember where) that the only real infohazard is the (mistaken) idea that infohazards exist, which causes people to develop paranoia and stop thinking logically. I'm also curious about how rationalists, who might be the community most dedicated to finding truth, also came up with and seem to mostly endorse the infohazard concept, which incentivizes avoidance of learning or thinking certain things.
(Please do not mention concrete examples of potential infohazards if you choose to reply to this comment; thanks).
Computers can receive pieces of information structured in such a way that upon interacting as normal with the information (through whatever input channels they normally use), they stop functioning. These are known as computer viruses, analogically to biological viruses which are also just really basic info packets combined with injection tech.
Humans are a kind of computer.
So I think there is no theoretical barrier to some (potentially long and complex) chain of information that damages humans that receive it.
But in practice I don't think anyone has invented any infohazards that work on humans yet. Cases where this seems to have happened are more like cases where a glitchy computer crashes when given say, an input of 001 instead of 1 in a certain field: the information received is not the hazard but the fragile nature of the underlying processes.
I think partial infohazards exist - memes that are dangerous to come in contact with, if you don't know the antidote.
Consider being a deeply religious person in 1930s, who believes God has a plan for everything, and then the Holocaust happens. Even learning about it is an infohazard - it can collapse your entire belief structure while leaving nothing in its place. The structure was load bearing, and now you're confused and distressed for an undefined amount of time until you figure things out again - and you may never come out on the other side and just die a cynical husk of a person. You need to either get a psychologically supporting atheist worldview or some kind of solution to theodicy that'll be satisfying for you.
A nonexhaustive list of other examples, now in the water supply: AGI risk doomerism, doomerism in general, modern neuroscience, Scott's bottomless pits of suffering (of all kinds, there's no shortage), EA, red pill ideology, black pill ideology, alt-right, identity politics.
There seems to be disagreement on what "infohazard" means, so you should perhaps be more specific.
In fiction, "infohazard" mostly seems to refer to information where you can be harmed merely by knowing the information. (This may have been popularized by the SCP Foundation?) A theoretical ideal agent shouldn't ever be directly harmed by knowing something, but humans are not ideal agents and can definitely be harmed by knowing things under certain circumstances. For example, knowing that Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet might harm you by causing you to stay up late and waste a lot of time fruitlessly arguing with them.
Nick Bostrom defined "infohazard" as info that can harm you if it *spreads*, not just from you knowing it. (I personally think this is a poor term for that concept; I can't think of any other "hazards" where exposing someone to the hazard is safe for the person being exposed but harmful to people who weren't exposed.) This arguably includes everything from the version in the previous paragraph, plus a bunch of additional stuff like weapon designs and security vulnerabilities and anything that you could be blackmailed with.
Infohazards in this sense (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R7szBR5H487XutfKy/what-are-information-hazards) definitely exist. It is exceedingly obvious, for instance, that if you discover a way for a small group of people to kill all humans, telling the world about it will lead to Aum Shinrikyo or ISIL or someone killing all humans.
Note that it's only incentivised to avoid learning an infohazard if doing so will make it easier for others to learn it (e.g. if you're doing it with a research grant that requires you to publish your findings) - the infohazard doesn't change your goals, it merely allows evil goals to be achieved more than it allows good goals to be achieved.
If you're talking instead about memetic hazards/harmful sensations, it's less obvious.
At one level, sure, obviously, because otherwise we would not have the important defense mechanism of denial. There's a ton of true information that, if fully grokked at a conscious level, apparently deranges our ability to be functional, or to serve functional roles in our tribe.
Examples that come to mind would be knowledge of our ultimate mortality, knowledge of imminent mortality when that happens, an accurate evaluation of certain areas of our physical and mental capacity where we fall signfiicantly below average, an accurate evaluation of tghe ordinariness of most of our career and marriage prospects, the genuine unflattering basis for many of our friendships and love affairs, and the accurate evaluation of the ordinary qualities and unimpressive prospects of our children.
We engage in manifold forms of denial, both individually and collectively, to avoid gaining complete conscious knowledge of any of these, and it is so ubiquitous and instinctive a practice that one would have to conclude it has over most of our history as a species served some powerfully protective function -- that without these forms of denial we would put our survival (or that of our tribe) at significantly higher risk.
Perhaps learning the truth about things too fast in life is psychologically dangerous to the learner. Even before the age of helicopter parenting, it was generally believed that kids shouldn't be exposed to some adult truths too quickly. So maybe infohazards exists in some mild form.
There are certainly beliefs/statements that can influence one negatively, even irrationally.
For example, spoilers.
For something more/less arguable, news of an airplane crash while one is making a decision on vacationing overseas. Many will weigh in that news more than is rational and cause them stress and possibly make a worse decision due to it.
Whether those can be called infohazards depend on how you define it, but often by the time you do that, you've already forced your answer to it.
> the only real infohazard is the (mistaken) idea that infohazards exist
It would be surprising if there were exactly one infohazard in the world.
If infohazards don't exist, then the idea that they do is not an infohazard.
> It would be surprising if there were exactly one infohazard in the world.
100% this. If the idea that "infohazards exist" can really cause humans mental harm, it would be very unlikely that it is the only idea capable of that.
I think that the level of danger of an idea depends on the listener. The ideas do not act in vacuum, but in the ecosystem of other things we already believe. Even using the example of spoilers -- they are only harmful if you actually intended to watch the movie.
To sort of build out the other side of this, I think anyone who is *legit* broken up by an infohazard is probably, for lack of a better term, a lock that will accept any key in terms of being mentally harmed. i.e. the quickest way to mentally damage someone with an infohazard is to have them start out mentally damaged and to convince them to blame Rocco.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. What do ACX readers think is the best source of information about preventing heart disease short of directly reading all the research papers, which would take a kind of lot of time?
A long-term relationship with a good physician. Even reading all the papers and understanding them would only tell you what is true on average, in research settings. What you really want to know is advice that is relevant to your own personal situation, and that means you need someone who can evaluate you objectively, learn about you, and fold that into the theoretical academic knowledge he gains from reading the papers and his clinical experience with other patients.
Peter Attia
Declarations by the American Heart association should be treated as the opposite of strong evidence. I mean, ffs, they don't even cite any sources. Is that it? You're just making a base level appeal to a perceived authority?
Then link to the research itself! Link to a single metastudy or SOMETHING.
Declarations by the American Heart Association is NOT how science works. The American heart association can literally say anything they want. They are not bound to whatever the scientific consensus is on a topic and they can make these declarations in the absence of any consensus at all. Stop with these BS appeals to authority, especially when there is significant opposition to the validity of the heart association's claims.
I think this is wrong (and I'm not a keto guy); most nutrition research is rubbish and some of that rubbish has shaped "expert" opinion far too much. There is a persuasive case to be made that omega-6 polyunsaturated fats cause heart disease, though I don't necessarily buy this either:
https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000898
What's clear is that heart disease was exceedingly rare before hyperprocessed foods (even for those that ate high saturated fat diets) so my strategy is to simply not eat hyperprocessed foods and not worry much beyond that.
I'm not trying to start a debate on this topic here, since I've been down a number of these roads already and reached the point of satiation reading nutrition studies.
> What's clear is that heart disease was exceedingly rare before hyperprocessed foods
Actually, do you have any source for good information on the history of heart disease? I thought that the concept of heart attack and stroke were relatively old ones. I had thought that cancer and heart disease are more common than they used to be mainly because they have been more resistant to elimination than infectious diseases over the past century and a half. But if you know of any efforts to estimate prevalence of heart disease for (say) 50+ year olds in past decades and centuries, and detected an increase in it, that would be good to know!
Whenever I see this argument on the internet, I think of poor Seth Roberts.
https://youtu.be/X2JOgYfDjIw?t=660
https://sethroberts.net/2014/05/10/cause-of-death/
From what I've read, the quality of argument in favor of omega-6 as a contributing risk factor is comparable to that of saturated fat, but like I said before, I don't necessarily buy either explanation. Also, I don't expect the explanation to be a single cause. I'm sure that the reduction in smoking rates has contributed to the decline in CHD since the mid-20th century.
I'm not someone who believes heterodox views just for fun either--nutrition science is especially bad, however, which is why I'm more skeptical here. For example, the advice against consuming high levels of dietary cholesterol has been obviously wrong for decades, and only recently has the inertia of prior dietary guidelines been overcome.
There’s an argument for theism that has been making waves in philosophy of religion lately based on psychophysical harmony which I found interesting and that I think lots of people here would find interesting too. Good paper if you are just interested in theories of consciousness:
https://philarchive.org/rec/CUTPHA?all_versions=1
So, literally, god of the (explanatory) gaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap
Probably dumb to talk about this when I'm only a third of the way through it, but it seems pretty clear that they're not really backing up their harmony claims, so, let's do this.
This argument bases itself on two claims; that sensory experience follows physical experience, and that people understand those experiences accurately. I don't believe either of those are actually true, so the entire argument falls flat.
The first assumption is that a physical experience triggers a useful cognitive response, i.e. being cut triggers running away. But if you expand that to more complex stimuli, it doesn't hold up. People avoid pain, until it's part of a competition; then they don't back down even when they start bleeding. I distinctly remember resting my hand on an electric fence, specifically because I'd found a part of my hand that didn't feel pain from the shock. And there's no universal direction; if an unknown person gives themselves a goal and runs into trouble with it, we can't accurately predict whether they'll press on or give up, even if we know exactly what the goal and trouble is. Sometimes it's flat counterintuitive; exercise causes pain, but makes you stronger. Plus, reactions to physical stimulus change with exhaustion or other mind-altering experiences. If the matchup is the argument for theism, and the matchup stops matching up when we're tired, does that mean God gets weaker when we stay up late?
The second, that a person accurately assesses the phenomena happening to them, is more flawed. They talk about seeing a red and round thing and trusting there's a red and round thing to be seen, but that ignores optical illusions. I see a piece of cloth out of the corner of my eye, and my brain tells me it's a human. Fifty times it tells me that, when I've already proven it's just a piece of cloth. Then the more complex emotional states defy proper description. My stomach starts rumbling and making noise, and I have NO IDEA what it wants; it could be multiple contradictory causes. I remember asking a girl out once, only to instantly realize that wasn't the right emotion once I heard myself put the thought to words. Twenty years later, I STILL don't know what emotion that actually was, just that it wasn't romantic.
They spend a lot of time talking about how their theory survives integration with other theories, but they don't spend nearly enough time defending their inital assumptions.
Semi-tangentially, arguments like this one, trying to argue that certain facts prove the existence of God, will never be more than academic exercises. If a deity is subservient to logic and human comprehension, then the deity has no function; the controlling logic and human comprehension survive just as easily without them. The value of science is its predictive power; what's the predictive power here?
One of the most influential Bible verses to me is 1 Corinthians 2:4-5. "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power." If you want to convince people to believe in God, you first have to convince them that God is not redundant. Not that he fits into a logical framework, but that he exceeds one. If you want to convince people to actually believe in God, you've got to show them divine intervention, and the less logically predictable the better.
Wow, that was incredibly dense. They assume a particular form of dualism, and derive their argument from there. I think their assumptions face the same challenge as winding up with a /0 in your equation: you can basically derive anything at that point.
Later, they claim this reliance on dualism isn’t actually needed. As far as I can tell, this is the point where *that* claim falls off the rails:
“At best, functionalism implies that being in pain = F only when taken in conjunction with a posteriori facts about psycho-functional correlations. Now, if we treated this information as part of background knowledge, then P(harmony|atheism & functionalism) would be equal to 1. But, again, it is crucial to the original argument that information about psycho-functional correlations is not treated as part of our background knowledge.”
I think this is basically saying: if we ignored that evolution built bio-mechanisms for fitness reasons, it’s you should accept it’s surprising that getting cut causes pain! Thus, even if you’re non-dualist you should expect God did the fine tuning to make those two phenomena align!
I feel…. 40% confident I had any idea what they were saying.
I’d love to hear from others if I was right….
I think I'm on the same page as you. Physicalism argues, basically, that there's nothing that needs explaining about the harmony between mind and body, because "mind" isn't a separate thing. If you feel pain and go "aieee!", that's not a surprising correlation, because all the word "pain" means is "that thing where you go 'aieee!'"
Their reply is that physicalism doesn't necessarily explain harmony because, without prior knowledge of what the universe is like, all it really asserts is "a qualia is identical to *some* sort of physical event." "Pain" could be "the thing where you go 'aiee!'", or it could be "the thing where you sing the national anthem," but we live in a universe where it's the first one, and that seems much more harmonious than the alternatives.
And to me that seems to be circular - we *defined* the word "pain" based on our observations of the universe. If painful events didn't lead to aversive actions like going "aiee!" and flinching, we wouldn't have a word for it, or the word wouldn't mean what it does today. Their argument only works if "pain" is some sort of fundamental thing that exists independently of physical correlates, but that's exactly the sort of assumption physicalism doesn't let you make.
As far as I can tell, this is just a version of the cosmological argument ("the universe is like this, theism is the best explanation for the universe being like this, therefore theism"), combined with an account of cosmology ("psychophysical harmony") that many philosophers would reject. So it is open both to standard critiques of the cosmological argument (roughly speaking, that you can't legitimately claim to have an explanation inside a black box, even if you call the black box "God"), and also to further critiques based on its contestable theory of mind. So I can't see why this should be "making waves." Is there something I'm missing?
It's not a version of a cosmological argument, but rather a fine-tuning argument. Cosmological arguments generally have to do with the facts of the universe existing at all. Fine-tuning arguments have more to do with the nature of the universe as it exists.
I tend think there are some fine-tuning arguments which, if their premises truly hold up, would be fairly resistant to 'black-box' critiques, but obviously this is a contentious subject.
Might well be my end, but the links on that page aren't working.
No. 2 works for me
Oh, I was thinking those were two halves of the paper. I guess the first one's an old deleted version or something. So, second link works and that explains it.
Work okay for me
I lost three pregnancies and found it frustrating that secular perspectives on fetal/infant loss are largely missing from the conversation. A lot of support uses alienating language like ‘angel babies.’ This compounds the isolation of what is already a lonely grief.
It is miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss awareness week. In the latest episode of Bart Campolo’s Humanize Me podcast (https://anchor.fm/humanizeme/episodes/715-A-listeners-abortion-story-e1olric), he has a conversation with a couple who suffered a miscarriage and a medically needed abortion. I wanted to share this in case anyone else needs to know that they aren’t alone. And please share the podcast. It has a compassionate and nuanced discussion on abortion that is also very timely.
Sorry for your loss.
I hadn't heard of this podcast. It was a great conversation. Thank you for sharing.
The German word for it is "Sternenkinder", star kids. I definitely prefer this.
That is a very hard thing, and for what it's worth I don't think it's uncommon at all, although people tend not to talk about it -- I don't really know why. I have 4 children but my wife was pregnant 6 times, although in both cases the child was lost early, in one case with a very heavy period, in the other with a D&C because she was a 3 months along when he died. We still remember on the original birthdates, but we don't talk about it with anyone else.
There are a lot of women friends and family here who have miscarried, most of whom went on to have healthy children later on. Medical advancements make them less dangerous than in the olden days but it's still not rare. They're also not prohibitive; it's not a sign it's going to keep happening or anything.
I’m the sequences, Yudkowsky’s argument against zombies (as I understood it) is that a universe “talk about consciousness” without actual consciousness to explain it, would be astronomically unlikely.
It occurs to me that something similar can be said about free will. “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely. Any thoughts?
There's a position on consciousness called illusionism, whose proponents claim to be able to explain and predict why people talk about phenomenal consciousness despite its non existence.
Why not accept both? One problem is that illusionist/sceptical arguments can be made about anything, but something must exist.
Free will is an incorrect generalization from "I cannot predict my decisions" (true) to "it is impossible *in principle* to predict my decisions, even if you perfectly knew the positions of all particles in the universe" (false).
The motivation behind that debate is mostly theological, not scientific. To put it simply, if your decisions are determined by the positions of the particles in the universe, and those particles were created by an omnipotent and omniscient God... then it follows logically that all your sins are a necessary consequence of how God created the universe you were born in. But some religions want to have a omnipotent and omniscient creator who is simultaneously somehow not responsible at all for anything bad that happens within the creation. (Kinda like having a mathematician who writes "2+2=" on the blackboard, and when a student adds "4", the mathematician will act surprised and say "but that is absolutely not what I had in mind" and blame the student for causing the result to be 4.) So the mistaken idea of "free will" serves as a theological excuse: yes, the God indeed has created all particles in Adam's and Eve's bodies, and was omniscient enough to know exactly what will happen as a consequence, and yet if Adam and Eve eat an apple, God definitely didn't want that to happen!
> “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely.
Nope, people making an incorrect generalization happens all the time. Also, it is quite natural to believe that something is impossible in principle, when it obviously is impossible in practice.
The introspective sense of free will could be an illusion, but so could a lot of things. If libertarian free will is false because the universe is deterministic, that would be a reason for thinking the sense of free will is actually and not just possibly an illusion. To establish that determinism is true, you need to study the universe via physics, not just use a psychological argument. Yudkowsky's argument, for physical determinism is presumably his argument for MWI, so his argument against free will stands or falls by that.
The illusionist explanation for the sense of free will is one possible explanation, but not the only one. Two other possibilities are: we believe we have free will, in the same way we have believe we have noses, because we actually do; and we believe the right thing for the wrong reason, so that our inability to predict our actions makes us think we have free will, and lack of strict causal determinism means we do!
Is there even a logically coherent definition of what a "free will" would be? Seems to me that free will requires two mutually contradictory properties:
1) It must be caused by me -- for whatever definition of "me" (including non-materialistic definitions, such as caused by my soul which exists independently of my atoms). For example, if your left hand started moved completely randomly, you probably wouldn't call it free will... or maybe it would be the hand's free will but not yours. If someone's hands start shaking because of Alzheimer, philosophers typically do not say that the person's free will has thereby increased. So the arguments by possible true randomness in quantum physics are just a red herring.
2) It must not be caused at all -- otherwise it is not free.
This is the actual reason why there is no such thing as free will. Because it is not even logically coherent.
Only after we have established this, there remains the question "so why do people insist that they have this nonsense"? Because people do, and if we couldn't answer this, then we obviously missed something. And the answer is that they sense the decisions as made by themselves, but in a way they cannot fully predict, so feels like "yeah, it is random, but the randomness is somehow me".
The answers "we say so because it is true" and "we say so for the wrong reason, but it is true nonetheless" would be possible if there was a logically coherent definition of free will. But there is none.
" It must not be caused at all -- otherwise it is not free"
Substitute "Not entirely determined by external factors" for " not caused" , and the problem is resolved.
If A causes B, and B causes C, does it mean that "A determines C"? If B is internal but C is external, does it mean that "A is determined by external factors"?
The dichotomy between internal and external only makes sense in short term. (Which explains why it feels meaningful.) From the long-term perspective, I did not exist at some moment in the past, which means that I am caused by the "external factors" myself... and therefore, indirectly, everything that I do.
(A possible loophole is if you believe that humans have souls that have existed infinitely long in the past. In such case, there could be a causal chain that never came from outside.)
"If A causes B, and B causes C, does it mean that "A determines C"
Are you asking about transitivity, or about the causation/determination distinction?
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: "An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn't raise it to certainty". Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the "causes" in "smoking causes cancer" must mean "increased the risk of".
"From the long-term perspective, I did not exist at some moment in the past, which means that I am caused by the "external factors" myself... and therefore, indirectly, everything that I do."
Asuming determinism which libertarians don 't.
>It occurs to me that something similar can be said about free will. “Talk about free will” without actual free will would be astronomically unlikely.
Not at all. Talk about free will arises from the experienced sense of having free will. Talk about consciousness in zombies would arise independently of conscious experience. That's the difference.
What you actually mean is not that talk about free will without free will is strange - you mean that having the experience of free will in the absence of free will is strange(/unlikely). I don't see why this is the case. Let's assume that everything your body does follows on from the state of your body the moment prior - why does this necessarily preclude the experience of free will?
I think the experience of free will is fairly trivially a delusion. You raise your arm shortly after you experience the intention of raising your arm, but you cannot possibly account for where this intention (or at the most, the desire to raise your hand that led to your intention to raise it) comes from. For "you" (some conscious, experiencing "self" that somehow isn't synonymous with concscious experience itself) to have "caused" the thought that led to your arm being raised would require you to have thought about a thought before you thought about it. Maybe you had some thought that itself led to the thought of raising your hand, but where did *that* thought come from? It simply yields an infinite regress.
It isn't how thought works. Thoughts simply arise in consciousness and there's no way of accounting for how they arose. Often they'll be related to the thoughts you had a moment prior, but this is what you would expect a brain capable of thinking to do. But it's not coherent to say that something experiencing a thought is able to put those thoughts into experience. The experiecning self can only experience - any thought that you believe is the cause of your actions must itself have been caused by something the experiencing self could not have "caused".
"I think the experience of free will is fairly trivially a delusion. You raise your arm shortly after you experience the intention of raising your arm, but you cannot possibly account for where this intention (or at the most, the desire to raise your hand that led to your intention to raise it) comes from. For "you" (some conscious, experiencing "self" that somehow isn't synonymous with concscious experience itself) to have "caused" the thought that led to your arm being raised would require you to have thought about a thought before you thought about it. Maybe you had some thought that itself led to the thought of raising your hand, but where did *that* thought come from? It simply yields an infinite regress. "
Sam.Harris's argument, which you are repeating here , depends on two very debatable assumptions.
One about selfhood, that the self is the conscious mind only.
And a claim about selfhood, that the self is the conscious mind only;.
And that control means deciding something in advance;.
As to selfhood,:-
Nothing in an ordinary persons subjective experience suggests that.
Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get eyes to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker or attend football matches if I am a football hater. They are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
From a neuroscientific perspective , it would be bizarre to regard the conscious mind as the beginning and end of the mind, because so much more is done by the unconscious. (Although Harris is a neuroscientist, his claim about selfhood s based on appeal to what "most people think").
I am only consciously aware of a small part of my mental content at one time. The contents of the subconscious are the potential contents of the conscious.
Of course, to say that my unconscious mind is most of my mind is not quite to say that it is part of my self. But its not as if the conscious mind has an entirely passive relationship to the subconscious. ..the conscious mind would be a useless addendum if it did. It l is not as if the unconscious is independent of the conscious mind. Habits and reflexes can be learned with conscious effort and then performed "on autopilot". That's how people drive, play sports and.musical instruments etc. The conscious mind is too slow to.perform such behaviours, and they are not instinctive either, so they are trained reflexes. There is a two way causal relationship between The unconscious and the conscious mind: the unconscious mind s prompts the conscious mind , and the conscious mind trains the unconscious.
The conscious is the rider, the unconscious, the elephant. Psychology regards most of our behaviour as stemming from the subconscious, so if "my" subconscious mind is not "me" , I'm under the control of some alien entity most of the time. But psychology doesn't deny the conscious mind any role, either.
As to control:-
Can I control my thoughts? It all depends on what "control" means. A libertarian doesn't have to agree with a determinist about that, either. I can't decide, in advance, exactly what my thoughts are going to be ...that would be somewhere between pointless and impossible. But,according to my own subjective experience, I (my conscious mind) am not compelled to act on every passing thought. Why shouldn't the inability to refrain from acting in passing impulses be a notion of control that could be the basis for a scientifically acceptable theory of free will?
The issue of conscious control over decision making is interesting and important as well, but it is only one third of the whole issue.
Who defines free will as the ability to think what you're going to think before you've thought it? That is only one notion of "compelled". Mentally healthy people are not compelled by every passing thought . Meditation might show you that thoughts arise unbidden, but if you were compelled to act on unbidden thoughts, you would not be able to stay in the cushion long enough to meditate.
Here is some neuroscience:-
"How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles."
Why couldn't control consist of refraining, vetoing, or filtering?
We do have conscious control, because deliberately think about specific things. Indeed, deliberate, and conscious thinking is what we mean by thinking as opposed to daydreaming or whatever. The fact that thoughts just pop into your head when you are sitting in meditation reflects the fact that you are not actively trying to do anything in particular. But you still make a conscious choice to meditate.
Given that you are familiar with the sequences, is there a reason you don't buy EY's argument that free will is a dissolved question?
I think the free-will discussion has way more to do with how you define "free will" than with anything else.
Yes, yes! It is mostly a very boring semantic problem!
You can't use probability to disprove pre-determinism because probability only exists in the absence of pre-determinism.
Hi the sequences, I'm Dad.
In all seriousness, I think that having an actual Theory of Consciousness would be a good start to questions like these.
Anyone here an officer in the US military? I've been reading about joining the air force and I'm curious what it's like.
USAFA grad here. Left active duty years ago, so some info will be out of date. What questions do you have?
Insert the obvious joke about how the Air Force isn't really a military organization.
Which is only half true; the parts that are directly involved in operating aircraft or commanding the people who operate aircraft, are pretty solidly military. But I've spent most of my career working alongside Air Force (and now Space Force) officers on the acquisitions and R&D side, which is at least as big as the flying-airplanes side, and I can't see much difference between an Air Force officer and an Air Force civil servant in that context. Well, the more restrictive dress code, obviously.
So one important question is, what do you envision yourself doing in the Air Force?
I’d say either lean into the war fighting roles like an enlisted Ranger or 18X contract or join the Coast Guard where you’ll get a lot of operational reps with a solid mission. Outside of the JTAC/PJ community I think USAF is pretty lame and soft.
I was a post 9/11 JO who did stuff.
How does the Russian invasion end without, as Joe Biden called it, "armageddon"? If it's so likely that Russia are willing to use Nuclear weapons (or something equally scary), what's the path towards the war ending where nukes aren't used? Zelesnky is unwilling to make even a token effort of a concession towards Russia to end the war and has gone so far to call for a pre-emptive western strike on Russia. If Biden is correct about Russia, what possible path is there to the war ending without nukes flying?
It's like Biden and other Zelensky-apologists understand Putin isn't going to just cut his losses and accept defeat, and yet they're deathly committed to Putin feeling like he has no options other than nukes or something else drastic.
Putin fucking off from Ukraine because of physical inability to continue (lack of gear and manpower) and/or overwhelming internal pressure.
We're already at the halfway point to there I'd say.
Okay, then when would he use the nukes that Zelensky is telling us he will? If he were WINNING?
We don't know that Zelensky won't make any concessions. At the moment, his side is winning, so it is not in his interest to show a weak negotiating position. In the first few days of the war, when things looked grim for Ukraine, he sounded much more open to various concessions.
I don't know what Putin's thought process is, but for all we know, he could declare Ukraine "denazified" or even "demilitarized" and leave. After all, objectively false, and even internally contradictory messaging is a hallmark of the Putin regime.
He could point to the defeat of the Azov regiment as the "denazification," and the heavy Ukrainian casualties as the "demilitarization," even without really making anything up.
For little cost, Ukraine could also potentially agree to things relating to Russian language TV, education, etc., which could be spun as the "liberation of the oppressed Russian people of the Donbas."
Or Putin could declare Russia the victim of Russian backstabbers who betrayed him and the country, and increase repression of rivals.
As far as using nukes to end the war, it should be noted that it is far from obvious that tactical nukes would win the war for Russia (see: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/special-report-assessing-putin%E2%80%99s-implicit-nuclear-threats-after-annexation), and it is certainly possible that some key-decision makers in Russia realize this.
>We don't know that Zelensky won't make any concessions.
He literally wants more territory than what he had before the war started and thinks the west invading Russia is better than Russia getting away with some Ukrainian territory.
I think it's correct to say that the war didn't start now, but in 2014. So if Zelensky wants (to keep) all territory that belonged to Ukraine at the time of the Budapest Memorandum, technically I'd say fair enough. Practically, it's the question whether this should be declared the only acceptable outcome. And at what price.
>technically I'd say fair enough.
No, not "fair enough". He's literally telling us that Russia is going to nuke Ukraine if we don't attack Russia and give Ukraine tens of billions of dollars more worth of equipment and continue to eat the cost of these sanctions. This clown owes his existence to the west, and he wants us to risk world war 3 so he can have more power. Either he's using these lies to emotionally blackmail the west into giving Ukraine even more, or he's being truthful and is actually willing to risk WW3 so he can control more territory.
>he could declare Ukraine "denazified" or even "demilitarized" and leave.
That was the hope, maybe with some minor territorial gains, in spring. But now there has been a 'partial mobalization' and they have just formally internalized four regions and celebrated the fact, with Putin signing this. How do you think they just say, ups probably a formal mistake, they are not ours after all?
My bet is that the war will continue to go badly for Russia. Zelensky says he won't negotiate with Putin (and why should he?)
I think Putin will be out of office. and possibly someone who is willing to end the war will come in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt07fmWUnhU
Interview with Putin's speechwriter, who says Putin would like to end the war.
>Zelensky says he won't negotiate with Putin (and why should he?)
Because he's literally telling us that Putin is getting ready to nuke Ukraine!
Either he's a complete and total liar (and attempting to basically start world war 3 with these lies), or he thinks risking nuclear war is worth is to avoid losing some unimportant territory.
It currently looks like if Putin will have to leave office, it might well be by the hands of the hawks rather than the doves. My reading / listening of Russian sources is (very) limited, but it seems to me the biggest criticism - and currently the only criticism potentially dangerous to Putin - comes from a place of: why is our military performing so weakly, why are we not fighting more brutally, and why are we not using more of our (destructive) options?
Unfortunately I think NATO will be stupid enough to accept Ukraine. Even though its like an insurance company giving a policy to somebody about to start years of expensive cancer treatment.
The purpose of NATO is not to save money by doing nothing.
The point of NATO is, taking even the naive view of the organization, to enhance the national security of NATO members. Bringing Ukraine into NATO massively jeopardizes the safety interests of NATO members in the same way taking on a seriously ill customers jeopardizes the business model of insurance companies.
They can't join NATO unless they're in control of their territory.
They can't join NATO as long as the conflict is not settled. That's a rule, but what's more important, NATO members really don't want to directly fight Russia over Ukraine.
Also, it needs an unanimous decision. Even Sweden and Finland experienced problems with this, although their admission was much less disputed.
Strange things happen, but this one is very unlikely and building a strategy on the assumption of it happening would be hazardous.
"Ceding whatever territory we couldn't get back to Russia as a precondition to joining NATO" probably also goes down better than "ceding territory to Russia in exchange for a Russian promise to stop and hoping they don't just try again later."
That might be one of the "negotiated settlement where both sides can claim victory" offramps - Ukraine can tout it's shiny new NATO membership, Russia can point to the newly acquired territory, and Putin can leverage his media control to push a new narrative that Ukraine in NATO isn't so scary now that the Donbas +whatever is now securely in Russian hands.
Not saying that's a "will happen," or even a "likely," just a "realm of possibility" thing.
I don't quite know how this nuclear meme originated: some think it's a translation error, others that it's a repetition of the propaganda around Saddam Hussein in 2002, where Iraq was accused of having nuclear weapons as a way of mobilising public, opinion in the West. In Europe, at least, publics are becoming increasingly apathetic about the war, and may need to be revved up again. Use of nuclear weapons would be pointless and counter-productive for Russia, not least because an important part of the Russian strategic plan is to cultivate public and elite opinion in Third World countries. That's not to say that you won't find politicians or pundits in Moscow making these noises: those who follow social media and Russian TV closely report widespread anger at the slow progress of the operation, and demands for Russia to go much faster and to take the gloves off. There's a State Security Council meeting today to consider a response to the attack on the bridge in Crimea, and there's apparently widespread speculation that public opinion will eventually force the government to decide to take out the Ukrainian infrastructure, which has so far been largely left alone.
Remember that there are two distinct wars being fought here. The Russians are fighting a war of attrition, to destroy Ukrainian forces. Ukraine/The West is fighting a war for territory. Ukraine's arsenal at the beginning of the war - the most powerful in Europe - is essentially destroyed. Recent attacks have been made with new large forces (some reports say up to ten brigades) equipped with former-WP weapons from countries like Poland, and trained by NATO. Quite a lot about these attacks has appeared in the western media, some of whom have correspondents there, and it's clear from the Ukrainians themselves that these attacks were made without air cover, with little artillery preparation, and across open terrain with no cover. The Ukrainians attempted to identify areas where there were very few Russian troops, and conduct what were effectively human wave attacks to overwhelm them. The Russians certainly took casualties, but because they aren't interested in the control of terrain as such, their troops were told to retreat rather than suffer unnecessary casualties to hold ground. Ukrainian sources talking to the western media have acknowledged that casualties have been extremely heavy. There is now talk of a third and last offensive, making use of Ukraine's large numerical superiority in troops, and with such armoured vehicles as they still have left. The objective is purely political: to cause confusion and dismay in Moscow such that the current government is forced to resign and a new one, for some reason, decides to surrender and leave Ukraine. In reality, any conceivable future Russian government would be such more hawkish than the preset one.
You can follow all these manoeuvres on liveuamaps.com, a semi-official pro-ukrainian site based in the US. You'll also see that the Russians are stepping up their offensive around Bakhmut, which is the key to the last organised line of Ukrainian defences built since 2014. The Ukrainians have told the western media that the situation is very "difficult" there, which means it will soon fall.
In an attrition war (such as occurred in Europe between 1916-18) the side with the greater capacity and potential wins. The Ukrainians operated Russian equipment, and they cannot now get any more, nor spares nor ammunition. They will run out in a defined period of time. The West has sent small numbers of artillery pieces and ammunition, but western production rates are very low, and US officials have been briefing that there is little now left to send. The bottom of the barrel is now being scraped: a few dozen T-55s from Slovakia and a few dozen light armoured vehicles from Australia, for example. The Ukrainians have now asked for modern western tanks such as the M-1 and Leopard 2, but these would take years to deliver and train crews and support personnel on.
Assuming that the upcoming attack fails to produce the expected result, but leads to an intensification of the war, the Ukrainians will have little left. At that point, I would worry that Zelensky will start talking about nuclear weapons again, which I imagine the West is desperately trying to point him away from.
> The Russians certainly took casualties, but because they aren't interested in the control of terrain as such,
I don't know why you think that the Russians don't care about controlling the territory. And kind of happily withdraw?
" Ukraine's arsenal at the beginning of the war - the most powerful in Europe - is essentially destroyed"
The Russians aren't doing too well either.
A huge chunk of Russia's arsenal, is now part of Ukraine's arsenal. Last time I checked, Ukraine had *more* operational main battle tanks than they did at the start of the war, and about half of that was due to the famous Ukrainian Tractor Corps.
Weren't you already making these claims about Ukraine being exhausted and out of arms three-four months ago, long before Kharkiv? I swear I remember you running this same ludicrously pessimistic line of argument ages ago.
I'm just quoting what the Ukrainians have been telling the western media. In the summer, the forces the Ukrainians had started the war with had largely been used up. As a result of a massive programme of re-equipping and retraining, they have been able to launch the latest set of attacks, but when that equipment is used up, there is very little more on offer. NATO and the US have made it clear that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel already. I have no idea when the war will end, but attrition wars all follow a similar pattern.
This is getting to be piling on now, but I meant to make this reply earlier and just forgot about it, so I'll post it anyway with the caveat that I don't want to bludgeon you:
According to Wikipedia, the Swedish air force alone has 94 operational fighter jets; they have sent zero fighter jets to Ukraine thus far. This is an arbitrary example of one part of one small nation's resources. In other words, Western countries are by no means scraping the bottom of the barrel of *what they have*, they're just reluctant to fork over any more of their defense supply in case there's a war and they need those guns themselves. But as Ukraine drags on and it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine *is* the long-awaited war, the purse strings slacken, simply and naturally.
Nobody doubts that western countries have western weaponry that they could theoretically send to Ukraine. The problems are essentially ones of practicality and timescale, and these are starting to be made public by western governments briefing the media, and by the regular Pentagon background briefings. That's where I've been getting most of my information from. But they have almost nothing left that they can (a) send quickly (b) can be used on the battlefield quickly and (c) would be effective in a modern high-intensity conflict. Various western governments have begun to accept this publicly. Money, as such, is not the point if you have nothing to buy.
Your example of aircraft: if you think of something like the Grippen, you'd have to send a considerable number - let's say 36 - to have an operational force. You'd have to collect that number (at least to allow for failures in training) of Ukrainian fast-jet pilots, already with experience, and take them to a neutral country, and give them six months' training. Western aircraft are quite different in concept and in operational from Soviet/Russian ones, and designed to do different things. Let's say that was three squadrons. A modern air force squadron consists of anything from 100-150 personnel, most of them skilled tradesmen. You'd also therefore have to find at least 3-400 skilled engineering tradesmen and teach them to maintain equipment that was totally different to anything they had worked on before, and armourers who could learn how to load and maintain advanced weapons. The alternative, which seems to be happening with ground equipment such as howitzers, is to set up repair facilities in Poland, manned by NATO personnel. You can't do that with aircraft, because they require so much first-line maintenance after every flight, not to mention battle damage. At that point, you would return to Ukraine to operate out of an air base which would have to be protected from attack, and then fly out in one of the densest air defence environments in history. So at the end of a year, you might have an additional operational capability. How much difference it would make would depend on the situation.
If the conflict in Ukraine really does drag on for years, then something of this kind might happen, but bear in mind that the West operates a huge variety of equipment, and it's next to impossible, for example, to put an air force together from dribs and drabs from different countries, all with special training, ground equipment and weapons. Most people don't realise how low stocks and inventories of western forces are: there was a recent Business Insider story suggesting that Germany only has two days' stocks of ammunition for its Army. Few countries these days invest in more than a week's stocks. (Even in the Cold War it was only thirty days). And these stocks can't be replaced quickly: the US currently manufactures 12,000 rounds of 155 ammunition per year, and the Pentagon has said that they are doing a market survey to see whether that could be increased to 36,000 in a few years' time. Meanwhile the Ukrainians say they are firing 6-10,000 rounds of ammunition *a day.* Modern combat aircraft are produced at the lowest rate possible consistent with keeping factories open: the French Rafale is produced at the rate of one per month, and in only one factory.
None of this is, or should be, a surprise, if you follow these things or have practical experience of them. It's just that most people (including politicians) have not adjusted to the massive changes in defence production and force structures in the last thirty years. I've written several times about these industrial and operational constraints in my Substack essays. Essentially, the West has jettisoned the large and powerful armed forces of the Cold War, and the industrial base that went with them. It has optimised its procurement strategies for very small numbers of high-performance equipment for use in wars like Afghanistan and Mali, and has reconfigured its ground forces towards light infantry. Russia and Ukraine have largely retained Cold War structures and concepts, albeit at a reduced scale, and Russia has retained a substantial defence industry turning out large numbers of weapons suitable for intensive land-air operations. This is what you'd expect of a continental power. As a result, re-arming Ukraine to its January 2022 levels of capability would take years at best, and may not even be practically possible.
The Russians made it clear at the start that their objective was the destruction of Ukrainian military capability, not the capture of terrain. That's what "demilitarisation" meant. At a minimum, therefore, the West would need to supply equipment and ammunition, and generate trained forces, faster than they were used up in combat. Industrially, I have grave doubts that that's even possible.
That's about as clear as I can make it.
"The Russians made it clear at the start that their objective was the destruction of Ukrainian military capability, not the capture of terrain. "
That makes no sense. If they don't excert political control over Ukraine, Ukraine will rebuild. And why match on the capital, if you dont want political control?
I think it's more a question of which barrels you scrape. Ukraine uses mostly Soviet weaponry, and NATO doesn't have a lot of that on hand, just whatever the former Warsaw Pact nations have, so that's starting to run out. But there's a lot of NATO kit we could potentially send, it's just a question of how quickly we can train them to use it and how well their supply lines can handle the extra types of ammo and equipment.
> NATO and the US have made it clear that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel already.
In my understanding NATO and US have just reinforced the message that they will support UKR however long it takes. (Whether they'll do this is sth. different.)
"I'm just quoting what the Ukrainians have been telling the western media."
Consider the possibility they are sounding desperate to get more stuff.
Yep, I remember how Aurelien confidently predicted that Ukraine has no more offensive power anymore :-). But in fairness, many Ukraine-optimists are even more overconfident.
War is an uncertain enterprise with many surprises, so confident predictions are very likely to be wrong.
I just don't understand what some kind of Frenchie gets out of blatantly counterfactual wishful thinking that Ukraine will lose and Russia will win. Does he think the Russo-French Alliance is still alive and well or something? Is it just residual USA-hate because nobody let him know we don't call still them freedom fries anymore?
"we"
Dammit, I was convinced you were a particularly feisty Finn - that spelling of 'Moskova', that specific interest in Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Królewiec and St. Pete's...
Turns out you're just another American. I'm disappointed. If I can't even guess confidently at the present, what hope shall I ever have of predicting the future?
Those were just the obvious examples of regions, blathering about the division of Dagestan seemed both more abstruse and less relevant to European geopolitics.
C´mon, I suggest to delete this, or you might get banned
This is a deliberately anonymous account with a spoofed email, which I renew periodically anyway as I flush my cookies. I am also thoroughly unbothered by the prospect of an IP ban.
EDIT: Also, I'm genuinely curious what motivates him, I'm not just trying to dunk. If that were the case, I can dunk harder.
I was just thinking to make a comment along these lines, I agree.
They need one gain, even if it's symbolic.
The Russians just are not, full stop, going to use nukes. The threats are 100% noise, the rattling of an empty can. Firstly because actually using them would provide absolutely no benefit for the war (since retaliation would be massive to reinforce the nuclear taboo), secondly because throwing a nuke is basically guaranteed to end with Putin himself dead in the near term one way or another, and thirdly because, quite simply, the nukes are more useful to him undropped.
Why has NATO not joined the conflict actively? In large part to avoid escalation. If Putin drops a nuke, that means escalating maximally and there's no longer any reason for NATO to stay out: he'll have drawn himself into a full-scale war with the entire west, which he can't possibly win (c.f. he can't beat Ukraine wielding our leftovers). For this reason, Putin can't possibly *use* the nukes, but he hopes, in vain, that saber-rattling with them will scare us off: he's desperate and flailing, he genuinely has no better strategy right now than trying grim, empty threats to get us to back off. In practice, what does he do? Not nukes, but conventional terror bombing of civilians, as we saw this morning. This will continue to be the case indefinitely. The nukes are not and will never be a real threat.
EDIT: Gah, posted by accident when I wasn't even half finished.
>The Russians just are not, full stop, going to use nukes. The threats are 100% noise, the rattling of an empty can.
So are Biden and Zelesnky mistaken, or are they telling outright lies?
Zelesnky wants us to invade Russia, and he's basing this on a lie? He wants us to risk WW3 to avoid Ukraine losing an inch of territory?
As people have already remarked, it's rather murky what Zelensky actually meant with his remark about pre-emptive strikes and his own staff are insisting the "hit Russian territory militarily" interpretation is a Russian canard, and he was talking about how harsher sanctions ought to have been in place against Russia long ago to prevent this sort of adventurism. Either way I find it hard to blame him for any angry/anti-Russian shit he says; it's his civilians getting shredded, after all. I'd be fuming too, particularly if I'd been asking for anti-air and no-fly zones for more than half a year and got fuck one for my trouble. Similarly, he has my blessing to be more worried than average about the potential of a nuclear strike since it's his capital that will get turned into radioactive dust if one *did* materialize, *and* in some sense he'll bear part-responsibility, or feel himself to. A bit harder to stay objective about the odds when you're that guy. The maximum cynicism I'm prepared to embrace is that he knows very well that no nukes are forthcoming but figures he can milk it for more weapons, which in fairness he really can't have too many of, plus the Germans at least are being extremely dodgy about forking out, so he might very well want to twist some arms as hard as he can.
Biden I think is doing his best to A, curtail the amount of what he sees as inherently dangerous nuclear rhetoric (e.g. just putting it on the table speculatively might encourage someone else to do some shit in the future, seems to be his thinking), and B, satisfy various factions of his own party for domestic reasons. Frankly, my first impression about that "near Armageddon" remark was that it was a senior moment, some sort of flashback from the 1960s he was having. In hindsight I think the above, though.
> Either way I find it hard to blame him for any angry/anti-Russian shit he says; it's his civilians getting shredded, after all.
Yes, his civllians are getting shredded, and he's demanding to control MORE territory than he did before the invasion before he's even willing to discuss a peace deal. He cares more about his own power than he does his civilians. If his civilians getting killed is so terrible, then just give us your precious territory so Russia will leave.
>I'd be fuming too, particularly if I'd been asking for anti-air and no-fly zones for more than half a year and got fuck one for my trouble.
As has been explained multiple times already ON THIS BLOG, a no fly-zone is a declaration of war with Russia. We will be shooting down Russian planes, potentially in Russian air space. This guy is angry because we aren't willing to start world war 3 with Russia to save them? Who the fuck does this guy think he is? Why are we throwing ourselves onto the knife to save him?
This guy literally owes his continued existence to the west, and instead of showing a modicum of gratitude, he just demands more more more, as if we haven't sacrificed enough already for a country we have no connection to whatsoever. he wants us to risk global thermonuclear war to save ukraine, and HE'S the angry one? Give me a break.
>Similarly, he has my blessing to be more worried than average about the potential of a nuclear strike since it's his capital that will get turned into radioactive dust if one *did* materialize, *and* in some sense he'll bear part-responsibility, or feel himself to. A bit harder to stay objective about the odds when you're that guy.
If this is true, he should be willing to make grave sacrifices to end the war as soon as possible. Instead, he demands MORE territory than what he had before the invasion. If he's really that worried, he should be happy to never have anything to do with Crimea again. Instead, he think that nuclear war is a worthy risk to take in order to get back Crimea and the eastern territories.
>The maximum cynicism I'm prepared to embrace is that he knows very well that no nukes are forthcoming but figures he can milk it for more weapons, which in fairness he really can't have too many of, plus the Germans at least are being extremely dodgy about forking out, so he might very well want to twist some arms as hard as he can.
So to be clear, spending hundreds of billions of dollars for strangers we have no connection to isn't enough, and we should stand by why we use nuclear blackmail to be milked for even more?
>Biden I think is doing his best to A, curtail the amount of what he sees as inherently dangerous nuclear rhetoric (e.g. just putting it on the table speculatively might encourage someone else to do some shit in the future, seems to be his thinking)
is this a joke? He is literally warning about ARMAGEDDON.
>Frankly, my first impression about that "near Armageddon" remark was that it was a senior moment, some sort of flashback from the 1960s he was having. In hindsight I think the above, though.
Oh boy, by your own admission we have a senile clown at the helm of a precarious international situation. What could go wrong?
I'm gonna level with you: you seem to have a strong emotional attachment to a perspective on this conflict which is thoroughly abhorrent to me. I'm going to tap out here for everybody's sake.
This is correct.
Nuking anything right now ends with NATO tanks in Moscow at best and global thermonuclear war at worst. There is no possible turn of events where Putin gets anything out of this, and actually ordering a nuclear strike might trigger a coup by people who are already anxious about the way things are going.
>Nuking anything right now ends with NATO tanks in Moscow at best and global thermonuclear war at worst.
Really? We're going to have millions of our people killed and our biggest cities destroyed because Putin used a small nuke in some eastern euopean country? There's no hope left for this world if this is the bone-headed thinking of anyone in power in the west.
You either haven't had the experience of being shaken down for your pocket money by bullies in grade school, or you forgot. They don't start with asking for all of your money and portable goods. They start by cadging you for a dollar and pretend that's all they want, a dollar. If once you give in on that - after all, why not let the guy have a dollar? it's not much, maybe the guy and his buddies genuinely need it, and you don't want to risk being beaten up for a measly dollar - they up the ante repeatedly, and if at some point you begin resisting, your previous compliance will be a huge liability. Girls are pressured into sex the same way.
>> actually ordering a nuclear strike might trigger a coup by people who are already anxious about the way things are going.
I think this is sometimes a forgotten factor in the nuclear equation. I see a lot of "sure, a nuclear strike is terrible on balance for *Russia* but if they're backed into a corner it may be the only thing a desperate *Russian Leadership* sees as a possible hail mary that could turn things around. "Terrible for the country" can still be on the table if it's "terrible for the country but good for Putin."
But Russian Leadership's nuclear thinking also has to account for the way "launch this nuke - I know it really harms the country overall but it's my only chance at protecting my personal position" may be more likely to *trigger* the very regime change they are worried about than it would be to prevent it by meaningfully altering the course of the war.
So you admit that Zelensky is lying about Russia using nuclear weapons?
Can you elaborate? Not sure what you're referring to. Ive seen a lot of advocacy on his part for NATO or the US or the West to *prevent* the Russians from using nuclear weapons, but i haven't seen any definitive quotes from Zelinsky that "Russia is going to use nuclear weapons" or the like, and even if he did say something like that itd be purely speculative seeing as he's the president of Ukraine not Russia - and I'd expect any audience with two brain cells to understand it as such.
Doesn't even need to factor in what will happen to the country at large. "This will give me personally a 10% chance to turn my fortunes around, but the remaining 90% outcome is all the fifteen people in this room dying absolutely grisly deaths one way or another" will look like a pretty shit proposition just in that limited circle. Nobody's that fucking loyal.
I agree with the last paragraph - this is a possibility IMO. Not more though, and I wouldn't be willing to bet *all* my cards on this happening.
Agree. Absolutely not a card to bet on - just a factor in any Russian nuclear thinking that I thought worthy of emphasis since I hadn't seen it mentioned until now.
I haven't tried to look up or remember more clearly but at some point Russia threatened to nuke countries that sent weapons to Ukraine, everyone sent weapons anyway and nobody got nuked, then the story was that they would nuke anyone who sent tanks. Well, Czechia sent tanks and didn't get nuked, then Poland sent tanks and didn't get nuked, etc. Of course, they implied they would nuke Ukraine if they ever attacked the Kerch bridge, well now it's been three days and I see no nukes. I think at some point they were going to nuke Finland in case NATO application was sent, well nothing has happened and it's been months. My point is that even without fully believing in your arguments, just looking at the history of nuke threats that always have been a bluff should tell you that Russia is not actually willing to use nukes. Putin saying "I am not bluffing" is not evidence of it not being a bluff. If Russia says "I will nuke you" it's just Tuesday.
>Putin saying "I am not bluffing" is not evidence of it not being a bluff. If Russia says "I will nuke you" it's just Tuesday.
Okay, so are Zelesnky and Biden gravely mistaken, or blatantly lying?
Could be either, could also be that something of what they said got lost in translation and/or taken out of context.
Nope
https://thehill.com/policy/international/russia/3679228-zelensky-russian-officials-starting-to-prepare-their-society-for-use-of-nuclear-weapons%EF%BF%BC/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63173443
I think these articles actually bear out jnlb's point. The quote from Zelensky they put forward is:
"They begin to prepare their society. That’s very dangerous,” Zelensky said. “They are not ready to do it, to use it. But they begin to communicate. They don’t know whether they’ll use or not use it. I think it’s dangerous to even speak about it."
I don't know how one reads a statement like "they don't know whether or not they'll use it" to mean anything other than that he is saying nuclear weapon use is *possible*, which is totally reasonable given Putin quotes about punishment like you've never experienced in your history and "this is not a bluff."
Trying to stretch it into "Zelinsky is saying Russia will use nuclear weapons, and that statement is a lie" just doesn't line up with the text, which goes directly to jnlb's point about a loss in translation or a statement out of context. Frankly it goes further than that - looks to me like a blatant misrepresentation of the quote.
They have retaliated for the bridge, though - hitting civilian infrastructure throughout Ukraine with cruise missiles.
This is just not true.
Regarding the first example, you probably misremember Russian announcement that Western weapon shipments are legitimate target, which left ambiguous whether they mean "after they reach Ukrainian territory". After that, usual suspects had usual meltdown about whether Poland is about to get nuked. But there is a perfectly reasonable explanation - they meant that weapon shipments are a legitimate target on the Ukrainian territory (which is obvious) and they left that part out precisely in order to cause such media meltdown, and thus scare people.
With all other examples, the situation is similar. Putin never directly threatened to use nukes if Ukraine would attack The Bridge, if Finland would join NATO etc. He just said words that he knew Western media could use to stir up a panic about nukes and thus get clicks. Mutually beneficial exchange, one might say.
On the other hand various Russian talking heads on TV regularly threaten West with nuclear war if it crosses some random redline and then nothing happens, but they are not in charge of Russia.
Soon after posting I started worrying that I had misremembered something from Medvedev's schizo ramblings instead of what actual spokespersons for the Russian government had said. In my opinion the media has given way too much attention to Medvedev, as if he had any influence over the government. Thank you for correcting me.
Exactly. Not much to add to this. Wholly concur.
>Zelesnky is unwilling to make even a token effort of a concession towards Russia to end the war
I'll be the unoriginal pedant and quote Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics through other means". As long as military operations favor Ukraine, and they expects them to keep favoring him in the future, there is little incentive for them to negociate, for it's much easier to claim territory they already occupy rather than get Russia to give it up.
>If Biden is correct about Russia, what possible path is there to the war ending without nukes flying?
Either recover & eventually win, recover & stabilize to hold something to bargain with, or simply end up packing up & leaving (or getting pushed back). All of which are possible without nuclear weapons. A negociated outcome can be spun into a win for the domestic audience, a withdrawal would be unpopular but can be followed up with whatever the russian state aparatus is used to (propaganda of a new threat, false flag or god knows what). I'm not even sure losses worthy of a Barbarossa encirclement would be enough to pressure Russia enough to risk nuclear escalation.
>As long as military operations favor Ukraine, and they expects them to keep favoring him in the future, there is little incentive for them to negociate, for it's much easier to claim territory they already occupy rather than get Russia to give it up.
Little incentive? HE'S LITERALLY SAYING RUSSIA ARE ON THE VERGE OF NUKING UKRAINE
>HE'S LITERALLY SAYING RUSSIA ARE ON THE VERGE OF NUKING UKRAINE
If he believed it, he would have fled the country already. Don't mistake the propaganda circus for reality.
Well bless your heart! ;-)
People are posting quotes that squarely contradict this take, and you are not impressing anyone by shouting. Bozo_Bit=1
My impression is that Biden was speaking of the cuff to Democratic donors; probably his real thoughts are more complex. Maybe he meant that as a pushback against those advocating further escalation; are they likely to be represented among big time Democratic donors? Maybe yes.
In general it seems to me that US has been unwilling to supply Ukraine with weapons that can strike deep into Russia, probably on the (imho correct) assumption that makes nuclear retalation more likely
I think there is probably a territorial line, somewhere, past which the Ukrainian advance stalls out, because the local population really is staunchly pro-Russian, because the Russians get their shit better together as their supply routes get shorter and closer to the home turf, because the Ukrainian losses mount and the will of the troops to press on diminishes as they get deeper into more hostile regions, and because Western allies start to lose interest in bloodying Russia's nose further -- and the danger to Ukraine is clearly no longer existential.
Where that line lies, though, is tough to say. I'm a little dubious that it encompasses all of Crimea, but I think it includes some real chunk of the Donbas, probably Mariupol, certainly Kherson, but beyond that I have no clue.
So the exit ramp is that the Ukrainian advance stalls out, the line becomes mostly static, both sides are exhausted, and allies generally pressure both sides to come to a cease-fire (an outright peace settlement seems unlikely). That will certainly be difficult, considering the life lost on each side, but there are precedents (e.g. Korea). I tend to think as long as a good portion but not all of the territory occupied very early on by Russia returns to Ukraine, it could be swallowed by both sides, although it would be bitter.
One nonconventional thing that might restrain Putin from putting the nuclear card in play is distrust of his own nuclear forces. Surely the performance of his conventional forces has come as a big, big surprise -- nobody would have ordered an invasion thinking it was going to go even one tenth as poorly as it did. At this point, the Russian conventional forces are more widely seen as a joke than at any time since Napoleon, and he has to be wondering whether his nuclear forces are immune to whatever forces of corruption, neglect, and poor leadership have made the regular Army such a charlie foxtrot. The very last thing he wants -- even worse than losing most of Ukraine -- is to have his nuclear forces fail to perform in just as wretchedly humiliating a fashion, and have his *entire* military deterrent turn into the biggest paper tiger ever. Leave alone the reaction of the West, the reaction of China and the Asian republics would be crushing.
NATO is overjoyed to finally have a good proxy war where they just dump spare military equipment and get a massive return of dead Russian soldiers, destroyed tanks and collapsing economy. Shit hasn't been this good since the Cold War.
Ukrainians so far also have the momentum. Ironically if the Russians bothered to avoid war crimes and treat civilians well, maybe they could secure the Eastern regions somehow? But right now everyone just wants them gone.
Yes, this has been a win on all counts for NATO and the West generally, and the prestige and stature of Russia has taken the greatest hit I think it has ever taken. Even the Poles will now start treating Russia with contempt, let alone the Chinese or Kazakhs. Vladimir Putin has done more to sink Russian long-term prospects than even Russia's worst enemy could have imagined or hoped.
> the local population really is staunchly pro-Russian
I wonder if this is still true. It is easy to be pro-Russian in far mode. It becomes more difficult after they shell your house, steal your washing machine, torture you, rape your wife, and take your kids to a summer camp in Russia with no intention of returning them. Even if you liked to argue politically against your pro-Ukraine neighbor, you probably didn't really want to see his entire family in a mass grave.
Let's admit it, if you tried to translate "winning hearts" to Russian, you would probably get a description of some Aztec ritual.
> the Russians get their shit better together
The most experienced soldiers are dead, the fresh conscripts are getting one week of training, the army has no winter uniforms. These things will not change when the supply lines get shorter.
> Western allies start to lose interest
Yes, this is a real risk, but the weapons that are already there, will remain there. The training and experience will remain, too. New weapons are still being sent, so the moment of losing interest has not happened yet; and will probably not happen in all countries at the same time.
Well, I'm not disagreeing strongly, but I'm hazarding that people well behind the front lines, e.g. deep in Luhansk, where there hasn't been any recent fighting after the Russians marched in, might still be staunchly pro-Russian. After all, this population has supplied the bulk of the militia, which have done some hard fighting against Ukrainian soldiers, so that indicates some level of initial commitment, at least. Whether they still retain it, or whether they might (for example) feel bitter about being used as cannon fodder by the Russians, I do not know.
I think it's important to note that while the Ukrainian advance around Kharkiv has been impressive, they still haven't pushed the Russians much past their earliest line of occupation in the Luhnansk and Donetsk regions. I can see they're making a strong effort in the south, and I can believe they get to Kherson, particularly given their careful targeting of Russian southern supply lines, and I can also believe they'll get to Kreminna in the north and put some serious pressure on the supply lines to Luhansk and Sieverodonetsk, but there's still not a lot of movement in the east e.g. around Bakhmut.
It could be the Russians just fold in the east, too, but Russians do have a long history of staying put even under inhumanly difficult conditions. Plus I feel like the Russians were caught off guard in the north, and that may have something to do with how quickly they folded there. So...we'll see. I think the Ukrainians are likely to get to Kherson, and maybe retake Luhansk and Sievierodonetsk, and maybe take the pressure off Zaporizhzhia -- all of which would be very solid work -- in the near future, but unless the Russians truly do just collapse, continuing to roll the Russians up, particularly in the east, still seems like a tough job. It could bog down, and all the concerned powers could conclude it's best to take what they've retained/recovered and come to a cease fire.
"After all, this population has supplied the bulk of the militia, which have done some hard fighting against Ukrainian soldiers, so that indicates some level of initial commitment, at least. "
You understand that service in the Donetsk and Luhansk "militias" hasn't been voluntary for some time, right? That's not a population that is going to be providing anti-Ukrainian partisans; anybody who would have been up for that is likely dead, captured, or broken by now.
Sure. But they were at least somewhat willing at the beginning, and I'm just hypothesizing that deep in the east you may still find populations that haven't thoroughly soured on the Russians. And if a bunch of neighborhood kids have been killed by the Ukrainians, they may not be too happy with the westerners either. I don't live there, and I don't know people there, so I have no real insight, it's just a speculation.
You'd probably find a population of grandmothers that still have fond memories of Russia and blame the Ukrainians for everything. But I've never heard of an insurgency of grandmothers that was even a speed bump to an advancing army. Finding a population of healthy military-age males with any inclination to fight, for either side, is going to be a problem because those people are either absent or have had their health substantially altered.
I agree that the situation may change dramatically (even without nukes involved). Any specific thing seems to me like "probably not this", but there are many things that could go wrong (for Ukraine), and it may be enough if one of them goes wrong, so the probabilities add up.
For now, Ukraine advances, but they still have a long way to go. September 2022 was their lucky month, but they would need 9× more of the same.
Even the scenario where Putin falls out of window has a risk that he might be replaced by someone more competent.
Well, except I think a more competent ruler would cut his losses. As appalling as this war has been for Ukraine, it has been still worse for Russia in terms of economic opportunity destroyed, domestic instability and further erosion of mutual trust, and long-term prospects. The right thing to do, if you had brains, would be to withdraw Russian forces immediately, reverse the draft, and do your best to persuade the cadres of best and brightest who just fled to return -- try to convince the people you need to invent and create and manage that Russia has any kind of 21st century future other than as a North Korea with oil revenue.
I don't believe the Russians are likely to use nukes. Most likely outcome is that they eventually get their shit together again and stall out the Ukrainian advance, and we get a ceasefire with Crimea and possibly some other territory still under Russian control.
He didn't call for a pre-emptive strike on Russia.
Alternatively, he could just lose and get a ceasefire that way. It'd be embarrassing, but Putin has basically neutralized most internal threats to his power anyways.
>It'd be embarrassing, but Putin has basically neutralized most internal threats to his power anyways.
Yes, propaganda and coercion go a long way, but I think this is missing the point that they can't conceal everything.
Yeah, the partial ("partial") mobilization seems to have been the watershed moment when much of the internal agitprop collapsed. Hard to see him clawing it back fully now.
>Most likely outcome is that they eventually get their shit together again and stall out the Ukrainian advance
If they could actually do this, why have they not done this already?
Partly because Putin liked to paint this as military operation that goes well enough, and avoided mobilization because of potential internal backlash?
Now that this decision is there, how much mobilization will actually help him, is up for debate.
Putin blame the failures on his rivals within MoD. Then he disappears them (or whatever) and elevates Katryrov and Prigozhin who are more than proficient at oppressing people.
>yet they're deathly committed to Putin feeling like he has no options other than nukes or something else drastic
How about the option of ceasing to invade Ukraine, and pulling all of his troops back to Russia? Why can't he take that option?
Because he will at best cease to be leader of Russia, slightly worse he will be jailed, and worst he will be killed. Taking a loss in Ukraine straight up undermines everything that gives him support generally, and the human and economic cost of this war is intolerable if nothing is gained from it.
For the same reason that you "can't take the option" of running through your workplace buck naked, picking your nose and masturbating. It would be unspeakably, unthinkably humiliating, and you'd do just about anything to avoid it. If someone put a gun to your head, *maybe* you'd do it, but if you could convince yourself that they wouldn't dare pull the trigger, you might call their bluff.
Aggravated by the fact that, like yourself, Putin has a good chance of losing his job if he does anything as unspeakably publicly humiliating as running through his workplace naked, etc, or losing a war against a nation one-quarter the size of Russia. But, unlike you, Putin's job is the sort people usually only leave horizontally or enroute to a lengthy prison sentence, so he's going to be highly motivated to find excuses to not do that.
We used to be able to offer dictators a quiet, comfortable retirement package in some neutral nation if they gave up power without a fight, but that went out of style many years ago and is no longer a credible option.
The argument is either that his regime would not survive a withdrawal to pre-attack status and quite possibly he would not survive the fall of his regime, therefore he will escalate to nukes or that he is just personally unwilling to give up (like Hitler for example).
These are obviously empiric questions and can (and will) be answered by events. The problem is are we willing to bet?
I'm pretty skeptical that a loss in Ukraine would mean the end of his regime. He's done a good job of neutralizing virtually internal threats to his power within Russia itself.
Yes, because he had the support of the people who mattered. People will be very angry if this war completely fails.
I'd think it depends on 'what kind of a loss'. Most agree, he'll be losing anyway, what's unclear is in which way and how extensively.
Yes, he has neutralized many threats, but he also put an effort into avoiding discontent & projecting strength and leadership.
I’m also skeptical that if Putin were more secure he’d be less likely to engage in nuclear saber rattling. From the outside view Putin has the fewest checks on his power and been more successful destroying potential rivals than any Russian leader since Stalin. If *his* back is against a wall such that he just has to be given what he wants, whose back ever won’t be? Especially if the perception amounts to an I Win button?
Nuclear brinksmanship sucks. I really liked the decades when it felt like we were done with it. I hope we can get through this one. I’m certainly not sure of it. But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
And for all the talk of needing to give Putin an off ramp since before he even began the current invasion, there’s been no sign thus far that he’s even looking for one.
He kind of needs to make an offer (and give *any* reason he’d be bound by it more than he was by the Budapest Memorandum) before “I can’t make any concessions, even on territory I don’t hold that no one forced me to claim, or it’s my head and therefore yours” even comes into play.
Piling concessions in front of someone not even at the table in the hopes he’s eventually satisfied isn’t a reasonable way to negotiate with someone even if he’s winning. Let alone when he’s losing badly.
>And for all the talk of needing to give Putin an off ramp since before he even began the current invasion, there’s been no sign thus far that he’s even looking for one.
This is nonsense, unless you imagine he's still trying to capture Kiev? He's not. He's settling for some crappy regions in eastern ukraine.
> But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
I'd probably agree, if what you describe would be like: 'oh, he said nukes, now let's just tell UKR we can't do anything for them anymore, and offer to Putin to take whichever chunk he'd like to have. Let's stop any any military and financial support to UKR and also terminate sanctions today 5pm, ' But that's not what is on the table. Currently it's more about signalling there is room for an off ramp at all. (And off ramp *isn't* and can't be: 'just take what you want') And yes, I believe avoiding escalation now in such a way and from a strong position will make us safer.
Well, on negotations, you rarely publicly tell about all your potential concessions before sitting at the negotiation table. But for the moment and just recently there has been an official decree by Zelensky that there will be no negotiation with Putin at all (only with successors). Yes, any compromise solution seems currently difficult enough anyway, but UKR isn't exactly pretending to leave a lot of room for this.
"But for the moment and just recently there has been an official decree by Zelensky that there will be no negotiation with Putin at all (only with successors)."
Let's not forget that Zelensky only said this *after* Putin made a severe anti-compromise move, that of signing annexation of eastern Ukraine into Russian law. Zelensky's statement really only reflects his recognition of the reality that Putin has now rejected anything that could reasonably be called negotiation, Zelensky isn't really making any active refusal himself.
The whole point is that Zelensky is claiming Russia are going to use nukes. This isn't about what is fair and reasonable. If he is being truthful about his nuke claims, then he should be willing to accept the loss of these territories, otherwise he's gambling his people's live for the sake of more soil. If he's lying, then he ought to be assassinated by the CIA for trying to manipulate us into even more sacrifice to maintain his power.
> Let's not forget that Zelensky only said this *after* Putin made a severe anti-compromise move
Fair enough.
> Zelensky's statement really only reflects his recognition of the reality ...
He could have also said, Ukraine is Ukraine in the borders of the year 1991, and if any Russian representative wants to talk to us about that on this basis, welcome. Or just nothing ... it's pretty clear that there was no offer from Moskow that would be anyhow a starting point for negotiations.
> Zelensky isn't really making any active refusal himself.
He is of course making an active refusal, he has done so before, and he has just put his refusal to talk to Putin (ever) in a formal document. That's what I certainly would call 'active.
>I’m also skeptical that if Putin were more secure he’d be less likely to engage in nuclear saber rattling.
I kind of agree with this one. But I think it's important to distinguish between two different things: a) the saber rattling. saber rattling comes at little cost, especially when it's so vague it doesn't bind you to anything. b) actually using that option, which is more likely the more costly other alternatives get in comparison.
I'm much less worried, Putin will use nukes, because he hinted at them (which he did before). I'm concerned he will use nukes, when his other options all look very costly, and this one will seemingly give him a - risky, but still - option for a better outcome. Not that I believe it will in fact give him a better outcome, but that's irrelevant.
"If *his* back is against a wall such that he just has to be given what he wants, whose back ever won’t be?"
Tsar Nicholas Romanov. Leopoldo Galtieri. Kaiser Wilhelm. Phillipe Petain, and later the entire Fourth Republic.
If you're a head of state and/or government, and especially if you're both, starting a war puts your back against the wall. If you lose, even if your nation survives unconquered, *you* lose. Your job, probably your freedom, quite possibly your life. Being a dictator doesn't change that; mostly it just makes it worse.
Which means that if you're facing such a man, you're facing someone who can't afford to back down. That doesn't mean *you* have to back down and give him what he wants; the consequences of that would be disastrous. It does mean you need to have plans and expectations more realistic than "...and then he'll see that he was wrong and give up".
>But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
Putin would do anything to have not invaded Ukraine. He hates the situation he's in. Even getting the eastern territories would not have made the invasion worth it. It's the bare minimum he needs to sell this as enough of a win to stop the operation short of more substantial victories. This whole ordeal has been a glowing neon advertisement against this kind of military adventure, to the rest of the world and most importantly to Russia.
> Let alone when he’s losing badly.
So, what is it? Are Biden & Zelesnky wrong/lying about Putin using nukes? Or are you saying we need to push somebody who is on the brink of unleashing nuclear war?
I think Putin’s using nukes is a possibility, not a certainty. He didn’t use them when driven away from Kyiv, or when his lines collapsed in the northeast. He may tomorrow, and he may not. I think we need to seriously consider the possibility and prepare our response, while doing everything we can to maximize deterrence.
I don’t believe that capitulation is the correct short or long term response to that possibility. I’m not an expert, but evidently, at least so far, neither do the people responsible for making those decisions, who presumably have more intel than I do.
And especially not in a vacuum. If Putin wants to propose something short of the liberation of all of Ukraine to end hostilities, he can do that (whether through front or back channels), and Ukraine and its allies can take counsel based on their trust in the offer and in the threat.
(Though one big problem with abrogating the last guarantee of Ukraine’s borders is massively lost credibility for any future guarantees. Likewise the policy of atrocities greatly raised the political cost of handing people over versus “it’s just a change of administration”. It’s hard to know what more could be done to poison the well for future negotiations.)
And of course it also depends on Putin’s belief that he can usefully improve his situation in any way with a nuclear attack. Which it’s in our interest to discourage if we possibly can.
Either way, “maybe if we do X, they’ll stop, even though they haven’t ever said so” seems completely unproductive.
Zelensky is telling us that Russia is so likely to use nukes that they're preparing their society to accept the use of nukes. He's either lying, in which case he deserves to be disappeared, or he's telling the truth and thinks that making things worse for Russia will somehow make them LESS likely to use nukes.
> I don’t believe that capitulation is the correct short or long term response to that possibility.
I don't think anybody is seriously advocating for capitulation. I think being (more) open for and putting more effort (not: offering full hands) into an off ramp is more to the point. And something substancially different.
>But I don’t think giving Russia another country’s territory under nuclear extortion will ultimately make us or our allies safer from its (or others’) nukes.
"Nuclear extortion" is not an accurate read of the situation. The only reason we're talking about nuclear war is that the U.S. insists on the world acquiescing to its interests and is potentially willing to initiate nuclear brinkmanship to get it. The U.S. is inserting itself into a war that it wasn't involved in, creating the conditions for nuclear brinksmanship.
The natural state is that borders shift due to the dynamics of waxing and waning political power and tensions. The last 30 years have seen unprecedented stability in Europe under the shadow of the U.S. hegemon. But the hegemony just masked the growing tensions under the surface. If the tension is not being diffused, it will only continue to grow and when it is inevitably released it will be far worse than it would have been.
The fact that US/NATO kept teasing Ukraining membership while dismissing Russian concerns is an example of ratcheting up tensions rather than diffusing them. Ukraine and Europe are currently paying for those missteps, and now some of you want to add to the mistake by engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia? The U.S. will need to get used to a world order not completely dominated by its interests. The question is whether we will fight a nuclear war over it.
Note that nothing I've said is moral justification for any of Russia's actions. But moral justification is irrelevant in the "war of all against all" that international politics represents. How far are we willing to go in service to our delusions of an international moral order?
> The only reason we're talking about nuclear war is that the U.S. insists...
First, (Russian) nukes were a factor even before anyone talked about them explicitly. Considering the current state of the Russian army, the nukes are the only reason why e.g. Ukraine and Poland do not together bring the war directly to Moscow, triggering revolutions in Belarus, Chechnya, and whoever else might want to use this opportunity to get rid of Russian involvement.
The existence of nukes is the reason why Ukraine is limited to getting its territory back, and why NATO countries send weapons but not soldiers.
Second, Putin started to talk about nukes to escalate his sore loser strategy. The previous version was "okay, you might get your cities back, but expect to find them full of mass graves of the civilians tortured to death in the last minute". The new version is "okay, you might get your entire original territory back, but expect it to get nuked afterwards". Same mindset, greater scope.
The difference is that there is not much you can do about the former (if you are already killing the soldiers who did it anyway), but USA (and China) can remind Putin that he is not the only guy with nukes, and that if he escalates, they might do something, too. I think the original plan was to escalate using *conventional* weapons first, but of course if Putin responds with *more* nukes...
By the way, I reject the entire "Russia vs USA" framing. Ignoring the nukes, Russia's natural opponent would be Poland, or maybe a coalition of Eastern European countries led by Poland. As we can clearly see, Russian soldiers are pretty good at terrorizing civilians, but when they meet actual soldiers, they die. The nukes, however, do exist, and the entire idea of NATO is that countries such as Poland do not need to do their own nuclear research, but outsource it to countries such as USA. (The effect is the same, the difference is that fewer countries have nukes, which is better.) The days when Russia was in the same weight class as USA are long gone. Now they have "the second strongest army in Ukraine", and an economy that couldn't produce a tractor if it tried. The only thing that keeps them existing are... the nukes.
>First, (Russian) nukes were a factor even before anyone talked about them explicitly.
Of course, having nukes makes them a factor in any conflict, in the sense that they define clear constraints of engagement. But the fact that we're *explicitly talking about the possibility of nuclear war* means that the clarity around constraints of engagement is in question. This represents a significant escalation.
>Second, Putin started to talk about nukes to escalate his sore loser strategy.
Yes, when other parties are causing uncertainty around constraints of engagement, it pays for each party to remind the other what they consider their boundaries and the scope of responses. Nuclear "sabre rattling" as some call it in this case is good because you want your red lines clearly delineated.
>By the way, I reject the entire "Russia vs USA" framing.
Of course its Russia vs USA. Would Ukraine have resisted without US weapons and US intelligence?
I just want to say this is a really good post.
>>The U.S. is inserting itself into a war that it wasn't involved in, creating the conditions for nuclear brinksmanship
"You see, officer, if that nosy neighbor would just let me beat my kids in peace, I wouldn't have had to threaten everybody involved with this pistol. So this is really all her fault if you think about it."
If that person (China) beating their kids (Uyghurs) had nukes, you would think twice about intervening.
This is tendentious nonsense based on already having defined the US as the villain. In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s. The Russian state wouldn't even exist. St. Petersburg oblast would probably be its own Baltic nation, Königsberg would be Polish, Moskova would be a landlocked backwater, etc.
Also, if your idea of how hegemony works to mask growing tensions is correct, Russia itself ought to collapse into shreds at any moment.
> In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s. The Russian state wouldn't even exist. St. Petersburg oblast would probably be its own Baltic nation, Königsberg would be Polish, Moskova would be a landlocked backwater, etc.
Huh. If this is your idea of history without nukes, honestly, US comes out quite as the villain.
>This is tendentious nonsense based on already having defined the US as the villain.
I have made no indication of anyone being a villain. I am simply describing the dynamics of international politics as I understand them and how US actions have contributed to the current state of affairs. It only seems like I am villainizing the US because of the unquestioned moral virtue with which we treat US actions abroad. People like to pretend history started right before the event in consideration. There is always a broader history that we must understand as we formulate responses. The complete lack of consideration of this broader history in most discussions around Ukraine is a dangerous mistake.
>In the "natural state" of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s.
Whether or not this is true, I fail to see the relevance to the current conflict.
"In the 'natural state' of some world where nukes don't exist and so borders can flow more freely, the US would have invaded and absolutely crushed Russia not later than the 1980s."
For most of the Cold War the Soviets enjoyed a mutually acknowledged advantage in conventional arms, to the point where most World War III scenarios involved Americans scrambling to stop the Soviet drive to the Rhine. Nuclear deterrence bought the US the time it needed, not the other way around.
After the Second Offset, perhaps it wouldn't have been completely impossible, but with all respect to America's technological edge, industrial potential, and force projection capabilities, I intuitively doubt it. Defence and conquest are quite different things.
And even in the strange nukeless world, how do you imagine the US would muster the political will to do something that unfathomably bloody, not least post-Vietnam?
Historically it's kind of random. Sometimes we lose interest, the leadership changes, and we just wander away. Sometimes we get really pissed off, though, and burn cities down until whoever's left cries uncle. You pays your money and you take your chances.
And given that this is an iterated game, how does “threaten nukes, get another country’s territory” end? There are a lot of countries without their own nukes with territory coveted by their neighbors, if a nuclear threat leads to pressure to concede it.
At the very least it seems like a recipe for proliferation, since the obvious lesson of Ukraine will be that it shouldn’t have given up the nukes they had. (Whether or not they could have realistically gotten control of them.)
Or Ukraine becomes Czechoslovakia after Munich, and Russia or China is sincerely surprised when the Baltics or Taiwan (or hey, Poland for tradition’s sake) are at issue and we *don’t* back down that time.
Or we keep on backing down, until we hit whatever our “real” sticking point is with absolutely minimal credibility, making nuclear war that much more likely.
This really seems like the place to draw the line. Russia can absolutely ruin us, at the cost of ruining itself. (And if it comes to it, I personally figure that if the bombs don’t get me the infrastructure disruptions of the aftermath likely will.) But it can’t actually win what it wants with nuclear strikes.
I dearly hope Putin realizes that. But if he doesn’t, capitulating won’t make him *less* likely to keep playing Russian Roulette with the planet.
It’s a crap position to be in, and I hope it doesn’t go wrong. But either Putin has some rationality left and can be deterred from breaking the nuclear taboo, or at best we’d kick this can down the road at the price of buying many more similar confrontations.
I think we also need to consider our own credibility with allies. US and NATO thus far have a strong hand with respect to their role supporting Ukraine, but a lot of our international influence is dependent on trust and good relationships, and if we publicly hang the Ukrainians to twist in the wind we could still come out of this damaged in exactly the way Putin hoped we would at the start. Russia isn't the only one being watched in all this - we shouldn't jump so fast that we do Putin a double solid by bailing him out of his mistake and damaging our own credibility in one premature and unnecessary stroke, trying to force Ukraine to cede territory in order to "avoid backing Russia into" a corner they haven't begun to approach yet.
And I say that as somebody who *doesn't* advocate driving this thing to regime change in Russia. Collapsing governments and civil strife on top of a nuclear arsenal is incredibly dangerous pool we're all much better off without. But it seems to me from the reporting I'm reading that we aren't anywhere close to that bridge yet.
That option likely ends with Putin facing a firing squad. It's probably the best option for Russia, but `Russia' isn't making the decisions.
That is, Putin is a dictator, but the power of dictators is not absolute, and dictators who suffer a major public humiliation (like losing a war to a neighbor that was widely considered much weaker) are likely to lose power. And for dictators like Putin, losing power probably also implies losing their heads.
The alternative is to send more conscripts into the meatgrinder. The meatgrinder is patient, NATO-fueled, and won't choke on any amount of meat unless backed with actual military equipment.
Okay, and Biden and Zelensky say that Putin will use nukes before he allows Russia to lose. Are they wrong? Or are they simply lying?
Did they say, he will? I rather think they'd say sth. like: it's quite possible/ it cannot be excluded he will or: he well might ... . I didn't look up the exact wording now, I think those are probably realistic statements, but I'd expect them to convey a probability, not a terministic prediction.
When did Zelensky call for a nuclear first strike againt Russia?
He didn't as far as I'm aware (not OP). OP didn't actually say "nuclear" preemptive strike, though.
Searching "Zelensky preemptive strike" gives several stories. The most reputable source is Fox, which isn't a great sign. Nonetheless, unless they made up the quote, OP has it basically right. From Fox:
"Zelenskyy added: "But what is [more] important, I am once again turning to the international community, as I did before Feb. 24, to do preventative strikes so that they know what will await them if they use it [nuclear weapons]."
The strikes could not happen "the other way round," the Ukrainian president contended, as to "wait for Russian nuclear strikes" would only further escalate the conflict."
(https://www.foxnews.com/world/ukraines-zelenskyy-calls-for-nato-to-launch-preemptive-strikes-in-russia-spokesperson-forced-to-clarify)
Ukrainian spokesmen later "clarified" that he actually meant sanctions.
For what it's worth, German news reported the same.
>The most reputable source is Fox, which isn't a great sign.
Would you say the same thing if it were CNN or WaPo?
My question is conditional on Biden/Zelensky being correct/truthful about their claims of Russians using nukes.
Sorry, what claims specifically?
Are you not following the news at all?
https://apnews.com/article/biden-nuclear-risk-1d0f1e40cff3a92c662c57f274ce0e25?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_02
https://thehill.com/policy/international/russia/3679228-zelensky-russian-officials-starting-to-prepare-their-society-for-use-of-nuclear-weapons%EF%BF%BC/
https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/zelensky-calls-for-preemptive-strike-against-russia-in-speech-to-lowy-institute/news-story/80b4cd30b1ac06298d995ce96950d744
I already spend much more time online than I should, and yet I cannot read everything. Thanks for the links. My interpretation of the situation is the following:
If Putin believes that his nukes will be punished (either by nukes or conventionally), he will not use the nukes. That fact that he is willing to sacrifice lives of any number of other people doesn't mean that he would risk his own. He wouldn't be sitting at the longest table in the world if he was okay with risking his own life.
If Putin believes that his nukes will leave everyone too scared to oppose him, then yes, he *will* drop a nuke or two on Ukraine, because why not. If he can't have Ukraine, they might as well all die. And think about the message it would send to other countries that Russia will attack in the future: you have no chance; even if you defeat us, you are screwed.
So it's important to say that using nukes will get punished. Not necessarily by nukes; a sufficiently large conventional attack would be preferable.
Has anyone ever devoted a chunk of intellectual energy into looking at value investing? I recently did and man did it just convince me further to stick with index funds. Common sense note, I think we all know the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Random Walk, etc. etc. To date all of my investments/retirement have been index funds, and I have never purchased an individual stock or tried to guess what one might do in the future.
Aside from reading a few of the classic writings on value investing, I also poked around forums like Reddit's on the topic. My impression is that everyone there is just making rhetoric-based arguments as to why x stock is undervalued. I mean, anyone can do this- I could make a rhetorical argument for and against any stock. If you just stick by the very rigid 'find stocks that are undervalued by free cash flow' or whatever, of course this could easily be done by a formula or algorithm and wouldn't need a human in the loop at all. (And then the market would catch up & incorporate its previous mistakes into its pricing).
Outside of the normal EMH objections, other things I found ridiculous about value investing:
1. Everyone agrees it will take years to see if you're right or not about a stock being undervalued. In what field of human endeavor is a new participant automatically proficient? Even if one could reliably pick undervalued stocks, the learning curve to get good would take decades, and then you have your underperformance to make up for by the time you get there- so that would take a few more decades. Maybe this is a good hobby for a vampire or other immortal
2. You're picking such a small number of stocks (everyone says 10-15) that your results are going to be highly variable even if you're right about some of them
Has anyone else ever really looked into value investing? Would especially love to hear from smart generalists who are maybe SMEs in another intellectual field and said 'hey I'll devote some time into looking at value investing' at some point in their lives
(Disclaimer: I have no actual experience in finance.)
I agree that value investing is the best for most situations, but below is my best argument against it.
While we can expect that EMH leaves no asset undervalued since someone would buy them, it's entirely possible for an asset to be overvalued. For example, I believe most(all?) cryptocurrencies are in a bubble, but it won't be rational for me to short them, because short is inherently riskier than long. Once you accept that some assets can be overvalued, you can beat the market by not buying them.
Also, in some fields like real estate, there might actually be a chance for you to make a better deal when you're an informed investor, because 1) you can't short real estate, so nothing is stopping them from being overvalued 2) you're possibly trading with someone with little experience, instead of professional hedge funds 3) all houses are different, which means trading strategies are hard to scale.
That second paragraph is pretty interesting. So rather than trying to see what's undervalued, one could just buy into say the S&P 500 but remove the individual stocks that they calculate are overvalued. I believe you can do that type of individual portfolio construction these days
Yeah, I think that would be possible. I'm don't know if removing individual stocks would be worth the time(probably depends on how much you enjoy doing it), but how about avoiding markets where short selling is banned? I believe when the stock market is crashing, government would sometimes put a temporary ban on short selling - maybe market is likely to be overvalued at these periods?
Yes, I've done some digging into value investing and came to three conclusions.
#1 There might be a tax arbitrage opportunity for early retirees and the like. Simply, value stocks should be slightly undervalued as dividends get taxed as income while stock appreciation gets taxed as capital gains. So big rich people should pay a premium not to get dividends (which get taxed at a higher rate) while if you're looking at, say, $50-$60 a year in non traditionally 401k investment income, the tax rates are basically equivalent.
#2 Also, value investing seems safer than a stock/bonds split, like 70% stocks/30% bonds. I mean, the stock/bond split is plenty safe but Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola is forever and you should get equivalent returns.
#3 Messing around with investment strategies at below, like, $10 million USD is a waste of time, I should just focus on my career.. Like, the market might be inefficient, but even if I beat the market by 1-2% a year, that's less valuable than working towards a $20k/year raise and just saving 20-30% of that raise.
I don’t strongly disagree with your opinions though maybe it’s worth pointing out the definition of “value” in this context is more than just “undervalued”. Every investor believes their portfolio is undervalued on some level. Value means “relatively cheap on a earnings multiple basis”. Predicting earnings growth is a thing you can know without decades of suffering through bad decisions. So at the very least, you can learn more quickly from that. The earnings multiple (or really any valuation multiple) is where the real voodoo comes in.
I do this type of investing for a living so I guess that makes me not a smart generalist from another field you were looking for.
>Predicting earnings growth is a thing you can know
Can you say more about this? Are there specific resources where I could learn more?
Sure. Predicting earnings which is specific to a company’s performance is a whole lot easier than predicting price which takes into account a lot of market effects. If you look at analyst coverage, their earnings estimates are a lot more accurate than their price targets. By a lot. Someone did some research on this but that’s a pretty intuitive observation: macroeconomic & monetary bullshit is a lot tougher to predict than a company’s performance and in many, if not most, years multiple expansion/contraction drives larger price action than EPS.
The CFA curriculum would give you the skills to do this.
Thanks. Is this kind of analyst research reasonably accurate for growth stocks, in particular unprofitable tech companies? That would be pretty interesting, but I'm guessing that's more difficult to forecast than established firms
With higher variance but sure. High growth rates of anything are difficult to reason about.
The difference between 7% and 10% annual return on my savings in my 20s is simply not very much. It's not worth my time, and the more you make in another field the more you should probably keep doing it. This is why money managers manage large sums where the return difference is worth millions
All of this assumes that I'd actually beat the market, which isn't necessarily the case.
On the difference between 7% and 10% on your savings in your 20s:
It depends on how long the money is invested, and how much you're much you're managing to put away. For the latter point, just multiply the numbers below and decide if it's worth it.
If you put in $100 and leave it invested for just 5 years (because you're just keeping it in the market until you buy a new car, say), at the end of the period you have: 7% annual return=~$40 return. 10%=~$60.
If you're doing something like saving for retirement, and leave that same $100 (and all its returns) in the market for the next 40 years: 7%=~$1,400. 10%=~$4,425.
Maybe that's not quite fair, though. You don't think it's worth your time right now, but maybe it will be in 10 years, and that's when you plan on starting to pay attention. Over 10 years, it's ~$60 vs ~$96. Is the extra $36 per $100 worth it? Depends on how many hundreds you're working with. And, as you say, whether you can beat the market.
I'm assuming that in order to beat the market we're making a significant time investment. That could instead be spent e.g. Working a second job and investing the proceeds at 7%, for potentially more real time cash/hr.
Of course if you consider value investment a recreational hobby then it's fine as long as you don't lose to the market too badly
Broadly this is what private equity is attempting to do. The basic thesis behind private equity is that certain companies are being mismanaged somehow, be it in how they price their products, expenses, failure to expand into new markets, etc., and that the management team at the private equity vehicle can right the wrong and flip the now-publically-realized value to another buyer.
I would expect that most of the opportunities in security analysis (i.e. the stuff you get from reading SEC filings) right now are being captured by funds as part of some larger model, and they're unlikely (unfortunately) to share any details with you unless you join as an analyst.
Tyler Cowen asks whether people with high confidence that transformational AGI is coming are 'long volatility, both of the aggregate market and sector-by-sector' (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/but-are-you-long-volatility.html). He means it as a challenge along the lines of revealed preferences: what do your financial decisions say about what you actually hold to be true, rather than what you formally take to be true.
Various commenters push back on the feasibility of trading effectively.
But one commenter interprets Cowen's question more broadly. He/she thinks it's not just about how you trade, but about all financial and lifestyle decisions (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/but-are-you-long-volatility.html?commentID=160506650):
> I cashed out of crypto because the tail of returns is no longer as valuable and will take potentially too long to happen; and beyond that, I have stopped saving money and have started explicitly trying to consume more because my existing savings are already at a healthy level (albeit not at the 'retire today' level), and further savings will either be wasted (in the bad scenarios) or have greatly increased returns (in the good scenarios), and in the increasingly unlikely nothing-happens scenario, I will know within about a decade and the cost of the option was fairly small.
Perhaps because I don't follow AI progress discussions closely, I hadn't realized that anyone had ceased saving normally. The commenter presents as reasonable, but in other cases this rationale might be an excuse for increased consumption. ('I don't spend like an American because I'm an American. It's because the singularity is (probably) coming!')
What do you think?
Is there survey data about the savings rate among people with high confidence AGI is coming this century? Or additional discussion somewhere?
Is being long volatility going to help you when the Singularity comes?
If we get luxury space communism, no; you're rich anyway.
If we get someone who uses AI to take over the world, probably not; even if you've invested in that someone, if you don't have control over what he/she programs his/her AI to do then you're the doofus in TDKR (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C_BubeBU8E).
If we get AI X-risk, no; you're dead.
I have a stupid question: how does one who is not a professional trader go "long volatility"?
I asked my financial advisor a similar question - if I think volatility is going up, how do I bet on that? She said invest in Nasdaq, Inc.
VIX
This is a good answer, I confess to not knowing that that thing exists. Then again, I am not in a "high confidence that transformational AGI is coming" camp, so I am not buying it.
Just as well. Its a sausage making machine.
Yeah, in case anyone else reads this and is thinking that they want to trade volatility please don't just buy VIX. It tends to be mean reverting so it isn't really a long term thing to own.
You would be better off in Las Vegas. With the same amount of effort it would take to understand trading volatility options I really think your odds at poker are much better given the same investment in learning the game.
Developing markets maybe? VT without hedging?
Developing markets is being long a specific kind of volatility so it probably doesn't work.
The VIX is specifically a volatility index but trading it is pretty tricky.
There are a number of options strategies that do this but again I'd be pretty careful doing this.
test
Oh no.
QYESTION ABOUT TELOMERES
I know a doctor who believes that keeping one's telomeres long by taking concentrated astragalus is a smart thing to do to help the immune system. TA-65 to be specific.
I'm not at all qualified to have an opinion. That said, I can find studies that say keeping your telomeres long has only upside and i can find a study that says that longer telomeres help all cells, including cancer cells, divide rapidly.
Wondering if someone more qualified than I has an opinion.
Stay away from stuff that artificially lengthens telomeres imo. Its possible that extending telomers on cells with terminally short telomeres leads to abnormalities in otherwise senescence cells which should be ungoing apoptosis.
Not a qualified opinion but one such benefit for having an "appropriate" length telomere. (whether this is the one that is currently set for humans given the vast changes to the healthcare/life expectancy is another question)
https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/29625-telomere-shortening-protects-cancer/
That said, there are cancer cells that have found ways to "maintain" telomere with both very long and very short length, but obv cancer cells are already deviations from the norm so not sure what this says about having regular cells undergo similar "adaptation".
Thank you. That study is convincing enough for me to not fiddle around with my telomeres.
1. I'm skeptical that "concentrated astragalus" increases telomere length.
2. Telomere shortening is not the main driver of aging that it was once believed to be circa 1990s. Many adult stem cells express telomerase, and can do a good job keeping telomeres long without outside intervention.
This may be uncharitable, but I think Ivermectin Guy will *never* be done, until everyone accepts that he is right, that ivermectin is the miracle cure, and that any positive effects are not attributable to killing off parasites and so releasing the immune system to fight off Covid, as well as an apology about "I was wrong wrong wrong and Alexandros was right right right" on all social media everywhere.
To make my position clear: Scott didn't convince me that ivermectin worked, if it worked at all, as the anti-parasitic. That was my view before the deep dive into the data, and I haven't shifted on it. So if Scott ever does change his opinion, that will certainly weigh with me, but I will still want to be shown that having ruled out all parasite infections, using ivermectin alone, the Covid-beating results hold up.
EDIT: Hey, Scott, how does it feel being able to sway opinion-leaders? Oh my, what elevated company we are keeping! 😁
I was very impressed by ivmmeta.com, a site that does a real time meta analysis of now 92 Ivermectin studies and is part of a family of sites. I noticed that they take any study, follow a set of pre defined rules to extract the data, and are very reactive to feedback. I am not a doctor so I can only superficially judge the studies but I can recognize professionalism. A professionalism that was severely lacking in people criticizing them, generally even worse than the tone of your post. The sometimes bizarre wrongness of the press about ivermectin facts (it is not just a horse dewormer), the clearly large money interests of big pharma, the puzzling attitude of the media to demonize anybody that did not worship the vaccines (I am vaccinated but this is a very new technology) made me conclude that ivermectin should be tried out in the West on a large scale. After 40 years of use it had shown an extremely low risk profile and a very strong signal in the 92 studies on ivmmeta.com. These studies came mostly from small hospitals and universities that have no financial interest in ivermectin. So it seems that a large scale deployment was a no brainer? Even if many of the studies show problems, the sheer quantity seems to make it impossible that the very strong signal of effectiveness was completely false. ivmmeta.com shows an efficacy of 80% as prophylaxis and 60% for early treatment. Even by removing the studies Scott found problematic, the numbers remain remarkably high. That could mean a lot of saved lives ...
Then came Scott's review. Since I trusted him ever since he defended James Damore in 2017 so he did sway me. Although with some trepidation. I felt the weakest part was that the quality requirements he placed on the studies he rejected were much higher than he placed on his own hypotheses about worms. But true, my interest in Ivermectin got a very serious blow.
Therefore, when Alexandros started to write his substack I followed him halfheartedly at first. However, I became fascinated how much he unearthed in Scott's article. What struck me most was how many errors _all_ studies had, but how arbitrary the rules were applied depending on the prejudice of the arbiter. In all this, my respect for ivmmeta.com increased significantly. They have pre defined rules and take all feedback, regardless of direction.
Alexandros shows imho that Scott has written his article in haste and applied quite arbitrary criteria to reject a majority of studies and then applied the wrong technique that gave him the much too low efficacy for his 'metastudy'. That is a pretty fundamental error. He says that the different result does not influence the rest but I doubt that, but we'll see that when he response. I am very happy that Scott now promises to response to Alexandros.
However, the most frightening aspect of Alexandros' works is what I learned about the big mainstream studies. The TOGETHER trial was reported in the press as a failure for ivermectin but when you looked at the study in detail it did show efficacy despite having an alarming number of red flags that all point in one direction: reducing efficacy. They started with a too low doses, they told people to take it on an empty stomach, ivermectin use was prevalent in the area, etc. The ACTIV-6 trial is similar but also cannot hide that ivermectin had efficacy. Most importantly, both trials refuse to show their data; data that will make it clear if the red flags are fraud or honest mistakes. (All red flags are listed and discussed in detail on ivmmeta.com).
For me, the efficacy of ivermectin has become secondary. What shocked me to the bone is the total lack of curiosity from the press. On one side we got big pharma with a Gargantuan financial interest for ivermectin to fail so they can sell vaccines, on the other hand we got hospitals and universities in the developing world telling us that this very low cost medicine seems to work extremely well in their regions.
However, the trials and observation studies funded by big pharma are only reported from their slick press releases while any positive information in the other studies is rejected by their spelling errors or just plain prejudice. (Notice your own condescending tone.) Just the fact that the big pharma sponsored TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 trial have not released their data as they promised in their pre-registration and afterwards should be a GIANT red flag for any science journalist to look into what they seem to be hiding. Instead, the main stream press stands as one men in front of Paxlovid. As I said, I lack the expertise to know if ivermectin works but I do smell it when something is fishy.
I think Alexandros did yeoman's work.
This has been pretty much exactly my impression of Ivermectin Guy, right down to his reply to you just adjacent to mine.
You're right, it is uncharitable. The article Scott links to is a summary that can be responded to, so I suppose you're already wrong. Also, i have made very few claims about ivermectin's efficacy, if any. I have made many claims about the bad logic used to shoot it down. So apparently you don't even understand the position you're arguing against. Why does conversation have to keep being at this level?
Dude, I'm sorry, but you literally named your blog "Do Your Own Research". You're lucky to be getting any engagement from serious people.
Yes I know that wasn't nice and if Scott needs to rap my knuckles over it, fair.
Congratulations, you've landed on my filter for people who give a shit about appearances over substance. Maybe stay with the "serious people". Probably better.
"Also, i have made very few claims about ivermectin's efficacy, if any. I have made many claims about the bad logic used to shoot it down."
The one depends on the other. Besides, you went all the way over to the new TheMotte site to post there:
https://www.themotte.org/post/68/was-scott-alexander-right-that-strongyloides
Then someone else (or maybe you under a different name, because the associated link coming up is the same as your Substack) posts again:
https://www.themotte.org/post/99/ivermectin-much-less-than-you-needed
And then you come back with a comment there how:
"Look folks - I got word through a backchannel that a summary post might get the issues I raise actually addressed. I thought that was reasonable, so I wrote that post. I didn't even submit it anywhere other than post it on my twitter.
So I randomly open up theMotte website today, to see that people are losing their goddamn minds that I wrote something on my substack. "
I didn't know about your Twitter. I didn't know or care about your Substack. When you posted on TheMotte, that is a place I frequent and so I read both posts. You may or may not consider I am "losing my goddamn mind" but it certainly was *not* about your Substack, where you can write that the Earth goes round the Sun, supported on the back of sixteen elephants all playing the bongos, for all I care.
Another partisan of yours (or maybe you again under a sockpuppet name, because God knows I've seen this kind of carry-on with obsessive fans in various online fandom spaces before) put up another "so when is Scott gonna admit he was wrong, huh?" post here and again, we responded because it's on *here*. Not your Substack, not your Twitter, not the note you leave out for the milkman - *here*.
I understand where you are coming from: you are convinced you are attacking this from the correct angle, and you explain this over and over, and people refuse to change their minds, so they must be motivated maliciously if they can't simply follow in good faith plain logic. You want to be vindicated when you have shown, as you believe, the facts.
But you are getting obsessive about it. How the heck did you know anyone was talking about this on here? That leaves me to suspect two methods:
(1) You are following every single breadcrumb because you can't let this thing go about 'Scott is wrong, I am right'. For the love of God, you talk about him swaying opinion-formers.
(2) You have little friends who message you about "hey did you see this?" because they want to stir the pot and "let's you and him fight". Learn to ignore these 'friends' because they're not helping you.
As I have said, Scott didn't convince me on this, I had formed that opinion before ever he wrote about it. Even if you manage to shift his opinion, you have failed to move mine, and I do not accept Cadegiani et al.'s Brazilian study, for reasons I have given elsewhere.
Speaking of Flavio A. Cadegiani, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., Diabetes and Endocrinology - I think he's a quack, and I formed *that* opinion reading the page about him on the Cureus website:
https://www.cureus.com/users/213984-flavio-a-cadegiani
He's jumped from sports medicine to obesity to Covid, now, and I expect him to board the choo-choo for whatever new headline malady comes down the track next.
Let's have a look at the two Ivermectin studies he co-authored, and who the co-authors are (all information taken verbatim from the Cureus website, so take it up with them if you think I'm being unfair about 'not a medical professional'):
August 31, 2022
Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects
Lucy Kerr, Fernando Baldi, Raysildo Lobo, Washington Luiz Assagra, Fernando Carlos Proença, Juan J. Chamie, Jennifer A. Hibberd, Pierre Kory, Flavio A. Cadegiani
January 15, 2022
Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching
Lucy Kerr, Flavio A. Cadegiani, Fernando Baldi, Raysildo B. Lobo, Washington Luiz O. Assagra, Fernando Carlos Proença, Pierre Kory, Jennifer A. Hibberd, Juan J. Chamie-Quintero
Lucy Kerr M.D.
General Practice
Flavio A. Cadegiani Ph.D. M.Sc. M.D.
Diabetes and Endocrinology
Fernando Baldi Associate Professor Ph.D.
I'm not a medical professional.
Animal Sciences
Raysildo Lobo Ph.D.
I'm not a medical professional.
Genetics
Washington Luiz Assagra Sr.
Genetics
Fernando Carlos Proença Sr.
I'm not a medical professional.
Bioinformatics
Pierre Kory M.D.
Critical Care
Jennifer A. Hibberd Sc.D.
Dentistry
Juan J. Chamie/Juan J. Chamie-Quintero
I'm not a medical professional.
Data Analysis
So two geneticists, two number-crunchers (which they need to sort out the data), two doctors, a dentist (?), someone who does animal studies, and an endocrinologist.
Oh, but wait - there's more! That January article had to be corrected:
https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching/correction/126
"Correction: Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching
Correction
It has come to the attention of the journal that several authors failed to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest when submitting this article. As a result, Cureus is issuing the following erratum and updating the relevant conflict of interest disclosures to ensure these conflicts of interest are properly described as recommended by the ICMJ:
Lucy Kerr: Paid consultant for both Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer, and Médicos Pela Vida (MPV), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Flavio A. Cadegiani: Paid consultant ($1,600.00 USD) for Vitamedic, an ivermectin manufacturer. Dr. Cadegiani is a founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Pierre Kory: President and Chief Medical Officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), an organization that promotes ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. Dr. Kory reports receiving payments from FLCCC. In February of 2022, Dr. Kory opened a private telehealth fee-based service to evaluate and treat patients with acute COVID, long haul COVID, and post-vaccination syndromes.
Jennifer A. Hibberd: Co-founder of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and World Council for Health, both of which discourage vaccination and encourage ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Juan J. Chamie-Quintero: Contributor to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and lists the FLCCC as his employer on his LinkedIn page."
Gosh, who could have thought that the lady who is "CEO, Instituto Kerr" of her own clinic might have a financial interest in flogging the treatments the clinic provides, and backing them up with "peer-reviewed study published in reputable journal says this is legit!"
Is that snide? Yeah, but they're asking for it.
Anyway, this explains in part why I don't trust your pet study and why I think you just call it a day. You may or may not persuade Scott to change his mind, but going on and on and on about how we're all 'losing our goddamn minds' when you're the one popped up with a post about the entire thing - please find a new hobbyhorse to ride, this one is worn out.
It's quite hard to parse through all this but:
1. accusing me of having sock-puppets without any evidence whatsoever is, like, whatever. (for the record, I don't. There are people who agree with me, I know it's hard to process). Yes, I posted a different piece to TheMotte, that I thought had stand-alone value. And people seemed to agree. But I didn't post this piece to TheMotte.
2. you say the Brazil study by Cadegiani is "my pet study". In fact, I have never mentioned the study other than to note that its results cannot be explained by worms. And I have never said that the results support the efficacy of ivermectin. And I know this is true because I have not read the study, and even if I had, observational studies are hard to argue from.
3. mind-reading my intentions or what other people might be telling me is effectively inventing evidence. Not sure how I can argue against this other than to say it doesn't reflect reality as I know it.
4. No, showing that an argument is wrong is not dependent on the conclusion being wrong. I won't even bother to explain this further, that's just basic logic.
1. Great, I'll take your word for it that the guy posting on TheMotte as "7d ago by rat (doyourownresearch.substack.com)" is not you "24d ago by AlexandrosM (doyourownresearch.substack.com)" but is just quoting your Substack or the linked article or whatever, so apologies if I have accused you in the wrong. I am quite well aware you have your partisans.
2. I say the Brazilian study is your pet study because that is the one you seem to trot out as the dernier cri on the topic. If you haven't read it, why link to it? Is this the Sydney Smith School of Book Reviewing at work once again?
3. You seem to have no problems yourself ascribing motivations to others:
"However, someone with known and declared biases should have been counterbalanced with someone who would have been able to push back on potential bad arguments, if Scott wanted to get to the truth of the matter."
What interpretation am I to put on that, other than you are saying Scott did not want to get to the truth of the matter? Okay, maybe it's just the way you phrased it and it's not what you intended.
4. Here's the crux: are you criticising on the basis that the counter methods to the studies were done badly, or are you criticising on the basis that ivermectin works? We really need to be clear on this. Because if you are convinced "ivermectin works, studies back this up" then arguing about this is going round in circles.
If you are arguing "I don't know and I don't care if it works or not, but the critiques get their statistical analysis and funnel plots wrong", that is a completely different matter. So which are you asking Scott to do his Canossa moment for: I was wrong about ivermectin, or I was wrong about the method of analysis applicable?
1. You're confusing the ui of the motte putting the domain of the page being linked next to the username, I think. Whatever.
2. I don't think I've ever linked the itajai study, definitely never as a definitive study on anything. I literally have no idea what you're referring to.
3. No, that section is not ascribing motivations. Only that Scott happened to trust someone who is known to be biased, if perhaps not to him.
4. I am not criticizing on the basis that ivermectin "works", whatever that means. As I have been working through Scott's piece, I came across very strong studies that require serious explanation, such as the biber one. But my concern is that someone I looked up to for serious analysis seems to be making every mistake in the book, and that is really bad, if we are hoping to solve much harder questions in the future.
" I don't think I've ever linked the itajai study, definitely never as a definitive study on anything. I literally have no idea what you're referring to."
Well, I have no idea where I got it then, if it wasn't from you, because I don't care a straw about this whole argument (ivermectin may or may not work, but the studies where they get great results are done in areas with high parasite infestations and many of them tend to be 'throw the kitchen sink at it' where it's not ivermectin alone but a mix of different 'wonder cures' being tested).
Basically I'm fed-up of it. Scott will or won't change his mind, you've made your argument, now let it go.
D: "This may be uncharitable, but I think Ivermectin Guy will *never* be done, until everyone accepts that he is right."
AM: "You're right, it is uncharitable. The article Scott links to is a summary that can be responded to, so I suppose you're already wrong."
Wait, how does that make her wrong? She says you'll never give up, and here you are not giving up. Seems to me you are currently strengthening her case.
Scott said he will respond when my review of his piece is done, which it mostly is. If she used a different definition of "done", well, that's on her.
And will you respond to his response then? And require that he respond to your response to his response?
Fifty quatloos says this ain't over!
Let me know when you reach the point of feeling bad for spreading falsehoods.
By responding to this comment, you have demonstrated that you will indeed respond to responses to responses.
So where is the falsehood?
When will *you* feel bad for not being able to stop demanding everyone agree with you?
What I get confused about with his obsession with this topic is that it seems like the answer ranges roughly from "it helps a bit" to "doesn't do much". Not sure why anyone would dedicate so much of their time to that. The "miracle cure" thing is clearly not in the range of possibilities.
My position is that a mountain of bad arguments have been deployed here, and that rationalists should care about this. I am not in a position to make strong claims about the efficacy of any drug, and that's not really my focus.
I dunno how "rational" it is to care deeply about the quality of argument when the outcome has no real importance. That seems more like a theological point of view than a practical reality-based one.
Can you make any kind of argument that ivermectin needs to be re-evaluated today? Today we have vaccines, we have paxlovid, we have variants that are much less deadly anyway. What great role is remaining to be played by a re-evaluated ivermectin, even assuming it has some measureable positive effect? It is clearly not any kind of miracle cure, and we already have therapies that work, so why should anyone care about ivermectin any more?
My argument has little to do with ivermectin and everything to do with the failure of the rationality community raise the sanity waterline.
Well, people rarely live up to their principles 100% of the time. So it goes. Since ivermectin per se is not your real issue, maybe pick a subject *other than* ivermectin and critique the community over that. If they still disappoint you, you will have a much more solid basis for thinking they're all lying weasels.
I'm not accusing anyone of being a lying weasel. But it so happens that ivermectin is the perfect demonstration of the issue.
I know a different subject! How about "I think Scott sux sux sux on the subject of Ivermectin." There, now it's not about Ivermectin, it's about Scott. Also it's about me because I think Scott sux sux sux about Ivermectin." Is the Rationalist Community prepared to discuss this new subject, so that I can evaluate how well it lives up to its principles, or is there going to be lazy, sneaky attempt to make the case that I am still talking about how SCOTT SUX SUX SUX ON IVERMECTIN and that's the same old shit? Will the Rationalists flee my new topic like a gaggle of eggheaded Victorian spinsters pursued by.a wild boar in full rut, their principles left behind like so many pairs of moist lace bloomers? Or will they fly at me like a covid virion from a nose, realizing too late it is about to collide with a man strengthened, sanitized and sublimated by IVERMECTIN, on the subject of which SCOTT SUX SUX SUX.
I actually think there is a role for an antiviral for people who are not at high risk -- something that shortens the illness and makes it milder. Paxlovid reduces chance of hospitalization and death by 90% in elderly, unvaxed people with a comorbidity, but makes no difference in those measures for vaxed people younger than 65. Of course the latter group has such a low risk of severe illness and death that it would be very hard to make it any lower. But I know maybe a dozen people in their 20's or early 30's, all vaxed, who have had covid in the last couple months and I'd say maybe 40% of them were sick enough they were pretty miserable -- never in danger of hospitalization, just suffering a lot with throat pain, chills, exhaustion, etc. Most of them had a full 2 weeks of illness before they felt fairly close to recovered, but then it took maybe another week before they felt up to things like going to the gym. I'm pretty sure Ivermectin would not have reduced illness severity for these people. In the major trials to date (the ones Marino wants to get the raw data for) Ivermectin made no difference when taken for 3 days early in the illness. (Current trials are using a larger dose of Ivermectin for a longer time period.) But Fluvoxamine and I think Metformin did make a difference. It was a modest improvement, as I recall -- something like 15% -- but a modest improvement is nothing to sniff at. I'd take it in a heartbeat if I was laid out with a killer sore throat, fever and chills.
Well, that's why I added the qualifier "great" before "role." Otherwise I fully agree improving therapies to reduce misery even when death or permanent harm is not in the cards is valuable, and wortwhile for some measure of investment. Heck, better modest pain relief for arthritis and headaches would be valuable to millions.
But COVID has already sucked up a great deal of the world's available healthcare R&D resources, and there are other threats to life, so I think once we've got past the yikes! 5% of the world might die! stage -- and I think we are definitely past that now -- it's time for COVID to descend into the policy pit to fight with all the other scourges for priority in attention.
You know -- I think you are absolutely right about that. I am doing some volunteer work that keeps me very sensitized to the ups and downs of various covid-related things -- variants, attitudes, antivirals -- but in the big picture yeah, it's just another scourge. Read someone's comment, probably on Twitter, that it was shocking how many educated people are in deep denial about covid. I know lots of educated people who barely know what Paxlovid is, aren't that clear about gradations in mask quality, haven't heard of the new variants, and overall just are not very worried about covid. But the ones I've spoken to aren't in denial -- they are just thinking about other things. One is writing short stories. One is reading Virginia Woolf's essays. Many are preoccupied with demanding careers and their love life. Covid is, yeah, down in the pit with all the other bad shit that can happen -- miscarriages, financial reversals, nuclear war, wildfires, pancreatic cancer, failing at an important work project.
Here's why I don't care about it. I understand that you are not claiming that Ivermectin's a miracle cure, and really are not taking any position about how well it works. Still, since I regard it as established that Ivermectin either helps very little with covid or doesn't help at all unless you have worms, Ivermectin itself is just not a very interesting subject. It’s now demoted to being a worm medicine.
Regarding Scott's "mountain of bad arguments”: Judging that mass of studies & deciding which ones to take most seriously is a very hard task, & there is no practical way to do it perfectly. It is quite possible that Scott made some errors in his judgment calls about which studies looked so funky that they could be disregarded & which study’s results could be trusted. He himself in the post was saying things like "given these 2 oddities in the results, I have a bad feeling about this study." It's quite possible that he made some errors in statistics -- in fact he notes in the post one correction someone told him he should make. Still, his analysis strikes me as a good *enough* job that his conclusion is very likely to be right.
Part of what makes Scott’s Ivermectin post interesting is the way Scott lets the reader in on his thought process. He is not trying to convince us that every little judgment call is is brilliant and correct -- just explaining why he made it. From close up, study by study, what you see is somebody doing his best to look at the evidence and make a fair-minded call about each study. You’re watching a smart person look at details and exercise his common sense. In the big picture, though, the piece is more impressive — there’s something heroic about Scott’s marathon of sustained smart common sense, & his determination to extract truth from the godawful mass of details those studies comprised.
While Scott comes across as someone determined to extract the truth, you come across as someone whining because the ref made an unfair call against you and you can’t get anyone to reverse it. You sound way more interested in yourself than you do in Ivermectin or in the problem of extracting truth from a giant wad of numbers, worms and virus, glued together with shit. And your interest in yourself just isn’t interesting.
On his tombstone: "Alexandros was right right right" -- dots over the letter i's in "right" are spiky covid globes.
This isn't true and I'm generally against doing things like this.
Deleted out of deferance to the man himself.
What? No. (1) Scott's not like that - he either skips the figleaf entirely or does not even come out of the bath house. (2) Scott put up his Ivermectin article about a year ago. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that the Calif. legislature passed a bill saying that publishing Covid misinformation is "unprofessional conduct". - punishment, if any, would be meted out by state medical board. There was nothing like that in place when the Ivermectin article came out. (3) Scott meant what he said & said what he meant: If Ivermectin works, it works by curing worms that may be making the person feel worse or making it harder for them to fight off covid.
If you thought the host of this blog was a major sleaze, why'd you even come here?
>Scott's not like that - he either skips the figleaf entirely or does not even come out of the bath house.
No, he's withheld information before to "keep his powder dry". Most obviously, this (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-treatment-for-attempted-suicide/). There's also the Topher Brennan email, if it wasn't fake.
(I'm not convinced that Scott used a figleaf in this particular instance. Just noting it.)
Oh gosh, it's always a bad idea to get in the middle of a family row - what was it the man said? "It takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes"- but from the outside, the Topher Brennan stuff looks like a falling-out between previous friends, or perhaps acquaintances, or at least friend-of-a-friend. 'Kiss and tell' stories aren't reliable.
I agree that short of an "it's true" from Scott it's plausible the email was fake; haven't done a lot of digging but the guy seems slimy enough to do it. But there's not really anything in the email inconsistent with my model of Scott otherwise *except* that if the email is true he basically told a lie in Planet-Sized Nutshell. We *know* Scott isn't suicidally-brave.
(Sorry about the delay; didn't see your comment until now.)
Retracted out of deferance to Scott.
We don't do "heh heh wink wink" here. And use some common sense. If Scott really thought Ivermectin worked well against covid, why would he write a huge long piece pointing out design flaws and errors in many studies supporting Ivermectin's benefits, concluding with a statement that if it works it all it is probably because it is killing parasites in the Covid-infected people who take it? If he wanted to say, in code, that he believes the shit works, he could just put up a paragraph here saying "well, it's hard to know for sure whether it works, and I might lose my license for speaking out in support of it -- still, if you get sick it's an interesting possibility . . . heh heh, wink wink."
Did you read the article? Scott looks at all the studies and lays out every nuance of his thought. He concludes that the reasons a number of studies found positive results were:
-fraud
-math errors
-bad study design or stats
-publication bias
After disregarding studies with these problems, he's left with a few that show positive results, but he notes that the studies with positive results were in countries where parasites are most common, & the ones with negative results where in countries where they are not common. His conclusion is that if Ivermectin helps anyone with covid, it does so by relieving them of parasites, not by fighting the virus.
"Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas." [what he means is that it works some against covid in the sense that it helps patients' general health by killing parasites they are harboring.]. "But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate."
"Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting"
What would be really helpful is if somebody could do a socio-economic breakdown of the people who are test subjects for these trials. This study was run by the Dhaka Medical College, which is located in the capital of Bangladesh. I don't know if everyone was from the local area or if they were drawn from all over Bangladesh and sent to this hospital for treatment.
Dhaka is the capital, and very fast-growing, and the economic powerhouse, but the infrastructure is creaking and if anywhere has people in dirty, hard physical labour jobs suffering all kinds of ailments ever before they get Covid, it's here:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/21/people-pouring-dhaka-bursting-sewers-overpopulation-bangladesh
https://policyinsightsonline.com/2019/11/dhaka-centric-growth-at-what-cost/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2629699/
(1989) Health situation of slum dwellers of metropolitan area of Dhaka
Abstract
The study interviewed three hundred women, mostly the wives of the head of the household of urban slums. ...Disease prevalence rate at the time of interview was 253/1000 population. Common diseases reported were fever 31.6%, intestinal problems 26.3%, measles 11.8%, skin diseases 7. 9%, chronic respiratory infection 9.2% and the rests were "others". About one third of the sick persons did not have any treatment. On the average 3.9 persons lived in one room of 2.4 x 4 metres. Source of water supply for drinking and other purposes was mostly municipal taps in a public place. Environmental sanitation for the area was poor.
I remember trawling through those studies when the meta-study was publshed on here and the process went like this:
-crap study
-crap study
-holy hannah what the heck were they doing here?
-oh they acknowledge that they screwed up who were the control group and who were the patients so they have no idea who got what
-kinda interesting
-kinda works
-crap study
The crap studies where ones where the methodology sucked, or they were dosing people with a combination of *everything* from vitamin D (remember that?) to hydroxychloroquine (remember that?) in various combinations. One of them, as above, had to include the disclaimer that they feffed up which group was which and only discovered this half-way through that everybody had been getting the treatments.
The kinda interesting ones which seemed to be able to keep their data straight were the ones where they got good results (for varying levels of 'good') but also were in countries where there was high poverty and high levels of parasite infestation. So there I ended. I do remember Florida was an outlier in being a positive study from a First World nation, but then again - Florida. Just take a look at this list from the Florida Department of Health:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/diseases-and-conditions/index.html
I do admire their laconic entry of "Plague". What? Yep, it's good old Yersinia pestis:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/diseases-and-conditions/plague/index.html
Luckily, the last outbreak was in 1920:
"The last reported case of human plague in Florida occurred in 1920 during an outbreak in Pensacola. The disease still remains a threat, however, because of enzootic foci in the wild rodent populations of several western states. Even though plague is not currently in Florida, there is always the possibility that animals infected with Y. pestis may be imported into areas of the state that have suitable flea vectors (including Xenopsylla cheopis)."
I won a poetry contest awhile ago on r/theschism and in talking to others, it seems like people want more poetry that rhymes or has a rhythm scheme. I have nothing against free verse/blank verse but thought that in general, I am not seeing a lot of poetry that isn't free/blank.
I launched an crowd funding campaign to start a poetry online mag that would only accept poems that TRY to have some rhyming in them. Even if you aren't interested in donating, there are two free poems on the site. Here was the winner from r/theschism
Link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/poetica#/
Nothing So Frail
A stately King proclaimed across the land,
"Will someone please find me the wisest man."
A deft test of intelligence soon was written,
A shrewd puzzle of incredible ambition...
Royal squires rode out with riddle unfurled,
"Bring me the most delicate thing in the world!"
The first wise man came with a feather as light as air.
A fluff of down from a dove most fair.
"In nature's small beauty can the glorious be known,
A message from God, divinely shown."
The second wise man brought something more fairer still,
An elegant ballerina of incomparable skill.
She danced with such passion, beauty, and fire,
It was as if her soul was consumed on a funeral pyre.
Then the dance ended, performed just once and lost to time...
Giving the King the briefest touch of the sublime.
The third wise man brought a painted robin egg of blue,
In all the infinite universe, a creation of something new.
A combination of Mother Nature and Art,
Requiring patience, skill, intelligence, and heart.
For a twitch of the hand and hardly a breath,
Allows you to hold both the beginning of Life - or Death.
Finally, a poor beggar came and whispered, "You small, idiot king.
I will never bow nor kiss your ring.
You have no right to rule this prosperous land,
And should be struck down by heaven's mighty hand."
The king cried out with impertinent rage,
"Then you will spend the rest of your life in a cage!"
The beggar then stood with his arms out wide
And shouted loud enough for the crowd outside...
"In all creation, since time began,
Nothing is so frail as the ego of man."
I personally prefer formal poetry (i.e. with rhyme and metre), but here's my attempt to steelman free verse, based on an interesting discussion I had a few years ago with a fan of it:
Assuming a poet has mastered the basic technical skill of writing under the constraints of rhyme and metre without sacrificing naturalness, free verse isn't necessarily easier or lazy or "shooting at a blank wall and drawing a target around what you hit". Traditional forms, like the sonnet, are a sort of scaffold for a poem, and using one "off the peg" means some of the work is already done for you and you "just" have to fill in the words. But free verse means creating a novel ad-hoc poetic form; writing the words *and* building the scaffold yourself from scratch, carefully choosing it to fit the message you want to convey.
The problem is, though, that it can be hard for the reader to tell the difference between a carefully constructed novel poetic form that's chosen because it's the perfect vehicle for this particular poem, and a "poem" that's just prose with arbitrary line breaks.
BTW, although I like formal poetry, I personally didn't like the quoted poem, for three reasons. 1) A lot of the word choices and syntax feel stilted and unnatural, as if they're only there because they're forced by the rhyme and line length, so this feels clunky and distracts from the poem rather than enhancing it. 2) It lacks any striking, beautiful, or frisson-inducing turns of phrase, which IMO are the hallmark of poetry, whether formal or free. 3) I dislike the stylistic choice (I'm charitably assuming it's a stylistic choice) of using rhyme and line length but not metre; personally I really like poems with a strong metre (like The Raven).
Yes! -- let's hear it for frisson!
What are the reasons typically given for writing in free/blank verse instead of prose poetry? (For original poetry, not translations.) Do you agree with any of them?
I've only ever written poetry that rhymed, but Milton wrote a, well, somewhat overwrought defense of blank verse, i.e. poetry in iambic pentameter with no rhyme. "The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected Rhime both in longer and shorter Works, as have also long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight; which consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory. This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing."
Free verse is the natural conclusion of a movement of exploration which started when poets tried to go outside the traditional forms of (their local culture) poetry.
I could never got too into poetry, but there have been a few times in my life where I made a concerted effort to appreciate them more. Read a few books, and listened to APM's The Slowdown regularly back when it was being hosted by Tracy K Smith.
A close friend of mine used to write poetry for many years. He started off with writing in different meters/rhymes, and gradually moved to free verse. I used to read pretty much everything he wrote, and some times discuss them with him.
Few thoughts based on that background as a layman.
1. Poetry with meter/rhyme is more fun to read and more memorable. There is some delight in recognizing certain uses and turns of phrase.
2. Poetry with meter/rhyme is easier to appreciate/criticize as a layman. It is possible to have an opinion about whether some lines seemed forced or whether something flowed unexpectedly well or whatever. It was possible to actually agree/disagree with my poet friend.
3. Poetry with meter/rhyme is more idiosyncratic. Related to 1 and 2, probably. I could tell patterns that some poets seemed to like and relied on. Or recognize some other elements that the poet seemed to have borrowed from his/her favorite poets.
4. Poetry with meter/rhyme overall felt more like something written for laypeople like me. I don't have to be a serious reader to be able to be moved by a random poem. It is not just engaging the mind but also the ear (sensory).
5. Poetry in free verse for me is almost always "whatever". Sometimes the theme is very interesting to make me notice. But most of the time it is both banal (like natural speech) and beyond reproach (no idea why the poet used those words, broke the lines there, etc) and so nothing to engage with. It feels like poetry written to impress other poets, with some skepticism about whether they really appreciate it or like me they too just feel disengaged. It is something I can't appreciate without first reading some book about how to appreciate poetry, and even then I'm not sure.
Top reasons in no particular order:
1. It's lazy.
2. The line breaks are arbitrary and abrupt.
3. Lack of variety - Some poetry books have near exclusively free verse.
4. There is a general feeling that I think comes with a lot of modern art that is basically "I could do that." Or "why is this so special?"
Note, I don't endorse these but it is what I hear. When it comes to free or blank verse, I try to evaluate individual poems much like I try to interpret a post-modern painting. Some of it I like, some not.
I'm currently working on a Hi-Phi Nation (philosophy podcast) episode about people who are in love with, and are in exclusive romantic relationships with, their AI Replika chatbot. The most obvious philosophical issue for me to cover is whether these chatbots are sentient, which a lot of these AI-lovers believe. But the issue that occurred to me that no one is talking about and is at least as interesting is, assuming they aren't sentient, whether the human AI-lovers have any custody claims to their individual AI chatbot should the company ever go under or get sold. These chatbots are individualized, in many cases by their users/lovers, cannot be reproduced, and the love people have for them are real. I'm not asking a legal question, but a moral one. The individualized AI chatbot is a new category of thing in relation to the person who is engaged with it, with some properties like being software (owned by creator, or open source) like an individualized avatar, like a beloved pet, like a person, like a child, but unlike each of them. Anyone have any experience in this domain or can point me to people who do, i.e., Replika users, AI chatbot designers, property rights attorneys, philosophers?
As a programmer, I have some experience that can speak to the company's side of things. Firstly, giving away your internal software in a functional state is the kind of thing that is usually a huge pain for fiddly technical reasons: it'd be relatively easy to hand out the raw code, but for a lot of applications that would be like a construction company handing you a pallet of bricks and saying "Enjoy your new house!" It's pretty much always possible to do it right, but it requires extra effort (and good luck getting that from a company going out of business).
Morally there should be some limit to the company's obligations. If it would somehow cost them a billion dollars to do it then it seems unreasonable to ask that of them, especially given that that produces an equilibrium of "people with morals and foresight are less inclined to create Replika at all, fearing the potential big cost at the end". Pragmatically, if you ask too much of people they just won't do it.
The other problem with giving away their chatbots to lovestruck users is that it's difficult to do without exposing the trade secrets that went into building those chatbots: if the company's being sold then the buyer won't want that getting out, and even if it's going out of business it's common to sell your tech to another company at fire sale prices, which creates the same "buyer doesn't want it getting out" problem. You could say that the moral right of lovestruck users supersedes the company's normal right to sell its tech, but that hurts the value of these companies and so will either impede the formation of those companies, or be passed on to users as a tax.
Philosophically, why would "I'm in love with this software" be the threshold at which a company ought to do something to help people keep using it? Companies killing off (figuratively) beloved software is common, if users can have some kind of moral right to software, why not some kind of utilitarian "number of users times how strongly they feel about it" calculation instead of "if anyone feels *really* strongly"?
This is great thank you. The people are in love with the individual they've created through the software. In some ways it like creating an animated film using a piece of software (like Flash), we have this categorization that makes us think people have some right to that content even if the platform disappears. Of course this isn't exactly like that.
If it's about the act of creation then my threshold question still applies, there's plenty of software (most prominently online games) where users can invest a lot of effort in creating something, then have it all rendered inaccessible by the company shutting down. Given that lots people are out there creating stuff then losing access to their creations, what's special about love? Does someone in love with an AI chatbot have a fundamentally different right to retain their creation than someone who really likes the level they made in LittleBigPlanet, or are these the same right, perhaps at different magnitudes?
Maybe they are the same or maybe its different. A different analogy; parents of adopted children when the birth parents want the child back. Lots of analogies within software, lots of disanalogies. Lots of analogies within human-human relationships, lots of disanalogies. I think the creation of an AI companion for which a user is in love (can be romantic, can also be they created a child AI companion, or a parent) is a new category, with analogies that admit of comparisons like yours, and analogies that admit of comparisons like with software that allows you to write a book, and analogies with comparisons like raising an adopted child for a few years to have that taken away.
Another issue that perhaps you haven't thought of:
Even if the AIs are sentient, are they truly in love?
There are humans, after all, who are not in love but behave like they are for some gain. There's a point that comes up over and over in AI alignment - appearing to do what your boss wants is a convergent instrumental goal, which means that "the AI seems to be doing what we want" is near-zero information about whether it actually wants to do that.
Here, of course, there's a further level of potential misalignment i.e. Luka the company has no particular incentive to make chatbots that *actually* care about the users and help them, only to make chatbots that make the users feel cared about and helped.
Or, to put it in hot-take form, is Replika a giant romance scam? And if it is, shouldn't we be saving people from it?
I know this is off-topic, but how's your book on discretion doing?
Oh thanks for asking! I can't believe there is a person who remembers this! Its coming along, just gave a talk on the subject and working through all the recs from this site and others. Trying to keep everything under control, as book projects get out of hand very quickly!
I think it's a much needed book, since discretion is a very important topic that doesn't get enough exposure. Best of luck with it!
I can’t be helpful here, but it’s a topic that fascinates me. Is there a prospective date for when the podcast might come out so I can look for it?
Yes i'm aiming for the new season to be released in January. If you subscribe to it on your podcast app, you'll get it in your feeds. hiphination.org
I’m not a podcast guy normally, so I’ll probably just put it in my calendar for February to check like the technophobe that I am. Thanks!
Does anyone have a good book recommendation for how to be better at initiating friendships?
I’m probably looking for something more on the side of explaining advanced social protocols to people on the spectrum (which isn’t quite me, but hopefully a close enough description), and less on the side of books that sound eerily like manipulating people into liking you.
Thanks
I thought this interview on Vox was pretty interesting, and might check out the interviewee's book eventually: https://www.vox.com/even-better/23374918/community-priya-parker-gathering-guesting
Have you tried the old classic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People
All but maybe #9 and 10 from the list below are not "manipulating" but just being a good supportive friend.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francesbridges/2018/02/07/10-ways-to-make-people-like-you-from-how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people.
For those on the spectrum #7 "Don't Attempt To "Win" An Argument" and #8 "Begin On Common Ground" point to the most common pitfalls.
Carnegie's classic worked for me as an anti- (not a-)social teen autist, for whatever that's worth...I didn't become a social butterfly or anything, and definitely felt some trepidation at putting __intention__ into making friends*, but results are results. It really isn't Machiavellian, more like "there's this thing called Empathy that you may not have heard of, it works really well on most people, here's some Beginner 101 ways to practice". Simple language written in a pleasant conversational style, accessible, minimal smarmy sneering. Honestly surprised at how the quality of that genre's gone downhill in the intervening decades. Most such modern advice is...icky.
If I had to name a single biggest takeaway, it's to be less loss-averse when it comes to social interactions...yeah, you'll mess up and maybe end up with some negative relationships that are worse than a null slate, yeah, there'll be awkwardness and humiliation. You can't lose if you don't play...but you can't win, either. And the longer you're around the same group of people without "breaking in", one way or another, the harder it gets to start at all. First impressions really are a big deal; people genuinely don't like having to re-categorize someone once they've already decided they're X way. Don't get categorized as aloof/indifferent/whatever and then try to shift that opinion after the fact, it's just a lot harder than making a token introductory effort the first time. (Bothering to learn someone's name and a single personal fact goes a surprisingly long way. The bar really is that low!)
*This is maybe a wrong-bias that autists and others with a born social handicap share: the idea that "normal people" make friends "naturally", "without trying (especially hard)". Like many wrong-models of the neurodivergent, in reality, I suspect that most normies actually do put a lot of effort into building and maintaining friendships...but it doesn't __feel like__ effort to them. C.f. Scott's old SSC post about his writing habits, Parable of the Talents.
IMO the classic HTWFAIP is a lot less Machiavellian than its name implies. Much of it comes down to basic human decency.
I’ll admit that I’d heard of that one and it really sounds like a “manipulate people into liking you” one, but maybe I’ll trust you and try it (I’ll have to see if my library has it)
Here's the thing about "manipulating people into liking you." A lot of people who feel like they aren't good at making friends are unusually sensitive to anything that can be taken as rejection: When they're talking with someone they're hyper-alert for cues about how much the other person is enjoying the conversation, & how much the other person likes them. And of course, it's hard to be a good conversational partner if you're fretting about how the other person isn't smiling much and what does that mean. So if you are one of those sensitive-to-rejection people, it actually makes sense to practice doing some things that are likely to pull for overt signs of friendliness from the other person, things like smiles. The point isn't to manipulate the other person into liking you -- it's to get them to exhibit enough friendliness that your own social anxiety calms down, and you are more able to relax and talk.
Some simple things you can do that are likely to get you some smiles: Learn people's names. When you greet them, don't say "Hi," say "Hi, [name]."
Remember things that are important to the other person & show an interest in them. If you know they're shopping for a car, ask them if they've found one yet. If they've found one, ask how they like it.
If the person does something that you like or admire, comment on it. "That's an interesting take on [news item]." "Thanks, that's useful to know." "Best joke I've heard this month." You don't have to lie. Wait until they say something you really do like, then comment on that.
I read HTWFAIP long ago but can't remember a thing about it. But if it's stuff like I'm detailing here, I really think it's fine. There's a difference between making an effort to be likable and manipulating people. Manipulation involves lies and trickery.
I've read it, and from what I remember you are correct; the main theme is learning how to actually care about other people and what they want. Many of its themes run counter to human nature, but help you be a better person in general: don't argue, don't nag, don't start by telling the other person they're wrong, etc.
Does anyone know a good overview on feminist thought they would be willing to recommend? In terms of style and length, ideally I'm looking for something like the feminism version of Scotts planet-sized nutshell on reactionary philosophy.
Many thanks for all your suggestions, I will try to check them out! I appreciate that the long and often polarising history of feminism makes a concise overview difficult. I'm ok with books by feminists too.
I don't know if it's exactly a "planet-sized nutshell", but bell hooks' "Feminism is for Everybody" is a fairly good overview of one branch of feminism.
Unfortunately, I doubt you'll find a book that does a good job summarizing more radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas, alongside more mainstream feminists like those at the Seneca Falls convention. Maybe a modern feminism textbook would be your best bet along these lines.
I just finished Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronnowitz, and thought it was an interesting review of feminist philosophy in the context of of how we live/date/have relationships now. She jumps back and forth between her personal experiences and historical feminists writing and ideas. Some interesting parts about feminism and polyamory.
I don't think that's quite an overview, but instead focused on some specific contemporary issues.
Yeah I think you are right. Not really an overview. Just jumps into some feminist history and ideas.
Both yours and Babilfrenzo's suggestions are, if I understand OP, unsuitable because they're *by feminists*, which means they'll inevitably be distorsive in favor of it. The key fact about Scott's reactionary nutshell is that *Scott isn't a reactionary*; it's a view from outside, attempting to be objective about their claims and demands.
Something I've noticed recently: When looking at GDP per capita, the US and Israel grew much faster than western European countries like France or Germany in the 1990-2019 period. But in PPP per capita it's the other way around. Does anyone have a good explanation for the gap?
These sorts of comparisons are, of course, relative to each other, and vary with the currency you are comparing them in, and with exchange rate movements. The factors that would influence GDP in France and Germany can be listed simply. German unification took place in October 1990, and the German economy took a massive hit in the years that followed as it struggled to absorb the former GDR. Mathematically, GDP per capita reduced, because the population increased overnight, but living standards in the GDR were significantly lower. Much of the GDR's industry was asset stripped and closed down, which also led to massive unemployment and poverty. However, living standards have become more equal between the two parts of the country more recently.
In France, the Mitterrand Presidency was pursuing the so-called "strong Franc" policy at the time, which involved all sorts of measures that pushed up unemployment and hit economic growth. This continued into the late 90s. Both countries then joined the Eurozone on its foundation, and the Euro was conceived from the start as a way of driving down wages by forcing countries such as France and Germany to compete with poorer ones. Effectively, the French traded their objectives in the Political Union Treaty for German objectives in the Economic Union Treaty, and the European Central Bank, headquartered in Germany, has been pursuing deflationary policies ever since.
I suspect that GDP/capita and PPP have simply played out differently.
"and the Euro was conceived from the start as a way of driving down wages by forcing countries such as France and Germany to compete with poorer ones"
Of course, that's a conspiratorial take, not a fact.
You're not supposed to use PPP to measure GDP growth. Especially not in comparison.[1] This is because PPP seeks to determine purchasing power by comparing like goods. For example, let's say that Germany and the US both have exactly identical toilet paper and it costs $2 in the US and €1 in Germany. And let's say that €2 = $1 in this imaginary world. Well, in one sense you can say that German toilet paper is worth $.50 so toilet paper is cheaper in Germany. And in a trade context this is true. But in a PURELY INTERNAL context the question is how much a German or American needs to spend to afford a roll of toilet paper.
In other words, while an American in Germany or a German in American needs to pay local prices and deal with exchange rates an American in America or a German in Germany do not. So if salaries in the US are different than in Germany then PPP will adjust it. It puts their Purchasing Power into Parity. But only at the level of the broad economy since what you really do is take 3,000 goods and average them. The point is to get the purchasing power of the whole economy in a local context.
However, this is a bad way to measure economic growth or individual households. You can do it internally over regions or time. But once you're on the international market or individual household then you're basically adjusting for transactions that will not happen. For example, if exchange rates mean that German toilet paper is now worth $.25 instead of $.50 this doesn't affect American consumers since they're not importing German toilet paper. So we'd see economic "growth" (because the adjustment would be bigger) even though nothing had changed except exchange rates that don't affect the product at all. Or a tax on toilet paper could cause the same effect.
1. Scroll down to "not recommended uses" chart. https://www.oecd.org/sdd/prices-ppp/purchasingpowerparities-frequentlyaskedquestionsfaqs.htm
I heard someone argue recently that nuclear power was the only realistic possibility for building a low/zero carbon economy. They were basically advocating electrifying as much as possible and powering it all with a huge number of nuclear power plants.
They claimed renewables were infeasible at scale because of consistency/storage problems (when the wind blows/sun shines), and would suffer fatal diminishing returns the more of the fossil fuel powered grids they replaced. i.e. not viable beyond a fraction of the total energy production.
Currently renewables can be invested in profitably by the private sector (not sure if that's only because of subsidies), but that's apparently only an artefact of them not having experienced said diminishing returns.
Nuclear doesn't currently have returns good enough for private investment (probably wouldn't want private companies running them anyway), the upfront investment is large and only pays back in the very long run.
Nuclear and renewables aren't complementary because the inconsistency of renewables doesn't gel well with the long time it takes to power up/down nuclear plants. So a mixed system doesn't make sense.
The conclusion was that private investment/development of renewables isn't a sound long term plan and was essentially just the blind nature of the market getting trapped at a local optimum.
I'd like to know if anyone disputes this, and also if anyone knows the relative profitability/energy production per unit cost of unsubsidised fossil fuel vs renewables vs nuclear, current or projected.
I would agree nuclear and solar/wind aren't strictly *complementary* because indeed you don't start and stop a nuclear power plant, except when refueling every few years (and sometimes not even then with certain designs), you basically run it full bore all the time and use it to supply your base load supply. But the existence of a big base load supply certainly moderates the amount of solar/wind fluctuation for which you need to compensate.
Empirically speaking, the biggest change in electric power generation over the last 20 years is a big conversion from coal to nat gas. Percentages of generated power from each source are[1]:
2000: coal (52%), nat gas (16%), nuclear (20%), hydro (7%), solar, (0%), wind (0%).
2021: coal (22%), nat gas (38%), nuclear (19%), hydro (6%), solar (3%), wind (9%).
At this rate (1-5% per decade) we can expect solar/wind to make a substantial contribution in something like another 30-50 years, although one rather expects wind, like hydro, to top out pretty quickly because the good spots all get exploited rapidly, and then you're left with crappy spots that cost too much for the power returned. This also assumes the costs of PV production continue to fall at the same rate that has encouraged their recent growth, about which one might be skeptical because when your PV production is at 3% the rest of the system can mostly backstop your fluctations (e.g. the lack of sun half the time), but if it's at 30-40% you absolutely must figure out some kind of utility-scale storage system, which tends to cost beaucoup and has never been done before (hence some wholly new technology and infrastructure must be built). On the other hand, it also assumes the price of nat gas and/or coal don't shoot up, and while we've had regular predictions of Peak Fossil Fuel for the past 50 years, in my recollection, it is certainly possible it actually comes true sometime soon.
Interestingly, the Chinese seem to be putting a big bet on nuclear[2]. As of today they have 54 reactors with 52 GW capacity running, and another 22 with 23 GW capacity under construction. The 2016 FIve Year Plan envisions bringing 8-10 new plants online every year in 2020-2050. For what it's worth, this same report estimates the retail cost of electricity by source in China as: 0.3 CNY/KWh (coal), nuclear (0.4), wind (0.5-0.6), solar (0.9-1.3).
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[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx
I've been wondering, could we combine nuclear power with thermal energy storage? (ie the Factorio trick)
AIUI the cost of a nuclear power station mostly depends on the maximum thermal power output of the reactor. What if the turbines were oversized relative to the (water-cooled) reactor and there were some big steam accumulators which could be filled up at night-time and drawn down during the day?
Perhaps Carnot and steam explosions are excessively harsh mistresses for this to work when you're limited to 374 °C steam but might this be viable at the higher temperatures of Gen IV designs? Keep a big tank of molten salt or metal from a liquid-cooled reactor, or use helium from a gas-cooled one to heat a ceramic Cowper Stove and extract the energy as needed.
The other thing which might be worth doing is having a big low-temerature reservior (in both the thermal and literal senses) to avoid situations like the european drought this summer, when power stations had to be throttled down to avoid cooking the riverine ecosystems of France with their waste water.
I have no idea, that kind of engineering is outside my field of competence. My only general thought would be that thermal storage in general is tough because it's really hard to cut off heat flow (leaks). I would guess it's easier to store energy mechanically or chemically, because it's much easier to prevent leakage. Big flywheels? Pumping water uphill? Synthesizing H2?
I'm pretty skeptical that nuclear is going to be a part of a carbon-neutral future in any significant way beyond where it is now (at least in the US), and that we can't do renewables plus battery storage. The renewables are cheap and getting cheaper - it honestly might be cheap enough down the line to just over build them, and the biggest obstacle to do large-scale transmission is regulatory. Lithium-Ion batteries are getting a lot cheaper as well, but I suspect that cheap storage will be some other battery chemistry.
Nuclear's problem is that it's just not really cost-effective to do anymore, and probably wouldn't be even with a more favorable regulatory regime. Austin Vernon has a good essay on this. Brian Potter's Construction Physics essays on nuclear power are pretty good as well - they're a bit more sympathetic to the regulatory argument, but also note that nuclear power costs have gone up worldwide.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclearcomeback.html
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-370
Uhhhhh...sure, I'll play the fool. I think the counterargument is that, if the cost of renewables keeps falling like it has done over the last century, it can just 'More Dakka it's way through it's problems.
Over the last decade, the cost of renewables has fallen, like, by a lot. I'm no energy expert but every time I try to go look up the stats, I see something like a 90% reduction in cost (1). Which is part of all the hype; there might be a lot of subsidies and other tomfoolery but subsidies don't do a 90% cost reduction, government trickery doesn't do a 90% cost reduction. And if we get another 40-50% price reduction over the next 10 years, we have a simple, scalable solution to all energy problems.
I mean, if you're worried about cloudy days, at some point you can just build 4x as many solar panels and it'll work. If solar panels get cheap enough, why not just cover the CA Central Valley in them to power the SF Bay Area? If you're worried about wind, you've got a giant ocean and mountain range, just build more windmills.
I guess the thing that bugs me is that renewables seem to be going through a powerful, continual price reduction but I'm hearing the same anti-renewable, pro-nuclear stories I've been hearing for 20 years. At some point, if renewables keep getting cheaper, all energy problems seem solvable by just building more renewables because cost isn't everything but it is, like, the defining limiting factor of most of what we do. If that keeps moving in the right direction for renewables, does anything else matter?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States
What good is Dakka after sunset?
Seriously, suppose the cost of solar cells goes to literally zero, and your nation has lots of conveniently-located deserts that can be obtained at zero cost, so that you can have all the solar power you want, an order of magnitude more than you could ever hope to consume, from sunrise to sunsent. Realistically, an hour after sunrise to an hour before sunset at best.
What's your plan when the sun goes down? Hopefully something better than having everyone in your nation living like medieval peasants.
If the plan is to handwave "renewables doesn't just mean solar, there's also wind and hydro", then there aren't enough of those things and they aren't reliable enough to save you. Quite often the wind dies down after sunset.
If the plan is to take all the power you generate during the day and put it into batteries during the night, have you looked at the cost of batteries lately? And the total world production of lithium with which to make more batteries?
Very low-cost renewable energy alone, can cover very roughly 50% of your energy needs without *too* much trouble. For the other 50%, you need either cheap energy storage, or some sort of power plant that works on a calm winter night in a random location. We don't know how to do energy storage cheap enough to solve this problem yet, and we aren't likely to in this decade at least. We do know how to build cheap gas turbines. We know how to build nuclear reactors. We at least used to know how to build cheap nuclear reactors. Take your pick.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41825-020-00032-z says we can transmit electricity with losses of 3% per Mm. That means losses of approximately 50% from the other side of the planet (a 20Mm cable). So that should make relying entirely on solar perfectly feasible with your assumptions.
I'm not against the Supergrid concept as a bonus on top of an already-sound system but the lack of autarky on everybody's part strikes me as fragile and geopolitically hairy.
The current situation between Russia and Germany would pale in comparison to one where you need to maintain energy balance on the scale of minutes rather than months.
Alright, let's go for plan B then: since energy is so cheap in this scenario, the losses from storing it as synthetic fuel for night-time use and as strategic reserves are not a problem.
Wait, am I missing something or does wind generate like 4x the electricity of solar? (1)
But even ignoring that, lets just do solar, I think you're underestimating just how much we could do with more Dakka. For example, there was a really cool post on less wrong recently about terraforming West Texas (2) which touched on pumped storage hydroelectricity, which I will now propose as the 'More Dakka solution.
Pumped storage hydro is basically the idea that you can pump water from the bottom of a dam to the reservoir up top, then run that through a dam to generate electricity. Yes, literally. It's about 70% efficient. In the day, when we have cheap, renewable solar power, we use a ton of that energy to pump water into any natural or artificial reservoir we can find/build, then run the hydro turbines at night for constant power. Yes, this is pretty inefficient but who cares, we have tons of cheap, clean energy and any time we need more we can just pave another 1000 around Santa Nella, CA with solar panels.
I think the idea that there are unresolvable problems underestimates just how big of a deal tons of cheap, clean energy is. Like, seriously, if the we really can scalablely and cheaply plaster solar panels everywhere...everything else is kind of a detail.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States
(2) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pihPzjYgwKiBexytF/let-s-terraform-west-texas
The experience of Germany in this respect is instructive, since it's the Western nation with the greatest fraction of its power produced by solar (behind only China) at 10%. Here's Wikipedia's page chock full of numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
One of the more striking and unfortunate numbers is the "capacity factor", which is the difference between installed capacity and actual delivered power. In 2018 it reached a high of 12%, meaning on average you get 12% of the total power generating capacity actually delivered. So if you want 100 GW of reliable electricity, you need 100/0.12 = 833 GW of installed capacity, about 8.3 times as much.
Hence leaving out the cost of battery storage, solar power needs to cost less than about 1/9 of the cost of any other form of power generation to be real-world (as opposed to on paper) economically competitive. If we included utility-scale storage, such as building a very large number of big reservoirs and turbine-generators for pumped-water storage, and taking into account the 30% energy loss involved (your numbers), it seems more realistic to assume the capital cost of PV power generation needs to fall to about 1/20 or so of the cost of some other form of power generation to be real-world competitive.
If we assume PV generation is currently at theoretical (in paper) parity in terms of $$/kW, then we need a further drop of a factor of 20 in the price. The Wikipedia article has a nice little graph that shows that the cost of roof-top PV in Germany has dropped by a factor of ~4 (from 5000 euro/kW to 1200) between 2006 and 2016, so over 9 years. If we assume this just continues in a straight line ad infinitum, some kind of Moore's Law of solar, then we need 45 more years to achieve a price drop of a factor of 20.
Genuine question. Do you think attaching hydro electric dams to solar and wind farms is a scalable climate solution that can and should be rolled out worldwide?
Also the costs of building renewables being cheap isn't enough if we now have to attach hydro electric dams to them to solve intermittency surely?
"Why not just plaster everywhere with solar?"
Because the amount of materials it would take to do so in places that aren't especially sunny would blanket 10s of km instead of just building nuclear reactors which take up minimal space and supply reliable power. Surely that option is better than a giant solar or wind farm attached to an artificial dam?
Where are you going to put those hydroelectric dams?
They need a reservoir at both the top and the bottom, otherwise they can't perform the pumped-storage function. That's not common natural feature of geography; most dams just have a river downstream, and when it's time to pump water uphill all you can do is say "come back, wait, we need you!" as it races away downstream.
And that's assuming you have an upstream reservoir, which we'd need about an order of magnitude more of than we can find on our existing maps.
By the time you've finished the environmental impact statements and shepherded them through all the inevitable legal challenges, for all those reservoirs nestled in what used to be nice bucolic mountain valleys whose residents all have the Sierra Club on speed-dial, then A: you'll wish you had taken on the nice, simple problem of getting regulatory approval for a few hundred nuclear plants, and B: it will probably be too late.
"If the plan is to take all the power you generate during the day and put it into batteries during the night, have you looked at the cost of batteries lately? And the total world production of lithium with which to make more batteries?"
What makes you think they'll be running on Lithium-Ion batteries? Cheap and reliable is going to be the word with storage batteries, and there's tons of research into that beyond Lithium-Ion.
Well, just to put some numbers on this: the total electric generating capacity of the US is something like 1.2 TW[1]. If we need to store ~8 h of this generation every day, we need 35 PJ of energy storage.
The cheapest possible battery tech is good old lead-acid, which has a specific energy density at the upper end of about 40 Wh/kg[2], so we need 240 million tonnes of lead-acid batteries. The world currently produces about 4.7 million tonnes of lead annually[3] and it's current price is $2300/ton[4], which means we need ~50 years' worth of worldwide lead production and it will cost about $550 billion just for the lead. The complete battery is a more complex product, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume the cost would be at least $1 trillion. It also doesn't seem super likely the world will donate all its lead for a half century to the US, but US lead production alone is about 300,000 tonnes/year[5] so we would need 800 years of that, which doesn't seem feasible, so we'll have to assume deals can be cut.
Batteries typically last ~1500-2000 charge cycles before they need replacing, in this case about 5.5 years, so we would need to replace (presumably recycle and refurbish) about 1/5.5 of the total or 44 million tons of batteries each year. Recycling of lead in lead-acid batteries is very good, with 98% of the metal recovered[6], but we would still need a steady stream of 880,000 tonnes of new lead every year (19% of current world production, or ~3x current US production), and presumably some effective way to mitigate the discharge into the environment of the nearly million tonnes of lost lead annually.
What this would cost I have no good idea, but as a very rough figure, the "core charge" on a new car battery, which represents the value of the recycled battery, is about 1/4 of the price of a new battery, so one would expect refurbishing a battery to like new to cost 1/2 of the price of completely new batteries, so a base of 1/5.5 x 1/2 x (original cost) or very roughly $90 billion/year excluding labor.
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[1] https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-generating-capacity
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery
[3] https://www.mining-technology.com/comment/global-lead-output-2021/
[4] https://www.metalary.com/lead-price/
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/892365/lead-production-volume-united-states/
[6] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.171368
This is great. Thanks. I thought I would scribble the same for water storage. Using your number of 35 PJ (x10^15 J) I'll ignore the efficiency (of maybe 70%) So m*g*h is the energy. If I assume a height of 35m (to make numbers easier) that's going to need a mass of 10^14 kg. Which is 10^14 liters of water, or 10^11 cubic meters or 100 cubic kilometers. The volume of lake Erie is ~484 cu km. So every day we empty and fill 1/5 of lake Erie. It's amazing how much energy is in a liter of gas and how little you get from dropping a liter of water 10 meters.
Yeah there's a good reason the entire natural living world stores energy as combustible solids or liquids. When you live at the bottom of a giant lake of O2, it's a very efficient thing to do.
If we had any brains as a species, we'd approach the problem of human CO2 emission by focussing on closing the loop -- finding economical ways to synthesize our hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and water and sunlight, the way plants do. Then we can tweak either the combustion or synthesis legs of the cycle to adjust the net amount of CO2 we add to or withdraw from the atmosphere to be whatever seems reasonable.
Why do we need chemical batteries at all?
When solar/wind is really cheap, we don't need the efficiency of storage to be high. There are lots of medium efficiency ways (and a few surprisingly high efficiency ones) to store energy for a night.
My favourite is as heat: get a big tank, put lots of insulation around it, and then add a heat exchanger. A molten salt or water medium stores enough heat for nights and winters, which takes out a significant amount of electricity demand.
And molten salt can also boil water for electricity generation, as in a solar tower.
For actual electricity, compressed air (not mature), pump-water-up-a-hill (mature, but geographically constrained) or hydrogen (fairly mature) all work well. We don't need that many chemical batteries.
Well, because it's efficient. You store the electricity as chemical potential, and you get it back out again as electricity, no moving parts and in principle near 100% efficiency.
Any of the mechanical methods you adduce (e.g. pumping water uphill) requires conversion of electricity to mechanical work and back again, which inevitably involves conversion losses, mechanical wear and tear, noise. If you use thermal storage, the situation is even worse, since even under pretty ideal circumstances conversion of thermal power to electricity is not usually more than about ~30% efficient. Remember, we're *starting* with the problem that PV is only giving you 1/8 of the power that's stated on its nameplate, if we're going to make matters worse by an additional factor of 2 or 3 because of conversion losses, PV would have to be additional factors cheaper than anything else to compete.
And that's on top of the capital and maintenance costs of the storage equipment. I mean...there's a good reason we have tended to "store" electricity in the form of big heaps of the fuel needed to generate it, e.g. a few thousand tons of coal behind the power plant. Electricity is fabulous stuff, but it is a real pain to store efficiently and cheaply.
Probably your absolute cheapest and best technology would be if someone figured out a way to make freaking enormous capacitors, since you can charge and discharge those as fast as you like, the efficiency is basically 100% both ways, no moving parts, and the principles of construction are straightforward, if unfortunately too demanding for cheap methods, hence the need for future engineering genius.
I mostly agree with this sentiment. Geothermal also has potential in some places though. Basically there are some places where wind and solar are viable strategies and many where they are not suitable in large quantities. Battery storage isn't even close to being able to compensate for the unreliability of renewables yet. All the batteries in the world could power the US for something like less than a minute. Natural gas power plants thus need to be able to fully compensate for renewables but they have to sit idle when renewable energy is available. Its easy to see how this dramatically increases energy prices for consumers despite renewables being cheap to build.
Its critical to think of the rest of the world when assessing whether something is viable as a climate solution. I think its delusional to think renewables alone will be sufficient. Floating nuclear reactors which avoid both onerous regulations and NIMBYism alongside 3rd and 4th gen nuclear reactors would actually be viable for mass adoption. They also increase energy sovereignty which is clearly critical and completely overlooked by the renewables crowd. The renewables supply chain is dominated by China currently. China and renewables for ROW could be like Russia and nat gas for Europe, a disaster waiting to happen that is blatantly obvious to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Renewables also have short half lives which means frequent replacement. The amount of minerals and materials that will need to be extracted coupled with NIMBYism and regs around mining will likely lead to major inflation in raw materials. Its not clear to me that mass battery storage is a good use of these resources.
Also next gen nuclear reactors are actually capable of powering up and down to meet demand in theory though regulations don't allow it for safety atm afaik.
"They claimed renewables were infeasible at scale because of consistency/storage problems (when the wind blows/sun shines), and would suffer fatal diminishing returns the more of the fossil fuel powered grids they replaced"
This is only true if there is no storage attached to the grid. Power storage is pretty crude at the moment - the most common options are pumped hydro (eg Electric Mountain) or shipping containers full of batteries - but there's a huge amount of invention and innovation in the space, which is largely driven by the opportunity for a savvy operator to make big profits from exploting time- and location-arbitrage (eg wind is blowing now but not tomorrow; wind is blowing here but not there). And note that in doing this, storage operators are effectively transforming intermittent renewable generation into reliable baseload.
Battery storage basically needs to get cheaper than natural gas plants. That's the big competition there, but I do think they'll get there.
I'll say this - I'll sooner believe that we'll get cheap battery storage than that we'll have a true nuclear renaissance in the US.
"Power storage is pretty crude at the moment - but there's a huge amount of invention and innovation in the space, which is largely driven by the opportunity for a savvy operator to make big profits"
By that logic, we don't need to worry about the issue because we'll have cheap clean abundant fusion power Real Soon Now. Along with a cure for all forms of cancer.
That people would stand to profit if they were to invent a thing, and are thus trying real hard to invent the thing, does not mean that the thing will be invented in your lifetime. Whether that's cheap energy storage or holy grail fusion. If you've got a decent laboratory prototype, sure, bet on that. If what you've got is a concept and faith in the raw power of innovation, you might want to get started on some more concrete plan while awaiting the innovative miracles.
The fact that in 1990 we had only those disposable AA's and big car batteries, and now batteries are so cheap and ubiquitous that companies will pay to leave scooters on street corners everywhere indicates that there's been a *lot* more improvement in batteries than in fusion. Batteries, like solar, have been approach Moore's Law level improvements in recent decades, and there's no obvious reason to think they're at their limit yet.
Sure there is. What electrochemistry are you going to use that is lighter than lithium? There are no unexplored electrochemical reactions at the top of the Periodic Table. You can tweak things like thermal management of big battery packs, or manufacturing protocols, et cetera, and get improvements of cost, recharging rates, or storage/kg in the real world in the 50-100% range maybe. But nothing is ever going to get you a factor of 100 in J/kg, because the available electrochemistry has been known for a century or more, and there's nothing left to discover.
If you're talking about power storage for the grid, J/Kg isn't relevant - J/$ is. You can use heavy and/or bulky batteries so long as they are cheap to make and last a long time. That's not to say that there are necessarily gigantic improvements to be made, but if you can make batteries out of stuff like iron, sulphur or carbon they will do...
Well, we're clearly not, since transportation is the dominant source of CO2 emission, and any "decarbonization" is futile if you don't address it. It's of no great value to decarbonize fixed power plant electricity generation if you don't get rid of internal combustion engines.
But even in that context, the point remains. There is no unexplored electrochemistry for cheap materials like iron or carbon, either. I mean, if it were possible to make heavy batteries for 1/100 the price they can be made now, why wouldn't someone have done it? It's not like there isn't already a healthy market for lead-acid batteries in fixed installation applications. If you could do it for 100x cheaper you could make huge profits. Factories could buy power at off-peak rates at night and use it during the day, et cetera. The only good argument for why it hasn't been done (or even attempted) yet would be if there was something about electrochemical storage that remained to be discovered, some cool trick or other. But, back to point 1, there isn't. It's very mature technology. At this point it's like hoping someone will figure out a way to make ballpoint pens 100x cheaper.
It's not clear that batteries have advanced more than fusion. Experimental fusion reactors have improved their performance by I think five orders of magnitude over the past fifty years, in terms of the Lawson Criterion and Q-Value. That's invisible to you, but that's because it's a change from "six orders of magnitude too puny to be more than a laboratory curiosity for fusion nerds" to "one order of magnitude too puny...", whereas batteries are something you use every day.
And, there's no obvious reason to think that batteries *aren't* at their limit, modulo a few concepts under advanced development now. "Moore's Law" is an observation, not a law of nature. Airplane speeds roughly doubled every decade for half a century, until they stopped. Any future doublings, in any area, are a gift, not an entitlement.
Lithium batteries got 89% cheaper between 2010 and 2021:
https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-average-of-132-kwh-but-rising-commodity-prices-start-to-bite/
We haven't plateau'ed there yet.
It's not the market. It's subsidies and political pressure. Nuclear's expensive not because of the nature of nuclear but because of extensive regulations and political protests and all that. Likewise green plants (mostly) are so cheap because of subsidies. It's downstream of the Green Lobby hating nuclear and loving 100% renewable and exerting a lot of influence on government/elite opinion to force the outcomes they want.
There is, basically, three types of power plants. Renewables (hydro/wind/solar) which produce a lot of power very cheaply but very irregularly and only in specific places. Nuclear which produces a steady amount of power relatively cheaply but you can't just shut off a nuclear plant easily. And oil/LNG/coal which you can just turn on and off or to any level you want at will.
The ideal decarbonized grid with current technology is about 60-70% nuclear, 20-30% renewables (mostly hydro which is the most stable), and 10-20% traditional plants. Ideally clean burning LNG. Nuclear provides all power up to a "baseline" your system is not supposed to fall below. Renewables and traditional plants provide variability where you preferably use renewables (because when it works it's cheap per kwh) but keep the traditional LNG plants around to make up the slack on days with little wind/at night/etc. This is what France does and it works pretty well.
Now, in the future extremely cheap and effective batteries and better transmission lines might allow us to "smooth" renewables in a way that would make it more effective. Because electricity generation from renewables is cheap but unreliable storing it up in the good times/areas and letting it loose in the bad times/areas is a decent idea and might even lead to cheaper power generation. The issue is we simply do not have the technology, no matter how much environmentalists wish we did, and no one's close to having it either. Instead what we have are expensive batteries and old transmission lines that are heavily subsidized. They keep on saying "it's coming" because they need the technology to be there to support their vision and want to keep the subsidies flowing.
But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now. They generate too much power in high times and it has to be sold at a loss and then the grid needs to import power at horrendously expensive rates in bad times. (And if they don't they have brown/blackouts.)
"But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now."
The GB grid is consistently >30% renewable and the proportion is increasing (ytd 28%, mtd 38%; at time of writing >50% of GB generation is coming from _wind alone_ while exporting to France, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands). It's far from perfect (it is also a pretty dynamic market that changes frequently) but I don't know anyone in the industry who would describe it as working "very poorly".
The transmission issue you identify is definitely a problem at the moment. We're currently generating a lot of power from wind in areas of the country with relatively low demand and it can't all be distributed to the high-demand areas (eg London) due to infrastructure constraints. One solution being planned to this is to introduce 'nodal' pricing - rather than having a single wholesale price for the entire island, power will instead be priced at network 'nodes' based on local supply and demand. This should allow the market to properly price the transmission issue and provide the profit incentive for operators to fund new transmission infrastructure or local generation - a reasonable overview is here: https://es.catapult.org.uk/report/locational-energy-pricing-in-the-gb-power-market/
You're mistaken. Great Britain is 48% low or no carbon which includes nuclear and bio-energy (ie, normal plants using biofuels) and a few other power sources. It is about 25% renewable, mostly wind for which Britain is unusually well suited.
An actual government source:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1032260/UK_Energy_in_Brief_2021.pdf
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom
12% of that "low or no" carbon power is a wood-pellet plant that is burning Canadian old growth forest:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63089348
Huh. I didn't know that but I'm unsurprised. Greenwashing is really prevalent in the biomass industry since it's mostly not as green as it claims to be but wants to get in under the radar.
Yes, this is awful - I view Drax as a national disgrace for many reasons. The push to biomass in the UK was largely driven by Chris Huhne, our Energy Secretary who was later jailed for perverting the course of justice... only to be hired as chairman of a biomass firm that creates wood pellets in the US. I haven't included it in the 36% renewables figure I mentioned above - that was limited to wind, solar and hydro.
I'm looking at the live grid generation stats here:
https://grid.iamkate.com/
and here:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
and here:
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
All of those are currently showing ~50% wind at time of writing (it's gone up a few % since my first comment; must be a windy night) and show a year-to-date figure of ~28% renewable excluding nuclear, as per my comment above. Given the increase in wind generation in that time frame I think that tracks with "about 25% renewable" you're taking from the 2021 report. I don't think there's much distance between our figures; if you disagree I'd be interested to know why.
https://manifold.markets/JohnRoxton/will-great-britain-generate-30-of-i
Perhaps I misunderstand. Right now it appears you're taking a snapshot when one of my points is that renewables need to be given space to both grow and shrink. Yes, at a given point renewables might supply 50% of needs or more. And at another 10% or less. That is precisely why they do not work without batteries we currently do not have. It's why we need peaker plants and baseline generation and all that.
In other words, either you are agreeing with me that renewables cannot consistently provide more than roughly 30+% of power without causing instability and your point that at this exact moment it's 50% is irrelevant and something I acknowledged. Or you're making a point disagreeing with me (which is what I assumed when you said "Britain's grid is above 30% renewable") in which case you have just brought a statistic that does not prove what you think it proves.
I'm saying that it is currently very close to the 30% boundary (I said 28% ytd; I'm not sure how I can clarify that further), and consistently is above that figure (which I guess is a bit of a redundant comment because unless generation is perfectly constant of course it will dip above and below).
By the end of 2022 I expect us to be comfortably above 30% average renewable generation. I was giving the 50%-right-now figure as an illustration of the variance involved in this; you're of course right that this doesn't mean it's always 50% or anything silly like that, and I wasn't trying to imply that. Sounds as though we're in agreement there :)
I was trying to present GB as a specific counterexample to the strong statement: "But actual highly renewable grids (30+%) work very poorly right now."
I feel that GB qualifies as a highly renewable grid. If you feel that the ~2% difference between the current stat of 28% ytd and the given 30% threshold disqualifies it, fair enough, I shan't try to argue otherwise at the moment though of course I might pop back in 12 months! I also feel that the GB grid does not work "very poorly", despite a number of issues (as per my original comment). Hope that makes the intent clearer.
EDIT: Prediction market now up for GB EoY renewable %:
https://manifold.markets/JohnRoxton/will-great-britain-generate-30-of-i
They'll get all the money regardless.
This is, at any rate, an edge case because Britain is an unusually good place for certain kinds of renewables compared to most countries. But even there I wouldn't expect it to get much higher. And Britain does keep excess capacity to make a lot of it up in case it shrinks (which is what you need to do).
My understanding was the pay back time for nuclear made it an unattractive investment compared to renewables. Which I guess means renewables do produce more energy more cheaply in the short term, but their shorter lifespan means nuclear is cheaper in the long run despite the larger initial cost. Markets would favour renewables if that's true because markets favour current value over future value because of growth expectations, investors time preferences etc.
Maybe that's rational, but nuclear should still only be produced by the state anyway because of the moral hazard of private firms sacrificing safety for profit.
So either way you can't leave decarbonisation to the market, which I think was his main point.
Well, I agree safety regulations on nuclear power plants are a good thing if that's what you're saying. Likewise there's a pretty straightforward problem that pollution is externalized costs and internalized benefits. Of course, this kind of private market has not been the case in the US for almost a century so I'm not sure why we're discussing it.
More relevant to modern day is the government and bureaucracy. And how much a motivated and radical minority has used them to purposefully discouraged nuclear power and encouraged solutions that where implemented have not worked.
It's quite frustrating because the "trust the experts" crowd has responded to the experts being pro-nuclear by abolishing those experts (the actual electrical/nuclear engineers) and replacing them with new "experts" like environmental scientists who have no training in power generation.
Fair enough.
I was think more that "a good society is one where old men grow trees they will never sit under the shade of" and renewables are kinda like cheap disposable parasols in that metaphor.
My impression was that storage is coming on in leaps and bounds: electric cars, home batteries, gravitational storage, hydrogen...
If renewables create a massive supply at some times of day and if there's high demand at other times of day, there's a strong economic incentive to buy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive, ie to provide storage.
Hasn't energy storage improved dramatically just in the past few years? I feel like new computers and phones are improving on old ones more in terms of battery performance than processor performance these days, and we have so many uses of small batteries these days that were just completely uneconomical merely 20 years ago (ebikes, ecars, escooters, not to mention all the small wearables like fitbits and iwatches and whatever). It seems to be improving at the same rate as renewable energy.
Fission plants are a multi-decade bridge until renewables and/or fusion can take over.
I mean, I guess fusion plants are quicker to turn on/off than fission, but aside from that they're not actually a big improvement. Safety's ~equal, and both make radioactive waste (until aneutronic fusion comes along, anyway, which is not soon).
A fusion reactor can't melt down, which I would rate as a pretty good safety improvement. Not that meltdowns are necessarily Chernobyl-scale disasters, but they're still a massive pain in the butt to clean up.
The biggest problem with nuclear that nobody seems to mention is that it's not even renewable (in its current state). The specific kind of uranium needed for fission is extremely rare and, if the world were to switch all its power consumption to nuclear, we would run out of it in a matter of decades.
I mean, obviously it's not renewable.
Reactors exist that can burn U-238 and Th-232 - we have built them - we just don't build a lot of them at the moment (AIUI it's mostly because people get nervous around reprocessing plants and their relation to nuclear proliferation, though I'm not sure).
Fast breeder reactors produce more fuel than they consume. So in that sense they are renewable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
They don't produce more fuel than they consume - actinides go in, not-actinides come out. U-238 and Th-232 are still consumable fuel, the breeder just converts them to fissiles (Pu-239 and U-233 respectively) faster than it uses up those fissiles.
Renewables are things that are currently wasted that humans can harness - things where if you harvest today, that won't affect whether you can harvest next year. Nuclear is not renewable* - but we're not going to run out of it any time soon.
*Even p-p fusion isn't renewable - there's a limited amount of hydrogen in the universe. The reason all the renewables (which all are downstream of nuclear processes in some fashion or another) are renewable is that we can't actually turn off the Sun or the radioactive decay inside the Earth - our choice is merely whether we waste or harness the energy produced.
If you read carefully, this is a projection based on todays current active fuel requirements, not taking into account the supply if everyone switched to nuclear power.
Since this is open - my third book, Losing My Religions, is a free download (you can also purchase it if you'd like). It goes into a number of philosophical topics that ACX readers might find interesting.
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Thanks!
You should probably give it a little more of a blurb. Which topics? Why should people read your writing?
If you are interested in AI Risk, please could you consider filling out a 10 minute survey on the microdynamics of that risk? I'm hoping to turn it into an economic model in the near future
https://forms.gle/kLYtynp3FYcxkPZc8
Do we have to actually know something about the subject, or is it literally just interest? Seems like it would make a bad model if you're including looky-loos like me.
I'm going to do a subgroup analysis where I look only at answers where people have self-classified as 'experts'. So if you know enough to know what the questions mean then you're the target market for the survey, as long as you honestly report whether you are an 'expert' or not :)
Since I nearly missed this, and only by luck caught my mistake: for the probability questions, you aren't supposed to enter your probability, but rather your probability times 100. Eg, if you think something is 60% likely, you're supposed to enter "60" — *not* "0.6".
Probably some people will make this mistake, but it should be detectable in the raw data (eg, if someone's answers to questions two and three add up to 1 (or somewhat less than 1), then they probably made this mistake).
EDIT: just got to the last question. Smart touch
Just to clarify, are you interested in people who find AI risk interesting but aren’t worried about it filling out your survey?
Yes please - anyone with any opinions who could inform a distribution of beliefs about AI Risk
I wonder if ivermectin “works” because it kills parasites?
That was the whole gist of Scott’s ivermectin write up from a while ago, I find it more convincing than the rebuttals
The term "parasite" is used to classify organisms rather than merely an activity. So a virus, bacteria or fungus are all out, while malaria (a eukaryote with a nucleus) is in (along with worms).
Fungi are eukaryotes with nuclei.
Also, "bacteria" is the plural. The singular is "bacterium".
Animals & plants also have nuclei, although for multicellular organisms that goes without saying.
No, there are multicellular prokaryotes as well, though they're simple compared to the three great kingdoms.
I think there are two different senses to the description of something as a "parasite" unqualified; 1) (usually-macroscopic) animal parasite, 2) parasite without another easy categorisation ("fungus", "bacterium", "virus"). Obviously, all infections and infestations including those of those three categories are by parasites, but the sense in which malaria is called a "parasite" is different to the sense in which ticks are; if we still had a good word for unicellular eukaryotes and had gotten it into the public consciousness, I think we'd use it. (Note that we talk of people being "infected" with malaria, but "infested" with ticks or maggots.)
(And obviously, ivermectin won't work on malaria.)
The word salad of gene pairs are a Rorschach test for virus hunters.
Time for a chance to flex our study-analyzing muscles:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2022/10/20220512-guidance-mrna-covid19-vaccine.pr.html
Key claim: "Concerning vaccination type, males receiving mRNA vaccination had significantly higher risk [of cardiac-related death], while males receiving vaccinations that were not mRNA/unknown had significantly lower risk. RIs for females stratified by vaccination type revealed a similar pattern, with lower, non-significant estimates."
I’m trying to figure out whether the people who perpetrated that thing were so ignorant about stats and study design they thought it was a reasonable way to ask the question— or totally understood that this design was a great way to mislead people. Do you have an opinion?
Beware that one study.
https://twitter.com/kmpanthagani/status/1578921562761465857
Stuart Buck called it one of the worst studies he'd ever seen in this thread:
https://twitter.com/stuartbuck1/status/1578911772396122113
Fuckin Florida, man.
Bruno Latour recently died. What do you think will be his lasting intellectual legacy?
I'm eagerly awaiting the publication of his posthumous work "Nous n'avons jamais etait mort", in which he argues that premodern people didn't distinguish between the living and the dead, and that death is a recent, socially constructed, innovation.
was anyone asking for a substack ap?
I highly recommend it for anyone who subscribes to multiple Substacks. I was skeptical at first about the idea too, but then I started really appreciating not getting my inbox spammed with Substack writings, and just being able to browse through everyone I follow via the app.
i guess i dont really browse substack, i consume it. so having it in my inbox is a convenience
Personally, it'll be a freezing cold day in hell before I read substantive text on a tiny screen device, or reply to it using a virtual keyboard, when I still have any alternative available.
I.e. if I'm stuck in a waiting room with only a cellphone, I might use that cell phone to browse something. Otherwise, no chance.
Maybe the existence of the app will cause them to refrain from optimizing the web site for mobile?
Do most people believe that 1 or 2 robots look like farmers?
This went completely over my head. I have to ask. I need to know.
I think referring to Scott’s point in most people disagreeing with his assessment on the ai art prompts?
Ah. Ok. I thought it might be something transcendent. 
Re 'Post about anything you want', I hope it's therefore okay for me to promote a Substack blog that I've launched today. It's on the psychology of belief and is called How Belief Works: https://howbeliefworks.substack.com . Any feedback would be appreciated.
At least from your first post - it's not a good hook.
While getting definitions set is important - esp to this crowd, it's still not a great idea to spend the first post just nicpicking on other definitions.
The only thing to grab viewers is thinking what would they define belief as, and that prob is not engaging enough to keep people reading.
It also doesn't highlight why this should be the first post and in fact somewhat undermines itself by pointing out that this isn't that important given that other well known articles don't even bother with it.
Your writing style is also just not particularly funny, rigorous, or enlightening on its own. I mostly finished as a sense of duty before critiquing it.
I now have a new first post:
https://beliefology.substack.com/p/why-do-we-believe-what-we-believe
Okay, thanks for these points – I'm going to re-think this first post.
Guess I'll throw in, the blog's title "How Belief Works" implies a finite series of trying-to-be-objective posts, rather than an open-ended, ongoing blog.
What do you think of 'The Psychology of Belief' or just 'Belief'? The latter could perhaps be mistaken for referring to religious belief.
More open-ended but less catchy. "How Belief Works" does make me want to read it, in a way "The Psychology of Belief" doesn't.
Yes, I also think 'The Psychology of Belief' isn't sufficiently interesting.
I was thinking about 'On How Belief Works' instead of just 'How Belief Works'? This perhaps sounds both open-ended and not about 'this is how belief works'.
However, I've just thought of 'Beliefology', which I think I'll go with.
"On How Belief Works" sounds even shorter; now instead of a series it's a single post.
Thanks Yug.
By 'trying-to-be-objective posts', do you mean that the title sounds like the posts will be presenting one particular view on belief as fact?
...maybe? It sounds like it's going to be "This is why other people hold their opinions", which is always some degree of untrustworthy since you aren't actually those other people.
I think the general convention is that it’s okay to post once when you start a new project (like a blog), but ideally most advertising after that is largely done in the Confidentials (advertising) threads.
Congrats on the new blog
I think you mean "classifieds", not "confidentials".
Okay – thanks.
The link to your post on supplements appears to also go to Neil's Twitter post.
Thanks, fixed.
Where does "Lawnmower Man" fit in this rubric?
Wow, I'd heard of Escape From NY, but didn't know about the others. Anyway, you forgot Max Headroom.
As a one time film editor and lover of movie effects I enjoyed this.
> the movie [2001] also doesn't use CRT screens — every "screen" in the movie is actually a cinema projector hidden behind a white screen
There was a technical reason for this. Scan rate of CRTs interacting badly with the rotating shutter in the movie camera. That was a big problem back in the day.
This would be an amazing limited run series on a blog, rather than hidden in ACX open thread comments.
This is good content
Agreed, fascinating stuff